Études irlandaises

43-2 | 2018 Varia

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5581 DOI : 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5581 ISSN : 2259-8863

Éditeur Presses universitaires de Caen

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 18 décembre 2018 ISBN : 978-2-7535-7693-3 ISSN : 0183-973X

Référence électronique Études irlandaises, 43-2 | 2018 [En ligne], mis en ligne le 18 décembre 2018, consulté le 23 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5581 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ etudesirlandaises.5581

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 23 septembre 2020.

Études irlandaises est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. 1

SOMMAIRE

Civilisation

The Knutsford Hotel Irish Volunteer Prisoners in Knutsford Gaol in 1916 David Shaw

Education, the New Science, and Improvement in Seventeenth-Century Ireland John Patrick Montaño

Les Syndicats irlandais et la question cubaine, 50 ans après la révolution Marie-Violaine Louvet

L’État irlandais et les aides humanitaires destinées au peuple espagnol durant la guerre civile espagnole Pere Soler Paricio

Arts visuels

Mind the Gap: The Big House in Cinematic Representations of the Anglo-Irish War Shannon Wells-Lassagne

Littérature

“The Debris of History”. On Waste and the Past in Irish Celtic Tiger Poetry Daniel Becker

Interviews with four Irish writers Bertrand Cardin

The Irish Female Migrant, Silence and Family Duty in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn José Carregal-Romero

L’échec du mythe de la virilité dans The Ultras d’Eoin McNamee Anne Duflos

John Banville’s “Overman”: Intertextual dialogues with Friedrich Nietzsche in Shroud Mehdi Ghassemi

The Queen’s two bodies: Panti at the Abbey Alexandra Poulain

A Big House Divided: Images of Irish Nationhood in Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation Jennifer A. Slivka

‘A lament for the Fianna in a time when Ireland shall be changed’: Prospective/Prescriptive Memory and (Post-)Revolutionary Discourse in Mythological Gate Plays Ruud Van Den Beuken

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Recensions

Mairéad Carew, The Quest for the Irish Celt. The Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland, 1932-1936 Patrick Galliou

Neil Murphy, John Banville Thierry Robin

Mauyen Keane, Love Without Border in War-Torn Europe : An Irishwoman’s Story David Shaw

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Civilisation

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The Knutsford Hotel Irish Volunteer Prisoners in Knutsford Gaol in 1916

David Shaw

The Knutsford Hotel Poor men and rich men all on the mash, No need for money, no need for cash: Only polishing your boots and scrubbing your cell, This is the way at the Knutsford Hotel1

1 Following the defeat and surrender of those that took part in the Easter Rising the British Government found itself in legal quagmire.2 They had to decide how to deal with the prisoners using either a military or civil legal framework. It was decided that they should be detained under section 14B of the Defence of the Realm Act. DORA would become the primary component in the British legal tool-box when it came to Ireland between 1915-1921.3 This was a decision of dubious legality but did allow, on the surface at least, for the indefinite detention of those charged.4 Before and after being charged, those involved had to be placed under guard and suitable locations needed to found that would be fit to hold large numbers of men. The decision was made to transport the prisoners to Britain and to place them in available gaols. A total of 1,836 were interned in British prisons.5 These were either civilian prisons with convenient space for large numbers, or those that had been commandeered by the military for the purposes of military discipline or to hold conscientious objectors. They were dispersed to Glasgow, Knutsford, Lewes, Perth, Reading, Stafford, Wakefield, Wandsworth and Woking.6 Female prisoners were sent to Aylesbury. 7 It is from within Stafford and Reading that we get the most famous images of this period, including that of Michael Collins and some of his fellow inmates.8 As many of the leading figures were absent from Knutsford, there is something of an assumption that little of note occurred. Due to this the experiences of lesser known individuals following their deportation to Britain remain under-researched. The accounts of the prisoners not only contradict the view that little happened, but provide a fascinating narrative of life for an Irish prisoner and the reactions of their gaolers and the wider British population. The prisoners that were

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dispersed to Knutsford with dark humour named their new location the Knutsford Hotel.9

2 Work on the Knutsford House of Correction began in 1817 and it was described in 1822 as containing yards that were ‘spacious and well flagged’ and with three radiating wings already completed and a fourth in progress which would result in a final total of 176 cells. The new house of correction would not just hold those convicted of crimes, but also the ‘the maintenance of vagrants, many of whom, from various infirmities, cannot be employed’.10 It was constructed to meet the latest ideas concerning prison reform. In 1843, the conditions and regime experienced by Chartist prisoners resulted in questions being asked in the House of Commons.11 However, by 1915 its population had declined to such a low level that the Secretary for the Home Office decided to turn the prison over to military authorities to be used as a detention barracks for soldiers sentenced for military offences.12 The few remaining civilian prisoners would be transferred to Strangeways in Manchester.13 It would later be used to house conscientious objectors who refused to serve in the British military following the 1916 Military Conscription Act.14 Knutsford would become a work centre for those who had their status as conscientious objector rejected by local tribunals.15 As it was no longer a civilian prison those who were sent there would find a much tougher regime than those incarcerated in Reading, Stafford or any of the other locations still under civilian governorship.

3 The number of prisoners recorded in Knutsford varies from source to source. Seán McConville in his work, Irish Political Prisoners 1848-1922 records a total of 624. 16 In his account of the Easter Rising and its immediate aftermath W.J. Brenan-Whitmore recalled approximately 200 being sent to Knutsford on 30th April and he was sent with a further 308 on 3rd May.17 The first Irish prisoners arrived in Knutsford on 1 st of May 1916 and the final cohort arrived in Knutsford on 7th June. The Irish Rebellion Handbook records approximately 600 being transferred to Knutsford.18 When William X. O’Brien arrived at Knutsford he estimated there were already approximately 500 Irish prisoners already in the gaol.19 This was not a pleasant journey for them. The language and threats made by British officers and NCOs on the way to board the boats to Holyhead gave some indication of what could be expected, with one man recalling the ‘barbarous’ language used by the soldiers.20 Once on board, they were placed either into the hold of the vessels, or into cattle pens. A British Officer on one of the boats, drunk, declared he was Irish and berated the prisoners for not waiting until the war was over, after calming down, he offered the men cigarettes.21 There was little room to move, sit or sleep. Many could only sleep when overcome by exhaustion.22 The crossing to Holyhead turned into a rough, miserable journey, and the seasick prisoners were happy to leave the cramped conditions on ships that stank of vomit.23

4 Upon arrival at Holyhead they were met by some of the local population, many of whom made it clear that they viewed the prisoners as traitors and murderers.24 Although they had been given simple provisions of bully beef before leaving Dublin, the prisoners received nothing when they arrived in Holyhead. The situation was different for the soldiers that guarded them who were provided with tea and sandwiches by the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.25 The soldiers guarding the prisoners took a mixed view of the prisoners, some taunted them, others were aggressive and a few passed cigarettes and tea to the prisoners on the train journey from Holyhead.26 Such acts of kindness by individual soldiers acted as reminders to the prisoners that ‘there were

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still human beings among the soldiers of the British army’.27 Few had any idea of where they were, or their final locations, some sharp eyes noticed the livery on the trains suggested that they were somewhere in Cheshire. Arriving in Knutsford the men had little opportunity to get a good view of the town, the prison was only a few yards away from the railway station. What little they did see gave the prisoners a favourable impression as they were marched into to the gaol. The prisoners arrived early in the morning and received little attention from local population who were too busy making their way to work. The local press also showed little interest. They were far more interested in the role played by Sir Roger Casement and the unfurling scandal of his involvement in the Easter Rising. The shock and potential disgrace of a peer of the realm being involved in an act of treason against the crown was far more interesting for the local press than the rebellion itself.

5 The first weeks in Knutsford were harsh. Prisoners were immediately placed into solitary confinement. In the gaol itself the prison guards were something of a motley collection. Each wing of the prison was under the control of a staff-sergeant, each landing was supervised by a sergeant. They were from a variety of regiments. Some had been sent for home service due to wounds suffered on the front line. Others had no experience of the front and it was these who had the severest attitude towards the prisoners. They made use of the British military prisoners to fetch and carry meals to the prisoner’s cells and other menial tasks.28

6 The cells that the prisoners occupied were small, sparsely furnished, and uncomfortable. The contents of the cells would often vary from wing to wing. One prisoner found his cell contained no bed or bedclothes.29 Those that had beds found that they were a simple affair made from three planks and no mattress.30 Only a lucky few found blankets.31 Other than this, the prisoners had brushes to scrub their cell, a tin wash basin, a stool, chamber pot and a bible.32 The cells had changed little since the prison was built and they were designed to conform to 18th and 19th Century prison reforms. The conditions in Knutsford still reflected the old ideas of ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed’.33 The idea of this was to encourage prisoners to use their solitude to reflect on their crimes.34 One volunteer even found a copy of Think Well on It by the Right Reverend Richard Challoner in his cell. The motives for providing this book was not lost on the volunteer, to encourage him to reflect on his ‘criminal habits’, it did not work, but he was glad of the reading material, no matter the reasons for its provision.35 For this volunteer, this attempt to encourage moral reflection on his actions and the justification for them did not act as a deterrence or motive enough to abandon his political beliefs. However, regimes and ideas such as those at Knutsford were now increasingly regarded as old fashioned and ineffective. The final stages in reform would come too late the Irish Volunteers in Knutsford as it would not be until 1931 that new prison rules would finally remove separation and initial periods of solitude from prison regimes.36

7 Food in Knutsford was terrible and at times barley deserved being categorised as such. The quality and lack of sustenance sapped morale during the first weeks. The prisoners were given dry bread, very poor quality (black and green) potatoes and a thin oatmeal soup called Skilly. All the prisoners hated the Skilly and only consumed it out of desperation. During the first weeks in Knutsford some prisoners even resorted to eating grass, salt, lime from the walls and anything discarded by visitors.37

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8 Initially when the prisoners were allowed out of their cells for exercise, this was done in silence which was rigorously imposed by the guards, each in full kit, armed with a rifle, with bayonet attached and issued with 100 rounds of ammunition.38 Some of whom were quick to punch or strike any prisoners that attempted to communicate with each other.39 During exercise periods prisoners were kept apart as they trudged in a ring around the prison yard. While they were exercising their cells were often searched and when they returned to their cells they would find that what personal possessions that they had managed to keep had been confiscated or stolen by the guards.40 Even the presence of guards from Ireland did not prevent such things occurring. The NCO in charge of E-Wing was Sergeant-Major Abbott from Dublin and he was not the only one, with a Corporal Marshall also from Ireland.41

9 The prisoners in Knutsford initially found it difficult to obtain information about events in Dublin. It was not until the prison authorities began to relax the regime and their own personal attitudes towards the prisoners that news began to arrive. Slowly, some had become aware that a number of the leaders of the Easter Rising had been executed but lacked detail. As visitors arrived in Knutsford, the prisoners began to learn the true extent of the executions and the changing feelings of the Irish population towards those that had taken part in the Easter Rising.42 The news of the executions in Dublin came as a severe blow to the morale of the prisoners in Knutsford. 43 However, thanks to supporters from Britain and Ireland, it was not enough to break it.

10 As soon as they were allowed, the prisoners in Knutsford began to receive assistance from the Irish in Liverpool and Manchester. As the prison regime was slowly relaxed, visitors reported that it was improving and that if relatives wanted to send parcels to the men in Knutsford, then they could send them to Manchester and that they would ensure they were distributed to the men in Knutsford. The Irish in Manchester wanted the relatives of the prisoners to know that ‘their Irish friends in Manchester are doing everything they can to comfort them’.44 Liam McMahon, who was a member of the IRB in Manchester and later the Irish Self Determination League would recall the organising visits to the prisoners in Knutsford every Sunday with extra food.45 Volunteers would later ‘recollect with sincere thanks the great solace they were to us’. 46 One unforeseen consequence of these visits was that Rosaries which belonged to the prisoners became collector’s items and such a buoyant market for these was created in Manchester that guards would often do favours in return for the payment of a Rosary.47 This was not the only support available to the volunteers in Knutsford, the Irish National Relief Fund was set up to provide support and assistance for the prisoners and their families with its headquarters in Holborn, London and by July 1916 it had raised £350, most of which had been spent on buying clothes and food for those volunteers imprisoned in Britain.48 This was not the only organisation, The Irish National Aid Association and the Irish Volunteer Dependent’s Fund were based in Dublin.49

11 From Ireland, they also had political support in the form of Alderman Alfie Byrne MP from Dublin. The visit of Byrne was popular with some prisoners, who carried him shoulder high. He brought with him cigarettes and cooked chickens for the prisoners. One prisoner remembered being very thankful for the ‘few Woodbine’ that Byrne gave him.50 In the prison chapel, one volunteer in full uniform played the organ and the prisoners sang ‘Hail Glorious St Patrick’. Byrne arranged for an extra priest to visit the prison so that all could attend mass and take Holy Communion. One prisoner, Michael

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Lynch, organised and conducted the singing of Hymns with such skill their singing became so popular with the local population they would gather outside the prison on Sundays to listen.51 Mass and the ability to attend confession was popular with the volunteers but not all were Catholic, there were a few Presbyterians and Church of Ireland in their numbers, sadly the exact numbers of whom seem not to have been recorded.52

12 However, Alfie Byrne MP was not popular with some volunteers. Volunteer Thomas Pugh had been acquainted with Byrne prior to the Easter Rising and still held bad feelings towards Byrne after previous arguments concerning the Osborne judgement.53 Byrne got a sharp response when he offered cigarettes to Pugh.54 Another prisoner recalled contrary to the public version of Byrne’s visit, the MP was attacked by the prisoners and that they only calmed down when it was revealed he had condemned the executions of the Rising’s leaders in Parliament.55 Michael Lynch also regarded the reception of Byrne by the prisoners very cold. However, he warmed to him when Byrne complained to the prison chaplain about the lack of spiritual provision for the volunteers.56 The personal accounts of the visit of Byrne reveals something of split between the prisoners in Knutsford over his visit. Those that had been part of the Citizen Army, and had been longstanding supporters of Connolly and Larkin, did not welcome Byrne because of his previous links with the Irish Parliamentary Party and his attitude towards the Irish Transport and General Workers Union during the Dublin lock-out.57 Others viewed Byrne’s visit as cynical, an opportunity to impress his Dublin constituents that he was on the rebel’s side.58

13 Byrne was not the only MP to visit the volunteers in Knutsford. Laurence Ginnell MP, also visited Knutsford and he too received a frosty reception from the prisoners.59 However, Ginnell improved his popularity by smuggling uncensored letters in and out the prison, when this was discovered he was banned from making further visits to Knutsford.60 The visits of Ginnell would cause a minor scandal as he was later fined for continuing to visit Knutsford, Stafford and Wandsworth by using the Gaelic spelling of his name to confuse the guards. His efforts resulted in a £100 fine and a suspension from the House of Commons.61

14 However, these divisions were not made public and at times a somewhat rose-tinted picture of prisoner moral was provided for public consumption in Ireland. One thing that was not made public was the boredom and monotony of prison life, and the effects this had on the mental health of the volunteers. Volunteer Robert Holland described the numerous ways he filled his days, he counted the bricks in his cell, improvised a calendar and even made a sundial.62 Volunteer Thomas Pugh recalled; ‘There was not very much happening in Knutsford except the usual prison regime. We were badly off in this respect—we were nobody’s children, we were neither prisoners of war nor convicts and they did not know what to do with us or how to feed us. We could not blame the prison Commandant for this, who was rather a decent chap. I used to read his stories over and over again, he wrote stories for “The Boys’ Own Paper”. The worst thing that ever happened was when they to the bible and prayer-book, as well as some other religious tracts from my cell. They were a terrible loss.’63

15 When he was initially searched one volunteer was particularly happy that the guards missed a tiny pencil which became his ‘great friend’ as he marked of the days of his confinement. It was a great loss when it was discovered and confiscated four days after arrival.64 After the loss of the pencil, Michael Lynch took comfort in his memory of

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having previously read Tom Clarke’s experiences in prison and followed the advice set out by Clarke. Following the observations of Clarke he; ‘realised that a man could keep sane, under these conditions, only as long as he was able to keep his mind revolving on something or other. If the mind when blank, or if you started worrying about your loved ones at home, madness was staring you in the face’.65

16 Lynch remembered the darkness of night being especially traumatic with little to distract the mind, he would often hear the silence broken by ‘a heartrending sob from some distant cell.’66 One volunteer described the shock of being placed in a cell at Knutsford; ‘It had an effect on me. One felt that the world had somehow ceased to be, that human kind no longer existed, that individualism as a quality of human progress was a thing of the past and that the only value of one’s relationship with life was represented by a card index system epitomised by a medley of alphabetical signs. To be suddenly thrown into a cell and to become aware of your insignificance and helplessness was forsooth an experience and no small moment’.67

17 Whilst the poor quality of the food in Knutsford meant that the volunteers were constantly battling hunger, most found that it could be overcome but more importantly it was that ‘the mind also needs something to feed on’; the body could be trained to endure physical discomfort, but sitting alone in a cell was ‘pretty deadly after the first few days’.68 Some prisoners used repetitive tasks to alleviate boredom, others were showing signs of involuntary compulsive behaviour. One volunteer was observed standing in one corner, folding a piece of paper, walk to the next corner, drop the paper, rub his hands together and repeat the same routine time and time again until the exercise period ended and he was returned to his cell.69 Whilst his comrades were concerned about their friend, the volunteer received no sympathy from the guards who viewed his behaviour as a source of amusement.

18 Whilst these guards and others seemed to enjoy the discomfort of the prisoners, the volunteers found that their guards were a mixed bunch, some capable of acts of kindness, others seemed to enjoy treating the prisoners with brutality and cruelty. Robert Holland was bound and tortured by Scottish Soldiers after he lost his temper and struck a Scottish guard.70 On one occasion the volunteers had the opportunity to see that this barbarity was not just reserved for them. One British soldier under sentence, possibly from the Non-Combatant Corps, unable to face the violence of the front had slashed his foot tendons with a razor. Unable to walk without assistance, the prison guards kicked and beat the man until he got to his feet. Despite their own conditions and treatment received at the hands of the guards, the volunteers were shocked and disturbed by what the conscientious objectors had to endure.71 The hatred shown to conscientious objectors extended to civilian population in Knutsford. The Easter Rising and the Irish prisoners was regarded as something of a curiosity. As conscientious objectors began to arrive in greater numbers, the civil population protested at their presence. This lingered into 1918 when this exploded into violence and a gang attacked conscientious objectors in the town.72 The response in Knutsford was typical of that found throughout the United Kingdom during the war. This reaction was due to several reasons which when taken in totality ensured that conscientious objectors were not just viewed as cowards, but represented a rejection of the national character, their objections to the war were a rejection of their Britishness.73

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19 The attempts at separation and reflection at Knutsford did not break the morale or spirit of the prisoners. When the death of Kitchener was announced some openly celebrated. News from home and their new-found status as heroes, now accepted as the most recent entry in the history of Irish rebellions also boosted morale. The volunteers in Knutsford also found other ways to keep up their spirits. William O’Brien managed to collect autographs of those who were with him in Knutsford and later Frongoch.74 This was given to him as a gift by Lillie Connolly.75 Many of those signing his book would also leave a small defiant message to show that the fight would continue.

20 Some turned to poetry, which also reveal something of the spirits of the volunteers. A nationalist handbill published, Life and Death, which contains the following lines ‘What is it ye’d be askin, God! there’s life in us still’. The final verse is as follows: Man! d’ye hear them prayin? For the lads beneath the sod, Who have answered their names in Heaven, And rest in the sight of God.76

21 Although the authors name is missing from the printed version, William O’Brien’s autograph book reveals the author as John MacDonagh, brother of Thomas MacDonagh. 77 There was clearly political life left in MacDonagh and the above verse reveals that the prisoners were aware of the changing attitude of the Irish to the Rising. In the poem, those that were doing the praying were those back home in Ireland, MacDonagh knew they would be going home as heroes. There is also a hint of pride in these lines, that they had answered Pearse’s call for a sacrifice for the nation. MacDonagh was showing that, in the aftermath of the Rising and the executions, it was not just the prisoners in mourning for fallen comrades, this was the nation turning its loss into the spark capable of igniting the next rebellion.78 Another poem from Knutsford shows that what silent reflection that was taking place was a determination for their battle to continue: Come, take a turn around this sun-rayed yard; Forget awhile that egress here is barred; Survey the world, with Knutsford as Grand Stand; With mind-lit eyes hold one trump card.79

22 The author of another poem, the Rubaiyat of Knutsford, followed the original style of Omar Khayyam, constructing his work in four-line verses.80 The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám had become popular on a global scale following the championing of Edward FitzGerald’s translation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin.81 This popularity quickly found its way to Ireland and multiple copies and translations were advertised in local and national newspapers. FitzGerald’s mother came from Ireland and could trace her lineage from the Earls of Kildare.82 In 1908 it was translated into Gaelic and printed in the Sinn Féin Newspaper.83 Although no author is listed it is probable that the translation is by Tadhg Ó Donnchadha.84 He would be a key figure in the Gaelic League and would work closely with Padraig Pearse.85 Its influence would later appear in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.86 As with the original Rubáiyát, this poem offers mysteries for the reader to solve. The author leaves blank the names of some of his fellow prisoners and adds further mystery comparing one fellow inmate to ‘Rory on the Hill’. Further, he then links the volunteers in Knutsford with older Fenian traditions and heroes such as John Mitchel.87 One Knutsford poet, from County Meath chose to pay homage to the most recent Irish martyr, Padraig Pearse. This was a call to ‘Lament an honoured soul, ‘whose life-long thought’, was ‘Ireland a Nation – untrammelled— unconfined’. The author used Pearse’s own words once again as a warning that ‘Ireland

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unfree shall never be at peace’.88 It is the poem The Knutsford Hotel that brings together all the themes of the encountered by the prisoners into a single text. The first verse is a satirical attack on the conditions experienced by the prisoners, it lists all the things the prisoners miss and would expect to find at the best hotels including Lipton’s tea, Scottish marmalade, bacon and eggs. The author, with acidic whit, wondered why popular musical hall entertainers such as George Lashwood did not stay at the Knutsford Hotel when on tour.89

23 One prisoner used his skills as a commercial artist to record his own contribution to the recollections contained within O’Brien’s autograph book. Patrick Lalor had been a Lieutenant in ‘B’ Company, the Irish Citizen Army.90 In common with the poets in Knutsford, he also used his art to imagine the participants of the Easter Rising as the inheritors of the traditions of previous rebellions. However, he chose to go even further back in Irish history beyond the Fenians and Tone. He produced a pen and ink sketch of a mythic Irish warrior calling to the spirit of Shane O’Neill.91 The sacrificial motif remained an important theme within the prison art produced in Knutsford, Lalor continued this trend, calling to Ireland’s dead generations.

24 The witness statements, press reports and poetry reveal that Thomas Pugh was correct in his description of his fellow prisoners as ‘nobody’s children, we were neither prisoners of war nor convicts and they did not know what to do with us or how to feed us’.92 These first weeks were an involuntary languishing in a British purgatory. During this time they were isolated, ill-fed and allowed almost no chance to exercise. They were confined to cramped cells, with little or nothing to occupy their time and personal items were either confiscated or stolen. Maintaining morale was difficult for the volunteers, during the first weeks, especially after news began to filter through of the executions in Dublin.

25 The prisoners had mixed experiences of their captors. Some treated the volunteers with standard military discipline, others seemed to relish being able to physically and mentally abuse the prisoners. The guards themselves also seemed unsure of the volunteers. Some soldiers regarded the prisoners with contempt, others thought that they had fought for their beliefs and had earned respect. This would be something that would never be shown to the conscientious objectors. Despite the harshness of the prison regime at the start, the volunteers in Knutsford did not suffer brutality on the scale that had previously been the experience of the suffragettes or what the conscientious objectors such as Fenner Brockway would endure.93 Unlike British conscientious objectors, the volunteers would never have their masculinity questioned or their bravery doubted. They would return home heroes, whereas conscientious objectors would return to a society that not only shunned them but also at times utterly rejected any attempts by them to re-enter British civic society.

26 There was universal praise for the support that they received from the Irish living in Manchester which was organised by Father O’Hanrahan who created a prisoner aid programme with the help of the local Cumann na mBan.94 One of the Volunteers wives with great affection regarded Father O’Hanrahan as ‘simply marvellous’.95 Contrary to the fondness shown for the Manchester Irish, those politicians that visited Knutsford were not so well remembered. Some of the prisoners remembered previous political allegiances and philosophy of both Alfie Byrne and Laurence Ginnell, however even those volunteers that did not agree with their politics were appreciative of Byrne’s and

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Ginnell’s gifts of food, cigarettes, attempts at letter smuggling and later efforts in Westminster.

27 The witness statements, reaction to MPs visits and poetry also unwittingly expose the character of the prisoners. These were relatively well-educated individuals, capable of considered, deliberative political thought. They were also able to produce sophisticatedly structured poetry, understanding literary rules and rhyme schemes, even if the message their work contained varied in its subtlety and content. This was not a cohort of rebellious urban peasants, they were intelligent individuals that would later be reunited with the remaining leadership at the ‘University’ of Frongoch.

28 Despite the privations of incarceration, the attempts at isolating the prisoners so that they would reflect on their ‘crimes’, the determination of the prisoners to remain true to their cause was never broken as was shown in the final verse of the Knutsford Hotel; We are facing the future, Oh! what shall it send? Can it break the spirit that never can bend, Can law and its arm make Irishmen fear, Or hard labour’s lot from us drag a tear? Oh! no, Mother Erin, that will never be, We’re willing to suffer, my darling for thee; For Pearse and his heroes our hearts they do swell Although we’re locked up in the Knutsford Hotel.96

29 This final verse supports Edna Longley’s conclusion in her analysis of Yeats 1916 poetry, that whilst Ireland had changed utterly, the rebels themselves remained unchanged.97 However, the Knutsford poets show none of doubts or guilt that can be found within Yeats own work. There is no room for scepticism, Knutsford’s prisoners are determined to continue the fight. These were not the poems of the national bard or an attempt to provide a link to the public mood.98 They are a window for the public on the experience of incarceration in British prisons. The authors, in the words of George Bernard Shaw knew that ‘will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester martyrs’.99

30 Although Knutsford did not contain any of the most famous or romantic figures from the Easter Rising, it is unsound to regard it as a mere stepping-stone to the ‘university’ of Frongoch. The prisoners were not detained long enough for them to establish anything resembling the commonality and organisation established in Frongoch. However, to ignore their story reduces the dignity of their struggle to resist prison regime that never broke their moral. Some would return to Ireland and continue to fight. For others such as William X. O’Brien this would not be their final experience of England. He would return and contest the 1920 Stockport by-election.100 He would stand as the Independent Republican candidate, this would be notable for two reasons. First, it would become one the first attempts to raise the saliency of Ireland in British politics by having single issue candidates stand in British constituencies. They would all fail as the Irish in Britain became embedded in British politics choosing to support mainstream British political parties. Secondly, it would expose the difficulties that the Labour Party would face as it attempted to create a coherent policy regarding Ireland.

31 The poems and statements of the volunteers in Knutsford are a written dedication, a literary promise to endure the degradations of the Knutsford Hotel and to continue the struggle.

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NOTES

1. Knutsford Hotel, written by an Irish rebel in Knutsford, June 1916, The National Library of Ireland, EPH A243. 2. W. Murphy, ‘Nowhere Else Does One Learn to Know a Colleague So Well’, Political Imprisonment and the Irish 1919-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), [Oxford Scholarship online accessed August 2017]. 3. Murphy, Political Imprisonment and the Irish 1919-1921, p.34. 4. D. Foxton, Revolutionary Lawyers Sinn Féin and crown courts in Ireland and Britain, 1916-1923 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), pp.88-107. 5. Foxton, Revolutionary Lawyers Sinn Féin and crown courts in Ireland and Britain, 1916-1923, p.68. 6. 1916 Rebellion Handbook (Dublin: The Mourne River Press & Colour Books Ltd, 1998), pp. 67-96. 7. Foxton, Revolutionary Lawyers Sinn Féin and crown courts in Ireland and Britain, 1916-1923, p.93. 8. C. Townshend, Easter 1916 The Irish Rebellion (London: Penguin Books, 2005), plate 21. 9. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, pp. 67-96; Knutsford Hotel, written by an Irish rebel in Knutsford, June 1916, The National Library of Ireland, EPH A243. 10. The Fourth Report of the Committee of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders (London: T. Bensley, 1822). 11. Hansard, HC Debates, Vol.69, cc817-41, 23rd December 1843. 12. D. Woodley, Knutsford Prison the Inside Story (Northwich: Ann Loader Publications, 2007), p. 75: The Manchester Guardian, ‘The Future of Knutsford Gaol’,1st October 1915; The Observer, ‘New use for Knutsford Gaol’, 17th October 1915. 13. The Future of Knutsford Goal, The Manchester Guardian, 1st October 1915. 14. Military Service Act 1916, HMSO, The National Archives, Kew. 15. C. Barrett, Peacemakers War Resistance 1914-1918 An Anglican Perspective (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014), p.142. 16. S. McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848-1922: theatres of war. 17. W.J. Brennan-Whitmore, Dublin Burning: The Easter Rising from Behind the Barricades (Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1996), p.125. 18. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, pp. 67-96; ‘More Prisoners, List of over 300, Nearly 800 Deportations’, The Freemans Journal, 13th May 1916. 19. William O’Brien, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 1,766, BMH Dublin. 20. Thomas J. Doyle, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 186, BMH Dublin. 21. John McDonagh, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 352, BMH Dublin. 22. Oscar Traynor, T.D, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 340, BMH Dublin. 23. Frank Robbins, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 585, BMH Dublin. 24. Ibid. 25. William James Stapleton, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 822, BMH Dublin.

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26. Colonel Joseph V. Lawless, Statement by Witness, Document No, W.S. 1043, BMH Dublin. 27. Frank Robbins, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 585, BMH Dublin. 28. Thomas J. Doyle, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 186, BMH Dublin; Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, W.S. 51, BMH Dublin; Frank Robbins, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 585, BMH Dublin; Colonel Joseph V. Lawless, Statement by Witness, Document No, W.S. 1043, BMH Dublin. 29. Oscar Traynor, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 340, BMH Dublin. 30. Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 511, BMH Dublin. 31. Sean Kennedy, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 885, BMH Dublin. 32. Colonel Joseph V. Lawless, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 1043, BMH Dublin. 33. M. Ogborn, ‘Discipline, Government and Law: Separate Confinement in the Prisons of England and Wales, 1830-1877’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 20, No.3 (1995), pp. 295-311. 34. T. West, The curious Mr Howard: legendary prison reformer, (Hook: Waterside Press, 2011), p.182. 35. Captain Seán Prendergast, Statement by Witness, Document, No W.S. 755, BMH, Dublin. 36. I. O’Donnell, Prisoners, Solitude, Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1-33. 37. W. Murphy, ‘Nowhere Else Does One Learn to Know a Colleague So Well’, Political Imprisonment and the Irish 1919-1921, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), [Oxford Scholarship online accessed August 2017], p.259. 38. Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 511, BMH, Dublin. 39. Joseph Good, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 388, BMH, Dublin. 40. William James Stapleton, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 822, BMH, Dublin. 41. Thomas Doyle, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 186, BMH, Dublin. 42. Colonel Eamon Morkan, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 411, BMH, Dublin. 43. Thomas Doyle, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 186, BMH, Dublin. 44. ‘Life in Knutsford’, The Kerryman, 3rd June 1916. 45. Liam McMahon, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S.274, BMH, Dublin. 46. Colonel Eamon Morkran, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S.411, BMH, Dublin. 47. W. Murphy, ‘Nowhere Else Does One Learn to Know a Colleague So Well’, Political Imprisonment and the Irish 1919-1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) [Oxford Scholarship online accessed August 2017]. 48. ‘The Irish National Relief Fund’, The Herald, 22nd July 1916. 49. Murphy, ‘Nowhere Else Does One Learn to Know a Colleague So Well’, Political Imprisonment and the Irish 1919-1921 (2014). 50. Robert Holland, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 371, BMH, Dublin. 51. Sean Kennedy, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 885, BMH, Dublin.

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52. Captain Seán Prendergast, Statement by Witness, Document, No W.S. 755, BMH, Dublin. 53. The Osborne Judgement and the Taff Vale Railway Case were landmark moments in British Labour history, concerning the funding of political parties by Trades Unions and the protection of Unions from prosecution during industrial disputes; see H. Pelling, The Politics of the Osborne Judgement, The Historical Journal, Vol.25, 4, 1982 and J.G. Moher, ‘The Osborne Judgement of 1909: Trade Union funding of political parties in historical perspective’, History and Policy, Policy Papers, 2nd December 2009. 54. Thomas Pugh, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 397, BMH, Dublin. 55. Joseph Good, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 388, BMH, Dublin. 56. Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 511, BMH, Dublin. 57. Frank Robbins, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 585, BMH, Dublin. 58. Colonel Joseph V. Lawless, Statement by Witness, Document No, W.S. 1043, BMH, Dublin. 59. Liam O’Carroll, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 594, BMH, Dublin. 60. Captain Seán Prendergast, Statement by Witness, Document, No W.S. 755, BMH, Dublin. 61. ‘Sequel to visit to Knutsford Prison, Irish MP fined £100, The Guardian, 4th August 1916. 62. Robert Holland, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 371, BMH, Dublin. 63. Thomas Pugh, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 397, BMH, Dublin. 64. Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 511, BMH, Dublin. 65. Ibid. 66. Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 511, BMH, Dublin. 67. Captain Seán Prendergast, Statement by Witness, Document, No W.S. 755, BMH, Dublin. 68. Colonel Joseph V. Lawless, Statement by Witness, Document No, W.S. 1043, BMH, Dublin. 69. Robert Holland, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 371, BMH, Dublin. 70. Ibid. 71. Michael Lynch, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 511, BMH, Dublin. 72. ‘Attack on Knutsford C.O.’s’, The Manchester Guardian, 18th May 1918. 73. L.S. Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service During the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 74. William O’Brien, Autograph Book, National Library, Dublin, MS 15, 662. 75. The autograph book contains the dedication, ‘From Mrs James Connolly to Wm O’Brien, Richmond Barracks, Dublin, 2nd June 1916’. 76. Life and Death, National Library, Dublin, EPH B427. 77. William O’Brien, Autograph Book, National Library, Dublin, MS 15, 662.; Thomas MacDonagh was a signatory of the Proclamation of the Republic and was executed for this role in the Easter Rising. John MacDonagh would later become a significant figure in Irish theatre and film.

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78. S. Cole, At the Violent Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.137-138. 79. Rubaiyat of Knutsford, National Library of Ireland, EPH B289. 80. O. Khayyám, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996). 81. E. Z. Behtash, ‘The Reception of FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyáit of ‘Umar Khayyám by the Victorians’, in, A. A. Seyed-Gohrab (ed), The Great Umar Khayyám: A Global Reception of The Rubáiyát (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), pp. 203-205. 82. S. Goldfarb, ‘FitzGerald [formally Purcell], Edward (1809-1883), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 83. ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’, Sinn Féin, 26th December 1908. 84. A. G. Potter, A Bibliography of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Together with Kindred Matter in Prose and Verse Pertaining thereto (New York: Georg Olms, 1994), p.139; P. O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park (PA): Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), p.374. 85. Tadhg Ó Donnchadha would become an important figure in the Gaelic League which was established in 1893 by Douglas Hyde for the promotion of the Irish language. He would become the Irish language editor of the Freeman’s Journal and the Gaelic Journal. He would later become Professor of Irish at University College Cork. 86. C. Brown, ‘Omar Khayyam in Monto: A Reading of a Passage from James Joyce Ulysses’, Neophilogus 68 (1984), 623-636. 87. Rory on the Hill is a poem by Charles J Kirkham (1828-1882), the main character of which is waiting for the next rebellion to take place. John Mitchel was a member of the Young Irelanders and later elected as MP but disqualified due to his previous conviction under the Treason Felony Act 1848, his Jail Journal would become immensely popular. 88. ‘Lines to Patrick Pearse’, Meath Chronicle, 31st August 1918. 89. George Lashwood was a famous musical entertainer, known for his distinguished dress and was dubbed the Beau Brummell of the music hall. 90. Patrick Joseph Lalor, Military Service Pension Records, W24SP8028, Dublin; Shane O’Neill was a significant figure in the Tudor campaigns in Ulster for further reading see C. Lennon, Sixteenth Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2005). 91. William O’Brien, Autograph Book, National Library, Dublin, MS 15, 662. 92. Thomas Pugh, Statement by Witness, Document No W.S. 397, BMH, Dublin. 93. A. Kramer, Conchies: Conscientious Objectors of the first World War, (London: Franklin Watts, 2014), pp. 27-31. 94. Colonel Eamon Morkan, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 411, BMH, Dublin. 95. Mrs Phyllis Morkan, Statement by Witness, Document No. W.S. 210, BMH, Dublin. 96. Knutsford Hotel, EPH A243. 97. E. Longley, The Living Stream Literature & Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-Upon- Tyne, 1994), p.83. 98. J.W Foster, ‘Yeats and the Easter Rising’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 1985).

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99. J.W Foster, ‘Yeats and the Easter Rising’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 1985). 100. M. Moulton, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp.56-57.

ABSTRACTS

The events following the Easter Rising in 1916, the executions in Dublin and incarceration of the volunteers in Frongoch have been examined and published on multiple occasions. What remains missing are studies of the experience of prisoners in British gaols as they waited for the British Government to decide what to do with them. The most important studies of their prison experience have been completed by William Murphy and Seán McConville. Knutsford was a military prison and unlike the more relaxed regimes of civilian prisons where photographs of notable prisoners including Michael Collins were taken no such records for Knutsford exist. The words and memories of the remaining volunteers remain largely unpublished other than in one or two fleeting sentences. Although the cohort sent to Knutsford did not contain any of the leaders of the Easter Rising significant figures were incarcerated there, including William X. O’Brien, Richard Mulcahy, Oscar Traynor and W.J Brennan-Whitmore. The Witness Statements, letters and poems of those who endured their imprisonment at Knutsford reveal an intimate story of abuse, stress and support of the Irish in Britain, in what, with gallows humour, they called the Knutsford Hotel.

Les évènements qui ont suivis le soulèvement de Pâques 1916, les exécutions à Dublin et l’incarcération des Volunteers à Frongoch ont été étudiés et ont fait l’objet de multiples publications. Il manque cependant des études de l’expérience des détenus dans les prisons britanniques alors qu’ils attendent que le gouvernement décide de leur sort. Les études les plus importantes de leur expérience en prison ont été menées par William Murphy et Seán McConville. Knutsford était une prison militaire et contrairement aux régimes plus souples des prisons civiles ou les photographies de prisonniers célèbres comme Michael Collins ont été prises, il n’existe pas de telles données pour Knutsford. Les paroles et souvenirs des Volunteers restants n’ont jamais été publiés pour la plupart si ce n’est une ou deux phrases en passant. Bien qu’il n’y ait pas eu dans la cohorte envoyée à Knutsford de grandes figures du soulèvement de Pâques, certains de ces acteurs importants y furent incarcérés comme William X. O’Brien, Richard Mulcahy, Oscar Traynor et W.J Brennan-Whitmore. Les dépositions des témoins, les lettres et les poèmes de ceux qui ont enduré leur emprisonnement à Knutsford révèlent une histoire intime de maltraitance, de stress et du soutien des Irlandais en Grande-Bretagne, dans cette prison, qu’avec humour noir, ils avaient baptisé l’Hôtel Knutsford.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Irlande, prison, 1916, soulèvement, Knutsford, historiographie Keywords: Ireland, prison, 1916, rising, Knutsford, historiography

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AUTHOR

DAVID SHAW Dr David Shaw, lecturer at Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. Winner of prestigious University of Liverpool and Franklin College International Research Fellowship University of Georgia (UGA). Research interests include the Irish in Post-War Britain, migration, Diaspora, peace and social justice.

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Education, the New Science, and Improvement in Seventeenth- Century Ireland

John Patrick Montaño

1 Steven Shapin began his book on the New Learning by saying “there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”1 In the same way, there was no humanist-style revolution in education in the seventeenth-century, yet this is a paper about its implications. It is clear that the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others introduced a novel way of gathering and using knowledge, fostering a new natural or mechanical philosophy that emphasized a new style of education aimed at the gentleman working in the service of the state—a disinterested thinker seeking knowledge for the sake of the common good and improvement of society. For Bacon, it was necessary “to try the whole thing anew upon a better plan, and to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations.”2 More importantly, Bacon aspired to create new methods that would produce a reformed knowledge and superior education that would prove worthy to be valued and supported by the state and other institutions of society. In short, new methods along with new men educated outside the university—men trained to take-up knowledge as an instrument of civic utility—would make the learning a more effective arm of state power.3

2 One point worth remembering without my truly it developing here is the importance of the general crisis in politics, society and culture following the Reformation; this widespread upheaval played a crucial role in contributing to the changing attitudes towards knowledge and in particular the relations between knowledge and social order. Indeed, a new method was viewed as a remedy for the problems of intellectual disorder, and the knowledge of nature in particular was considered deeply relevant to problems of order, not least because nature was understood to be a divinely authored book. Most importantly, a new method that relied on observation and reason was valued thanks to its claims to be objective and disinterested, making it a more valuable tool. Naturally, the capacity of knowledge to make valuable contributions to the world flows from an

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understanding that it was not produced to further particular human interests. With this in mind, the remainder of the essay will aim to look at how a few notable examples of the new types of knowledge and education were brought to bear on the strategies to order and to improve Ireland in the seventeenth century.

3 Bacon’s essay Of Plantations and his involvement in the Articles of Plantation for Ulster are well known, but his influence is more apparent in the Cromwellian period and after. 4 Part of Bacon’s plan for reform was to secure order through means approved of and implemented by the state. In the Novum Organon he called for novel educational methods along with organized and collective labor, all supported by the government. In the New Atlantis Bacon has Solomon’s House, a combination of bureaucratic and intellectual organization, a proto-research and engineering institute clearly intended to serve the interests of an imperializing state: the work done there was presented as powering the expansionist drive of the kingdom and consequently received huge resources from the state5. In the event, several such intellectual associations or circles emerged under the early Stuarts, and Cromwell and others were to rely on their expertise when it came to dealing with the damnable question of Ireland.6

4 The Irish Rebellion of 1641 destroyed much of the material changes to the landscape introduced by the plantations. But Cromwell’s conquest and confiscations provided the opportunity to impose order and civility once again. Surely the first stage in the process--the comprehensive defeat of the natives--was now complete. The improvement of Ireland was now the responsibility of men associated with the new learning, led by Samuel Hartlib.7 The Hartlib Circle had produced several tracts on husbandry and improvement in the 1630s and 1640s. Their association with the Independents in England meant that Cromwell’s victory might permit the implementation of some of their schemes on the blank slate of Ireland.8 A cursory examination of some of the writings and proposals for the improvement of Ireland produced by these new scientists is intended to support the three suggestions offered here: that the new learning’s views on economic improvement were informed by Renaissance and Classical assumptions about husbandry and cultivation; secondly, that they believed a civilized or enlightened society was rooted in private property, permanent dwellings, and enclosed fields;9 and finally that Irish hostility to, and destruction of, these markers of civilized identity convinced them that Irish pastoral society had to be replaced by a settled, civilized one before economic improvement could take place.10

5 The opportunities offered by Cromwell’s new dispensation in Ireland were like manna for the advocates of the new learning. The search for precise empirical knowledge of Ireland had begun before the civil war but was given new life by the Hartlib Circle. The shiring, mapping, and surveying of Ireland was pushed forward with renewed vigor, with Elizabethan servants producing a plethora of discoveries, accounts, descriptions, and views of Ireland.11 The earliest attempt to create accurate maps of lands beyond the pale was undertaken with the support of Sir William Cecil, though the constant disappearance of the cartographers limited the effectiveness of this project.12 Most importantly, one of the first expositions on the necessity “Of Plantations” was written by the father of the new science, Francis Bacon himself. But one of the distinguishing features of the new baconian science was its desire to gain control of the natural environment through improvement and technology. This endeavor served both spiritual and utilitarian purposes. Hartlibians accepted the puritan view of fallen man

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existing in an unfriendly environment, a mindset which convinced them that the godly man must labor to “correct” or improve nature as a means of atonement.13 Many of the adventurers who came to Ireland considered the pastoral society of the Irish as the perfect example of ungodly sloth and sin: an indolent people living passively on the earth, taking only what nature offered. The new devotees of reason and improvement believed this passivity blurred the distinction between man and beast. For them, Ireland was an island of savages and barbarians, a nation overdue for a sharp dose of physical and moral improvement. But before this could be undertaken, a reliable description of Ireland based on empirical observations and the latest technical knowledge was required.

6 Thanks to the efforts and influence of Hartlib just such an effort was sponsored by the Council of State, resulting in William Petty’s Down Survey, the most thorough account of Irish topography ever attempted. Petty drew upon the most advanced scientific and technical methods available in the seventeenth century, relying heavily on members of the Hartlib group.14 In addition to the instructions supplied by Petty, the surveyors were given standardized tools and training, a survey course by Miles Symner at Trinity, and instructions to ensure consistency and accuracy in their endeavors.15 The empirical approach, the modern instruments, the recording of data in uniform folios provided by Petty and placing the findings “down” on a map, are all examples of the new scientific skills advocated by the Hartlib Circle and the new education. But if the skills and methods were new and improved, the goals of the modern scientists displayed a considerable continuity with the Renaissance adventurers who had preceded them in Ireland. Petty joined a chorus of previous reformers who condemned the primitive and impermanent architecture of the natives as a symbol of the indolent and unsettled lifestyle. For this reason, building with brick or stone and mortar was urged: sturdy dwellings were an important sign of the adoption of the new learning and the English style of order.16

7 After 1555, the outpouring of husbandry manuals and agricultural treatises inspired by the translation of the Foure Bokes of Husbandry helped to establish the relationship between civility, gentility, and husbandry. This further inspired the belief that the socio-economic conditions in Ireland were the root of all evil there. The Hartlibians further believed that agricultural and spiritual reform were linked. The efficient husbandman was a common metaphor for puritans, and in 1652 Dury & Hartlib published The reformed Spiritual Husbandman. The next year saw Ralph Austen’s, A treatise on fruit trees. together with the spiritual use of an orchard. held forth in divers similitudes between natural and spiritual fruit trees.17These ideas come from Bacon’s idea that a great co-operative effort to marshal empirical knowledge would help restore man’s dominion over nature which had been sacrificed at the Fall.18 This interventionist attitude toward nature justified the construction of an improved, man- made landscape. So before the Irish could embrace the spiritual reforms on offer, Ireland would have to be remade as an ordered society based on well-bounded agricultural plots and solid masonry. Conveniently enough, the precise technical survey being taken down would also help to identify the best land available.

8 Prominent among Petty’s Instructions for surveying and admeasuring the Lands in Ireland was the command that “distinction be made betweene the profitable and unprofitable parts...[and] whether the profitable be arable, meadow, or pasture.”19 Reforms and improvement were genuinely desired by some, while opportunism,

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ambition and the search for profit drove others. Yet they all agreed that the mobile pastoral society of the native Irish could not coexist with the tenant-based, individual agricultural units of the arriving settlers. Within years Petty would offer a solution for native idleness through a public works project which would simultaneously give Ireland a more civilized, modern landscape. The “spare hands” of the idle, “(besides the making of Bridges, Harbors, Rivers, High-ways,) are able to plant as many Fruit and Timber Trees and also Quick-set Hedges as being grown up, would distinguish the Bounds of Lands, beautifie the Countrey, shade and shelter Cattel, furnish Wood, Fuel, Timber and fruit, in a better manner than ever was yet known in Ireland or England.”20 Beyond their concern for idle hands, these new scientific ideals remained tied to notions of civility, culture, and cultivation. Significantly, more and more of the improvements were directed almost exclusively at Irish land, the people becoming increasingly invisible as nature was emphasized according to the latest educational ideals. Ireland’s transition from barbaric to civilized continued to look like the transformation of an open pastoral landscape into a divided agricultural one. At the heart of all of this would be gardens and parks as evidence of having tamed a wild and menacing environment. Thus, new crops, new methods, selected livestock, land drainage, reclamation, manuring, emparking, and enclosing with hedges, ditches, palings, and walls and massive deforestations would join with the new towns to proclaim the distinctive (and superior) values of the newcomers.21

9 An early example of the novel educational ideas was provided by Samuel Hartlib in 1641.22 His ostensibly utopian Description of the Famous Kingdome of MACARIA drew upon the models of Bacon as well as Roman ideas about colonies but was in fact a thinly- veiled practical program for the improvement of newly acquired lands. Applying Roman colonial theory to individuals, Hartlib reported that in Macaria, if any man holdeth more land than he is able to improve to the utmost, he shall be admonished . . . and if he doth not amend his husbandry within a yeares space, there is a penalty set upon him, which is yearly doubled till his lands be forfeited, and he banished out of the Kingdom.”23 The failure to “improve” your land, or in this case, to farm it in the English manner, was here established as a justification for dispossession. MACARIA was offered as an Example to other Nations with councils and tax policies directed squarely towards the scientific improvement of the natural world. Beyond its Great Council there were five “under-councils” for “Husbandry, Fishing, Trade by Land, Trade by Sea, and for new Plantations,” just the sort of state-sponsored institutions recommended by Bacon. For Hartlib and his followers, husbandry was the basis of plenty and prosperity, and therefore essential to supporting the number of people necessary for trade and commerce: “except Husbandry be improved, the Industrie of Trading . . . can neither be advanced or profitably upheld.”24 This conviction was common to the new political economists, William Petty in particular. In order to expedite the spread of economic improvements in MACARIA, “the twentieth part of every mans goods that dieth shall be employed about the IMPROVING of lands, and making High-wayes faire, and bridges over rivers; by which means the whole Kingdome is become like a fruitful Garden.”25

10 The use of confiscation in probate was meant to maximize the number of acres under the plough, thereby laying the foundation for economic improvements. But plantations in Ireland over the last century had made clear that not all Irish acres were created equal. As a result, before Hartlib’s Macarian example could be followed, an exact reckoning of Ireland’s land and resources was imperative. The obsession here with agriculture and husbandry was not at all new, though thanks to the new educational

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ideas the empirical and technical methods used to gather information about Ireland certainly were.26 But despite the advanced techniques of the new science, the economic improvements planned were predicated on the need to eliminate the pastoral society of the natives. Throughout these years, the proper use of land was taken as the key signifier of civility.27

11 Hartlib found an excellent source for the information desired in the unfinished work of Gerard Boate. The first volume of his Naturall History of Ireland was published posthumously, with a dedication by Hartlib, who tried for years to gather additional material for later volumes by circulating a list of “Interrogatories,” but the responses were never sufficient to complete the work. He still felt the need to publish the first part as “a True and ample Description of the several ways of Manuring and Improving” Ireland. Beyond scientific benefits and the common good of Ireland, the title page freely admitted that the work was intended “for the benefit of the Adventurers and Planters therein.”28The Naturall History provides clear evidence of the link between education, agriculture, improvement, and cultural differences exposed by the imperial process. Boate wrote in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and that experience surely informs his entire work. Interestingly enough, the History also demonstrates how readily the Irish identified the ways in which agricultural improvements threatened their society and culture. Indeed, nothing outraged Boate more than the Irish rejection of the civility on offer and their determination to sweep it away in all its manifestations.29

12 Boate was convinced that husbandry was the surest path to the perfection of earthly benefits, “and in the management thereof by way of Trading.” Hartlib agreed with this in his Dedication, telling Cromwell and Fleetwood that he knew “nothing more useful than to have the knowledge of the Naturall History of each Nation advanced . . . otherwise there can be no Industrie used towards the improvement and Husbandry thereof.”30 But for Hartlib as for Boate the improvements in Husbandry were very much a part of the civilizing and improving process central to imperialism. Indeed, one of the subjects of the later volumes was to have been the “great paines taken by the English, ever since the Conquest, to civilize [the Irish], and to improve the Countrie.”31For centuries civilizing Ireland had been equated with pacifying Ireland. But by the mid- seventeenth century civility was firmly associated with cultivation, and the introduction of cultivated plots seen as the essential building blocks of an ordered, rational society that justified imperial expansion.32 The fact that conversion of confiscated pasture land into enclosed fields led to considerable personal gain only proved that the instruments of providence were reliably rewarded.33

13 For advocates of the new science, God manifested himself in nature and in human Learning, and it was one of the great failings of the Irish that they allowed so much of their country to lay watery and waste “through their carelessness, wherby all or most of the Bogs at first were caused.”34 This state of affairs was particularly galling to a Dutchman like Boate. He insisted that the excessive moisture which plagued Ireland could be reduced “by the industry of men, if the country being once inhabited throughout by a civill Nation.”35 The draining of Irish bogs may have been a fanciful idea in the 1650s, but the point to notice is the belief in the ability of “civil men” to make Ireland into a productive and wealthy nation. Boate’s descriptions of clearing fields, building roads, erecting fences, and draining bogs were intended as proof that the English were “the introducers of all good things in Ireland.” More importantly,

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Boate recognized that the key indicators of economic improvement and civility in Ireland were “building, planting, hedging, and the like, but chiefly with [new] kinds of manuring.”36 By the 1650s the ideas of the new science had provided considerable credibility for an ideology which saw landscapes and land use as a means of distinction, a means of expressing the values of a society. Furthermore, an ordered and settled landscape was a marked sign of the improved conditions in Ireland. In this case the English value being expressed is the valorization of order, particularly an order that serves as an assertion of imperial authority.37 Similarly, the alteration of a landscape may be viewed as a process that validates and legitimates power or as the method people use to transform the natural world into cultural realms of meaning. As a result, agricultural improvements and changes in the land become important sites where cultures and values are expressed, but also contested.

14 Accordingly, the native inhabitants were well aware of the significance of the “improvements” which were appearing throughout the country. Castles, forts, and walled towns were the most glaring examples of the new civilized identity being implanted. But these sturdy defensive structures were by no means the sole expression of the new and improved order being constructed in Ireland. The fields, fences, hedges, ditches, and walls were easily recognized as the borders and barriers they were meant to be. It should come as no surprise that the rebellion of 1641 witnessed widespread assaults on these monuments to civility and improvement. Boate complained bitterly of Irish ingratitude, reporting English improvements “for which that brutish nation from time to time hath rewarded them with unthankfullness, hatred, and envy, and lately with a horrible and bloody conspiracie, tending to their utter destruction.”38 In John Temple’s account of the Irish rebellion he acknowledges the native desire to destroy in symbolic fashion everything that reminded them of the English presence in the country. Thereby communicating their hostility fo the cultural markers being planted in the landscape. The lamentations about these attacks reveal how accurately the Irish identified the signs produced by the new science and education: Not content to have murthered or expelled their English neighbours . . . they endeavoured quite to extinguish the memory of them, and of all the civility and good things by them introduced amongst that wild Nation; and consequently in most places they did not only demolish the houses built by the English, the Gardens and Enclosures made by them, the Orchards and Hedges by them planted, but destroyed whole drove and flocks of ENGLISH Cowes and Sheep.39

15 The evidence for similar attacks on the material aspects of agricultural improvements is common in the years of relative tranquility from 1610-40. It seems that both sides were well aware of the role which land use and material culture played in distinguishing their incompatible societies. The tidy inclosed plots proved regular and easy targets, tokens of change that could be could be demeaned on a daily basis. One early improver complained bitterly about an annoying habit of his neighbors: For an instance of theire malice to the Englishe, an English man did strongly inclose a peece of ground for meadowe, and hee pitched out from thence an exceeding nomber of stones, and when he came to mowe his grounds he found more stones then he tooke out (for the Irish never went that way, day or night) but threwe in stones from under their mantles.40

16 On the English side, the absence of improvements was taken for a sign of the sloth and barbarism which the new settlers aimed to eliminate. Constructing a substantial stone house, orchard and gardens amidst a re-ordered and improved landscape were the

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most visible components of the civilized, enlightened identity which separated old from new. For the improvers, it tasts of the savage to see an ancient estated family continue to live in the country on their lands, yet without a tolerable habitation: without the decorums of garden: without meadow and enclosed pastures; without the coverture and embellishment of quicks and trees: without in fine anything that may speak of a gentle and wise economy.41

17 The “wise economy” craved by the settlers was based on assumptions about the merits of husbandry and the subjugation of the natural world so crucial to the new educational ideals. Enlightened man would rely on the new learning to advance husbandry. The remodeled landscape and the consequent peace and stability would create an environment in which manufacturing and trade would flourish. The civilized example of husbandry and permanent dwellings was the best way to “transmute” the Irish.

18 As early as 1641, John Temple mistakenly assumed that “these people of late times were so much civilized by their cohabitation with the English . . . [that] many Irish, especially of the better sort, have taken up the English language, apparel, and decent manner of living in their private houses.”42 Apparently he was soon to be disabused of this notion. The attacks in 1641 on English towns, buildings, boundaries, and all enclosed lands had demonstrated the natives’ hostility to the improved landscape.

19 Cromwell’s transplantations to Connaught proved one more failed solution; and by the 1670s it was a commonplace that the pastoral society of the “wild Irish” was the number one obstacle to the improvements desired. Petty’s scientific observations convinced him that forcing the Irish to live like the English would simultaneously eliminate their barbarous culture, provide jobs, and create the wealth necessary to sustain industry. Petty felt the government could “create jobs for Idle hands and wealth through building of 168,000 small Stone-wall Houses, with chimneys, Doors, Windowes, Gardens and Orchards, ditch’d and quicksteed; instead of the lamentable Sties now in use. . . . The planting 5 Millions of Fruit-Treees...The planting 3 Millions of Timber- Trees upon the Bounds and Meers of every [plot].”43 By forcing the Irish to live in the English manner, Petty believed they would inevitably be transmuted into the civilized farmers who would live in stone houses and generate the wealth necessary for advancing Irish trade. In the end, Petty even proposed that single Irish women be forced to marry English men, and raise their families in the English manner, for “when the Language of the Children shall be English, and the whole Oeconomy of the Family English, viz. Diet, Apparel, &c the Transmutation will be very easy and quick.” Imposing English husbandry, language, law, architecture, and culture on Ireland was accepted as the necessary precursors to introducing order and civility. For William Petty economic improvement was more reliable than “all Military means of setling and securing Ireland in peace and plenty.”44 Economic improvements--in the form of a settled agricultural society--were the key to the emergence of a civilized and enlightened Ireland. Since civility needed to precede religious conversion, economic improvements offered the Irish a most desirable combination: material gain in tandem with spiritual salvation.

20 Here again we see the new learning linking economic improvement and a civilized identity to the elimination of the existing Irish customs and society. For individuals, there were tremendous gains to be had from the economic improvements proposed. But for the government the improvements and civility desired were a means to remove

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the mobile, pastoral, society which had resisted English offers of peace and order for five centuries. Advocates of the new education and learning offered economic improvement as the means to create a new, enlightened identity for Ireland. But the emphasis on cultivation and agriculture meant that the Irish people were reduced a secondary concern. The appropriate social and economic attitudes toward land and settlement would have to come first. With the natural world properly subdued, the population could choose between husbandry or Connaught.

NOTES

1. Research for this work was conducted in multiple archives in several countries and on two continents. None of that would have been possible without the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, a University of Delaware’s General University Research Grant, the Department of History’s Research Fund and a Grant from the Center for Global and Area Studies: I am very grateful to each of these institutions. Professors John Brewer, Kathleen Wilson and Fiona Bateman have been loyal supporters of my work and my thanks remain constant. Joanne, Hektor and Carolina inspire me to continue working while providing incessant reasons not do so. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (London: The Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1996), 1. 2. Quoted in ibid., 66. 3. Ibid., 127; Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne, ed. The New Organon, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27-31 and passim. 4. For Bacon’s occasional works see James Spedding, ed. The Life and the Letters of Francis Bacon, 14 vols., vol. 4 (London: Longmans, 1868), Discourse on the Plantation in Ireland, 116-26; Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon's Essays, or Counsels Moral and Civil, 2 vols., vol. 1 (London1720), "Of Plantations", 211-19. See also the typically interesting reading in Willy Maley, "’Another Britain?’ Bacon’s Certain Considertions Touching the Plantation in Ireland (1606; 1657)," in Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 93-112. 5. Silverthorne, The New Organon; Jerry Weinberger, ed. New Atlantis and the Great Instauration, Crofts Classics. (Hoboken: Wiley, 2016). 6. Oana Matei, "Macaria and the Puritan Ethics of Direct Particiapation in the Transformation of the World," Society and Politics 5, no. 2 (2011). 7. Charles Webster, ed. Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chapts. 2-4 and 7-8; Toby C. Barnard, "The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland," in Samual Hartlib and the Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Michael Leslie Mark Greengrass, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 289-91.

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8. John Adamson, "Strafford's Ghost: The British Context of Viscount Lisle's Lieutenancy of Ireland," in Ireland Fro Independence to Occupation 1641-1660, ed. Jane H. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 132-48; Patrick Little, "The Irish 'Independents' Amd Viscount Lisle's Lieutenancy of Ireland," HJ 44, no. 4 (2001). 9. For my previous claims about the significance of cultivation and material culture in Tudor Ireland, see John Patrick Montaño, "‘Dycheyng and Hegeying’: The Material Culture of the Tudor Plantations in Ireland," ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapts. 1-3, 5. 10. Raymond: Gillespie, "The Murder of Arthur Champion and the 1641 Rising in Fermanagh," Clogher Record 14, no. 3 (1993); John Patrick Montaño, "A Frank Exchange of Views: Communicating through Violence in Ireland, 1565-1610," Études Irlandaises 42, no. 2 (2017). 11. Roots of Colonialism, chapts. 3-4; G. A. Hayes-McCoy, "Contemporary Maps as an Aid to Irish History, 1593-1603," Imago Mundi 19 (1965); John H. Andrews, "The Mapping of Ireland's Cultural Landscape, 1530-1630," in Gaelic Ireland: C.1250-C.1650: Land, Lordship and Settlement, ed. David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick Patrick J Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001); J. H. Andrews, Rolf Loeber, "An Elizabethan Map of Leix and Offaly: Cartography, Topography and Architecture," in Offaly: History and Society, ed. William Nolan & Timothy O'Neill (Templeogue, Dublin: Geography Publications, 1998); Annaleigh Margey, "Surveying and Mapping Plantation in Cavan, C. 1580-1622," in Culture and Society in Early Modern Breifne / Cavan, ed. Brendan Scott (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). 12. Andrews. J. H., The Queen's Last Mapmaker: Richar Bartlett in Ireland, 1600-03 (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2008), chapt. 4. 13. Matei, "Macaria and Puritan Ethics," 52-55. 14. Sir William Petty, The History of the Survey of Ireland Commonly Called the Down Survey, A.D. 1655-1656. (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1857); Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapt. 3; Adam Fox, "Sir William Petty, Ireland, and the Making of a Political Economist, 1653–87," The Economic History Review 62, no. 2 (2009). 15. T. C. Barnard, "Miles Symner and the New Learning N Seventeenth-Century Ireland," JRSAI 102 (1977): 291-94; Barnard, "Hartlib and Improvement." 16. Sir William Petty, Tracts, Chiefly Relating to Ireland (London, 1769), "Politcal Economy of Ireland," 109. 17. Samuel and John Dury Hartlib, The Reformed Spiritual Husbandman . . . . (London, 1652); Ralph Austen, A Treatise on Fruit Trees . . . Together with the Spiritual Use of an Orchard. Held Forth in Divers Similitudes between Natural and Spiritual Fruit Trees (Oxford, 1657); Webster, Hartlib and Learning, 165-91. 18. Hartlib and Learning, 3-5. 19. Petty, Down Survey, 47. 20. A Report from the Council of Trade in Ireland, to the LL and Council, which was drawn by Sir William Petty, Consideration relating to the Improvement of Ireland, 217, in Tracts. 21. T. C. Barnard, "Gardening, Diet and 'Improvement' in Later Seventeenth-Century Ireland," Journal of Garden History 10, no. 1 (1990): 77-81.

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22. Samuel Hartlib, A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria . . . . (London, 1641); Charles Webster, "The Authorship and Significance of Macaria," P & P 56 (1972). Compare this with attitudes in Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975), 45. 23. Hartlib, Macaria, 5. 24. Dedication to Cromwell and Fleetwood, Commander in Chief in Ireland, by Samuel Hartlib, in Gerard Boate, Irelands Naturall History. Being a True and Ample Descritption Of . . . The Several Ways of Manuring and Improving the Same . . . . For the Common Good of Ireland, and More Especially, for the Benefit of the Adventurers and Planters Therein (London: Published by Samuell Hartlib, 1657), sig. a3. 25. Hartlib, Macaria, 3. 26. Charles Webster, Utopian Planning and the Puritan Revolution: Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Hartlib and Macaria (Oxford: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1979); "Macaria, Samuel Hartlib and the Great Instauration," Acta Comeniana 26 (1979). 27. Montaño, Roots of Colonialism, 1-21. 28. Boate, Naturall History. 29. See below, pp. 12-13. 30. Boate, Naturall History, Dedication, sig, a3. 31. Ibid., sig. a6v. 32. Montaño, Roots of Colonialism. 33. The earl of Cork’s motto was: God’s Providence is Mine Inheritance. 34. Boate, Naturall History, 113. 35. Ibid., 169. 36. Ibid., 114, 97-8. 37. Barnard, "Hartlib and Improvement," 284-87; Webster, Utopian Planning; "Macaria, Samuel Hartlib and the Great Instauration." 38. Boate, Naturall History, 114. 39. Ibid., 89. 40. Huntington Library, in Ellesmere MSS (San Marino, California), 1746, fo. 12; D. J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 57-72. 41. Huntington Library, Ellesmere, 1737, fo. 17 42. Temple. quoted in Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle First Earl of Cork, 1566-1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 138. 43. Petty, Tracts, "Political Economy of Ireland," 109. 44. Ibid., 321.

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ABSTRACTS

Bacon and Hartlib were leaders of an empirically based movement that contributed to the transformation of reform strategies in Ireland. While continuing to rely on changes to land use their claims to scientific objectivity helped alter the reformers goal from civilizing Ireland to improving it by relying on the new learning of the Hartlib Circle. The support of Oliver Cromwell provided unprecedented opportunities to apply theories of political economy on the blank slate of Ireland’s landscape.

Bacon et Hartlib furent à la tête d’un mouvement empirique qui contribua à la transformation des stratégies de réforme en Irlande. Tout en continuant de dépendre des changements de l’usage de la terre, leurs revendications à l’objectivité scientifique aidèrent à faire évoluer le but final des réformateurs : au lieu de civiliser l’Irlande, l’améliorer en se basant sur le nouveau savoir du Cercle Hartlib. Le soutien d’Oliver Cromwell fournit des occasions sans précédents d’appliquer les théories d’économie politique à la page blanche qu’était le paysage de l’Irlande.

INDEX

Mots-clés: nouvelle science, Samuel Hartlib, Irlande, amélioration, résistance culturelle Keywords: new science, Samuel Hartlib, Ireland, improvement, cultural resistance

AUTHOR

JOHN PATRICK MONTAÑO ohn Patrick Montaño is Professor of History and Head of Irish Studies at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Courting the Moderates, Ideology, Propaganda and the Origins of Party, on Restoration political culture in England and more recently of The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland, part of Cambridge University’s Critical Perspectives on Empire Series. He is currently working on a book on the relation between ideas about science, improvement and the Stuart Plantation strategies as well as a project on violence and destruction as a form of cultural communication. He is very grateful to Hektor and Carolina for preventing a timely conclusion to these efforts.

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Les Syndicats irlandais et la question cubaine, 50 ans après la révolution Irish Trade Unions & the Cuban Connection: 50 years after the Cuban revolution

Marie-Violaine Louvet

1 En République d’Irlande, l’engouement autour de la vente de timbres à l’effigie du Che Guevara, dont on fêtait en 2017 le 50e anniversaire de la mort, révéla une certaine fascination populaire pour la figure socialiste1. C’est la célèbre image du révolutionnaire, créée par l’artiste irlandais Jim Fitzpatrick à partir d’une photo prise par Alberto Korda en 1960, qui illustrait cette collection unique de timbres. Le Che, décrit par An Post, le service postal irlandais, comme « la quintessence du révolutionnaire de gauche2 », avait un ancêtre irlandais, Patrick Lynch, né à Galway en 1715, raison pour laquelle Ernesto Guevara Lynch – le père du Che – affirma que le sang des rebelles irlandais coulait dans les veines de son fils3.

2 La figure du Che, est indissociable de celle de Fidel Castro, qui dirigea Cuba de la fin de la révolution (1959), jusqu’à quelques années avant son décès, le 25 novembre 20164. Le Président irlandais Michael D. Higgins – lui-même membre du Parti travailliste pendant 40 ans – fut le premier officiel à signer le livre de condoléances ouvert à l’ambassade cubaine. À cette occasion, il affirma que « … [L]a vision de Castro n’était pas seulement une vision de liberté pour son peuple mais pour tous les peuples opprimés et exclus de la planète5 ». Son commentaire élogieux provoqua des protestations véhémentes, notamment de la part de Cubains exilés aux États-Unis, qui soulignèrent la répression sévère menée à l’encontre des opposants politiques par le régime castriste.

3 La popularité de ces figures de la révolution cubaine est remarquable au sein des cercles politiques influencés par le socialisme, notamment le mouvement syndical irlandais. On le voit en particulier en 2009, année du cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine de 1959. En effet, à l’occasion de cet anniversaire, la fédération nationale de syndicats, l’Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), tout comme certains de ses syndicats affiliés à titre individuel, fut à l’origine de multiples actions qui témoignèrent de leur

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admiration pour l’héritage de la révolution menée par Fidel Castro6. L’année 2009, qui correspondit aussi au cinquantenaire de la création de l’Irish Congress of Trade Unions7, fut un moment privilégié qui marqua un accroissement des échanges entre les syndicats irlandais et différents groupes cubains.

4 La question de l’appropriation de la question cubaine par les syndicats irlandais, et des liens de collaboration qui sont tissés avec la société civile et le gouvernement cubain, est à ce jour inexplorée dans la littérature scientifique, contrairement à la lutte syndicale contre l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud, dans les années 1980. Les causes internationales défendues par les syndicats irlandais au 20e siècle ne sont pas très nombreuses, et se concentrent principalement sur la lutte pour la fin de l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud, et le soutien à la cause palestinienne ces vingt dernières années. Le sujet cubain n’est pas aussi consensuel que ne l’était celui de la lutte contre l’apartheid à cause de la nature du régime politique qui règne sur l’île. Afin d’explorer cette thématique cubaine au sein du mouvement syndical irlandais, cet article repose sur l’étude de la littérature grise publiée à la fois par la fédération nationale des syndicats irlandais, l’ICTU, et les différents syndicats qui lui sont affiliés : rapports des délégations qui visitèrent Cuba en 2009, prospectus de propagande, fiches d’information, magazines à destination des membres, ouvrages publiés pour usage interne, sites internet, réseaux sociaux – mais aussi communiqués de presse, et discours à destination du grand public.

5 À partir de ces sources primaires, cet article se propose d’analyser les mobilisations syndicales irlandaises autour du cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine en 2009, afin de mettre en lumière la persistance d’une mythologie révolutionnaire qui peine à se confronter à la réalité du castrisme aujourd’hui, à l’épreuve des contacts directs avec la société civile cubaine. Les résonnances, toutes particulières en Irlande, du discours pro- cubain, fondé sur les notions d’anti-colonialisme et d’anti-impérialisme seront d’abord étudiées, à travers l’identification de mythes qui viennent lier les histoires irlandaises et cubaines. Puis l’action militante engagée dans les deux principales campagnes ralliées par les syndicats irlandais sera analysée, avec d’abord la protestation contre l’embargo américain sur l’île de Cuba et ensuite l’appel à la libération des « cinq de Miami8 ».

Création d’une mythologie cubaine dans le discours syndical en Irlande

6 Pour les syndicats irlandais, s’emparer du récit de la révolution cubaine de la fin des années 1950, c’est parler de leurs propres aspirations et de leurs propres valeurs dans l’Irlande d’aujourd’hui. En termes de mythe, l’histoire cubaine dans son ensemble est intéressante car elle comporte des figures héroïques, qui sont engagées dans un paradigme de la résistance à un ennemi incommensurablement plus puissant – la lutte contre l’impérialisme espagnol à la fin du 19es, puis contre les États-Unis, alliés du gouvernement de Fulgencio Batista au 20es9. Le gouvernement cubain lui-même a une maîtrise certaine de la communication au sujet de son histoire révolutionnaire, comme on peut le voir avec le magnifique Museo de la Revolución, à La Havane, qui retrace l’histoire de la révolution de 1959 contre Batista mais aussi de la guerre d’indépendance contre l’empire espagnol (1896-1898). En 2009, lors du cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine, deux figures rapprochant l’histoire irlandaise de l’histoire cubaine sont

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commémorées par l’ICTU et SIPTU10 : José Martí (1853-1895) et James Joseph O’Kelly (1845-1916).

José Martí et James Joseph O’Kelly : traits d’union entre Cuba et l’Irlande

7 José Martí et James Joseph O’Kelly, deux personnages historiques engagés dans la dénonciation des crimes de l’empire espagnol lors de la guerre d’indépendance de Cuba, ont ceci en commun qu’ils furent un trait d’union entre Cuba et l’Irlande à la fin du 19es. Il s’agit alors d’un moment charnière de l’histoire de l’île de Cuba mais aussi d’une Irlande défigurée par les affres de la grande famine (1845-1852) et agitée par la campagne en faveur de plus d’autonomie vis-à-vis de Londres11.

8 Il convient tout d’abord d’évoquer le héros national cubain José Martí, dont le nom fut fréquemment cité dans le discours des syndicats irlandais sur Cuba en 2009. José Martí fut avant tout un intellectuel et un écrivain, qui, épris de l’action politique et « apôtre d’un Cuba indépendant », mourut sur le champ de bataille pendant la guerre d’indépendance de Cuba contre l’Espagne12. Dans ses chroniques, écrites en exil aux États-Unis entre juillet 1881 et mai 1892, Martí étudia et commenta la vie de la diaspora irlandaise aux États-Unis13. Comme l’a montré Felix Flores Varona, il développa alors un intérêt tout particulier pour les grandes figures politiques irlandaises que furent Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt et Charles Stewart Parnell14. Micheál Martin15, ancien Ministre des Affaires étrangères de la République d’Irlande, effectua la première visite officielle d’un ministre irlandais à Cuba en février 2009, et alla lui-même déposer une couronne sur le mausolée en l’honneur de José Martí, qui se trouve sur la Plaza de la Revolución, à La Havane16.

9 Si l’on érigeait un panthéon des personnalités qui servirent de relais entre l’Irlande et Cuba, James Joseph O’Kelly figurerait en bonne place. C’est SIPTU qui le mit particulièrement à l’honneur en 2009, année qui marqua à la fois le centenaire de la création de SIPTU et les cinquante ans de la révolution cubaine17. En effet,, SIPTU publia l’ouvrage Irish Solidarity with Cuba Libre: a Fenian eyewitness account of the first Cuban war of independence18, édité par Manus O’Riordan, membre de SIPTU mais aussi chargé de la recherche pour cette formation syndicale19. Manus O’Riordan est le fils de Micheál O’Riordan, membre de l’Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) 20 et l’un des fondateurs du parti communiste d’Irlande21. Par ailleurs, SIPTU souligna que c’est grâce à deux pionniers de l’ITGWU, William O’Brien et Frank Robbins – respectivement ancien secrétaire général et ancien secrétaire pour la région de Dublin22 – que les manuscrits de O’Kelly purent être archivés23. O’Kelly était une figure du mouvement fénien, membre du parlement britannique qui défendait plus d’autonomie pour l’Irlande, et correspondant pour le New York Herald pendant la première guerre d’indépendance de Cuba contre l’Espagne. Il décrivit cette guerre comme une lutte de libération nationale, dépeignant avec verve la « terrible sévérité du gouvernement espagnol » à l’encontre de la population cubaine24. Michael Davitt lui rendit par ailleurs hommage dans The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, publié en 190425. O’Kelly fut enterré au cimetière de Glasnevin, à Dublin, auprès de héros de l’histoire irlandaise, tels que Daniel O’Connell et Charles Stewart Parnell. SIPTU lui organisa une cérémonie d’hommage en 2009, en présence de l’ambassadeur cubain.

10 Pour le cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine, l’appropriation de l’histoire de Cuba par les syndicats irlandais comprit, nous l’avons vu, l’intermédiaire de figures

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contemporaines de la guerre d’indépendance qui rapprochèrent Cuba de l’Irlande, par le biais de leur sensibilité anti-impérialiste. La mise en valeur de ce faisceau idéologique commun, fut aussi caractéristique des commentaires des syndicalistes irlandais sur l’héritage de la révolution de 1959.

Admiration pour certaines caractéristiques du régime socialiste cubain

11 La mort de Castro fut l’occasion pour les syndicats irlandais de rendre hommage au Líder Máximo. Un événement intitulé « Farewell to Fidel » fut organisé en avril 2017 à Liberty Hall, le quartier général de SIPTU et le siège historique de l’ITGWU. Jack O’Connor, le Président Général de SIPTU26, Hermes Herrera Hernández, ambassadeur de Cuba en République d’Irlande27 et Jack McGinley, président de SIPTU Solidarity Forum with Cuba28, se succédèrent pour évoquer les succès de Castro et fustiger la politique américaine à l’encontre de Cuba29. Le coordinateur national de Mandate30, Brian Forbes, insista pour qu’un livre de condoléances soit placé à la mairie de Galway, afin que les habitants de la ville puissent y laisser un message à la mémoire de Castro et à la gloire de son héritage :

That is Fidel Castro’s legacy – a legacy of putting his country and its people before the extreme excesses and wealth of the one per cent […] it is a fine example for us all as we fight to achieve a better, fairer, way for our people here, on this island. […] Given Ireland’s colonial history of oppression and of denied human rights, surely the small act of opening a book of condolence in recognizing Fidel Castro for all his great achievements and also for his love of the underdog is the least we can do.

12 Le cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine en 2009 fut aussi l’occasion pour l’ICTU, SITPU mais aussi NIPSA, Unite, UCU, GMB, Trademark et le Belfast Unemployed Centre d’envoyer des délégations à Cuba31. Dans le rapport qui fut rédigé à leur retour, les délégués se déclarèrent particulièrement favorables au régime castriste à trois égards : la promotion de l’égalité entre les sexes, le niveau d’alphabétisation et la qualité du système de santé. Ils soulignèrent notamment que plus de 70% du budget annuel de Cuba était consacré à ces deux derniers postes de dépense32.

13 En matière d’égalité entre les sexes, le rôle prépondérant des femmes dans les instances nationales de Cuba fut largement mis en avant dans le rapport publié après la visite de la délégation syndicale irlandaise en 200933. Pauline Collins, membre du conseil exécutif de University and College Union (UCU), va même jusqu’à souligner l’absence d’impact négatif de la domination numérique des femmes en responsabilité dans l’enseignement secondaire et l’université sur la population masculine, inversant ainsi le paradigme auquel tout observateur européen est accoutumé :

I found it interesting that even though most school principals and university lecturers are now female, Cuban males have no problems achieving the same levels of education as females. Maybe this is because the system is geared to learning, something we could we learn a lot from34.

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14 La délégation de 35 membres de SIPTU qui se rendit à Cuba en novembre 2009 passa une journée à observer les actions de l’association Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, fondée en 1960 par Vilam Espin, la femme de Raúl Castro35, visant à la promotion des droits des femmes à Cuba. En mars 2009, Nancy Coro Aguiar, secrétaire générale de la Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, participa au séminaire consacré à la question des femmes dans la récession économique en Irlande, organisé à Belfast par l’ICTU36. Ces rencontres témoignent de la dynamisation des échanges entre certains membres de la société civile cubaine et certains syndicalistes irlandais et nord-irlandais. La place des femmes à Cuba est régulièrement mise en avant dans les rapports de l’ICTU, notamment leur influence dans la vie politique cubaine37.

15 Le cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine fut aussi l’occasion pour l’ICTU de louer le système médical cubain, deuxième grande réussite du régime castriste reconnue par les syndicalistes irlandais. En 2009, lors de la conférence bisannuelle de l’ICTU qui eut lieu à Tralee, le syndicat Dublin Council of Trade Unions défendit une motion permettant d’évaluer « the success of the Cuban medical model in order to see what lessons car be learnt in the context of the current crises besetting the Irish health system38 ». Il s’agissait en particulier de faire face aux mesures d’austérité budgétaire décidées par le gouvernement irlandais après la crise économique de 2008. La délégation de SIPTU qui se rendit à Cuba en 2009 relata, dans un rapport, la journée qu’elle consacra à la visite du centre médical Hogar Benjamin Moreno, à La Havane. Elle insista en particulier sur l’humanité des méthodes utilisées, malgré le manque de moyens. SIPTU effectua un don de 10 000 € à destination de 131 centres de soins médico-psychologiques39. Ce dernier vint compléter la somme de 60 000 € rassemblée par l’ICTU en 2009, afin d’aider l’île de Cuba à faire face aux conséquences de la série d’ouragans qui s’abattit sur elle en septembre 200840.

16 Enfin, dans le domaine de l’éducation, troisième pilier et garant symbolique du progressisme du régime cubain, les délégués de SIPTU rencontrèrent le Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, la Ciencia y el Deporte (SNTECD) lors du premier jour de leur visite en 2009. Le rapport rédigé à leur retour loue en particulier le taux de 70% d’accès à l’université pour la classe d’âge des 18-23 ans et l’attention apportée aux enfants souffrant de handicaps. La conclusion encourage une collaboration accrue dans le domaine de l’éducation entre la République d’Irlande et Cuba, en particulier avec l’objectif de s’inspirer de certaines réussites du système cubain : « Given the strategic position of the Cuban educational and health policies and their world class rating, we recommend that a series of bipartite engagements take place including student, postgraduate and practicing medics placements in the other country so that we both might understand and learn from each other's systems41 ».

17 Dans le récit de retour des syndicalistes irlandais qui visitèrent Cuba en 2009, l’égalité hommes-femmes, tout comme la qualité de l’éducation et du système de santé sont les pierres d’angle de l’utopie cubaine caractérisée par les valeurs progressistes qui régissent cette société. Pourtant, ce bilan, qui ne semble nuancé que par les difficultés matérielles que rencontre l’île, n’est pas similaire à celui qui est fait par certaines autres organisations de travailleurs en Europe et dans le monde.

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Contraste avec le discours de l’ETUC/ILO/ITUC sur la question des droits des travailleurs

18 Le portrait idéal de Cuba qui apparaît dans le rapport de l’ICTU, et a fortiori dans le rapport de SIPTU de 2009, rejoint celui qui est fait par les associations civiles pro- cubaines, telles que Cuba Solidarity Campaign42. Il convient de souligner qu’il existe moins de voix dissonantes qui se lèvent pour protester contre le régime castriste au sein du syndicalisme irlandais que parmi les syndicats australiens par exemple, avec l’ Australian Workers’ Union (un syndicat rassemblant plus de 100 000 adhérents) qui signa une lettre afin de manifester son refus de rencontrer l’ambassadeur cubain jusqu’à la fin attestée de la répression à l’encontre des syndicalistes cubains43. Les droits des travailleurs touchent au cœur des revendications syndicales, en particulier en ce qui concerne les négociations collectives et l’indépendance des syndicats. Or la fédération européenne de syndicats European Trade Union Congress (ETUC), la confédération internationale de syndicats International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC, qui par ailleurs n’a pas de syndicat affilié et basé à Cuba) et l’organisation internationale du travail International Labour Organization (ILO) ont tous fait part de leur réticence au sujet du régime castriste44.

19 Cuba est l’un des rares endroits au monde où le plus grand pourvoyeur d’emploi est l’État. Il paye les salaires et régule les horaires et les conditions de travail par publication de décrets. Dans son bilan annuel des violations des droits des syndicats sur l’île, l’ILO souligne le décalage entre ce qui est légal et ce qui est toléré en pratique par les autorités. En effet, le gouvernement cubain ne reconnait qu’une fédération nationale de syndicats, le Central de Trabajadores Cubanos (CTC). On retrouve les personnalités du CTC dans les plus hautes sphères de l’État. Selon l’ILO, le code du travail cubain, qui fut publié en 1985 et modifié en 2014, ne défend pas de véritable liberté d’association. Le gouvernement interdit les syndicats indépendants de la fédération nationale, bien qu’il n’y ait pas d’obligation légale pour ceux-ci de s’affilier au CTC45. Selon les autorités cubaines, citées par l’ILO: « Freedom of association, protected in Convention 87, does not translate into the false concept of ‘trade union pluralism’ imposed by the main centres of capitalist and imperial power46 ». L’ITUC souligne le fait qu’il n’y a pas de législation sur le droit de grève sur l’île et qu’en pratique :

No independent trade union activity is possible. Such organisations that do exist are unable to represent workers effectively. As they are not recognised, they cannot engage in collective bargaining or take strike action. Workers are not able to exercise their rights or to take part in peaceful marches or demonstrations in support of their demands. Workers are required to keep an eye on their colleagues and report any ‘dissident’ activity. Independent labour activists are periodically arrested, harassed, threatened with prosecution and pressurised into going into exile47.

20 Quand elle était à Cuba en 2009, la délégation de SIPTU rencontra le CTC mais aucune question concernant la pluralité politique ne fut posée. Cette question fut en revanche soulevée lors d’une rencontre avec Oscar Martínez, directeur adjoint du département international du parti communiste cubain, en présence de Manuel Montero Bistilleiro du CTC, et la réponse reçue fit état du fait que Cuba était bel et bien une démocratie

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représentative : « There was an opportunity for all citizens to express their political opinion. If there were a multi-party system in operation they would be unable to get the current spend on Health and Education48 ». Le caractère discutable de l’argument invoqué par les autorités cubaines n’est pas commenté dans le rapport rédigé par SIPTU.

21 En 1958, la révolution de Castro fut caractérisée par son appel à une grève générale lancé à tous les travailleurs de l’île, mais les rapports successifs de l’ONG Human Rights Watch soulignent l’intimidation et les risques d’emprisonnement qui frappent les syndicalistes cubains49. Un tel paradoxe ne peut manquer de mettre en relief le décalage entre le discours des syndicats irlandais et la réalité de la condition des travailleurs sur l’île. Le mythe cubain qui apparaît dans le discours sur Cuba en Irlande est nourri de l’adhésion à certaines valeurs fondatrices du régime castriste comme l’anti-impérialisme. Il se fonde sur le souhait de croire à la possibilité de l’utopie socialiste, facilitée par la distance géographique entre les deux îles et l’exotisme de Cuba.

22 De manière plus concrète, les célébrations de 2009 permirent à l’ICTU et à certains syndicats irlandais, dont SIPTU, de réaffirmer leur engagement dans deux grandes campagnes liées à la « cause cubaine » : la demande de la fin de l’embargo américain sur l’île et la libération des « cinq de Miami ».

Les syndicats irlandais en campagne pour Cuba

23 Pour les syndicats irlandais, Cuba est un objet de discours, parfois un objet de fascination, mais c’est aussi une cause à défendre, un allié contre l’impérialisme de la domination américaine à qui il convient d’apporter du soutien, dans le cadre de l’internationale socialiste. Un tel engagement s’incarna dans deux campagnes qui trouvèrent un nouvel élan dans les célébrations du cinquantenaire de la révolution en 2009.

Sus à l’embargo américain sur Cuba

24 En 1960-62, suite à la révolution cubaine, les États-Unis imposèrent un embargo économique, commercial et financier sur Cuba. Un contexte international très tendu prévalait alors, marqué par la guerre froide, avec la tentative d’invasion américaine par la baie des cochons en 1961 et la crise des missiles cubains en 1962. L’embargo fut par la suite renforcé par la loi Helms Burton de 1996, qui avait pour objectif de précipiter la chute de Castro. Vingt ans plus tard, Barack Obama prit la décision historique de l’alléger et de rétablir des relations diplomatiques avec le régime cubain. Cette politique fut remise en compte par son successeur Donald Trump, lequel revint en particulier sur le très symbolique visa touristique qui permettait aux citoyens américains de se rendre directement sur l’île50. Depuis 1992, l’Assemblée Générale des Nations Unis passe chaque année une résolution condamnant l’impact de l’embargo américain sur Cuba et soulignant que celui-ci va à l’encontre de la Charte des Nations Unis et des lois internationales51.

25 Pendant la conférence bisannuelle de l’ICTU en 2009, les syndicats Unite et Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union présentèrent une motion (n°68) consacrée aux questions internationales. Elle comprenait un volet sur Cuba, plus particulièrement sur la levée de l’embargo américain sur l’île: « To campaign in support of the people in Cuba

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and, in particular, to raise the demand that the US embargo and sanctions be lifted immediately without preconditions at every possible opportunity52 ». Ce positionnement s’inscrivait dans la droite ligne de la création du Solidarity Forum with Cuba au sein du syndicat SIPTU en 2005. En effet, le groupe avait ratifié la décision de son homologue européen d’amplifier les actions jusqu’à ce que l’embargo soit levé. Dans cette optique, une levée de fonds, ainsi qu’un convoi humanitaire furent organisés avec différents syndicats étrangers en 2011. Lors de la conférence bisannuelle de l’ICTU, Margaret McKee, qui représentait le syndicat irlandais Unison, témoigna de l’initiative en ces termes : « we filled two ships with buses, ambulances, computers and even a train and delivered them through the US blockade53 ».

26 Après le nouvel élan donné en 2009 à la campagne des syndicats irlandais contre l’embargo américain sur Cuba, l’effort se poursuivit. En 2015, le journal syndicaliste cubain Trabajadores Daily (CTC) publia un article intitulé « Irish against the blockade », signé de Orestes Eurgellés Mena54. Des représentants de Union of Industry, Professionals, Construction and Public Administration of Ireland vinrent réclamer à La Havane la fin de l’embargo lors d’une rencontre avec des cadres du Central de Trabajadores Cubanos. Des événements eurent régulièrement lieu en Irlande, comme « Mr Obama, Unblock the blockade », organisé par Unite the Union en collaboration avec l’association civile Friends of Cuba55 en 201656.

Les cinq de Miami : Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, René González.

27 La seconde campagne dans laquelle les syndicats irlandais s’investirent en 2009 pour la cause cubaine fut la demande de la libération des cinq de Miami, dont le nom réveille le souvenir d’autres campagnes liées à l’histoire des Troubles en Irlande du Nord. Il fait référence à cinq citoyens cubains emprisonnés aux États-Unis après avoir été arrêtés par le FBI, le 12 septembre 1998. Ils furent condamnés, en 2001, à Miami, pour conspiration avec l’intention de mener des activités d’espionnage, de meurtre et autres activités illégales57. Leurs sentences, qui s’échelonnaient de 15 ans d’emprisonnement à la prison à vie, furent dénoncées comme injustes et de nature politique par des figures internationales, telles que l’Archevêque Desmond Tutu et l’ancien président américain Jimmy Carter. Les cinq hommes assurent qu’ils furent arrêtés alors qu’ils enquêtaient sur les activités de cellules terroristes anti-cubaines basées à Miami, lesquelles auraient mené des actions criminelles à Cuba comme la série d’explosions qui toucha des hôtels de La Havane en 1997, ainsi qu’un avion de ligne58.

28 En 2009, John Douglas, secrétaire général de Mandate et futur président de l’ICTU (2013-2015), rencontra Teresita Trujillo, première ambassadrice de Cuba en Irlande, tout récemment nommée. Plus tard, en 2012, le Galway Council of Trade Unions invita Magali Llort, la mère de Fernando González, pour témoigner lors d’une rencontre destinée à informer et sensibiliser le public à la question des cinq de Miami59. En 2013, le même John Douglas réaffirma au nom de l’ICTU le soutien de plusieurs personnalités syndicales à la commission d’enquête dans l’affaire des cinq de Miami60: « The entire process surrounding the conviction of the Cuban Five was dubious to say the least and, in the interests of justice, the US government must release these men immediately and allow them to return to their home country […] They should be erecting statues to these men, not jailing them61 ». La même année une veillée fut organisée pour les cinq hommes au pied de la Spire,

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sur O’Connell Street, à Dublin. Les personnes présentes portaient un ruban jaune en hommage aux cinq de Miami et John Douglas adressa un discours au public.

29 La mobilisation des syndicats en faveur des cinq de Miami, qui prit un nouvel essor en 2009, atteignit son terme en 2014. En effet, René Gonzalez avait été libéré en 2011 après avoir terminé sa peine en prison62 et Fernando González fut libéré le 27 février 2014, suivi d’Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, et Gerardo Hernández le 17 décembre 2014. Ces libérations en série eurent lieu dans le cadre de la normalisation des relations avec Cuba, souhaitée par le gouvernement de Barack Obama. En signe de bonne volonté, Cuba libéra Alan Gross, travailleur humanitaire américain qui fut emprisonné pour avoir importé du matériel de télécommunication interdit sur l’île63. Les commentateurs s’accordèrent pour considérer la décision de Barack Obama comme étant courageuse, puisqu’elle fut âprement critiquée par la communauté cubaine installée en Floride, laquelle est farouchement opposée au régime de Castro. En effet, cette communauté cubaine en exil constitue un lobby important au sein de l’un des swing states et la libération des cinq de Miami intervint un peu plus d’un an seulement avant les élections présidentielles de 2016.

30 Le cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine fut l’occasion pour l’ICTU et différents syndicats irlandais de réaffirmer leur solidarité avec le peuple cubain. Il permit de relancer les efforts engagés dans les deux campagnes principales, contre l’embargo américain et pour la libération des « cinq de Miami », autour de l’organisation de lobbying politique, de levées de fond, de conférences et de veillées.

Conclusion

31 L’ambivalence avouée qui caractérise les relations de certaines fédérations internationales de travailleurs, telles que l’ILO ou l’ETUC/ITUC, avec Cuba, ne se retrouve pas chez l’ICTU, et, a fortiori, chez SIPTU. Cuba est célébrée par les syndicats irlandais comme un exemple de résistance contre la domination américaine, à travers la promotion de personnages emblématiques tels que José Martí et James Joseph O’Kelly, dont les parcours rapprochèrent l’histoire de l’île d’Irlande de celle de l’île de Cuba. De surcroît, le discours syndicaliste se nourrit de valeurs communes défendues par le régime castriste, telles que l’égalité des sexes, le droit à l’éducation ou encore à un système de santé égalitaire.

32 Le triple anniversaire de 2009, qui marqua à la fois le centenaire de la révolution cubaine, de la fondation de SIPTU et le cinquantenaire de la création de l’ICTU, permit de donner un nouvel élan aux campagnes contre l’embargo américain et pour la libération des cinq de Miami. D’un côté les syndicalistes voudraient croire à l’utopie socialiste, adhérer au mythe de la révolution cubaine contre l’impérialisme, de l’autre nul ne saurait ignorer les atteintes aux droits de l’homme qui y sont inquiétantes, en particulier concernant le droit des travailleurs et les intimidations subies par les syndicalistes locaux. Le malaise de certains syndicalistes irlandais transparaît entre les lignes des rapports de 2009, lesquels montrent que les délégations de syndicats sont emmenées autour de l’île pour visiter écoles et hôpitaux mais ne reçoivent pas de réponse convaincante concernant le droit des citoyens à quitter l’île ou le pluralisme politique.

33 L’histoire révolutionnaire de Cuba, fondée sur le rejet de l’Empire espagnol, fut marquée par un dialogue avec les idéologies socialistes et nationalistes, comme ce fut

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aussi le cas en Irlande. Par conséquent, aux côtés des syndicats, le parti républicain Sinn Féin prête une attention toute particulière à l’île. Un monument fut dévoilé à La Havane en 2001 par Gerry Adams, alors leader du Sinn Féin, pour honorer la mémoire des républicains irlandais qui perdirent la vie lors de grèves de la faim en Irlande du Nord dans les années 198064. La récente reconnaissance par Hermes Herrera Hernández, ambassadeur cubain à Dublin, qu’à l’instar de Fidel Castro lui-même, il avait soutenu l’action de l’IRA, a fait couler beaucoup d’encre65. Castro décrivit les grèves de la faim des républicains en Irlande du Nord comme « le geste le plus émouvant de sacrifice, d’altruisme et de courage » et les grévistes comme ayant gagné « le respect et l’admiration du monde66 ». On ne peut qu’espérer qu’aucun autre prisonnier de conscience ne mourra dans les geôles cubaines suite à une grève de la faim, comme ce fut le cas de l’activiste Orlando Zapata Tamayo en 201067. La poursuite ou non de la politique de détente, initiée par Obama en 2013-2014, et actuellement remise en cause par le gouvernement de Trump, aura un impact fondamental sur l’avenir de Cuba, son inscription dans les réseaux internationaux de syndicats et l’évolution des droits des travailleurs et des opposants politiques sur l’île.

NOTES

1. Les 122 000 exemplaires de la première impression ont tous été vendus très rapidement, voir « First print of controversial Che Guevara stamp sells out », The Irish Times, 12 octobre 2017. 2. Les termes utilisés par An Post sont « the quintessential left-wing revolutionary », voir le site internet d’An Post, « Iconic Che gets stamp treatment », 9 octobre 2017, http://www.anpost.ie/AnPost/MainContent/About+An+Post/Media+Centre/ Press+Releases/2017/Iconic+Che+gets+stamp+treatment.htm?wbc_purpose=Basic, consulté le 27 février 2018. 3. Les termes précis sont « in my son’s veins flowed the blood of Irish rebels ». Ils figurent sur une enveloppe vendue par An Post en complément des timbres. Voir Vivienne Clarke, Fiach Kelly et Ronan McGreevy, « What is Ireland doing putting Che Guevara on a stamp? », The Irish Times, 9 octobre 2017. 4. Fidel Castro fut Premier ministre de Cuba de 1959 à 1976, Président de Cuba de 1976 à 2008, et premier secrétaire du parti communiste cubain de 1961 à 2011. 5. Les termes exacts sont: « Fidel Castro will be remembered as a giant among global leaders whose view was not only one of freedom for his people but for all of the oppressed and excluded peoples on the planet », voir Ian Begley, «A giant among global leaders' - Irish President leads tributes to Fidel Castro», The Irish Independent, 26 novembre 2016. Par ailleurs Michael D. Higgins se rendit en visite officielle à Cuba, en février 2017. 6. Voir « Seizing the moment », le discours de Patricia McKeown, Présidente de l’ICTU, à la conférence bisannuelle du Congrès à Tralee en 2009, disponible sur le site internet

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de l’ICTU, https://www.ictu.ie/press/2009/07/07/seizing-the-moment-patricia- mckeown-ictu-president/, consulté le 27 février 2018. 7. L’Irish Congress of Trade Unions naît de la fusion de l’Irish Trade Union Congress et du Congress of Irish Unions en 1959. 8. « Cuban Five » ou « les Cinq de Miami » est l’expression consacrée qui désigne cinq citoyens cubains arrêtés par les autorités américaines à Miami en 1998. Pour plus de détails, voir la section « Les cinq de Miami : Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, René González. », p.13 de cet article. 9. Fulgencio Batista, qui fut Président de Cuba entre 1940 et 1944, s’empara du pouvoir par la force en 1952 et mena le pays d’une main de fer jusqu’à la révolution de 1959. Entre 1944 et 1952, il vécut en Floride et il bénéficia, pendant ses mandats, du soutien américain. 10. SIPTU (Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical) est un syndicat irlandais qui compte plus de 200 000 adhérents. 11. On fait ici référence au « Home Rule movement », ce mouvement qui domine le nationalisme irlandais dans le dernier quart du 19e siècle et qui demande une autonomie gouvernementale pour l’Irlande au sein du Royaume-Uni. 12. José Martí est souvent désigné par les termes affectueux de « apóstolo de la independiencia » à Cuba. 13. Les chroniques de Martí furent publiées dans divers journaux d’Amérique latine tels que La Opinión Nacional du Vénézuela, La Nación d’Argentine, El Partido Liberal du Mexique ou encore La República, du Honduras. 14. Papier intitulé « The Irish element in José Marti's New York Chronicles », Félix Flores Varona (Universidad de Ciego de Ávila), présenté les 27-30 juin 2007, à National University of Ireland, Galway, http://www.irlandeses.org/galway_varona.htm, consulté le 27 février 2018. 15. Michéal Martin appartient au parti Fianna Fáil, centre-droit, dans la République d’Irlande. Le Fianna Fáil se désigne comme un parti républicain, engagé pour l’unité de l’île d’Irlande en une seule entité politique. Voir le site internet de Fianna Fáil, https://www.fiannafail.ie/ about-fianna-fail/, consulté le 27 février 2018. 16. John Moran, « A changed landscape as Cuba marks revolution », The Irish Times, 18 février 2009. 17. Plus précisément de l’Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, créé en 1909, dont la fusion avec Federated Workers' Union of Ireland donna naissance à SIPTU en 1990. 18. Manus O’Riordan, Irish Solidarity with Cuba Libre: a Fenian eyewitness account of the first Cuban war of independence, Dublin, SIPTU, 2009. 19. « Head of Research » est le titre précis. 20. L’Irish Transport and General Workers Union fut fondé en 1909 par Jim Larkin. De sa fusion avec Federated Workers' Union of Ireland, en 1990, naquit SIPTU. 21. Le parti communiste d’Irlande fut fondé en 1933. 22. Les titres exacts sont « General Secretary » pour William O’Brien et « Dublin District Council Secretary » pour Frank Robbins. 23. Manus O’Riordan, Irish Solidarity with Cuba Libre: a Fenian eyewitness account of the first Cuban war of independence, Dublin, SIPTU, 2009, introduction.

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24. L’expression en anglais est « terrible severity of the Spanish government », ibid, p.69. Les chiffres varient, mais on estime à plus de 100 000 le nombre de civils cubains qui moururent pendant cette guerre, en particulier suite à un internement dans des camps dans des conditions déplorables, voir John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2006, p.210-212. 25. « Mr. James O'Kelly's name must be honorably associated with those mentioned in connection with this early and valuable labor. He has always been a broad-minded thinker and worker in national movements. Narrow views or petty prejudices were never peculiar to Mr. O'Kelly. He favored every kind of useful action that could advance a cause in the service of which he has given the best years of his life, and throughout his varied and romantic career he has preferred the part of a silent worker to that which earns most distinction by inviting most public notice. » dans Michael Devitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland or The story of the Land League revolution, Londres, Harper & Brothers, 1904, p.128. 26. Jack O’Connor est General President de SIPTU depuis 2003, et fut président de l’Irish Congress of Trade Unions de 2009 à 2011. Depuis 2017, il dirige le Parti travailliste de la République d’Irlande. 27. Hermes Herrera est l’ambassadeur de Cuba en République d’Irlande depuis 2014. 28. Le groupe de travail SIPTU Cuban Solidarity Forum fut créé en 2005 au sein de SIPTU, sous l’égide de Kieran Jack McGinley. Kieran Jack McGinley fut membre du conseil national exécutif (National Executive Council) de SIPTU, ainsi que vice-président de son comité sur l’éducation. Il est toujours le président du SIPTU Cuban Solidarity Forum. 29. The Independent, 28 novembre 2016. 30. Mandate (the retail, bar and administrative workers’ union) est un syndicat majeur en Irlande, avec plus de 40 000 membres. 31. Brenda Callaghan, « 50 years on and still on march! », The Union Post, juin 2009, p.32. 32. SIPTU, « Report on visit to Cuba by the SIPTU Solidarity with Cuba Forum November 9th - 18th, 2009 », p.6. 33. L’égalité hommes-femmes à Cuba est aussi soulignée par l’International Trade Union Confederation, voir par exemple ITUC, « The global gender pay gap », février 2008, p.50. 34. Brenda Callaghan, ibid., p.32. 35. Raúl Castro est le frère de Fidel Castro, qui lui succéda en tant que président en 2008 et en tant que premier secrétaire du parti communiste en 2011. 36. ICTU, « Irish Congress of Trade Unions Joint Women’s Committees Seminar: Making the case for a strong focus on Gender Equality and Workers’ Rights in Recessionary Times report », 2009, p.3. L’ICTU est actif en Irlande du Nord comme dans la République. 37. Un rapport de l’ICTU consacré à l’égalité des sexes souligne, par exemple, que 43.2 % des parlementaires à Cuba sont des femmes, voir ICTU, « Gender equality and Global Solidarity:Decent work and the Millennium Development Goals », 2012, p.18. 38. Motion 47, « 47. Evaluation of Cuban Medical Model Congress calls on the Government to undertake a study to evaluate the success of the Cuban medical model in order to see what lessons can be learned in the context of the current crises besetting the Irish health system. Dublin Council of Trade Unions », dans ICTU,

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« Building Solidarity: Biennial delegate conference report, Tralee 7-10 July, 2009 », 2009, p.32. 39. SIPTU, « Report on visit to Cuba by the SIPTU Solidarity with Cuba Forum November 9th - 18th, 2009 », 2009, pp.11-12. Le rapport de la conférence bisannuelle de l’ICTU de 2011 souligna que la fédération était entrée en contact avec le Department of Health and Children, afin qu’une étude du modèle de santé cubain soit lancée. Voir ICTU, « Report of the Executive Council, Biennial delegate conference, Killarney 4-6 July 2011 », p.154. 40. ICTU, « Building Solidarity: Biennial delegate conference report, Tralee 7-10 July, 2009 », 2009, p.137. Sur la question des dons internationaux suite aux ouragans qui frappèrent les caraïbes et la propagande américaine, voir la publication de l’ICTU : « Media ‘buried Cuba story’ », The Union Post, avril 2010, p.8. 41. En 2017, une brigade de 47 jeunes syndicalistes du Royaume-Uni et d’Irlande participèrent à la 12e campagne de solidarité envers Cuba (Cuba Solidarity Campaign). Ils représentaient plusieurs syndicats britanniques et irlandais (Unite, UNISON, TSSA, GMB, RMT and CWU). Ils travaillèrent dans des fermes et participèrent à des conférences aux côtés de 286 membres des May Day brigades de 29 pays différents. Dans le bilan de leur voyage, ils précisèrent: « In addition to free university and medical school education that Cuba provides for its own citizens, the socialist island also offers free medical scholarships to young people from across the developing world. At the University Hospital in the delegation met with students from a wide range of countries including South Africa, Venezuela, Bolivia and Western Sahara. », voir le site internet de l’association britannique Cuba Solidarity, « Record-breaking 47 young trade unionists participate May Day brigade in Cuba », 26 mai 2017, http://www.cuba- solidarity.org.uk/news/article/3379/record-breaking-47-young-trade-unionists- participate-may-day-brigade-in-cuba, consulté le 27 février 2018. 42. Cuba Solidarity Campaign, « Trade unions: a Cuba Solidarity Campaign fact sheet », 2015. Voir aussi Debra Evenson, « Workers in Cuba: unions and labour relations », Institute of Employment Rights, Londres, 2003, pp.3-28. 43. La lettre, datée de janvier 2011, est signée de Paul Howes, le secrétaire national de l’ Australian Workers’ Union. Elle s’appuie notamment sur des rapports publiés par l’ILO et ITUC. Elle précise: « I would be happy to take up your offer to meet but this can, unfortunately, only happen once the Cuban government stops repressing independent trade unions and releases the many union leaders now in prison. », http:// www.labourstart.org/cuba/howes.pdf, consulté le 27 février 2018. 44. ETUC dénonce toutefois l’embargo américain sur Cuba. Voir par exemple ETUC, « Executive committee Brussels, 1-2 June 2010 », (EC188/EN/7a), 2010, p.11. En 2006, ETUC réaffirma cette position: « We fully support Cuba's sovereign rights. At the same time, we expect all our partners to respect international standards - on human rights; on trade union rights: freedom of association and collective bargaining; non- discrimination; no child labour; no forced labour. People should not be harassed or jailed for seeking to exercise those rights. The international community has set those standards. They should be universally applied. That is also why we unreservedly condemn the American blockade of Cuba, enforced now for forty years, and made even worse by the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. », communiqué d’ETUC à Londres le 25 février 2006, disponible sur le site internet d’ETUC, https://www.etuc.org/speeches/european-

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trade-union-solidarity-conference-cuba-and-latin-america#.WpZ_p3yDPIU, consulté le 27 février 2018. 45. Rolando H. Castañeda et George Plinio Montalván, « El sistema laboral cubano y la irresponsabilidad social corporativa de los inversionistas extranjeros : puntos de vista de sindicalistasy periodistas independientes », Cuba in transition, vol.19, Miami, 2009, p. 105. 46. International Labour Organization, « Rapport n° 337 (Cuba) », juin 2005, http:// www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB: 50002:0::NO::P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID:2907759, consulté le 27 février 2018. 47. International Trade Union Confederation, « Cuba: Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights », 2006. L’ITUC fit le même constat en 2009: « According to the ITUC figures, governments in at least nine countries – Burma, Burundi,China, Cuba, Iran, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey and Zimbabwe – were responsible for imprisoning trade unionists on account of their legitimate activities in support of working people. » dans International Trade Union Confederation, « Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights », 2009. Rapports disponibles sur le site internet de l’ITUC, http://www.ituc- csi.org/ituc-annual-survey-of-trade-union?lang=fr, consulté le 27 février 2018. 48. SIPTU, « Report on visit to Cuba by the SIPTU Solidarity with Cuba Forum November 9th - 18th, 2009 », 2009, p.13. 49. Human Rights Watch, « Cuba: Summary and recommendations », https:// www.hrw.org/reports/1999/cuba/Cuba996-01.htm, 1999, consulté le 27 février 2018. 50. The Irish Times, « US government restricts travel to Cuba with new rules », 8 novembre 2017. 51. Voir les résolutions 46/407, 47/19, 48/16, 49/9, 50/10, 51/17, 52/10, 53/4, 54/21, 55/20, 56/9, 57/11, 58/7, 59/11 et 60/12 de l’Assemblée Générale des Nations Unies. Sur la question des résolutions de l’ONU voir la publication de l’ICTU : « Embargo like NAMA each year », The Union Post, novembre 2009, p.10. 52. Motion 68, ICTU, « Building Solidarity: Biennial delegate conference report, Tralee 7-10 July, 2009 », 2009, p.39. 53. ICTU, « Report of Proceedings of Biennial Delegate Conference », 2011, p.103. 54. Orestes Eurgellés Mena (CTC), « Irish against the blockade », Trabajadores Daily, 16 novembre 2015. 55. Le groupe Friends of Cuba, ou Cuba Support Group fut créé en 1993 pour sensibiliser l’opinion publique à la question cubaine. 56. Unite the Union, « Mr Obama, Unblock the Blockade! Cuban Information Evening », https://www.facebook.com/events/1571971123110584/, consulté le 27 février 2018. 57. Les chefs d’accusation étaient les suivants: « conspiracy to commit murder, acting as an agent of a foreign government, and other illegal activities ». Communiqué de presse de l’ICTU, « Congress president calls for immediate release of ‘Cuban five’», 12 septembre 2013, https://www.ictu.ie/press/2013/09/12/congress-president-calls-for-immediate- release-of-cuban-five, consulté le 27 février 2018. 58. 73 personnes décédèrent dans le crash d’un avion de ligne qui reliait la Barbade à la Jamaïque en 1976 (vol Cubana de aviación 455). Un touriste italien succomba dans l’explosion qui frappa l’un des trois hôtels de La Havane en septembre 1997.

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59. « Galway Council of Trade Unions in Solidarity with the Cuban Five », http:// www.minrex.gob.cu/en/galway-council-trade-unions-solidarity-cuban-five, consulté le 27 février 2018. 60. Celle-ci fut organisée en mars 2014, à Londres, par la Law Society en présence de l’un d’eux, René González, qui avait effectué ses quinze années de détention. 61. Communiqué de presse de l’ICTU, « Congress president calls for immediate release of ‘Cuban five’», 12 septembre 2013, https://www.ictu.ie/press/2013/09/12/congress- president-calls-for-immediate-release-of-cuban-five, consulté le 27 février 2018. 62. Damien Cave, « One of ‘Cuban Five’ Spies Is Released on Probation », The New York Times, 7 octobre 2011. 63. « What's the new deal between the US and Cuba? », Thejournal.ie, 18 décembre 2014. 64. Gerry Adams, « Cuba and Ireland: Solidarity in struggle», An Phoblacht, 20 décembre 2001. 65. Cate McCurry, « I backed Castro's IRA stance: Cuban ambassador to Republic », The Belfast Telegraph, 16 février 2017. 66. Les termes précis sont « most moving gesture of sacrifice, selflessness and courage » et « earned the respect and admiration of the world ». Cate McCurry, « I backed Castro's IRA stance: Cuban ambassador to Republic », The Belfast Telegraph, 16 février 2017. 67. Raúl Castro a affirmé regretter la mort d’Orlando Zapata Tamayo, décédé en prison en 2010 après 85 jours de grève de la faim.

RÉSUMÉS

En 2009, les festivités autour du cinquantenaire de la révolution cubaine sont l’occasion pour les syndicats irlandais de réaffirmer leur attachement au régime socialiste de Fidel Castro. Dans leur discours, qui mêle phantasmes révolutionnaires et références historiques, le mythe d’un Cuba rebelle et socialiste vient flirter avec l’imagerie de l’anti-impérialisme irlandais alors que les campagnes contre l’embargo américain et pour la libération des cinq de Miami trouvent un second souffle.

In 2009, the celebrations surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution were an opportunity for Irish trade unions to explore their connections with the socialist regime of Fidel Castro. Their discourse, punctuated by revolutionary phantasies and historical references, mixed the myth of the rebellious Cuba with the imagery of Irish anti-imperialism. The anniversary gave momentum to their campaigns against the American embargo on Cuba and for the liberation of the Cuban five.

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INDEX

Keywords : Cuba, Ireland, trade unions, revolution, Fidel Castro, blockade, Cuban five, ICTU, SIPTU Mots-clés : Cuba, Irlande, syndicats, révolution, Fidel Castro, embargo, cinq de Miami, ICTU, SIPTU

AUTEUR

MARIE-VIOLAINE LOUVET Marie-Violaine Louvet est Maître de conférences à l'Université Toulouse 1 Capitole. Ses recherches portent sur l'activisme politique de la société civile irlandaise en lien avec les questions internationales et les mouvements transnationaux, en particulier entre l'Irlande et le monde arabe (20e et 21e siècles). Elle est l'auteur de Civil Society, Post-Colonialism and Transnational Solidarity: The Irish and the Middle East Conflict, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

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L’État irlandais et les aides humanitaires destinées au peuple espagnol durant la guerre civile espagnole

Pere Soler Paricio

1 Entre 1936 et 1939, la démocratie espagnole plongeait dans un affrontement fratricide qui aboutirait à l’élimination du jeune régime républicain et à l’instauration d’une longue dictature militaire. De l’autre côté de la mer Cantabrique, un nouveau venu dans le concert des nations, l’Irish Free State, se cramponnait non sans difficultés sur le chemin de l’émancipation et de la modernité. L’indépendantisme constitutionnaliste incarné par le Fianna Fáil et son dirigeant, Eamon de Valera, tentait de cimenter les bases d’un État républicain de fait sur lequel planaient de lointains nuages orageux. Érin, Île d’Émeraude, devait lutter contre ses propres démons, qui étaient nombreux. Un douloureux partage frontalier au nord avait séparé l’Ulster des vingt-six comtés du sud, alimentant ainsi un pénible conflit interreligieux qui perdurerait jusqu’à la fin du siècle. Le souvenir de la guerre civile irlandaise, lutte fratricide qui avait opposé les pro-Traité aux anti-Traité, divisait la société et enracinait l’usage de la violence à des fins politiques. La pénurie et l’émigration obscurcissaient l’existence de la paysannerie et des classes populaires qui habitaient dans les misérables quartiers ouvriers des villes. Quelques améliorations étaient entrevues sur le plan économique et Dublin, sans aucun doute, véhiculait une aura cosmopolite qui reflétait une avancée sur le plan culturel. Cependant, un grave conflit douanier avec le Royaume-Uni ralentissait l’avenir commercial du pays, qui devait parvenir à une nouvelle alliance avec la Grande- Bretagne afin de renégocier les bases de leur relation mutuelle et de régler plusieurs problématiques urgentes1. Les difficultés provenaient aussi de l’extérieur. L’agitation politique qui rythma la valse de l’entre-deux guerres perturba la paix sociale de l’île, où fleurit une manifestation endogène du fascisme, les blueshirts, qui semblait être appelée à se développer partout. Géante aux pieds d’argile, bien que cette organisation ait su utiliser la peur rouge prêchée par l’Église et l’opposition conservatrice dans les années

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précédentes, le manque de consistance idéologique de son discours et les choix contestables de ses dirigeants condamnèrent rapidement à l’oubli les attentes du corporatisme celte2. Le nationalisme invétéré, pour sa part, se releva de la défaite et libéra le cri des balles dans les rues. En plus de cela, une partie significative de ses militants rejoignit le nouveau projet émancipateur du républicanisme progressiste ; la lutte pour la souveraineté et la révolution sociale redevenaient les deux faces d’une même pièce3. Plus encore, l’ombre du Léviathan, qui vociférait des chants guerriers depuis le continent, éclipsait la lumière de l’horizon et annonçait de sombres temps à venir. La Couronne britannique conservait plusieurs ports sur le sol irlandais. Si le conflit européen, tant redouté, éclatait, la gueule de la bête engloutirait, selon toute probabilité, l’île des saints et des fous, et, de ce fait, la proto-indépendance de la patrie pour laquelle les pères fondateurs de la nation venaient de verser leur sang.

2 La guerre civile espagnole compliqua l’agenda politique du Fianna Fáil, et les réactions contrastées que le conflit provoqua parmi les groupes de pouvoir du Free State contrarièrent le Gouvernement. L’exécutif de Dublin approuva, avec diligence, le Pacte de non-intervention qui, selon De Valera, qui en plus d’occuper le poste de Taoiseach s’occupait aussi du portefeuille ministériel des affaires étrangères, se présentait comme étant la meilleure stratégie afin d’éviter que le conflit espagnol ne déclenche un conflit à l’échelle européenne4. L’abstention du pays dans les conflits extérieurs devint, de fait, une obsession du chef du Gouvernement, dans le but de préserver la souveraineté du Free State, ainsi que son fragile statut international5. Le Fine Gael, parti majoritaire de l’opposition, l’Église, la presse conservatrice et plusieurs municipalités s’opposèrent âprement à cette politique. Ils réclamèrent tous l’arrêt des relations commerciales et diplomatiques avec la République espagnole ainsi que la reconnaissance de Franco6. La droite extraparlementaire critiqua durement la politique du Taoiseach et éleva des obstacles qui aidèrent la cause du Généralissime, de plus, elle organisa un corps expéditionnaire qui s’unit aux troupes rebelles, compliquant grandement le dossier espagnol7. La gauche radicale, bien qu’en nombre réduit et attaquée par ses rivaux, mit en place une active campagne de défense des forces loyalistes et envoya ses meilleurs éléments dans les rangs des Brigades Internationales8. De Valera et ses ministres assistaient, stupéfaits, à l’hostilité croissante qui s’intensifiait entre les anciens blueshirts et le républicanisme armé en raison d’un confus et lointain conflit. La conflagration espagnole menaçait de rouvrir les plaies mal cicatrisées de la guerre civile irlandaise. En plus de cela, un ambigu mouvement d’inspiration catholique et teinté d’aspects politiques, l’Irish Christian Front, parvint à mobiliser les foules en faveur des insurgés au moyen d’un discours anticommuniste efficace. Leurs meetings, très fréquentés, réunirent plus de 40 000 personnes à Cork et à Dublin respectivement9.

3 La campagne électorale qui précéda l’élection générale de 1938 relégua la guerre d’Espagne à un second plan. Ensuite, l’indiscutable victoire dans les urnes du parti de Valera donna au Premier Ministre assez de crédit politique pour faire passer la nouvelle Constitution, ainsi que pour négocier avec l’Angleterre la restitution des ports et en finir avec le conflit douanier. Les affaires intérieures, liées à l’économie, aux relations avec la Grande-Bretagne et à l’évolution constitutionnelle du pays, monopolisèrent le débat public et refroidirent les passions que la guerre civile espagnole avait déchaînées. Néanmoins, ce conflit obligea le Gouvernement de l’Éire à gérer un bon nombre de problématiques qui sollicitèrent plusieurs Départements d’État et la détermination de leurs agents consulaires. L’évacuation des compatriotes qui se trouvaient sur le terrain,

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le transfert et la protection du bureau de représentation du Free State à Madrid, le maintien ou l’arrêt des relations diplomatiques avec chacun des camps rivaux, l’échange commercial avec ses ports, la persistance de l’activité de pêche dans les eaux irlandaises par les flottes de Cantabrie ou le rapatriement des volontaires qui s’étaient lancés dans la lutte, ne sont que quelques exemples des nombreux dossiers que la guerre d’Espagne imposa à l’agenda de l’exécutif irlandais. Malgré tout, en plus de la mise en application des mesures dictées par le Comité de non-intervention, le cabinet du Fianna Fáil dut faire face à de nombreuses et inattendues circonstances politiques, entre autres, les demandes d’aide au peuple espagnol que divers comités et organisations firent parvenir au Taoiseach.

4 Le Gouvernement irlandais répondit discrètement à ces demandes. À tel point que, selon la documentation entreposée au National Archive of Ireland, De Valera et ses ministres refusèrent les appels à l’aide formulés par des associations aussi célèbres que la Croix-Rouge Internationale. Dublin n’offrit son soutien qu’à une seule demande, celle de l’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain. La raison d’État, plus que la miséricorde, conseilla de soutenir la demande de l’organisation, qui était sur le point de ne pas recevoir le montant total de la subvention que les autorités de l’Éire avaient convenu de donner. En effet, comme nous le verrons plus tard, certains officiels du ministère des Affaires Étrangères ainsi que du ministère des Finances émirent des réserves et contrarièrent l'approbation du dossier.

Le National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief

5 La première de ces demandes fut formulée par la duchesse Katherine Atholl, membre de la Chambre des Communes et présidente du National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJC), plateforme qui prit, en Grande-Bretagne, la tête des initiatives solidaires avec les victimes de la guerre10.Au printemps 1937, ce comité organisa l’accueil en Angleterre de centaines d’enfants du Pays Basque dont les villages et les villes étaient bombardés par l’ennemi. Dans ce contexte, la direction du NJC envoya une lettre à De Valera, datée du 17 mai, qui demandait à l’exécutif de Dublin de financer les coûts de la campagne :

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Dear Prime Minister, As you are no doubt aware, arrangements have been made for the admission of Basque refugee children in this country. It is the object of this Committee to receive as many children as possible, and owing to the continued bombardment of Bilbao and other Basque towns, the matter has become one of increasing urgency. A substantial sum of money has already been raised in England for this purpose, and many organisations of widely differing opinions, are cooperating in the care of the children. The Archbishop of Westminster has personally expressed himself in full cooperation with the proposal, and is represented on the Committee, the Salvation Army, the Trades Union Congress and many other relief organisations are also cooperating. We thought that your Government might perhaps like to cooperate in this humanitarian work, and we are therefore venturing to ask whether you could see your way to assisting us financially, or in any other manner you may think fit11.

6 Le bureau du Taoiseach transféra le dossier au ministère des Affaires Étrangères, chargeant ainsi Joseph Walshe d’informer le Haut-Commissariat irlandais à Londres sur la réponse qu’il devait transmettre au comité :

I should be glad if you would inform the Committee that no request has been received by the Irish Government to admit Basque or other Spanish refugee children into this country. Should such a request be received it would, of course, receive sympathetic consideration. You might add that you understand that considerable sums of money have been sent from Ireland to Spain for relief of the suffering poor in that country12.

7 L’État irlandais ne donna pas un sou au NJC, et son engagement à loger certains mineurs pouvait difficilement être respecté, puisque le dispositif d’accueil exigeait la coordination d’un vaste réseau de services volontaires qui ne pouvaient être pourvus qu’en Angleterre. De plus, l'exécutif de De Valera et le reste des chancelleries européennes savaient que le front du Nord était condamné, puisque la majorité des journaux du continent suivaient de près l'avancée des troupes rebelles sur la frange cantabrique ; sous peu, il n'y aurait plus d'enfants à évacuer de ces zones. Tant et si bien qu'un mois après que le NJC avait remis sa lettre à De Valera, Bilbao tomba aux mains des insurgés. En octobre 1937 se termina la Campagne du Nord, qui signa la fin de l'occupation de la Cantabrie et des Asturies par l'armée franquiste.

La Croix-Rouge Internationale

8 Un an plus tard, le Département des Affaires Étrangères ordonna à la Délégation irlandaise auprès de la Société des Nations, basée à Genève, de prendre contact avec l’ International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, une organisation à laquelle le Gouvernement de l’Éire avait promis d’accorder une subvention. Étant donné que l’agence de représentation ne réussit pas à joindre les responsables de la

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commission, le directeur du bureau essaya de les retrouver par l’intermédiaire du Comité de la Croix-Rouge Internationale qui travaillait dans la ville. Il se produisit alors un absurde malentendu qui mit en évidence la faible disposition du Saorstát à collaborer sur ce sujet.

9 Au printemps 1938, les difficultés financières menaçaient la poursuite du travail humanitaire que cet organisme mettait en œuvre. Auparavant, l’assistance aux deux camps belligérants avait généré de telles frictions entre la Croix-Rouge espagnole et la Croix-Rouge Internationale que cette dernière s’était vue contrainte de nommer un délégué pour le territoire républicain, Junod, et un autre pour l’Espagne franquiste, le comte de Pourtalès. Le premier gardait un agent fixe à Barcelone pendant que le second gardait un subordonné à Saint-Sébastien, ce qui garantissait sa liberté de mouvement. L’engrenage était complété par une agence à Saint-Jean-de-Luz dirigée par Muntadas, assistant du Comte de Pourtalès. Le manque de moyens remettait en question le maintien de cette structure et par conséquent, le travail que l’organisation fournissait en Espagne. Cette question serait débattue à Londres, le 19 juin, dans le cadre du congrès organisé par la Croix-Rouge Internationale ; faute de nouvelles subventions il faudra se passer des services des agents de Barcelone et de Saint-Sébastien. Lorsque la Délégation irlandaise de Genève prit contact avec l’organisation, certainement au sujet de la distribution d’une aide financière, elle fit penser au bureau de la Croix-Rouge que l’exécutif du Fianna Fáil avait l’intention de lui faire un don. Le 8 juin, le délégué du Saorstát informa le ministère des Affaires Étrangères de la situation, assurant qu’il avait rectifié son erreur auprès du Comité de l’organisation et que tous les doutes semés par la confusion initiale avaient été dissipés. Malgré cela, deux jours plus tard une responsable de la Croix-Rouge Internationale, Odier, téléphona depuis la Suisse au Représentant irlandais en Espagne, Leopold Kerney, dont le bureau avait été déplacé, comme tant d’autres agences de représentation, à Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Selon ce que le diplomate rapporta par la suite à ses supérieurs, Odier « stated that she had heard that there were rather bright prospects of financial assistance from Ireland. She did not make herself any more precise than that13 ». De plus, le matin suivant, obéissant aux instructions du Comte de Pourtalès, Muntadas rendit visite à Leopold Kerney pour, selon ses propres mots, « securing my friendly intervention with my Government on behalf of the International Red Cross14 ». L’Éire avait confirmé la présence de certains représentants au congrès que devait prochainement tenir la Croix-Rouge Internationale à Londres. Le rapport du représentant confirmait que l’imbroglio pourrait compliquer la mission de la délégation irlandaise :

[...] at the beginning of our conversation, was apparently for a donation which would help to keep the organisation going as at present pending the expected decision of the Congress, but, as we finished our talk, I gathered that its principal purpose was to acquaint you in advance with the position so that your delegate at the Congress on 19th June would go prepared to voice your desire to make a financial contribution for the desired purpose15.

10 Le ministère des Affaires Étrangères rapporta à son délégué à Genève la persistance du malentendu :

[...] Although it is stated in your minute under reference that you had already explained the error to the Red Cross Bureau in order that

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they might not expect a contribution from the Irish Government, it is feared that that explanation may not have been fully understood [...] it appers that the Committee’s hope of financial assistance from Ireland are in no way diminished16.

11 De Valera avait résolu la question de manière définitive : « In view of the fact that this country has not yet formed a national Red Cross Society, the Minister would not care to recommend a State grant to the International Body’s funds as suggested17 ». Selon cette instruction, en plus d’expliquer, en ce qui concerne l’organisation, que le gouvernement irlandais ne ferait aucune donation, le diplomate devait faire en sorte que la question ne soit pas soulevée au congrès de Londres : « As you are possibly aware, two observers from the Department of Defence will attend the forthcoming Congress of the Red Cross Society at London and it is desired that they may not be importuned in the matter of an Irish contribution to the Committee’s work in Spain18 ». À en juger par la documentation, la participation à l’événement des attachés militaires se conclut sans incident. À la fin de ce même congrès, et après que le délégué irlandais à Genève avait exprimé une fois encore la position de son Gouvernement au sujet de la Croix-Rouge Internationale, le bureau central de l’organisation transmit le message à Odier, qui jusqu’alors n’avait pas été informée du malentendu. Selon le rapport que l’agence de représentation remit au Département des Affaires Étrangères le 30 juin, l’affaire était close : « So far as the Red Cross people here are concerned it may be taken that the misunderstanding has been completely dissipated19 ».

Irish Foodship for Spain Committee

12 L’Irish Foodship for Spain Committee fut constitué à la suite de la réunion tenue au Molesworth Hall de Dublin début janvier 1939. Le révérend et ancien dirigeant du Sinn Féin Michael O’Flanagan en fut nommé président. Le républicain Patrick Byrne et le communiste Robin Tweedy occupèrent, respectivement, les fonctions de trésorier et de secrétaire. Par la suite, Frank Edwards, représentant du Republican Congress, le professeur Rudmose Brown, la célèbre républicaine Maud Gonne McBride et d’autres figures du spectre progressiste irlandais firent partie d’une vice-présidence partagée. L’objectif de l’organisation consistait à collecter des vêtements et des provisions pour les envoyer à Belfast, où un comité homologue affréterait un bateau chargé d’aide humanitaire à destination du peuple espagnol. Selon le communiqué envoyé à la presse, le nouvel organisme désirait « to stress the humanitarian nature of its appeal, and its sole aim is to relieve the suffering of the non-combatant population. It appeals to all those who differ on the issues in the Spanish war, the women, children and the aged20 ». Le comité dut répondre aux critiques formulées par les détracteurs de l’Espagne républicaine dans les journaux pro-franquistes comme Irish Independent. Les invectives reprochaient à la plateforme que sa campagne ne profite exclusivement qu’au territoire loyaliste et, dans le pire des cas, la possibilité que des armes soient cachées dans le navire était envisagée. Tant et si bien que Patrick Byrne fut contraint d’adresser une lettre à l’éditeur du journal conservateur dans laquelle il expliquait que les autorités nationales avaient refusé l’aide du comité, en même temps qu’il invitait toute personne qui le désirerait à inspecter le bateau au départ de Belfast avant qu’il ne prenne la mer21.

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13 Le 16 janvier 1939, le secrétaire du comité envoya une demande d’aide au nouveau Président du pays Douglas Hyde, intellectuel reconnu de confession protestante et ancien militant du Sinn Féin. Le message dactylographié disait ceci :

14 I enclose circular outlining the terms of our campaign to send a contribution from the people of the South towards the Irish Foodship which leaves Belfast at the end of the month.

The Belfast Committee, of which the Earl of Antrim is president and His Grace the Bishop of Down and Connor, and Professor Henry of Queen’s University, are vice-presidents, has been working for several weeks. My Committee feels sure that you will be in entire agreement with this humanitarian work. Conditions are so severe in parts of Spain that even hospitals are without soap and milk. We trust Your Excellency will excuse the liberty in writing to you, but we believe that you will be eager to assist us in our efforts to alleviate much unnecessary suffering22.

15 Au vu de la constante inhibition du cabinet De Valera face à la guerre d’Espagne et de sa réticence à s’impliquer dans les campagnes d’aide humanitaire, les dirigeants de l’organisation durent penser que Hyde serait un meilleur interlocuteur, étant donné ses anciennes convictions républicaines et la réserve dont il faisait toujours preuve, au vu de sa foi, face aux disputes sectaires. Ainsi que l’évoque la copie du pasquin paraphé par le révérend Michael O’Flanagan que nous reproduisons ci-après, l’appel du comité était adressé aux citoyens des deux côtés de la frontière, au-delà de leurs convictions politiques et de leur religion :

Dear Friend. Do you know that there are famine areas in Spain; that disease is spreading because of scarcity of soap; that there is an appaling shortage of clothing? Now, that knowledge of this conditions is rapidly spreading, Irishmen and women who differ on the issues in the Spanish War feel bound to come together quickly to help in the fight against famine and disease. In this we are only keeping abreast of charitable people in other lands. America is giving generously. France is doing a great deal. Scotland has sent a shipment of food. So has England. And now Belfast, through a Committee of which Lord Antrim is chairman, gives Ireland a lead by announcing that the people of that city will send a foodship by the end of January. Believing that the South of Ireland will be eager to help in the good work initiated by Belfast, a Committee has come together quickly in Dublin. I appeal to you in the name of that Committee to give what you can and to give quickly. Our appeal is for Food. Soap. Clothing: a tin of milk. A pair of socks. A blanket -Can you help? Then please make up your parcel now. Our collector will call in a day or two to take it to our depot. To doctors and chemists we appeal for medecines and dressings. Governments should intervene to remedy famine but international politics make governments hesitant and nervous. Only the people are free to move quickly and in great force, for to them politics are

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nothing in face of starvation and disease. In the name of our common humanity I appeal to all sections of the Irish people to give generously and quickly. On behalf of the Organising Committee in the South of Ireland for a Foodship to Spain23.

16 Tandis qu’une petite flotte d’aide humanitaire composée de dix-sept navires partait d’Angleterre et que la campagne en Irlande atteignait sa troisième semaine, le Metropolitan Hall de Dublin accueillit dans la nuit du 18 janvier 1939 un meeting comble de l’Irish Foodship for Spain Committee. En plus de recevoir les dons de plusieurs particuliers et de quelques collectifs comme les dockers du port, Patrick Byrne remercia Irish Times et Evening Mail pour leur collaboration. Accompagné par le leader du Republican Congress, Peadar O’Donnell, le secrétaire du comité souligna qu’ils avaient jusqu’alors reçu de l’équipement et des souscriptions en espèces pour une valeur totale de 300 livres sterling ; les contributions les plus significatives provenaient de religieux protestants. Face aux détracteurs de l’initiative, il précisa, ensuite, que les comptes de l’organisation étaient disponibles pour toute demande d’inspection, et qu’il était ainsi possible de vérifier comment était dépensé l’argent24.

17 Le 21 janvier, le secrétariat de la Présidence fit savoir à Patrick Byrne que Douglas Hyde s’était temporairement absenté de son poste. À son retour, la lettre du comité lui serait remise. En réalité, les conseillers du dignitaire voulaient gagner du temps dans le but d’étudier la composition de la plateforme et la nature de leurs activités. Cette semaine- là, alors que les adhérents de l’association parcouraient en fourgonnette les provinces de l’Éire pour récupérer les dons dans quarante-neuf communes différentes, les subalternes du Uachtarán rédigèrent une note interne qui déconseillait de soutenir le comité en raison des sympathies de gauche de ses membres25. Les républicains Michael O’Flanagan et Peadar O’Donnell, ce dernier étant leader du Republican Congress, étaient accusés d'être communistes. Ni l'un ni l'autre ne faisaient partie de l'Irish Communist Party, bien que tous deux aient pris part à la défense de la République espagnole. La note rédigée par le secrétariat de la Présidence signalait que le révérend venait de visiter le territoire loyaliste. En effet, à la fin de l'année 1938, O'Flanagan alla à Barcelone, où il offrit un entretien à un reporter du journal La Vanguardia ; il se rendit quelques jours plus tard à Madrid. L'ancien prêtre défendit la cause républicaine sur le sol espagnol, en Irlande et aux Etats-Unis d'Amérique26. Peadar O’Donnell participait activement aux actes de soutien et aux campagnes de solidarité en faveur de la République espagnole organisés par les partis politiques de gauche en Irlande. De même, il avait été témoin in situ de l'éclatement de la guerre civile espagnole, reportant cet événement dans une chronique publiée en 1937 et dans laquelle il défendait la cause loyaliste27. Robin Tweedy, décrit dans la note comme étant sympathisant communiste, appartenait quant à lui à l'Irish Communist Party. Parmi les diverses activités de soutien au camp loyaliste dans lesquelles il prit part, on remarque particulièrement son rôle dans la mise en place du Spanish Medical Aid Committee, une organisation créée en septembre 1936 dans le but d'aider la République espagnole sur le plan médical28. Michael O'Flanagan, Peadar O’Donnell et Robin Tweedy étaient, ainsi, les membres actifs du comité de Dublin qui déconseillaient d'approuver, d'après le secrétariat de la Présidence, la demande de l'Irish Foodship for Spain Committee. Les personnalités qui faisaient partie du comité de l'organisation installé à Belfast inspiraient une plus grande confiance aux subalternes du Uachtarán. Cependant,

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l'accusation de communiste qui pesait sur le cercle de Dublin, et le fait que les approvisionnements étaient destinés uniquement au territoire gouvernemental, fournissaient des arguments aux détracteurs de la demande. Ainsi l’annonce le document en question :

1. The names associated with the Irish Foodship for Spain Committee do not inspire confidence. 2. The President, Rev. Michael O’Flanagan, is a Republican of the extreme type in Ireland who is believed to have leanings towards communism. Mr. Tweedy who is associated with him as co-trustee, is also credited with communistic sympathies. 3. Fr. O’Flanagan was recently in Barcelona, which is the headquarters of the communistic Government in Spain. 4. Another prominent person associated with the project is Peadar O’Donnell, who is also stated to have communistic leanings. 5. On the other hand, it is stated in paragraph 2 of the letter from the Committee, that the Earl of Antrim is President of the Belfast Committee, and His Grace the Bishop of Down and Connor (presumably the Protestant Bishop) and Prof. Henry of Queen’s Unvy is also a member of the Committee. 6. Thus the composition of the Belfast Committee would at first sight seem to inspire more confidence that that of the Dublin Committee. Nevertheless, on account of the communistic hue of the Dublin Committee the President will not subscribe. Apart from this there is the bigger issue that to subscribe to a measure of this nature would be tantamount to the President taking sides between the two opposing parties in the Spanish Civil War, as it is perfectly clear that this ship is intended solely for the area controlled by the communistic Government in Spain29.

18 Le 24 janvier 1939, le secrétariat de la Présidence fit savoir à Patrick Byrne que Douglas Hyde avait refusé de satisfaire sa demande : « While the President is entirely in sympathy with any measure for the alleviation of distress and suffering, he regrets that he cannot see his way to subscribe to the project in question30 ». Le 28 janvier, la campagne s’acheva. Les dons collectés dans les vingt-six comtés du Sud avaient permis de réunir et/ou d’acheter une quantité totale de nourriture et de matériel médical dont la valeur atteignait les 600 livres sterling31. Trois camions remplis de provisions quittèrent Dublin en direction de Belfast le 30 janvier 1939. Douze membres de l’Irish Foodship Committee accompagnèrent les véhicules, sur lesquels étaient affichés les drapeaux de l’Irlande et de la République espagnole, ainsi que des affiches sur lesquelles on pouvait lire : « Irish aid will give you hope » et « Ireland helps war-torn Spain ». Après une longue pause à la frontière à cause de la Six-County Transport Act, la marchandise arriva dans la capitale de l’Ulster32. Une fois là-bas, le Northern Ireland Joint Committee for Spanish Relief rassembla le chargement avec les provisions et le matériel qui avaient été collectés dans le Nord, dans l’attente de pouvoir embarquer la cargaison dans le bateau qui transporterait la marchandise vers le territoire loyaliste33. Il faut signaler que quelques jours auparavant, le 26 janvier 1939, Barcelone avait été prise par les rebelles.

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L’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain et l’Internationale pour le Respect du Droit d’Asile et l’Aide des Réfugiés Politiques

19 En janvier 1938, le juge et président de l’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, Michael Hansson, dirigeant aussi de la Nansen International Office for Refugees installée à Genève, se mit en contact depuis la Suisse avec le Secrétaire du Département des Affaires Étrangères, Joseph Walshe, dans le but de demander l’aide économique du Gouvernement irlandais pour financer la campagne solidaire que cette organisation prévoyait d’organiser34. Active dès la fin de l’année 1937, l’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain déployait son action sur le terrain par l’intermédiaire d’associations et d’organismes étrangers qui accomplissaient des actions humanitaires à l’arrière-garde des deux camps opposés, en utilisant aussi les propres organisations espagnoles de secours social. La principale mission de la Commission était l’assistance aux enfants qui avaient abandonné leurs villes et villages pour fuir les bombardements, dont les familles ne pouvaient s’occuper, et qui vivaient dans des centres d’accueil disséminés dans toute l’Espagne. L’organisation estimait que 250 000 enfants réfugiés étaient menacés par la faim et la misère. En réponse, l’ International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain organisait une collecte internationale, dont l’argent collecté serait réparti de manière impartiale dans le territoire des deux camps belligérants, pour fournir aux enfants un repas chaud par jour pendant quatre mois. Hansson prit soin de préciser que le gouvernement britannique avait confirmé sa volonté de contribuer par un don de 25 000 livres sterling, ce qui correspondait à un sixième du montant total requis pour financer l’opération35.

20 Quelques semaines plus tard, Hansson et Edith Pye, membre de l’International Commission et cadre du Friends Service Council, renouvelèrent leur demande36. En effet, le président de l’organisation envoya un télégramme en français dans lequel il assurait que « selon rapports récents situation véritablement catastrophique37 », en même temps que la porte-parole des quakers anglais faisait savoir au ministère des Affaires Étrangères que la Nouvelle-Zélande et le Danemark avaient déjà annoncé leur entière disposition à contribuer à la campagne ; la Suède, la Norvège et la Suisse soutinrent l’initiative quelques jours plus tard. Les autorités britanniques jouèrent une carte de défi, étant donné que la Dominions Office fit connaître à certains de ses agents consulaires le plan de l’International Commission, et l’adhésion à ce même plan de l’exécutif de Sa Majesté, dans le but qu’ils en informent les Gouvernements auxquels ils étaient accrédités. Dans ce contexte, le Haut-Commissariat irlandais à Londres fut mis en garde : « […] the Under Secretary of State asks me to inform de Irish Government of the view which the British Government take of the scheme proposed by the Friends Service Council and the reply which they have given to the appeal38 ». Le cabinet de Valera pourrait difficilement se dérober à la demande formulée par l’International Commission.

21 Au début du printemps, l’organisation avait détaché un commissaire sur le terrain, le suédois Malcolm de Lilliehöök, qui devait superviser l’activité embryonnaire de l’International Commission en Espagne. Un premier contingent de 15 000 enfants, répartis des deux côtés du front, était déjà alimenté grâce à la Collecte Internationale. La France, la Belgique et l’Australie l’avaient rejointe, en plus du Dominion d’Afrique du Sud et la Commonwealth d’Australie, ce qui augmentait la pression morale et surtout

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politique que pouvaient ressentir les autorités irlandaises. De plus, les interlocuteurs cités plus avant renouvelèrent leurs appels. Ainsi de Michael Hansson, depuis Genève, qui fit parvenir une note à De Valera dans laquelle il annonçait :

The funds at the disposal of the Commission enable it to bring assistance only to this small proportion of the vast number of children in need of extra nourishment, whereas, according to recent reports received from Spain, it may be asserted without exaggeration that, in spite of the efforts of the authorities the health of thousands of children is threatened by the lack of sufficient food39.

22 Edith Pye en fit autant auprès de Joseph Walshe : « When we first issued an appeal, the Spanish refugee children were getting at least one meal a day; now we understand from our workers that there is not even this amount of food available and the situation is going from bad to worse40 ». À son tour, le Haut-Commissariat irlandais à Londres informa que la Couronne continuait à réclamer, implicitement, l’intervention du cabinet du Fianna Fáil : « […] a further letter which has been received in this connection from the Dominions Office ». L’insistance des intéressés se poursuivrait les mois suivants, laissant pour chacun des témoignages documentaires41.

23 À la fin du mois de mai 1938, le futur représentant irlandais à Paris et à l’époque agent du ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Seán Murphy, transmit au Roinn Airgeadais (ministère des Finances) l’avis de De Valera. Il fallait contribuer à la collecte international, sinon « […] owing to the official support already given or promised by other countries, a continued refusal on our part to contribute would reflect adversely on our international prestige42 » ; prenant comme référence la contribution du reste des Dominions, le Taoiseach détermina le montant de la donation : « Taking New Zealand as a fairly appropiate example, the Minister is of opinion that a contribution of £2.000 would […] be regarded as quite adequate43 ». Le transfert de l’argent, issu du Fonds de Contingence de l’État, devait être ratifié par le ministère des Finances qui, par contre, formulerait quelques réserves et compliquerait l’approbation du dossier. Le représentant de ce ministère demanda au ministère des Affaires Étrangères qu’il lui fournisse des informations au sujet de la composition de l’International Commission, du travail qu’elle réalisait et de la façon dont étaient utilisés ses fonds. Encore plus significatif, il manifesta sa réticence en soulignant que le peuple irlandais avait déjà suffisamment démontré sa solidarité en prenant part aux collectes humanitaires que quelques organismes de l’île avaient organisées : « […] it is presumed that your Department has borne in mind the contributions that have already been made, not through oficial channels, by the people of this country towards relief of ditress in Spain44 ». Ceci démontre à quel point le conflit espagnol avait divisé non seulement l’opinion publique mais aussi l’ensemble de la classe politique, une diversité de postures s’étant installée au sein du parti progouvernemental. En effet, trois députés du Fianna Fáil firent partie du ICF. À l'opposé, Hugo Flinn, secrétaire parlementaire du ministre des Finances irlandais, défendit tout au long du conflit la cause républicaine. De même, quelques mairies où le parti travailliste et le Fianna Fáil avaient établi un pacte de gouvernement approuvèrent des résolutions qui refusaient la souscription du Plan de Non- Intervention par De Valera, et plaidaient en faveur de la reconnaissance diplomatique du camp franquiste. En revanche, certaines branches locales du Fianna Fáil, comme celle de Killolane et Movidy (comté de Cork), prirent part aux campagnes de soutien à la

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République espagnole et approuvèrent des motions de solidarité en faveur de la cause loyaliste. Cependant, le groupe parlementaire du Fianna Fáil soutint toujours le Premier ministre irlandais dans tout ce qui concernait la guerre d'Espagne45.

24 Seán Murphy répondit en assurant que De Valera s’était plié à la demande de l’International Commission, à la condition que l’argent soit employé de manière impartiale pour venir au secours des enfants des deux camps opposés. Le Premier Ministre recommandait de donner dans un premier temps 1 000 livres sterling, puis 1 000 de plus à mesure que le reste des Gouvernements européens rendent effective la totalité de leur engagement46.

25 Le 11 août 1938, De Valera reçut dans son bureau Malcolm de Lilliehöök, qui venait le voir dans l’espoir d’obtenir l’aide tant convoitée. Deux jours plus tard, ce représentant de l’International Commission lui fit parvenir depuis Genève une note brève, qui résumait le travail effectué en Espagne par l’organisation depuis le lancement de sa campagne le 1er mai 1938, et il énumérait le nom des nations qui avaient souscrit au plan ainsi que la quantité d’argent que chacune d’entre elles avait apportée ; l’Italie, la Croix-Rouge allemande et même l’Inde avaient réalisé un don. Grâce à la Collecte Internationale, 14 000 enfants de Catalogne étaient nourris, 26 000 dans le centre et le sud de la péninsule, et trois cantines étaient financées dans l’Espagne nationaliste. Avec l’arrivée de l’hiver, on estimait que 400 000 enfants avaient besoin d’un apport complémentaire de nourriture. Le taux de mortalité parmi les enfants était, selon le rapport, « already heavy », leur pâleur et leur manque de vitalité sautaient aux yeux, et de très nombreux cas de malnutrition sévère étaient détectés47. En un mot, la situation était désespérée et le Gouvernement de l’Éire n’avait pas avancé un seul centime.

26 Après avoir rendu visite au Secrétaire Général de la Société des Nations, entrevue durant laquelle Malcolm de Lilliehöök fit part de ses rencontres avec De Valera et Lord Halifax, le représentant de l’International Commission se rendit, en compagnie de D. E. Blickenstaff, dirigeant de l’American Friends Service Committee (quakers américains), dans le bureau de Cremins, Délégué permanent de l’Irlande auprès de la Société des Nations à Genève. À partir de ce moment, cette agence de représentation consulaire devint une nouvelle scène de manœuvres où l’International Commission essaya de faire valoir ses intérêts auprès du Gouvernement de l’Éire. De son côté, l’exécutif du Fianna Fáil se servit aussi bien de Cremins que du Haut-Commissariat irlandais à Londres pour obtenir des informations complémentaires au sujet de l’organisation48.

27 Après l’élection générale qui avait vu le Fianna Fáil reprendre le pouvoir avec la majorité absolue, comptant depuis fin août sur l’accord du ministre des Finances pour une possible contribution de 2 000 livres sterling, et étant donné la reprise de l’année parlementaire à partir du mois d’octobre 1938, De Valera et Joseph Walshe jugèrent opportun de conclure la demande de l’International Commission et de rendre effectif le paiement de la donation avant que l’année fiscale en cours ne se termine. Dans ce but, ils demandèrent à Malcolm de Lilliehöök de leur fournir la plus grande quantité possible d’informations et de solides arguments afin de défendre le don au Dáil ; on s'attendait particulièrement à ce que le fait que l'organisation destinerait beaucoup plus de ressources à l'Espagne républicaine plutôt qu'au territoire rebelle, où la pénurie était loin de la crise de subsistance qui touchait le camp loyaliste, soit un sujet sensible. Ainsi, non seulement l’opposition parlementaire pouvait torpiller l’initiative en critiquant dans la Chambre Basse, une fois de plus, la posture adoptée par le Gouvernement face à la guerre d’Espagne, mais certains officiels du ministère des

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Affaires Étrangères réaffirmèrent aussi leurs réticences. À cet égard, on conserve trois notes à usage interne, rédigées entre les mois d’octobre et novembre de cette même année, qui remettaient en question des éléments concrets de l’opération ou la déconseillaient complètement. Le premier de ces rapports, intitulé Method of paying over our contribution (total £2.000) to the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, envisageait la possibilité de réduire de manière significative la somme d’argent promise par le Gouvernement :

As no undertaking has so far been given to the International Commission to pay them any precise amount we are free to give them less without breach of commitment. In view of the fact that most of the few European States who have contributed so far to the Commission’s funds have given less tan £1.000 later, if and when the majority of European States decide to contribute also, or if and when the other contributing States double (or increase considerably) their previous contributions49.

28 La deuxième note, intitulée Question of a contribution to the Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, expose, d’un côté, l’idée de ne donner aucune rétribution à l’organisation. Dans un deuxième temps, elle suggère aussi de faire des dons alimentaires plutôt que monétaires ; elle évoque aussi dans son introduction la possible concession des droits de belligérance aux insurgés, une question qui avait soulevé les passions lors des débats parlementaires tenus à la chambre basse un an auparavant :

[…] 4. In short, our position in the whole matter appears to be still unprejudiced. We could, if desired, contribute up to £2.000 (on the basis of some of the British Dominions’ donations) or under £1.000 (on the basis of what many European countries have given) or give nothing at all on the ground that the Commission is actually spending nearly six times more on the Barcelona child refugees than on those in Franco Spain. Our whole view of the matter may be altered by events in Spain should belligerent rights be accorded in the near future to General Franco’s forces. Undoubtedly, when we were considering the possibility of a contribution the war in Spain seemed less likely to come to a sudden end as it does now. 5. Perhaps an easy solution of the whole problem might be… that we could help the Spanish children with food or other contributions in kind. Such a method of dealing with the plight of those children would probably raise less criticism here than a proposal to send out taxpayers’ money to Spain. The purchase by the Government of some hundreds of pounds’ worth of butter, soap, dried herrings, etc. here would not only help agriculture and trade in this country to the extent of the amount actually purchased, but might do something also to initiate a taste for Irish products throughout a country which may soon be again in a position to purchase from abroad50.

29 Le troisième message, qui, bien qu’il ne comporte aucun en-tête est le plus long, digresse sur les conséquences de la cession d’un don étant donné l’évolution récente des événements en Espagne sur le terrain militaire. Ce document avertit qu’une telle

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décision remettrait en question la prétendue neutralité du Saorstát, un autre cheval de bataille sur lequel les discours enflammés au Dáil avaient insisté, prolongerait inutilement la résistance républicaine déjà condamnée à l’échec, et exposerait l’exécutif à une possible réaction défavorable de l’opinion publique irlandaise. En effet, à ce moment du conflit, la pénurie matérielle et le manque d'aliments qui touchait l'arrière-garde républicaine, étaient devenus un outil de premier ordre dont se servaient les commandements nationalistes pour vaincre leur ennemi. Le mémorandum signalait que si des approvisionnements étaient fournis au territoire loyaliste, et d'autant plus si cela était soutenu par d'autres gouvernements, les conditions de vie de la population civile pourraient s'améliorer, gâchant ainsi le blocus de fait que l'armée rebelle avait imposé à l'Espagne républicaine. La remise de l'aide réclamée par l'International Commission pouvait changer, ainsi, le cours de la guerre, en particulier si l'approbation de la demande suscitait à l'étranger une réaction en chaîne de solidarité. D'autre part, compte tenu de la réaction d’opposition citoyenne à une manifestation de soutien à la cause loyaliste dans la localité de Birr, la note soutenait que l'approbation de la demande formulée par l'organisation pouvait provoquer le refus de l'électorat. De même, le fait que la majeure partie de l'envoi ait pour destination le territoire républicain, au lieu d'avoir prévu une répartition équivalente entre les deux camps, menaçait de compromettre l'adhésion du Gouvernement au Pacte de Non-Intervention ; la souscription à l'initiative de l'International Commission de la part de l'exécutif irlandais pourrait être considérée, en fin de compte, comme un acte d'ingérence dans la guerre civile espagnole. Ainsi l'annonçait le rapport :

1. The circumstances have altered considerably since other Governments agreed to contribute to this scheme. The food position in Republican Spain has now become such a big factor in the whole situation that, if we were now to undertake to supply food to any section of the “Republican” population, we would be open to the charge of committing what would amount in effect to an act of intervention in the Spanish conflict. 2. Within recent months, the reduction of the food supplies of Government Spain has become a vital part of Franco’s campaing. He has succeeded in instituting what, if he were granted belligerent rights, would certainly be regarded as an effective blockade. At the moment, it is on this blockade, more than anything else, that the Burgos Government is relaying to bring the war to an end. […] any scheme involving the supply of food to “Government” Spain, even though it is confined to a particular section of the population, must help to strengthen the Republican Government in its resistance to Franco and, by so doing tend to prolong the conflict. […] 4. […] the case against an arrangement under which the Irish Government would itself set up a committee to purchase food and ship it out to Spain is even stronger. It would mean that the Irish Government would be taking a more active and direct part in the supply of food to Spain than any other Government has yet taken; it would carry the implication that the Irish Government agreed with the refusal of belligerent rights and disapproved on humanitarian grounds of the measures of blockade instituted by Franco; and it

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would create the danger that other European Governments would be encouraged by the Irish precedent to yield to the pressure of their Leftist supporters and take active steps to defeat the purpose of Franco’s present campaign. 5. All this is, of course, merely one point of view. But that it is one likely to find fairly general acceptance is suggested by what happened when the Society of Friends tried to hold a dance in Birr to raise funds for objects similar to those of the League Commission. The Gárda opposed the grant of the licence on the ground that “there was an undercurrent of feeling in the town that the fund would be used to help Red Government”, and, though the licence was granted, the dance had eventually to be abandoned owing to local opposition51.

30 À la fin du mois de décembre 1938, anticipant l’approbation du Parlement, le Gouvernement irlandais accorda la concession immédiate de 1 000 livres sterling à l’International Commission. Le respect du principe de neutralité au moment de fournir l’aide, et l’acceptation du plan par les deux camps opposés, étaient les conditions sine qua non que l’organisation devait respecter, selon les termes de l’attribution fixés par Dublin. Les responsables de l’organisme saluèrent chaleureusement le geste et rappelèrent, ainsi que l’exprime une lettre remise à Joseph Walshe, « that the task that is still confronting the International Commission is of such urgency and magnitude as to demand regular and substantial contributions from all Governments ». En effet, du point de vue humanitaire, la situation sur le terrain continuait à se détériorer. Ainsi que le soulignent les rapports remis par le Délégué irlandais à Genève au Département des Affaires Étrangères en février 1939, « the cessation of attacks on shipping outside the limit has not done away with the shortage of foodstuffs. There is all the time the blockade, and of course there is a shortage of transport ». Le travail de l’International Commission, qui continuait à se dérouler principalement en Catalogne et dans le centre de l’Espagne, dut s’étendre aux enfants déplacés qui commençaient à se regrouper dans le sud de la France. À tel point que, pour pouvoir faire face à cette nouvelle urgence, l’organisation transféra son siège à Paris et étendit la collecte, au-delà des organismes gouvernementaux, au public en général. Des nations comme la Pologne ou l’Égypte rejoignirent la collecte internationale, d’autres, comme les Pays-Bas, les États-Unis ou le Canada, apportèrent une contribution en nature. La fatigue accumulée par les déplacements constants et l’ampleur de la tâche forcèrent la succession de Malcolm de Lilliehöök en tant que directeur de terrain par l’américain Howard E. Kershner, qui accompagna au milieu du mois le président de l’International Commission à Burgos, où ils eurent une entrevue avec Franco. Les conditions de la population civile dans les deux arrière-gardes étaient si graves, que le Généralissime accepta que l’organisme étende ses opérations à toutes les régions du pays qui se trouvaient sous son contrôle, en particulier en Catalogne, tout en approuvant le travail de l’organisation sur le territoire républicain ainsi que dans le sud de la France. De plus, selon le document dactylographié de Cremins, il permettrait le passage par la mer des approvisionnements destinés au territoire de la Meseta aux mains des loyalistes ; c’est- à-dire, « that in cases in which ships may be held up within the limit, those containing supplies for the Commission’s work will be allowed through. Further, that there will be no bombing of such ships ». Enfin, le chef militaire des insurgés estimait que, même si la guerre

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terminait ipso facto, le peuple espagnol aurait besoin de l’aide de l’organisme au moins durant six mois de plus52. Malgré tout, les besoins urgents auxquels l’International Commission dut faire face, à partir de ce moment, obligèrent ces dirigeants à réclamer, auprès des autorités irlandaises, la remise des 1 000 livres sterling complémentaires qu’elles avaient promis de donner.

31 Les porte-parole de l’organisation firent pression, de nouveau, sur Dublin. Le Foreign Office et le Dominions Office britanniques en firent de même ; ainsi, en guise d’exemple, nous pouvons recopier un extrait de la note reçue par le Haut-Commissariat irlandais à Londres, au début du mois de mars 1939, de la part du Vicomte de Halifax :

I am further to inform you that His Majesty’s Government consider it desirable, in the interests of the Commission’s relations with General Franco’s Administration that no time should be lost in arranging for the distribution of a portion of the Commission’s supplies in those parts of Spain which are in General Franco’s possession, and particularly in Barcelona, where the need is understood to be extremely urgent53.

32 À cette même époque, le ministère des Affaires Étrangères envisageait encore la possibilité de ne pas procéder au second paiement ou de diminuer le montant de l’aide. Cependant, l’engagement pris s’imposait comme un fait accompli, les agents du ministère commençant ainsi à se demander quel type d’aide impliquerait des coûts politiques plus raisonnables, à ce moment-là, une contribution en nature. La note suivante, remise le 4 mars à Joseph Walshe par un de ses subalternes, résume ce cas de conscience :

I quite agree with your view regarding the final moitey of our contribution to the Spanish Child Refugee Commission. It would undoubtedly be best to take no hasty action before further pressure is brought to bear on us, yet there would seem but little hope of eventually evading payment, in some form, of the full amount sanctioned by the Dáil. Perhaps, when the matter seems somewhat riper, we might act… In any event, the case for a contribution in kind is now definitely more arguable. If the Minister were to agree, we might consult the Departments of Agriculture and Industry & Commerce concerning the produce or manufactured goods most suitable, from their points of view, for shipment to Spain54.

33 Quelques jours plus tard le Secrétaire adjoint du ministère des Affaires Étrangères, F. H. Boland, ordonna au représentant irlandais à Paris de l’époque, Seán Murphy, de faire part aux dirigeants de l’International Commission de la décision du gouvernement : quelques semaines plus tôt, le Dáil avait approuvé, sous la recommandation de Valera, la concession des 1 000 livres sterling complémentaires. L’argent serait remis à condition que les responsables de l’organisation acceptent d’en dépenser les trois quarts en Irlande, en achetant des produits élaborés ou manufacturés dans l’île ; plusieurs ministères aideraient les commissaires de l’association dans cette tâche. L’année fiscale en cours se terminant à la fin de ce même mois de mars, la contribution serait remise de manière imminente, dans le cas contraire le Parlement devrait approuver de nouveau la mesure à l’ouverture de la nouvelle année fiscale. Le 24 mars

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1939, Howard E. Kershner reçut le chèque promis par le gouvernement, ainsi qu’une liste de possibles fournisseurs irlandais et les prix auxquels les produits seraient vendus à l’organisation. Le directeur de l’International Commission se rendit à Dublin début avril afin de concrétiser l’achat. Le Département d’Agriculture ainsi que celui d’Industrie et Commerce lui apportèrent leur aide le temps de son séjour dans l’île. Durant cette visite, et ainsi qu’il l’avait auparavant annoncé par écrit, Kershner fit savoir aux officiels du ministère des Affaires Étrangères sa volonté de demander à De Valera que le Gouvernement irlandais continue à fournir de la nourriture aux réfugiés à l’avenir : « In view of the wide spread starvation existing there, which condition will probably grow worse rather than better during the next 2 or 3 months, I am hoping that your Government may become interested in making available additional quantities of food-stuffs for the innocent war victims in Spain ». À cette occasion comme lors de ses demandes ultérieures, la réponse fut toujours la même : « circumstances do not permit the Minister to recommend further financial contributions to your funds during the present financial year55 ».

34 Les approvisionnements, des vêtements et des chaussures pour enfants, du lait concentré en poudre et des produits comme de la margarine et de la farine d’orge, furent embarqués à destination de Bilbao, où ils furent pris en charge par l’Auxilio Social, une organisation franquiste dirigée par Javier de Bedoya ; le Sous-Secrétaire du ministère des Affaires Étrangères nationaliste, le général Espinoza Monteros, garantissait personnellement la protection et l’immunité de l’équipe détachée sur le terrain par le délégué de l’International Commission, David Blickenstaff.

35 En 1939, l’organisation continua à aider la population espagnole, en priorité les enfants, sur le territoire national, sous contrôle des rebelles à partir du mois d’avril, comme en France et en Afrique du Nord. Les chancelleries européennes, et en particulier le Royaume-Uni, continuèrent à financer, dans la mesure du possible, les coûts de la campagne humanitaire maintenue par l’International Commission. À ce sujet, le Dominions Office continua à faire pression sur le Haut-Commissariat irlandais à Londres pour que son Gouvernement rejoigne l’initiative. À plusieurs reprises, les responsables de l’organisation en firent de même. Voici, à titre d’exemple, un court fragment de la lettre que Hanson et Kershner firent parvenir à De Valera en août de cette année : « […] it should be emphasised that Winter is approaching. Heavier clothing and blankets will be necessary if the lives of these people are to be preserved. Many of them are children; some thousands are orphans, almost all are scattered fragments of families, without home, country or friends56 ».

36 À l’automne, l’International Commission transmit à la Légation irlandaise de Paris une offre d’achat adressée aux entrepreneurs textiles de l’île, dans le but d’acquérir une quantité considérable de couvertures pour les réfugiés. Le Département d’Industrie et du Commerce interrogea quelques enseignes, mais toutes refusèrent la proposition. Au début de l’année 1940, Howard E. Kershner réclama encore à De Valera la participation de son Gouvernement à la campagne solidaire. À cette date, l’organisation venait d’affréter 575 tonnes de lait en poudre pour l’Espagne, et se préparait à envoyer six cliniques mobiles sur le terrain ainsi qu’un nouveau chargement de provisions. Malgré tout, l’activité de l’International Commission sur le sol espagnol touchait à sa fin, puisque la fin des batailles et le rationnement des aliments que les autorités nationalistes avaient mis en place permettaient de prévoir, malgré la misère dans laquelle se trouvait le pays, la subsistance des enfants espagnols. À partir de ce moment, l'organisation humanitaire concentrerait ses efforts en France et en Afrique

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du Nord, où les conditions de vie dans les camps de réfugiés républicains étaient très précaires57. Cependant, après le versement des 1 000 £ complémentaires au mois de mars de l’année antérieure, le gouvernement de l’Éire n’apporta aucune autre aide à l’organisation, ni en espèces ni en nature.

37 Il faut souligner, enfin, qu’en mai 1939, l’Organisation internationale pour le respect du droit d’asile et l’aide des réfugiés politiques fit parvenir une lettre à Joseph Walshe depuis son siège à Paris, dans laquelle elle priait les autorités du Saorstát d’accueillir quelques-uns des plus de 350 000 réfugiés espagnols qui se trouvaient en France. Le Secrétaire du ministère des Affaires Étrangères conclut l’affaire par une note qu’il fit parvenir à la Légation irlandaise de Paris, où nous pouvons lire : En plus du nom de l’organisation, fortement suspect en soi, vous déduirez à la lecture de la lettre que M. Perrin souhaiterait que notre Gouvernement donne du travail à un certain nombre de rouges espagnols qui apparemment ne souhaitent pas retourner dans leur propre pays. Auriez-vous l’amabilité d’informer M. Perrin que, étant donné que l’Irlande souffre d’un grand problème de chômage, elle se trouve dans l’incapacité de pouvoir fournir un emploi aux étrangers58 ?

38 L’exécutif de Dublin n’évoqua plus la question et n’établit jamais aucun contact avec cette organisation.

39 Ainsi que nous le présentions dans l’introduction, le lecteur aura pu se rendre compte que le Gouvernement irlandais refusa de coopérer avec les organismes qu’il pouvait accuser de sympathies gauchistes. La crainte d’être associé, par une partie de l’électorat, à une attitude connivente envers la République espagnole, suffisait pour justifier cette position. Cela détermina la réponse de Dublin aux demandes d’aide formulées par le National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, l’Irish Foodship for Spain et l’Organisation internationale pour le respect du droit d’asile et l’aide des réfugiés politiques. La réputation internationale et la pression de l’Angleterre finirent de convaincre l’exécutif du Fianna Fáil, malgré la réticence de quelques ministères, de l’intérêt de répondre favorablement à la demande de l’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain. À son tour, le faux pas diplomatique survenu au sujet de la Croix-Rouge Internationale met en relief la réticence du cabinet de Valera à financer les activités d’aides au peuple espagnol, sauf dans le cas, ainsi que cela se produisit avec la demande de l’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain, où l’impératif politique les rendrait inéluctables.

NOTES

1. Francis Mac Manus (ed.), The years of the great test, 1926-39, Dublin/Cork, 1978. 2. Mike Cronin, The Blueshirts and Irish Politics, Dublin, Four Courts Press Ltd., 1997, p. 1-17. 3. Richard English, “Socialism and republican schism in Ireland: the emergence of the Republican Congress in 1934”, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 27 No 105, May 1990.

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4. Bowyer J. Bell, “Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to 1939”, in H. Gustav Klaus (ed.), Strong Words, Brave Deeds. The Poetry, Live and Times of Thomas O’Brien. Volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, Dublin, The O’Brien Press, 1994, p. 248-250. 5. Diarmaid Ferriter, Judging Dev: A reassessment of the life and legacy of Eamon de Valera, Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2007, p. 129. 6. Fearghal McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War, Cork, Cork University Press, 1999, p. 202-211. 7. Eoin O’Duffy, Crusade in Spain, Dublin, Browne and Nolan Limited, 1938. 8. Michael O’Riordan, Connolly Column. The story of the Irishmen who fought for the Spanish Republic, 1936-1939, Dublin, Warren & Pell Publishing, 2005. 9. Robert Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, Crusades in conflict, Manchester, Mandolin, p. 7-14. 10. Quatre autres députés de la Chambre des Communes intégrèrent les instances de l’organisation, qui eut la parlementaire Eleanor Rathbone et le maire de Listowel pour vice-présidents. Le NJC, qui hébergeait un total de 150 associations et comités, déplaça son action humanitaire sur le terrain espagnol tout en animant en Angleterre les campagnes d’aide pro-républicaine. L’évacuation des enfants, l’établissement de colonies pour enfants et l’affrètement de bateaux chargés de nourriture constituèrent la plus grande partie de son activité. Source : “Aid to Spain” in Modern Records Centre (University Library) - University of Warwick [https://www2.warwick.ac.uk]. 11. National Archive of Ireland (ci-après NAI), Dept. For. Aff - 200 Series files - 243/7. 12. Les « considerables sums of money » auxquelles se réfèrent la note, font allusion aux 32 000 £ que l’Église catholique d’Irlande réunit grâce à une collecte, organisée à l’automne 1936, au profit des victimes de la guerre d’Espagne. L’argent récolté termina dans les mains des militaires rebelles, l’Irish Christian Front ayant joué un rôle trouble dans la remise de l’argent, ce qui souleva une grande polémique dans l’île. Hilari Raguer, La pólvora y el incenso. La Iglesia y la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939), Barcelona, Ediciones Península, 2001, p. 110-112. 13. NAI, Dept. For. Aff - 200 Series files - 243/7. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Irish Press, 6 janvier 1939. 21. Irish Independent, 14 janvier 1939. 22. NAI, Secrt. of the Pres. -Registered files- PRES 1/P 1165. 23. Ibid. 24. Irish Times, 19 janvier 1939. Irish Press et le journal de Lombard Murphy rendirent aussi compte de ce qu’il s’était passé. Irish Independent, 19 janvier 1939, p. 12; Irish Press, 20 janvier 1939, p. 2. 25. Concernant la récolte des dons dans les comtés ruraux, voir Irish Times, 24 janvier 1939.

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26. Pere Soler, Irlanda y la Guerra Civil española. Nuevas perspectivas de estudio, Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa [http://hdl.handle.net/10803/113554], p. 126-130. Concernant l’activité politique de Michael O’Flanagan tout au long de sa vie, voir, Denis Carrol, Unusual Suspects. Twelve Radical Clergy, The Columbia Press, 1998, p. 205-245. 27. Concernant l'implication de Peadar O'Donnell dans les actes et campagnes de soutien à la République espagnole qui furent organisés en Irlande, voir Pere Soler, Op. Cit., p. 87-88, 126, 162, 164, 167, 172, 182, 184-189, 269, 370, 434, 512. Concernant la chronique qui relate son séjour en Espagne au commencement de la guerre civile, voir Peadar O’Donnell, Salud! An Irishmen in Spain, Methuen and Co. Ltd., London, 1937. 28. Pere Soler, Op. Cit., p. 163, 174. 29. NAI, Secrt. of the Pres. -Registered files- PRES 1/P 1165. 30. Ibid. 31. Irish Press, 27 janvier 1939, p. 9. 32. Irish Press, 31 janvier 1939, p. 9. 33. Irish Independent, 31 janvier 1939, p. 9 ; 1 février 1939, p. 12. 34. Basée à Genève, l’International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain bénéficiait de l’appui de la Nansen International Office for Refugees déjà mentionnée, de l’International Migration Service (situé à Paris et à Genève), du Relief Work for Refugees (basé à Leeds), de l’Intergovernmental Advisory Commission for Refugees (dont les bureaux se trouvaient à Paris) et du Friends Service Council (basé à Londres). 35. NAI, Dept. For. Aff. -200 series files- 243/7. 36. Le Friends Service Council était un des comités centraux de la Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, l’organisation nationale des quakers en Angleterre. 37. NAI, Dept. For. Aff. -200 series files- 243/7. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Voir la lettre de Edith Pye datée du 26 mai, la Note Verbale du Haut- Commissionariat irlandais à Londres du 27 mai ainsi que du 5 août, et la lettre de Michael Hansson paraphée le 2 juin. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. En effet, en plus de l’important don qu’avait offert l’Église catholique d’Irlande, de nombreuses associations et organismes irlandais de bords politiques différents organisèrent des petites collectes tout au long du conflit, que ce soit pour venir en aide à la population civile comme en soutien aux volontaires étrangers qui luttaient en Espagne. Pere Soler, Op. Cit., p. 90-103. 45. Pere Soler, Op. Cit., p. 93-95. 46. NAI, Dept. For. Aff. -200 series files- 243/7. 47. NAI, Dept. For. Aff. -Secrt. Office- S92.

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48. Voir, entre autres, la Note Verbale remise par Cremins au Département des Affaires Étrangères le 31 octobre 1938, ainsi que les instructions transmises par ce ministère aux deux agents diplomatiques le 18 février 1939. Ces courriers abordent des questions aussi diverses que la remise en question de la foi religieuse dans laquelle étaient éduqués en Espagne les enfants accueillis par l’International Commission, l’effet que l’interruption des attaques contre les navires marchands par la flotte rebelle, à la fin de la guerre, pouvait avoir sur les besoins en provisions alimentaires, l’opinion de la Société des Nations sur l’organisation, ou les perspectives de l’International Commission de poursuivre son travail humanitaire en Espagne après la fin du conflit. NAI, Dept. For. Aff. -200 Series files- 243/7a. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. Au sujet des débats qui eurent lieu au Dáil autour de la souscription du Pacte de non-intervention par le Gouvernement irlandais, et la concession de la reconnaissance diplomatique des insurgés, voir Gonzalo Butron Prida, “El gobierno irlandés ante la Guerra Civil española. Actividad legislativa y debates parlamentarios”, Trocadero. Revista de historia moderna y contemporánea, Universidad de Cádiz, No. 3, 1991. 52. Le rapport soutenait, de même, que le général assura aux représentants de l’organisation que le nouveau régime mettrait fin aux exportations de blé vers l’Allemagne tant que perdurerait la pénurie alimentaire. La nature de ces échanges avait été récemment révélée à la presse, causant la stupeur parmi l’opinion publique internationale. Sans aucun doute, l’Italie recevait, en compensation de l’aide militaire qu’elle fournissait, des produits alimentaires provenant du territoire nationaliste, de son côté, l’Allemagne se satisfaisait de l’envoi, sous le même prétexte, de matières primaires. Évidemment, les autorités rebelles durent aller au-devant de ces nouvelles. NAI, Dept. For. Aff. -200 Series files- 243/7a. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Concernant la correspondance entre la Dominions Office et le bureau du Haut- Commissariat irlandais à Londres, voir la circulaire du 13 mai 1939 que ce dernier envoya au Secrétaire du Département des Affaires Étrangères. Quant aux échanges postaux entre l’International Commission et les autorités irlandaises durant l’année 1939, voir, entre autres, les lettres ou rapports du 12 et 21 août 1939 ainsi que du 13 et 20 octobre 1939. Ibid. 57. Voir la lettre envoyée par Howard E. Kershner depuis Paris à Eamon de Valera le 20 janvier 1940. Ibid. 58. Dermot Keogh, Ireland and Europe 1919-1989, Cork & Dublin, Hibernian University Press, 1990, p. 103-106 [traduit de l’anglais].

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RÉSUMÉS

La guerre civile espagnole, qui eut lieu entre 1936 et 1939, compliqua l’agenda politique du Gouvernement irlandais, l’obligeant à gérer un grand nombre de situations, parmi lesquelles les demandes d’assistance au peuple espagnol que plusieurs organismes avaient fait parvenir au Taoiseach. Que ce soit pour des motifs idéologiques, étant donné la conjoncture internationale, ou en raison d’un pur intérêt électoraliste, l’exécutif du Fianna Fáil répondit négativement à la majorité des demandes. Cet article expose la chronologie factuelle des faits et des motivations particulières qui accompagnèrent la dialectique contradictoire qui s’établit entre les différents interlocuteurs.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, aroused some political difficulties that the Irish Government had to face, among others, the humanitarian demands of assistance to the Spanish people that were sent to the Taoiseach. Ideological reasons, the international situation or electioneering interests explain the response of Fianna Fáil executive, that rejected the bulk of the requests. This article surveils the encountered dialog that was established between the different interlocutors, each one of them putting forward his own concern.

INDEX

Keywords : Spanish Civil War, Free State/Eire, humanitarian aid, Second Spanish Republic, nationalist Spain, Eamon De Valera, Joseph Walshe Mots-clés : guerre civile espagnole, Free State/Éire, aide humanitaire, Seconde République Espagnole/Espagne nationaliste, Eamon De Valera, Joseph Walshe

AUTEUR

PERE SOLER PARICIO Né dans la Principauté d’Andorre en 1981, Pere Soler Paricio a obtenu son diplôme de docteur en Histoire Contemporaine à l’Université de Barcelone début 2013. Sa thèse s’est intéressée aux relations hispano-irlandaises durant la période de l’entre-deux-guerres, sous différents aspects. Grâce au contrat de recherche doctorale dont il a fait l’objet, il a pu effectuer un stage de recherche (visiting researcher) au Collège of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences-School of History, à l’Université de Cork. En 2013, il a travaillé comme ingénieur de recherche à l’Institut d’Études Andorranes (IEA) du Gouvernement de la Principauté d’Andorre, pour lequel il a rédigé le rapport officiel Le processus constituant 1991-1993. Une révision historique ; essai d’investigation historique rédigé en langue catalane qui analyse un épisode récent de l’histoire politique de la Principauté d’Andorre. Fin 2015, Pere Soler s’établit en France pour occuper un poste d’ingénieur de recherche à l’Université de Poitiers par le biais d’une bourse postdoctorale avec laquelle il s’incorpore au laboratoire MIMMOC (EA 3812). En septembre 2016 il commence à travailler comme ATER à l’Université de Bretagne Sud, où il intègre le Département d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, ainsi que le laboratoire HCTI (EA 4249). Actuellement, pour l’année 2018-2019, il occupe toujours le même poste au sein de cette Université, et il continue à former part du laboratoire HCTI. Son travail d’enseignement se centre principalement sur l’étude de la civilisation hispanique et hispano-américaine, néanmoins pour son travail de recherche il

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continue à s’intéresser prioritairement à l’histoire contemporaine de l’Irlande, et notamment aux relations hispano-irlandaises au cours du XXè siècle. Pendant son parcours, Pere Soler a également dispensé des cours d’histoire contemporaine à l’Université de Barcelone ainsi qu’à l’Université d’Andorre. Auteur d’articles d’investigation historique en langues française, catalane et espagnole, il a été publié dans des revues académiques françaises et de la Principauté d’Andorre. Au cours du premier semestre 2019 le Service Éditorial de l’Université du Pays Basque publiera son essai d’investigation historique L’Irlande et la guerre civile espagnole. Nouvelles perspectives d’étude, écrit en langue espagnole.

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Arts visuels

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Mind the Gap: The Big House in Cinematic Representations of the Anglo-Irish War

Shannon Wells-Lassagne

1 As my title indicates, this article will be focusing on “the gap” – between Ireland, Anglo-Ireland and Britain, as well as the gaps implicit in these and indeed any representations of the War of Independence. These gaps, I suggest, are manifested in the very nature of the Big House. As both a concrete object and a symbol, the Big House is fraught with meanings. It is of course the focal point for Ascendancy power, a manifestation of Anglo-Irish occupation of the country, but also, as Elizabeth Bowen insists, a promise of civility. As the owner of a Big House herself, she argued that these structures were in fact the incarnation of Anglo-Irish hopes of civility, and as such were perhaps even more necessary after the trauma of the War of Independence and the Civil War than they were before it. There was a true bigness, a sort of impersonality, in the manner in which these houses were conceived. After an era of greed, roughness, and panic, after an era of camping in charred or desolate ruins (as my Cromwellian ancestors did certainly) these new settlers who had been imposed on Ireland began to wish to add something to life. The security that they had, by the eighteenth century, however ignobly gained, they did not use quite ignobly. They began to feel, and exert, the European idea – to seek what was humanistic, classic and disciplined. […] From the point of view of the outside Irish world, does the big house justify its existence? I believe it could do so now as never before. As I said, the idea from which these houses sprung was, before everything, a social one; […] ‘Can we not,’ big, half-empty rooms seem to ask, ‘be as never before, sociable? Cannot we scrap the past, with its bitterness and barriers, and all meet, throwing in what we have?’1

2 In this essay, entitled “The Big House,” Bowen posits a central diplomatic role for the titular structure2. As the author remarked in this essay and elsewhere, these houses really were only “big” in comparison to the poverty of the lesser structures that surrounded them3; Though they were to be a bastion for British and Anglo-Irish culture and a center for social and administrative interactions, ultimately they were a stronger metaphorical and political presence than they were impressive architectural

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landmarks. In this sense, they straddled the gap between the towns of Dublin and London, whence their power came, and the villages to whom they administered: it is no coincidence that these garrisons of British power bore the brunt of Republican anger during the Troubles of 1919-1921. In this sense, given the inherent tendency towards symbol and allegory in historical film, itself characterized by their “gaps,” since the narrative impulse that dominates Western cinema requires historical films to distort, allegorize, and condense historical events into a unified plot, the Big House becomes a key image in the representation of the Irish War of Independence. Examining two of the rare films to focus on this conflict from the perspective of rural Ireland (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach 2006, The Last September, Deborah Warner 1999) allows us to examine the representation of the Big House and its place between the Irish village and the British-ruled town, present in absentia in the films. I suggest that though these structures were meant to breach the gap between town and country, between British power and Irish tenantry, both films ultimately emphasize the chasm that separates the two, and as such the films center on the idea of absence, of loss: to the extent that this gap is to be bridged, this will not take place in the Big House, but outside it.

3 Given the importance of figures of absence or marginality in these two films, it seems crucial to understand the context in the margins of the two narratives (both in terms of production and plot) so as to fully appreciate their representation of the Big House. The lesser known of the two films, The Last September, is an adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, written by Irish novelist John Banville in his first screenplay, and directed by Deborah Warner in her first film. Banville is of course famous for exploding the genre of the Big House novel in texts like Birchwood, and Warner was well-known in the theater world, notably for her longtime association with Fiona Shaw and her tendency to cast her in gender-bending roles (like the titular role in Shakespeare’s Richard II). The film deals with the mounting opposition to the British occupation of the country as seen from the perspective of the local Anglo-Irish family, the Naylors, who live in Danielstown with their niece and nephew, Lois and Laurence, and three family friends who are visiting, the Montmorencys (Hugo and Francie) and Marda Norton. Lois is the protagonist of the film, a young woman described by Marda as being “desperate to fall in love”, and is being courted by ineffectual soldier Gerald Colthurst, though she is enamoured of her childhood friend Peter Connelly, the brother of her best friend Livvy, who has joined Republican forces in fighting against the British. The lovers meet at an abandoned mill where they played as children; it also serves as a convenient hiding- place for Peter, on the run from British forces. The relationship between the young Anglo-Irish girl from the Big House and the Irish rebel is fraught with tension, and Peter’s advances grow increasingly violent. The seduction/attempted rape is interrupted by the arrival of Gerald, who has come to investigate despite the fact that Lois has already broken off their relationship, and as a wounded Lois runs out (having insisted that Peter inflict an injury on her in order to save her honor) Gerald is shot by Connelly. The film ends with Lois fleeing Danielstown, joining Marda on her honeymoon.

4 Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, as the winner of 2006’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the work of a much-lauded (and criticized) director, is the better known of the two films; it can easily be seen as a continuation of the filmmaker’s previous outings: Hidden Agenda (1990) had already dealt with the difficult relation

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between the British and the Irish (in contemporary Northern Ireland), and Land and Freedom (1995) had broached the topic of a national revolution that failed to spawn the socialist republic so many were hoping for. The Wind that Shakes the Barley depicts the Irish war of independence through the relationship of two brothers, Teddy and Damien. Damien intends to go to London to pursue his career as a doctor, while Teddy has joined a Flying Column of the IRA and begs Damien to stay and fight. After witnessing the fatal beating of a young man for refusing to speak English rather than Gaelic, and the brutality of British soldiers who refuse to acknowledge the train union’s decision to not carry British troops or munitions, Damien decides to stay, and begins his military training. An initial raid of the barracks for arms is followed by the shooting of officers, and the British investigate by paying a visit to the local Big House, the Reed estate, where the Anglo-Irish landowner, Sir John Hamilton, forces one of the laborers involved, Chris Riley, to confess. The rebels are captured and tortured, only to be saved by a British soldier with Irish heritage of his own, and they in turn find themselves at the Big House, where they kidnap Chris and Sir John. After a forced march into the Irish countryside, the two British conspirators are then put to death. The cycle of violence is suddenly interrupted by news of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and after celebrating the truce, the Treaty further divides the group, caught between the idealist desire for complete separation from Britain and a socialist nation, and the pragmatic resignation in accepting what’s offered. Damien and Teddy find themselves on opposite sides of the argument, and when Teddy dons the uniform of a Free State officer and Damien continues in the IRA, the younger sibling is soon captured, interrogated on the whereabouts of ammunition, and shot by a firing squad – on the orders of his sibling, who shoots him himself.

5 Of course, in describing the two films, the gap between the two also becomes apparent: The Last September is very much a heritage film, whose historical backdrop is sometimes relegated to a setting for a coming-of-age romance, complete with lingering shots of period paintings and saturated colors, focusing on the elegance of the Ascendancy lifestyle (albeit while critiquing that extravagance) in a manner reminiscent Andrew Higson’s description of the genre4; The Wind the Shakes the Barley, however, like all Loach films, places itself firmly in the realm of social realism, where laborers have pride of place, and as much time is allotted to Dáil court cases as to the consummation of the romantic subplot5. However, both films have significant similarities that justify setting them in relation to one another. As mentioned above, they are rare examples of the Independence movement seen from a rural perspective, without famous figures like Michael Collins to anchor the narrative (Neil Jordan, 1996); both insist on the impact of political intrigue on those initially isolated from it, the slow recognition of the inevitability of change. Though their approaches are very different, ultimately their conclusions are similar, providing a mirrored perspective of the conflict (from an Anglo-Irish standpoint in The Last September, and from a rebel’s standpoint in The Wind that Shakes the Barley).

6 In Declan Kiberd’s landmark work Inventing Ireland, his discussion of the Big House novels as practiced by Somerville and Ross insists on contextualizing with a description of the difficult affinities of the Anglo-Irish: England, by the final decades of the nineteenth century, was a very changed place, heavily industrialized and filled with a new élite, whose social standing derived more from money than from land. Many leaders of English society were now openly hostile to aristocrats: and even those who admired people of caste were by no

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means certain that the occupants of draughty, decaying mansions in windswept Irish landscapes really counted as ‘top drawer’. Ever since the time of Jonathan Swift, there had been pressure on the Anglo-Irish to throw in their lot with the natives. […] it became more and more clear that a strange reciprocity bound members of the ascendancy to those peasants with whom they shared the Irish predicament. […] It was the new economic pressure [of the Land Acts] which compelled both Somerville and Martin to turn to art for a living which the big house could no longer provide but also for a fully comprehensive image of the crisis. Their profound Christian convictions led them to a tragic sense of the underlying injustice of their own privileged position, while their concern for family tradition led them to lament what seemed sadly like the end of the line.6

7 Both Kiberd and Otto Rauchbauer, who edited Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo- Irish Literature, suggest that the exchange between the two populations is central to the Big House novel; Rauchbauer for example, among his five characteristics of the Anglo- Irish novel, cites “a critique of absenteeism as well as outright recommendation of paternalistic estate management”7, suggesting that the crux of the Big House tradition is the successful interaction between the landowner and his tenants.

8 In this case, then, the Big House is ideally the meeting-ground between British and Anglo-Irish power and Irish rebellion (making their widespread destruction during the Anglo-Irish War all the more significant as a symbol of the destruction of any middle- ground). At the same time, the structure represents the gap itself, as it is the material incarnation of the distinction made between the generally Protestant gentry and the generally Catholic tenantry.

9 However, it seems that discussion of the Big House has in a sense always been retrospective, after the decline of the society it housed: the Somerville and Ross novels testify to the end of an era, and Bowen speaks of Big Houses under new owners, in the aftermath of the strife caused by independence and civil war. Likewise, in these films depicting the guerrilla war fought by the IRA for independence, the possibility of consensus, of a meeting point, is already gone.

10 The principal testament to the lost role of the Big House as meeting place is to be found in its geographical and cultural isolation, where it becomes the physical manifestation of the gap itself between village and town. As Ruth remarks in Irish National Cinema, the Big House is “the concrete embodiment of colonial rule in Ireland […] The stately homes of the English films and the society that inhabits them are structured on a naturalised hierarchical system […] In […] Irish films, [unlike their British counterparts,] the Big House is both alien to the landscape and under constant threat, of decay and attack.”8

11 Thus in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the removal of the Reed estate from the village occupied by the British is emphasized: the troops must take jeeps to arrive there, and it is only seen twice, once to show landowner Sir John forcing one of his workers to inform on his fellow IRA members, and once for said rebels to find him and take him hostage in hopes of keeping their comrades alive. When the two factions meet, their conversation insists on both the physical distance that separates the Big House from the village (and its prison where the rebels have been held), as well as the emotional distance that the landowner’s lack of empathy makes unbreachable: ‘This is a lovely room; it’s hard to imagine a man’s scream from here. Have you seen fingernails ripped out with a rusty pair of pliers, Sir John? All your learning, and you still don’t understand.’

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‘Oh, I understand perfectly, Mr. O’Donovan. God preserve Ireland if ever your kind take control.’ (46:48)

12 Clearly, in Loach’s rendition of the war, the Big House is geographically, politically, and emotionally peripheral to the primary conflict, and the possible interactions between town and country implicit in the Big House are thwarted by architecture – the Anglo- Irish are in the drawing-room, while the Irish laborers are limited to working in the stables, not indoors (24:07-26:06). In The Last September, the Big House is the primary setting of the film, and as such is of course central – however, though almost all characters gravitate around Danielstown, ultimately the action scenes, the scenes of actual conflict, take place elsewhere, and the repeated establishing shots show a Big House that is utterly isolated, almost overwhelmed by the surrounding countryside (where dandelions are symbolically running to seed, suggesting that the Big House they frame may also be past its prime). The physical divide between the different factions is ironically even more absolute in The Last September than in Loach’s film: neither Irish and British characters actually penetrate the depths of the house; they ultimately remain on the threshold and do not go beyond the entry of the house proper, whether it be for a tennis party or to deliver the mail and tell the latest news. As such, the representations of the town and the country, i.e. British power and Irish rebels, become radicalized in both films. Thus, in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the British army is associated with industrialization, making use of jeeps, motorcycles, and lorries, and dressed in uniforms, the Irish are unabashedly associated with the countryside, shown either attempting to blend in with the countryside in their training, or actually succeeding as they march through the fog to make a successful raid (1:04:12-1:05:25), and are never shown in any kind of motorized vehicle – they walk, they take a horse and trap, they use bicycles, but are clearly made to seem at odds with this industrialization (the viewer can notice the motorcycle one of the rebels obtains is not being ridden, and is in fact part of the disguise used to attack the Black and Tans, feigning the guise of a soldier with a broken-down vehicle)9. Rebels in The Last September are similarly associated with the countryside (as in our first glimpse of the rebels through the tree line, 4:55), which makes the encroaching nature in the establishing shots suddenly invasive, hostile: it’s as if the country itself is rising up against them, as actress Fiona Shaw remarked10. The film shows that the Anglo-Irish are associated only with refracted or contained versions of nature, as we see at the end of the long opening credit sequence, featuring cut flowers in vases (with falling petals) and a preserved flower in a glass sphere (6:19-6:34), as well as in the extensive use of lush and exotic vegetation in scenes of the conservatory (20:36-53), where the camera shot showing the conservatory and the dinner party being held there from outside the glass walls becomes an apt translation of Bowen’s original passage where the meal is not in the conservatory, but where the inhabitants find themselves “enisled”11.

13 Ultimately, then, this radicalization of the two factions, industrialization and rural living, English and Irish, are depicted through symbolic passages representing the chasm that exists between the opposing forces. In The Last September, which centers on the position of the Anglo-Irish, and “the death of a world”, as the opening titles tell us, the tree swing that our protagonist Lois returns to again and again epitomizes the position of the film’s Anglo-Irish contingency, moving back and forth between allegiance to the British or the Irish without being able to choose between the two (23:40, 1:37:24-1:38, 1:39:06-1:39:42). The last sequence mentioned here is particularly interesting, as the subjective camera shifts its perspective; while the subjective camera

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is initially motivated by Lois’s actions, we go on to take the swing’s perspective – we the audience have taken her place, and its metaphorical meaning has become literal – perspective has clearly been lost.

14 In The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the metaphor for the unbreachable divide between town and country, English and Irish, is linguistic. When Black and Tans harass the principal characters for assembling (and participating in a hurling match), they demand names, occupations, and addresses, and the response of one young man in Gaelic is enough to have dire consequences (4:52-8:00). The double identity of the boy, as Micheál/Michael Sullivan becomes indicative of the split of the Irish psyche. Since the film makes fairly extensive use of Gaelic that is pointedly not translated in the English or foreign subtitles, the gap in understanding between the two people is shared by an Anglophone audience, emphasizing the already the distinction already present in the back and forth between various British and Irish accents.

15 Ultimately there is a feeling of absence in both films, exacerbated by the inevitability of each narrative’s tragic outcomes. The function that the Big House was intended to fill, as a relay of influence and information between English and Irish, as a place of exchange between the two, as the intermediary between town and country, has been left empty (and in The Last September at least, we are left swaying with the wind…). So for example The Wind that Shakes the Barley is permeated with the absence of James Connolly, the Socialist Republican shot in the wake of the Easter Rising that arguably put an end to a left-wing solution to the stirrings of revolution. Protagonist Damien and his mentor Dan are both inspired by Connolly’s speeches, and parrot his words when arguing against the Anglo-Irish Treaty, insisting that to not push for a socialist country is essentially to simply change the accent of their oppressors. Loach goes so far as to have the characters first recite the speech together, and later use it in a debate about unfair lending practices from a merchant who supports IRA troops. In a sense, the tragic tone of the film is not so much linked to the war itself as of the path not followed, the leader who might have clarified the distinctions to be made for or against the Treaty in a way that De Valera did not. The idea of the Anglo-Irish providing some sort of middle-ground is here explicitly refused, both in the limited time given to both Sir John and his demesne, and in the landowner’s unabashed and unequivocal identification with the British, crying out “You’ll never beat us” upon being killed, and treating both rebels and country with disdain (“rustics with delusions of grandeur” and “a priest-infested backwater”, respectively). In this, the Anglo-Irish simply become English squatters, without any pretensions at Irish nationality.

16 In The Last September, the spectre is again twofold. Elizabeth Bowen’s novel seems a fundamental presence in the film. The written text is much more critical of the Anglo- Irish than is the film, as the Irish are voluntarily absent (a fact that Sean O’Faolain famously deplored12) while the Danielstown inhabitants attempt valiantly to ignore their plight; their home is eventually destroyed, it is implied, as much by their blindness as by the actions of rebels. The text is also much more radical in its refusal of all traditions, literary or political, as the heroine spends her time deploring the fact that she’s unable to live like a heroine in a historical novel, unable to love her young soldier or feel much of anything about her situation except resignation, and even the novel’s elegiac tone is curtailed by the many examples of humor and grotesque. Ironically, though Banville and Warner take pains to include the conflict in their story in a much more obvious way than did Bowen, one can say that the scope of the conflict

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itself is also missing, as the nameless rebels that populate the book, that seem part of the countryside rising up against the Anglo-Irish, are in the film reduced to a single member, Peter Connolly, né Connor in Bowen’s novel, whose ultimate purpose is to make Lois’s allegiances clear (does she love the rebel or the soldier?).

17 The encounter that the Big House might have offered is to be found elsewhere, ultimately: the hospitality Bowen hopes the Big House will offer in an attempt at putting enmity behind them is recurrent amongst the Irish families in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, where the rebels are assured of food and shelter wherever they stop along the way, the solidarity of a nascent and innate socialism as the director’s ideal, while the British are unable to share even a billiard table, and Sir John has hospitality only for the British officers. Ultimately, the function sought out for the Big House is occupied in the film by Peggy’s house, a home that has seen generations of difficulties, where families and friends repeatedly meet, the scene for the repeated conflict between the Black and Tans and the Flying Column members. Indeed, the house suffers the same fate as many of the Big Houses of the time, being set afire like Bowen’s version of Danielstown. In Laverty and Loach’s vision of the conflict, the Anglo-Irish are to be excluded altogether from this conflict.

18 In The Last September as well, encounters happen not at the Big House, but in the abandoned mill, where Lois can meet with her childhood love (Peter Connelly) and Gerald can learn the truth of the futility of British intervention in Ireland: clearly, we’re shown, the Irish (Anglo-Irish or Irish) must solve this among themselves. However, like Peggy’s house in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the place is ultimately marred by violence (Connelly’s aggressive behavior towards Lois, and then his assassination of Gerald), and both films end with exile. Teddy is ordered away from the house when Sínead learns that he’s had his brother executed, an exile that was previously implicit in Peggy’s daughter Brigitte’s indignation that the Free State soldiers would search her home for arms like the British had done, even after they had given them food and shelter. Lois is shown leaving with Marda while a family portrait peers out from the window, suggesting she is fleeing not just the conflict, but the weight of family expectations both personal and social.

19 If the narratives end without a sense of resolution, departing the place where all can meet, one can wonder if the films themselves are an attempt to breach this gap, not only between town and country, the Irish, the Anglo-Irish, and the British, but also between the past and the present? Films are of course by their expensive and collaborative nature meant to be accessible to the general public, bringing a difficult period in both British and Irish history to light for town and country. But the final similarity between these two films is perhaps this larger political significance (for their filmmakers and for their audiences). Both directors have commented on the relevance of the films as allegories for current events. Warner speaks of the plight of the Anglo- Irish as being evocative of American hegemony: It’s also a very sobering reminder to us all that things change, that we may feel very sure of where we are […] America feels very sure of where it is, England feels pretty sure of where it is, so too the Anglo-Irish felt very sure of where they were. And yet, by the end of that year of which this last September is a part, they were to be eclipsed and never seen again, because Ireland needed to move towards its democracy, towards its future, and I think it becomes a very meaningful and very very contemporary tale in that respect.13

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20 Actress Fiona Shaw (who plays Marda) goes even further, suggesting that “The Last September is more pertinent now than it was when it was written14”, associating Anglo- Irish identity problems with conflict in the Balkans, where “people who seem to be getting along, who seem to be of the same race to anybody from the outside, in fact are full of histories that divide them”. For Ken Loach, The Wind that Shakes the Barley could be taken as a commentary on the futility of occupying armies in any country – though the occupation of Iraq at the time of its release was often pointed to as a pertinent example15. Indeed, Loach’s comment upon receiving the Palme d’Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley was that in understanding the past maybe we can understand the present. Nostalgia, fascination for the past so often seen in historical films, fetish for period authenticity, here meant to instruct instead of simply to please aesthetically. In this sense, the framing mechanism of the doorway that permeates The Last September takes on a new meaning: beyond showing the limitations of the different characters, who never cross over, we can say that film can, and does, breach those thresholds.

NOTES

1. Elizabeth Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, p. 27, p. 29. 2. Perhaps one of the more obvious gaps in this article is the presence of Bowen herself; as author of the source text for The Last September, as author of this essay that inspired the following analysis of The Last September and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Elizabeth Bowen is also a central (absent) figure here. 3. Bowen herself commented that her family home, Bowen’s Court, was “larger in manner than in actual size”, and further commented in an essay entitled “The Big House”: “The paradox of these big houses is that often they are not big at all. […] Is it height – in this country of otherwise low buildings – that got these Anglo-Irish houses their ‘big’ name? Or have they been called ‘big’ with a slight inflection – that of hostility, irony? One may call a man ‘big’ with just that inflection because he seems to think the hell of himself.” Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (1942), Cork, Collins Press, 1998, p. 31; Elizabeth Bowen, “The Big House”, In Hermione Lee, ed. The Mulberry Tree: Collected Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, p. 26. 4. “[H]istorical narrative is transformed into spectacle; heritage becomes excess, not functional mise-en-scène, not something to be used narratively, but something to be admired. […] This heritage presence is enhanced by the visual style that the film- makers have adopted, what I’ve called the aesthetics of display—that is, a particular use of the camera and a particular way of editing that works superbly to display as spectacle this range of heritage properties.” Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 39 and 172. 5. Even the romance is given political significance, as when the protagonist undresses his lover, a cliché of the love scene, here he unwraps the turban hiding her bald head, shorn by Black and Tans in retribution for rebel actions.

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6. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Vintage, 1996, 67-68. 7. “The Big House and Irish History: An Introductory Sketch”, in Otto Rauchbauer, ed., Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1992, p. 19. 8. Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema, London: Routledge, 2004, 121. 9. This of course relates to Loach’s larger premise associating the rebels with a pre- industrial, and arguably pre-capitalist society. 10. Interview with Fiona Shaw, Bonus, DVD The Last September. 11. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (1929), London: Penguin, 1987, p. 24. 12. He suggested that it showed the Ascendancy unaware “of the Ireland outside its walls”. Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen (1981), London: Vintage, 1999, 45. 13. Interview with Deborah Warner, Bonus, DVD The Last September. 14. Interview with Fiona Shaw, op. cit. 15. Loach comments: “It [The film] has a resonance to any armed occupation and to any anti-colonial struggle […] But Iraq wasn't an influence. Paul wrote the screenplay before we were in Iraq. We've been discussing this story for 10 years.” David Gritten, “Hate Britain? Of course I Don’t,” The Telegraph, June 16, 2006. http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/3653150/Hate-Britain-Of-course-I-dont.html. Accessed 11 July 2017.

ABSTRACTS

It goes without saying that the Big House was intended to be a symbol: as more than one critic has remarked, these houses really were only “big” in comparison to the poverty of the lesser structures that surrounded them. They were to be a bastion for British and Anglo-Irish culture and a center for social and administrative interactions. In this sense, they straddled the gap between the towns of Dublin and London, whence their power came, and the villages to whom they administered: it is no coincidence that these garrisons of British power bore the brunt of Republican anger during the Troubles of 1919-1921. Examining two of the rare films to focus on the War of Independence from the perspective of rural Ireland (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach 2006, The Last September, Deborah Warner 1999) allows us to examine the representation of the Big House and its place between the Irish village and the British-ruled town. Loach’s film, which emphasizes the Socialist associations of the Anglo-Irish War and is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of British rule, highlights Republicans blending in to the landscape, walking from the activity of the village to the windswept hills of the countryside; the Big House, however, is reached only by (Black-and-Tan) jeep, and though landowner Sir John Hamilton may know his own servants, he fails to recognize the Republican members of the community. Deborah Warner’s The Last September takes a more clearly revisionist stance, and can be seen adding both the Irish and the British to its adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel about an Anglo-Irish family residing in the Big House of Danielstown during the war. In so doing, the

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Naylors become the middlemen in the struggle between the Black-and-Tans and the Republicans, once again associated respectively with town and country. In so doing, the films “mind the gap”, focusing on the Big House, so obviously present in the landscape, but which ultimately symbolizes the absence of middle ground between the two factions.

La Big House irlandaise avait bien évidemment une valeur hautement symbolique : comme plusieurs critiques l’ont signalé, ces maisons n’étaient vraiment “grandes” que par rapport à la pauvreté des structures qui les entouraient. Ils étaient conçus comme un siège culturel britannique et anglo-irlandais, le lieu d’échanges sociaux et administratifs. Dans ce sens, ils rapprochent les grandes villes comme Dublin et Londres, d’où vient ce pouvoir, des villages auxquels ils administrent: ce n’est pas un hasard que ces remparts du pouvoir britannique ont été un cible de choix de la colère républicaine pendant les Troubles de 1919-1921. Analyser deux des rares films à traiter de la Guerre d’Indépendance du point de vue de l’Irlande rurale (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach 2006, The Last September, Deborah Warner 1999) permet d’examiner la représentation de la Big House et de sa place entre le village irlandais et la ville sous emprise britannique. Le film de Loach, qui accentue les implications socialistes de la guerre anglo-irlandaise et présente la brutalité de la règne britannique sans broncher, souligne la capacité des républicains de se fondre dans le paysage, passant de l’activité du village aux collines de la campagne ; la Big House, toutefois, est accessible uniquement par jeep (rempli de Black et Tans), et si le propriétaire Sir John Hamilton connaît ses propres domestiques, il ne sait reconnaître les membres républicains de la communauté. The Last September de Deborah Warner se situe dans une veine plus explicitement révisionniste, et rajoute des personnages irlandais et britanniques à la trame de l’adaptation du roman d’Elizabeth Bowen qui traite d’une famille anglo-irlandaise qui habite la Big House Danielstown pendant la guerre. Ce faisant, les Naylor se retrouvent tiraillés entre les Black et Tans et les républicains pendant ce conflit, les deux groupes étant associés de nouveau à la ville et à la campagne, respectivement. Ainsi, les films soulignent la faille entre les deux lieux en focalisant l’attention sur la Big House, qui domine le paysage irlandais, mais qui symbolise finalement l’absence de terrain d’entente entre les deux factions.

INDEX

Keywords: Wind that Shakes the Barley, The Last September (film), Anglo-Irish War, Troubles, Big House, heritage film, War of Independence

AUTHOR

SHANNON WELLS-LASSAGNE Shannon Wells-Lassagne est professeure à l’Université de Bourgogne, et spécialiste de l’adaptation filmique et cinématographique. Elle est l’auteur de Television and Serial Adaptation (Routledge, 2017) et Étudier l’adaptation filmique (PUR, 2010), et éditrice de De la page blanche aux salles obscures (PUR, 2011), Screening Text (McFarland, 2013), et L’adaptation cinématographique: Premières pages, premiers plans (Mare et Martin, 2014), ainsi que des numéro spéciaux des journaux GRAAT, The Journal of Screenwriting, Interfaces, et TV/Series, et un dossier spécial dans Screen. Ses articles sont parus dans Études Irlandaises, Études Anglaises, Irish Studies Review, Critical Studies in Television, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Angles, Cinémaction, Journal of the Short Story in English, et Screen.

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Littérature

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“The Debris of History”. On Waste and the Past in Irish Celtic Tiger Poetry

Daniel Becker

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article is based on a chapter from Daniel Becker’s PhD dissertation project entitled Thresholds of Memory: National History and Liminality in Contemporary Irish Poetry.

1 During the Celtic Tiger era – which roughly refers to the time between 1994/95, when the term was first coined by Kevin Gardinger to describe Ireland’s enormous economic growth, to the world financial crisis in 2007/08 – Ireland, among other things,1 radically altered its outlook on the national past. Thus, in contrast to Irish society in the pre- boom era, where “the appeal to history was ever present in public discourse”,2 Celtic Tiger Ireland developed a new dominant perspective on the historical predecessors that orchestrated a collective break from history. In that sense, as Paedar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin claim, a recurring theme in popular and academic discussions of the time was the shared conviction that “a modern, vibrant economy and society […] has successfully abandoned its reactionary, nationalist Catholic past” and other existing narratives on Ireland’s historical development.3 With the Celtic Tiger, it was argued, the Republic of Ireland had reached the pinnacle of its economic and cultural development.4 As such, a ‘new’ Ireland was established that, according to former president Mary McAleese had “matur[ed] as a nation”,5 and that, eventually, had ‘outgrown’ the grasp of its troubled past. In this context, as Orla O’Donovan claims, with this newly-gained confidence in the present, a “nauseating norm of ‘othering’ Ireland’s past”6 developed in the public sphere: in a strictly binary cultural coding, the past was dominantly conceptualized as an inferior, negative tableau against which the superior Celtic Tiger society in the present was contoured. Thus, Celtic Tiger Ireland

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cultivated a trend of allotting negative features to the past in a process in which the more the past was discredited, the brighter the present shone in contrast.

2 In this context, metaphors played a pivotal role: during the Celtic Tiger years, a surge of negatively connoted images permeated public characterisations of Irish history that were used to underline the past’s ‘despicable’ status on a figurative level. Hence, to merely name a few examples, Kirby, Gibbons and Cronin speak of the past as the scary “bogeyman” that terrorizes the present with the vision of an “eternal night”,7 Paul Sweeney refers to the “sad tale”8 of Irish history that depressed people for too long and Scott Brewster mentions the recurring image of the past as the “dark ages”.9 Furthermore, in a more implicit manner, Gene Kerrigan, for example, implies the image of the past as a despotic master that oppresses its subjects when he talks about “the shackles of the past that held us back”.10

3 Without going into further details, the present paper will examine one of these metaphors, which could mostly be found in Irish poetic productions of the time: the metaphor of the past as waste. While the theme of waste is not new to Irish poetry and certainly not an ‘invention’ of the Celtic Tiger years – as writers such as Patrick Kavanagh11 or Derek Mahon12 show – in a variety of poems written during those years the concept obtains a specifically interesting connotation: as these poems link the concept of waste directly to concrete Celtic Tiger settings, it shall be claimed, waste as a point of comparison becomes a critical tool to counteract the dominant trend of discarding the past in an affluent Celtic Tiger society. More specifically, many poems that directly correlate waste and the Celtic Tiger society, allegorically depict the Celtic Tiger abandonment of the past in form of a speaker and/or other poetic persona discarding or confronting concrete entities that are no longer useful in his/her prototypical Celtic Tiger environment; the poems are set in what Eóin Flannery labels “clichéd set pieces”13 of Celtic Tiger Ireland, such as suburbs or shopping malls. Yet, in these settings, it will be shown, the process of discarding fails since the past as a ‘wasted’ entity is shown to constantly defy its own abandonment in one form or another. As such, in these poems, the concept of waste does not at all signify the past as inferior and useless, but, as can be shown with the help of recent waste studies, presents it in a liminal position between devaluation and revaluation.

4 The paper will proceed in two steps: first, the concept of waste shall be briefly defined in general, before examples of how this complex concept becomes a critical tool in Irish poems of the time shall be discussed. It goes without saying that, for spatial reasons, the paper’s selection of texts must remain strictly limited. For that matter, although there are numerous poems that somehow deal with waste in a Celtic Tiger setting – see, for example, David Wheatley’s descriptions of Celtic Tiger Dublin in “Misery Hill”,14 Rita Ann Higgins’ portrayal of ‘toxic’ wastelands in “The Builder’s Mess”,15 Vona Groarke’s discussion of abandoned houses in “House Contents”,16 or Paula Meehan’s plea for the creative potential hidden in the discarded in “Molly Malone”17 – only three poems shall be analysed in detail below: Iggy McGovern’s “The Skip” from his debut collection The King of Suburbia (2005), John McAuliffe’s “A Pyramid Scheme”, taken from Next Door (2007) and Paul Durcan’s “Politics” from his 1999 publication Greetings To Our Friends in Brazil. These three poems are neither chosen because they are deemed more important or aesthetically valuable than the ones listed above nor to insinuate that the three very different poets combined here belong to the same ‘school’ of Celtic Tiger poets – if such a thing even exists. Rather, quite on the contrary, the poems were chosen for the

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simple reason that, in the author’s opinion, these three texts most clearly represent the range of different modalities of how the waste metaphor is used in Irish poetry during the Celtic Tiger. In that sense, the selection of these poems is not a choice against other poems than rather a decision for opening discussions on similar poems by suggesting ways of how they might be categorized.

Waste as Cultural Practice

5 To properly understand the different facets of how the waste metaphor is used in Celtic Tiger poetry18, the ‘source domain’ of this implicit comparison requires specific attention. A closer look at the concept of waste is particularly important, since in the poems to be discussed waste is much more than the umbrella term for any discarded entity. Thus, although the poems display a wide range of car wrecks, indefinable rubble, or even social outcasts that obtain a waste quality, these devalued ‘things’ merely constitute one part of a larger waste picture. In that regard, it appears adequate to explain the use of waste in Celtic Tiger poetry with recent approaches to the concept that more broadly define waste as a cultural practice. Martin O’Brien, for example, generally understands waste “not just [as] the end of a useful life” but also as the socially constructed “transition to negative value”.19 Two important observations can be deduced from O’Brien’s short description: first, that the concept of waste moves beyond the level of concrete entities to incorporate the social process (“transition”) in which an entity is classified as ‘waste’ and, secondly, that this process is inseparably linked to the concept of value.

6 Regarding the first aspect, the idea that the concept of waste is more than the reference to a specific entity is formulated in Susan Strasser’s seminal study Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999). In her opinion, “[n]othing is inherently trash”. 20 Waste is not a natural feature deeply encoded in the properties of an entity but needs to be permanently created in a dynamic social process of categorization: “[t]he categories of objects we use and throw out are fluid and socially defined, and objects move in and out of the classifications”.21 Like O’Brien, Strasser’s take on waste stresses the fact that a focus on the material level is not enough to grasp the concept adequately. Rather, waste is a dynamic concept that necessarily harbours a procedural component in form of a permanent process of actively categorizing elements as ‘waste’. Similarly, Gay Hawkins underlines the process-nature of waste by including the active “conversion of objects into waste”22 in his definition of the concept. Here as well, material entities are not inherently waste but they “translate human interests”23 in becoming waste. Hawkins particularly foregrounds the notion of an active subject that initiates the “conversion” by consciously choosing to distance itself from an entity: “[w]hen people classify something as waste they are deciding that they no longer want to be connected to it”.24 Consequently, the process of categorizing waste is the result of a subjective and affective response to the (material) environment.

7 Secondly, this process of dynamically signifying entities as waste cannot be separated from the concept of value. Thus, in recent waste studies, wasting is understood as one important side of a complex cultural practice of establishing a meaningful relationship with the world by ordering the material and social environment into valuable and non- valuable components. Commenting on this cultural function of waste, Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke point out that

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[e]xpelling and discarding is more than a biological necessity – it is fundamental to the ordering of the self. Waste management […] is deeply implicated in the practice of subjectivity. It is bound with a whole host of habits and practices through which we cultivate particular sensibilities and sensual relations with the world.25

8 Equally, for Michael Thompson, “the social control of values attributed to objects functions via the waste category”.26 Waste, as such, is the dynamic catalyst that makes a flexible distribution of value possible in the first place. In a society’s circulation of economic and symbolic values, waste is the regulatory ‘valve’ that allows entities to temporarily leave the system to be re-integrated in a new position later. Waste, therefore, as Miles Orvell classically states, is by no means just “a symptom of disorder, of things gone wrong”. Rather, waste is the “raw material” out of which entities can be “rescued, reclaimed, reworked, reintegrated”.27 In the end, the fact that entities can dynamically shift between waste and value is not only a possibility but a cultural necessity to flexibly position oneself in an ever-changing environment.

9 This wider understanding of waste also applies to many ‘waste poems’ of the Celtic Tiger years. As such, in these poems, waste can be understood as a triadic constellation: it is a constant interaction between (1) an individual/ a group that defines what waste is (waster), (2) the (social) process of devaluation (wasting), and (3) the concrete entity that has been devalued in this process (wasted). These three components (waster, wasting, wasted) occur in every poem presented in this paper. Yet, the poems differ in the specific focus they apply on this constellation. Thus, there are (1) poems that focus on the figure of the Celtic Tiger waster and the subsequent process of wasting. (2) Poems that focus on a process of revaluation after the wasting has occurred and (3) poems that predominantly focus on the devalued entity itself. As mentioned before, the three poems discussed below shall serve as examples for each of the three foci and the ways they place the past in a liminal position.

Waste in Celtic Tiger Poetry

Focus on Waster and Wasting: “The Skip” (Iggy McGovern)

10 Concerning poems that focus on the figure of the Celtic Tiger waster and the process of wasting, Iggy McGovern’s “The Skip” is a good example to examine. The sonnet starts ‘in medias res’ with a lyrical I, shown in the process of discarding “bits and bobs” into a skip in a suburban street: Spring-feverish, I cheerfully dispatch my clutter, bits and bobs into the skip and, from the bedroom window, keep a watch on neighbours filing past the funeral ship.28

11 In the poem, the suburban environment functions as a microcosm of Celtic Tiger society that, like the Irish community of that time, appears utterly disconnected from the past. In that context, the Celtic Tiger’s optimism of having ‘outgrown’ the past is echoed in the figure of the waster finding himself in a “spring-feverish” mood to “cheerfully” get rid of last year’s burden. The image of new cycle of seasons, starting with a hopeful spring, hints at the concept of a ‘new’ Ireland where, in a Yeatsian spirit of a cyclical history, the “clutter” of the ‘old’ Ireland is consumed in the fire of a now completed cycle. As implied in the metaphor of the “funeral ship”, anything related to

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last year is in the process of leaving suburbia, as the ship is about to enter a finite journey, never to return to the Celtic Tiger ‘haven’.

12 Soon, the speaker’s individual discarding transforms into more collective practice of ‘cleansing’ the suburban environment. Thus, after watching the “neighbours filing past the funeral ship”, the speaker describes how these neighbours participate in the process of wasting as well: and later in the evening they will bring additional detritus of their own in royal cheek or gentle reasoning: tomorrow’s trip should not be made alone.29

13 Like at a “funeral”, this collective discarding of the “detritus” follows strict rules of conduct. Seeing that the speaker has disposed the useless, the neighbours are obliged to keep up with suburban conformity. Here, wasting becomes a necessity for social acceptance: hanging on to the old is deemed taboo, much like lingering on the past in the Celtic Tiger present is considered as a form of ‘treason’ against the ‘new’ Ireland.30 In that regard, while they must participate in getting rid of the old, they are not meant to get too close to what is wasted. Their contribution to the collective cleansing can only be done “later in the evening”, presumably under the cover of darkness and under less surveillance by the neighbours. Nonetheless, even in this situation, their actions need to be justified under the speaker’s watch: they discard it “in royal cheek or gentle reasoning”.

14 Yet, most important in the present context, this conventionalised process of wasting described in the octave is countered in the sestet with the arrival of a ragpicker figure: The suburb waits for one last visitor to creep around the corner of the past. what buried chalice is he looking for, grave robber turning archaeologist?31

15 Walter Benjamin famously describes the ragpicker as a modern revolutionary who, existing on the thresholds of society, is constantly “shaking the foundations of this society”.32 As such, he/she becomes a social “provocateur”33 who can move freely (“[f]or him alone, all is open”34) and who can change established social structures from the outside. The ragpicker in “The Skip” displays this revolutionary mentality too: he is an outside figure, a mere “visitor” that enters the speaker’s suburban realm. In this position, he is freed from answering to the conventions of the suburban neighbourhood and, as such, he is at liberty to not comply to the collective disposal of the past. Rather, he does the impossible and counteracts the process of wasting by looking “around the corner of the past”. As such, the ragpicker becomes a counter-figure against the Celtic Tiger waster. By appearing in the street at night, he functions as the physical reminder of waste’s (and the past’s) liminal status: it has already been discarded by the suburban community, yet it is not completely gone and still obtains a certain presence nonetheless. Like many speakers in Seamus Heaney’s ‘bog poems’, the ragpicker in “The Skip” takes up the role of an “archaeologist” who recovers valuable elements from the past, as he is climbing into the skip under the observing gaze of the speaker. Suddenly, in the ragpicker’s alternative access to what is wasted, the “clutter, bits and bobs” that were “cheerfully” disposed of at the beginning, now transform into the “buried chalice” (an indirect reference to the more traditional Catholic past) to “brag about”.35 Waste and value coexist, as the skip is both the funeral ship meant to be sent out for good, and the ancient grave that the “grave robber” discovers.

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16 In the end, like the ragpicker “creeping around”, waste becomes an uncanny existence between the familiar and the unfamiliar. As such, John Scanlan points out, it turns into “the unwelcome shadow that trails the present” as the “eerily familiar object […] that continuously resists any of our attempts to disconnect from it”.36 This can be seen in the sonnet’s closing couplet. What started out as a “spring-feverish” discarding of last year’s burden ends with the speaker’s realisation that the past cannot be completely ignored: now climbing up to brag about his find his shadow ribbing my venetian blind.37

17 In form of the ragpicker, the speaker is directly confronted with the on-going presence of the past that still casts a shadow on the speaker’s home. This shadow becomes an active force in the present in two ways, related to the double meaning of the word “ribbing”. On the one hand, it can be interpreted as a synonym for ‘teasing’: the ragpicker’s “brag” about his “find” makes the speaker painfully aware that the disposed is all but valueless. In form of his shadow, the ragpicker’s success with revaluing items from the skip, teases the speaker’s suburban façade (his “venetian blind”) with his failure to disconnect from the discarded. On the other hand, “ribbing”, as a noun, can also refer to the human skeleton (as in a ‘structure of ribs’), through which a more physical component is added to the presence of the past. Understood in this sense, “ribbing” semantically draws back on the image of the past as a corpse in the “funeral ship”. This corpse that has been prepared to be sent on its final journey has risen from the grave, uncovered by the ragpicker-archaeologist. The supposedly forgotten, therefore, are back with the living where they still ‘haunt’ the speaker.

18 To conclude, in “The Skip” waste is depicted as a liminal entity that is far from being insignificant and inferior. In the guise of discarded entities, the past exists in an in- between state between being distanced on the one hand and being revived on the other. What has been thrown away in the octave by the speaker is revalued in the sestet. Thus, the complete disconnection from the past fails, since it still seems to “creep around” the suburban neighbourhood, defying any attempt to be forgotten.

Focus on the Process of Revaluation: “A Pyramid Scheme” (John McAuliffe)

19 John McAuliffe’s “A Pyramid Scheme” can be analysed as an example for a poem that focuses on a process of revaluation, after the initial discarding has already occurred. In that sense, the poem is centred around an “old Cortina” that has “come to rest/ at the end of the road”.38 In short, the poem describes the car’s transformation over time: while, at the beginning of this six-stanza-poem, the old car appears as a non-value item that materially decays (“the weeks pelt/ its glass and steel”39), at the end of the poem, the car wreck has gained new value, as the speaker’s market rhetoric suggests: “its fag- end” is “still paying a dividend”.40 Within this frame, the stanzas in between the first and the last focus on the car’s phase of transition between non-value and (renewed) value. To begin with, formally speaking, this focus on the Cortina’s transition is supported in the textual arrangement of the poem. As Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmstem claim, a liminal phase of transition between two states is generally “characterized by a certain openness and relaxation of rules”.41 As such, in the liminal space established boundaries are softened and overcome toward the fluid and flexible.

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In this context, the car’s transitional situation finds a formal equivalent in the several run-on-lines (both within and in between stanzas, e.g. between 3-4, 4-5 and 5-6) that likewise blur the boundaries between the poem’s individual formal units. The same can be said for the poem’s syntactical structure: starting in the third stanza, the poem consists of one single sentence that runs throughout stanzas 4-6 and only stops after the poem’s final word “dividend”. This arrangement leads to the impression that on the syntactical level as well, clear boundaries are no longer maintained, as everything blends into one syntactical ‘stream’.

20 Next to these structural implications, the revaluation process also becomes apparent on the poem’s content level, where the Cortina’s transformation can be more specifically defined as an interaction between a form of material and symbolic recycling. Thus, first, after the car has been decaying for “weeks”, a ragpicker rediscovers it and “strips” the car off anything still useful: emptying it and making free

with some random person who strips the interior and then, accompanied, helps himself to tyres, battery, driveshaft, exhaust.42

21 What is important here is the description of the ragpicker’s activity as an “emptying” and “making free”. In Rubbish Theory, Michael Thompson argues that most material objects move from a transient phase (i.e. everyday objects that lose value over time) to a “zero-value”43 phase (i.e. objects being classified as waste). The transition from one phase into the other, Thompson states, contains an emancipatory moment, since in gaining a zero-value status, the object is ‘taken out’ of the regular value circulation to exist in a “timeless and valueless limbo where at some later date [the object] has the chance to be rediscovered”.44 The wasted entity is inherently liminal as in its devaluation, the object already signals the potential to be revaluated. The same counts for the car in “A Pyramid Scheme”: with the last remaining material value removed (“tyres, battery, driveshaft, exhaust”), the car is now ‘freed’ from any attachment to its former position in a material value cycle. The Cortina has become a ‘tabula rasa’ – the speaker suitably describes the remainder of the car as “looking naked”45 – that can attain new value.

22 More concretely, during the poem, the Cortina shifts from its former material value into a new symbolic value. Thus, starting from this “naked” state, the Cortina transforms from being a car to becoming a “guarded hiding place”46 for the “elders”47 of the local community. This transformative process is mirrored in the physical change of the car’s appearance in stanzas 3 and 4: mirrorless and windowless, it gathers accessories

like one of those disused roadside crannies: plastic bags, a seatful of empties and, adjacent, a holed mattress, a pallet, a small fridge […].48

23 No longer maintaining its use value as a car, the Cortina, subsequently no longer appears in the form of a car. Rather, it goes through a process of (physical) metamorphosis that reflects the item’s liminal status. In stanzas 3 and 4, it is no longer the car from the beginning, yet also still not the hiding place it becomes in stanzas 5

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and 6. Instead, as it “gathers accessories”, the Cortina is in what Holmstem and Nordin describe as a “transitional place of becoming”.49 Being dumped at the beginning of the poem, the Cortina now is used as a dumping site of its own. Yet, this waste collection already entails the potential for new value: while the single items appear without any value individually (e.g. “empties”, “holed mattress”), in their accumulation and combination over time they obtain a new function. Thus, the dumping site in total faintly mimics a rudimentary house, including a place to sleep (“mattress”) and a place to eat (“small fridge”).

24 The transition from waste to a renewed symbolic reference finally takes place in the run-on-line between stanza 4 and 5:

25 the whole lot useless, inside out,

till the rusting shell starts half-stories, the kind that makes it first notorious, for the children who will have to learn what goes on at night, or could go on,

then a shelter for their elders, a try-out zone, its vacant doorless frame a guarded hiding place […].50

26 Now, the “whole lot” is no longer “useless” but has turned into a memory medium for the “half-stories” collectively shared by the local community. Thus, the car wreck has shifted from its abandoned waste position at the end of the road into an overt position again in the community’s communicative practice, where it becomes a haunting presence that challenges suburban norms. Fed by the community’s speculations about how the dumping site might be used “at night”, the Cortina-wreck has turned into a “notorious” myth, positioned somewhere between fact (“what goes on at night”) and fiction (“or could go on”). The speaker’s ‘refusal’ to directly mention “what goes on at night” implies that the activities happening in the “rusting shell” are of a socially stigmatized nature. Hence, the waste pile and its “half-stories” ultimately return from the realm of the useless as a threatening harbinger of the socially ‘unwanted’.

27 Set in another suburban community, the transformation of the Cortina in “A Pyramid Scheme” can again be read as a comment on the past’s position in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Although it has been abandoned as useless (as much as the car is no longer useful for driving in the street), the past cannot simply be forgotten, but reappears in an altered form. Thus, although it has “come to rest” (another allusion to death, like the “funeral ship” in McGovern’s sonnet) the past returns into the communal realm. Here, it fulfils a productive and essential function: the past becomes the necessary “try-out zone”, in which present structures can be renegotiated (as the “elders” use the car to negotiate behaviour that is not accepted in the suburban context). By depicting the past as waste in transformation, the poem displays the inherent potential of a devalued history to ‘strike back’ with new value and meaning. In the context of the Celtic Tiger’s ‘trashing’ of the past, in which only the ‘broken’ pieces remain visible in the present, the past can still be re-assembled and by gathering and reconnecting the pieces, can create new ‘stories’ that are still meaningful for the present.

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Focus on Wasted Entity: “Politics” (Paul Durcan)

28 To conclude this analysis of the waste metaphor in Celtic Tiger poetry, Paul Durcan’s “Politics” shall serve as an example for the third focus in ‘waste poems’. In this last kind of poem using the past as waste metaphor, as pointed above, the focus is on the wasted entity itself. More specifically, in several poems, the wasted entity representing the past appears in form of a living being turned social outcast. Thus, next to the figure of the crooner – who claims that he has “fought for Ireland” in the past but is not heard by anyone – in Kevin Higgins’ “The Shop Street Crooner”51 and the infected dog that must be kept at a distance in Lorna Shaughnessy’s “Dogged”,52 Durcan’s narrative poem “Politics” displays the past through the figure of “the Associate Professor of Modern Irish History”.53

29 Significantly, in the consumerist setting of a Celtic Tiger shopping mall, the history professor is unemployed and, seemingly, homeless. Hence, in the first part of the poem, the speaker describes the professor as a downtrodden person who, “at 11.30 a.m. in the morning”54 dwells in a car park where he succumbed to alcoholism to bear his social insignificance: He had a white enamel toothmug in his hand into which he as mptying a litre can of Guinness. There was froth on his lips and he had not shaved for a week or two, sporting a fine, white stubble.55

30 In his deplorable physical and social state, the professor obtains the quality of a discarded item, as becomes abundantly clear at the very beginning of the poem: in the first line, the professor is introduced as a figure that is symbolically seated right next to a “bottle bank in the shopping centre car park”.56 In this position, “upright on the ground/ between the tank and the hedge”,57 the speaker discovers him by chance while “slotting wine bottles into the green tank”.58 The professor appears to have lost his subject status since, in the process of disposing the bottles, the speaker is unable to clearly identify his discovery as a human being: when I saw what I thought was a human leg clad in trouser and boot, protruding from under the far end of the tank.59

31 The leg, on first sight, almost appears as dismembered and cast off as a disposed entity. In the speaker’s initial half-recognition, is it caught in an abject state, neither being the ordinary waste object, nor being identifiable as a subject. Only a moment later, the speaker, upon cornering the tank, can confirm “[t]hat the leg belonged to a face I recognized”.60

32 The history professor, therefore, becomes as a ‘wasted’ social outcast, cast out by a society that has dispelled any connection to the past. Thus, to the speaker, for example, who in his “Nike white trainers/and […] Nike white baseball cap”61 can be identified as a “commonplace”62 Celtic Tiger consumer, the professor’s repeated claim that “we should never have left the Commonwealth”63 remains meaningless. Instead, the speaker exists in a depoliticized space where only present consumer choices matter (e.g. later, the poem is set in the shopping mall’s own supermarket), while he remains numb towards any broader historical contexts. Symbolically, he carries “white, pocket carrier bags/ of sleeping pills and anti-depressants/ My Tranxene 7.5 and my Seroxat 20”;64 an

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example of Durcan’s recurring motif of a medicated consumer who is kept calm and disinterested in anything outside of his/her everyday consumer routine.

33 Yet, like in the other poems, in “Politics” waste defies its own abandonment. Although the history professor is introduced as a wasted entity, and the past is seemingly irrelevant, it is once again shown in a liminal position. More concretely, the past’s liminality is expressed through the professor becoming a liminal character in his own right. In that sense, as the poem progresses, the speaker’s initial depiction of him as a homeless man, at a second glance, turns out to be ill-fitting. Rather, the professor escapes the semiotic frame of the homeless, as the speaker painfully realizes by examining the professor’s attire and outward appearance more closely: Compassionately he stared up at me out of black horn-rimmed spectacles brushing back a forelock of his mane of grey hair in my jerkin and jeans I felt so commonplace while he looked so distinguished sitting down there at 11.30 a.m. in the morning in between showers. […] His crumpled pinstripe suit, his polka-dot bow tie.65

34 The professor, from the speaker’s perspective, appears in between social categories and in between two distinct stereotypes. Whereas his sitting next to a dumpster with a drink in hand suggest a low social status, his “horn-rimmed spectacles”, “his mane of grey hair”, or “his polka-dot bow tie” challenge this categorization, as these aspects signify the stereotype of an intellectual. The man sitting next to the bottle bank is neither the one nor the other. Rather, he is an in-between figure – a hybrid between two unlikely social categories – that cannot be clearly classified.

35 The speaker’s failure to pigeonhole the liminal professor in his otherwise well- rehearsed consumerist routine becomes a source of unease. As both part (in form of the beggar) and not part of society (in form of the intellectual in an anti-intellectual, materialist climate), the professor is in a more comfortable position than the speaker. The social outcast suddenly turns into an empowered figure, as he is no longer subjugated under the strict social conventionalism of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Thus, in contrast to the speaker who can only endure the present with “anti-depressants”, the professor radiates comfortability: I saw satisfaction steaming out of him. But not only satisfaction – something else also, something you might call tranquility. Or rectitude.66

36 Agnes Hovarth and others suggest that the liminal evokes “the reversal of established hierarchies”.67 The same can be said for “Politics”: faced with the professor’s “tranquility” and “rectitude” in his liminal position, the hierarchy between the speaker and his former teacher is reversed and the speaker is forced into an inferior position. As “satisfaction” is “steaming out of him”, the professor dominates the scene and, despite his ‘disposed’ status, he maintains a dominant presence. Now, the objectifying gaze has turned to the opposite direction. Thus, although it is the professor who is caught in an unfortunate condition in the car park, the speaker now becomes the ‘odd one out’ to be looked at and ‘examined’: It was embarrassingly obvious that I puzzled him as if somehow I seemed out of place. […]

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He sat up straight, looked me in the eye more steadily with that medley of deference and defiance that an elder in the palaeolithic would deploy looking down the lens of a TV camera.68

37 The observer becomes the observed and Durcan ultimately arranges a poetic set-up in which the degrading gaze on the past is reversed to critically reflect on a shallow present that cannot and should not ignore its history.

38 Without going into further details, in form of the liminal professor, the past is represented as a lingering and even dominating phenomenon. Although neither the speaker in the car park, nor the “teenage checkout girl”69 or the “tight, small queue”70 in the supermarket show any understanding of the professor’s historical references, the past nevertheless ‘forces’ itself into the text: no matter how much the speaker, for example, internally rages against the professor’s obstruction of the regular consumerist routine by intruding in the supermarket check-out line (e.g. “Jail would not be good enough for him!”71), the last eight lines of the poem are dedicated to the professor’s direct allusions to the past, including the reference to the “1916 crucifixion”.72 The poem, therefore, ends on a historical note, which defies the exclusive perspective on the present by establishing the past more dominantly in this ‘forgetful’ setting instead.

Conclusion

39 The paper attempted to show that the frequent use of the waste metaphor in poems written during the Celtic Tiger is a poetic means to undermine the dominant discourse of abandoning the past in Celtic Tiger Ireland. In that regard, in the three poems discussed, the process of discarding the past always fails in one way or another. The past remains in a liminal position, where in the process of being distanced and forgotten, it already returns as a presence to be reckoned with. In some cases, this liminal position entails waste’s uncanny status as an element that is meant to be forgotten, yet still lingers as a strangely familiar entity and, in other cases, it refers to the wasted entity’s liminal potential to be recycled at any time. In either way, the past as waste challenges the present.

40 The use of the waste metaphor, therefore, initiates a poetic counter-discourse that pleas for the importance of the past in the present. Thus, in the spirit of Astrid Franke, who sees poetry’s role in society in offering opportunities “to think the public anew”,73 the ‘waste poems’ discussed above can be seen as experiments in thinking Ireland’s relationship to the past anew. As such, against the excessive degradation of history in Celtic Tiger Ireland, these poems show that the past still obtains a certain value in the microcosmic Celtic Tiger settings depicted, be it in form of a ‘mirror’ to critically reflect on the flaws of a shallow consumerist present, or as a liminal “try-out zone” to re- arrange and re-innovate established structures. In this context, the poems discussed resemble the figure of a ragpicker, as in these texts, the process of wasting the past transforms into a renovating practice: they pick up the pieces left of a thrown away past, re-assemble them in new shapes (see the car wreck in “A Pyramid Scheme”) and bring them to the foreground again as useful for the present. Or, in the words of Paula Meehan: “[o]ut of the debris of history/ a song, a name,/ a life we piece together”.74

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NOTES

1. cf. Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling, Collision Culture: Transformations in Everyday Life in Ireland, Dublin, Liffey Press, 2004. 2. Kevin Whelan, “The Revisionist Debate in Ireland”, boundary, 2.31 (2004), p.179-205, here: p. 179. 3. Paedar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (eds.), “Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland: A Critical Perspective”, Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, London, Pluto Press, 2002, p. 1-21, here: p. 7. 4. cf. Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman (eds.), The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2003. 5. qtd. in Gavan Titley, “Celtic, Christian and Cosmopolitan: ‘Migrants’ and Mediation of Exceptional Globalisation”, Ging, Debbie, Michael Cronin and Paedar Kirby (eds.), Transforming Ireland: Challenges Critiques, Resources, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2009, p. 157-173, here: p. 157. 6. Orla O’Donovan, “Pharmaceuticals, Progress and Psychiatric Contention in Early Twenty-First Century Ireland”, Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin and Paedar Kirby (eds.), Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques, Resources, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2009, p. 139-154, here: p. 139. 7. Paedar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, op. cit, p. 7. 8. Paul Sweeney, The Celtic Tiger: Ireland’s Economic Miracle Explained, Dublin, Oak Tree Press, 1998, p. 16. 9. Scott Brewster, “Flying High? Culture, Criticism, Theory since 1990”, Brewster Scott and Michael Parker (eds.), Irish Literature since 1990: Diverse Voices, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2009, p. 16-39, here: p. 22. 10. Gene Kerrigan, The Big Lie: Who Profits from Ireland’s Austerity?, London, Transworld Ireland, 2012, p. 3. 11. Cf. for example his poems “In these water-perished fields” or “Soft Ease” 12. Cf. Hugh Haughton’s detailed discussion of Mahon’s ‘waste poetry’ in “‘The bright garbage on the incoming wave’: Rubbish in the poetry of Derek Mahon”, Textual Practice (16:2), 2002, p. 323-343. 13. Eóin Flannery, “‘Ship of fools’: the Celtic Tiger and poetry as social critique”, Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (eds.), From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and its Aftermath, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2014, p. 203-217, here: p. 206. 14. David Wheatley, “Misery Hill”, Misery Hill, Loughcrew, Gallery Books, 2000, p. 10-11. 15. Rita Ann Higgins, “The Builder’s Mess”, Ireland is Changing Mother, Highgreen, Bloodaxe Books, 2011, p. 29-30. 16. Vona Groarke, “House Contents”, Flight and Earlier Poems, Winston-Salem, Wake Forest UP, 2004, p. 34. 17. Paula Meehan, “Molly Malone”, Dharmakaya, Manchester, Carcanet, 2000, p. 25.

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18. The term ‘Celtic Tiger Poetry’, as also seen in the title, is strictly used in a temporal sense in this article, i.e. it broadly refers to the wide range of poems written during the Celtic Tiger years, roughly between 1995 and 2007/08. However, it does not refer to a specific form/style of poetry that might have emerged in the context of the radical social, cultural and economic changes taking place during the Celtic Tiger. 19. Martin O’Brien, A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 1. (emphasis original) 20. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York, Owl Books, 1999, p. 3. 21. Ibid., p. 5. 22. Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, p. 75. 23. Michael Thompson quoted in Gay Hawkins, op. cit., p. 79. 24. Ibid., p. 75. 25. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (eds.), “Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste”, Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, p. ix-xvii, here: p.xiii-xiv. 26. Michael Thompson. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, London, Pluto Press, 1979, p. 10. 27. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, Chapel Hill, U of North Carolina P, 1989, p. 287. 28. Iggy McGovern, “The Skip”, The King of Suburbia, Dublin, Dedalus, 2004, p. 1, lines 1-4. 29. Ibid., lines 5-8 30. cf. Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling, Collision Culture: Transformations in Everyday Life in Ireland, Dublin, Liffey Press, 2005, p. 153. 31. Iggy McGovern, op. cit., lines 9-12. 32. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2006, p. 54. 33. Ibid., p. 48. 34. Ibid., p. 86. 35. Iggy McGovern, op. cit., line 13. 36. John Scanlan, On Garbage, London, Reaktion Books, 2005, p. 36. 37. Iggy McGovern, op. cit., lines 13-14 38. Ibid., lines 1-2. 39. Ibid., lines 2-3. 40. Ibid., lines 23-24. 41. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmstem (eds.), “Introduction: Borders and States of In-Between in Irish Literature and Culture”, Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2009, p. 7-16, here: p. 7 42. John McAuliffe, op. cit., lines 4-8. 43. Michael Thompson, op. cit., p. 12.

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44. Ibid., p. 12. 45. John McAuliffe, op. cit., line 10. 46. Ibid., line 23. 47. Ibid., line 22. 48. Ibid., lines 11-16. 49. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmstem, op. cit., p. 7. 50. John McAuliffe, op. cit., lines 16-23. 51. Kevin Higgins, “The Shop Street Crooner”, The Boy With No Face, Cliffs of Moher, Salmon, 2005, p. 26, line 4. 52. Lorna Shaughnessy, “Dogged”, Anchored, Cliffs of Moher, Salmon, 2015, p. 29. 53. Paul Durcan, “Politics”, Life’s a Dream: 40 Years Reading Poems, 1967-2007, London, Harville Seeker, p. 432-434, line 10. 54. Ibid., line 40. 55. Ibid., lines 13-16. 56. Ibid., line 1. 57. Ibid., lines 11-12. 58. Ibid., line 2. 59. Ibid., lines 3-5. 60. Ibid., line 7. 61. Ibid., lines 64-65. 62. Ibid., line 37. 63. Ibid., line 59. 64. Ibid., lines 68-70. 65. Ibid., lines 36-40; line 44. 66. Ibid., lines 54-57. 67. Agnes Hovarth, Björn Thomassen and Harald Wydra (eds.), “Introduction: Liminality and the Search for Boundaries”, Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, New York, Berghahn Books, 2015, p. 2. 68. Paul Durcan, op. cit., lines 33-34; lines 60-63. 69. Ibid., line 77. 70. Ibid., line 78. 71. Ibid., line 80. 72. Ibid., line 89. 73. Astrid Franke, Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America, Heidelberg, Winter Verlag, 2010, p. 5. 74. Paula Meehan, “Molly Malone”, Dharmakaya, Manchester, Carcanet Press, 2000, p. 25, lines 1-3.

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ABSTRACTS

During the Celtic Tiger era of the late-1990s to early-2000s, Irish society radically altered its collective outlook on the national past. More to the point, Ireland transformed from a country ‘obsessed’ with relentlessly negotiating its own history to a country that was ready to disengage from the past altogether. In an affluent and successful Celtic Tiger society, so the dominant conviction of those years went, Ireland’s troubled past was no longer a vital point of reference but became the inferior ‘other’ against which the ‘golden age’ present was contoured. In this context, negatively connoted metaphors, such as history as a haunting ghost or a despotic master, played a pivotal role in contributing to the degradation of Irish history in the public sphere. The following paper analyses one of these metaphors, dominantly featured in Irish poetry of that time: the metaphor of the past as waste. This metaphor is particularly interesting since, by using waste as a concept of comparison, some poets writing during the Celtic Tiger era undermine and counteract the dominant trend of degrading Irish history. Thus, with the help of recent waste studies, the paper attempts to show that in Irish poetry of the time the past, in the form of concrete disposed entities, is not simply abandoned as useless and inferior but, in one way or another, is presented in a liminal position between devaluation and revaluation.

Pendant l’époque du Tigre celtique, entre la fin des années 1990 et le début des années 2000, la société irlandaise changea de manière fondamentale son attitude collective face à l’histoire nationale. Plus précisément, l’Irlande se transforma d’un pays ‘obsédé’ par la négociation continuelle de sa propre histoire en un pays prêt à se désengager entièrement de son passé. D’après la conviction prédominante de l’époque du Tigre celtique, l’histoire troublée de l’Irlande n’était plus la première référence d’une société prospère. Par contre, le passé devenait ‘l’autre’ inférieur, en contraste avec l’âge d’or du présent. Dans ce contexte, des métaphores à connotation négative comme l’histoire représentée en tant que fantôme obsédant ou seigneur despotique jouaient un rôle crucial car elles contribuaient à la dévaluation de l’histoire de l’Irlande dans l’espace public. Cet article analyse l’une de ces métaphores qui apparaît souvent dans la poésie irlandaise de l’époque: la métaphore du passé représenté en tant que débris/rebut. Cette métaphore est particulièrement intéressante : par son emploi comparatif, différents poètes sapent et contrecarrent la tendance prédominante à dévaluer l’histoire de l’Irlande. À l’aide d’études récentes sur le rebut, l’article tente de montrer que dans la poésie du Tigre celtique, le passé, sous forme concrète de déchets éliminés, n’est pas simplement abandonné comme inutile et vil, mais que, d’une manière ou d’une autre, il se manifeste dans une position entre dévalorisation et revalorisation.

INDEX

Keywords: Irish Poetry, Celtic Tiger, waste studies, liminality, Irish history Mots-clés: la poésie du Tigre celtique, les études sur les débris, la liminarité, l’histoire de l’Irlande

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AUTHOR

DANIEL BECKER Daniel Becker studied English and History at the University of Koblenz-Landau. After graduating in 2011, he worked as a teacher trainee at a secondary school in Trier where he completed his teacher education. From 2013 to 2018, he worked on his PhD-thesis at the University of Wuppertal (which he recently submitted) and taught courses on English and Irish literature and culture. Since October 2018, Daniel Becker works as a lecturer at the University of Münster. His research interests include literature and history, Irish Studies, modernist poetry and TEFL

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Interviews with four Irish writers

Bertrand Cardin

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Vernon, France, 8 April 2017.

Introduction

1 For several years, the Médiathèque – the multimedia library – in Vernon, Normandy (France) has been organizing a literary prize, ‘Escapades’, which is awarded every two years. The 2017 Prize is dedicated to Irish literature. Six recent novels, written by Irish writers, have been selected: • The Gamal by Ciarán Collins (2013), • Academy Street by Mary Costello (2014), • The Trout by Peter Cunningham (2016), • Ghost Moth by Michèle Forbes (2013), • Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch (2013), • The Thrill of it All by Joseph O’Connor (2014).

2 As these novels have been translated into French, they can be read by any French reader.

3 On 1st October 2016, to launch the event, I was invited to give a lecture entitled “An Overview of Irish Literature” to an audience of about 200 people, in order to contextualize these novels in the wide field of Irish literature, and to show the readers how far the listed books are anchored in the Irish tradition. The library’s readers, together with the local secondary school students, had six months to read the books and vote by secret ballot for their favorite one. At the end of this reading period, the prize was awarded on 8 April 2017 in the presence of four of the writers: Mary Costello, Michèle Forbes, Ciarán Collins and Paul Lynch. That weekend was a festival of Irish culture: in addition to the prize-giving at the end of a roundtable with the writers,

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several events were held – a concert of Irish music, an Irish dance class and Irish whiskey tasting… The four writers were delighted to meet their French readers, but also to enjoy good food and wine, or to visit French painter Claude Monet's house and gardens and the Museum of Impressionism in the nearby village of Giverny.

4 This event gave me the opportunity to interview four authors who are representative of a new generation of Irish writers: two men and two women, aged around 40, who have just written their first or second novels. I was interested in questioning them about Irish culture and heritage, the books that influenced their writing, those they are reading, but also their own work, the use they make of their artistic licence, and the way they perceive their recent status as men and women of letters. This paper reports the informal conversation we had together. To know more about each of them, let us start with a short biography of the writer and a brief synopsis of the listed novel.

Ciarán Collins

5 Ciarán Collins is an Irish author who was born in Cork in 1977. He grew up in the village of Innishannon, Co Cork. He studied English and Irish at University College Cork and completed an MA in 2001, specialising in modern drama, especially the works of Tom Murphy, Brian Friel or Eugene O’Neill. Ciarán Collins has been a full-time secondary teacher of English and Irish since 2003. He lives in Kinsale with his wife and daughter. Ciarán Collins has written a couple of plays, a few short stories which will be published as a collection some day, and a short film script which was shortlisted for an award1. In 2013, Ciarán Collins wrote his first novel: The Gamal. For this book, Ciarán Collins won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He was also one of the Newcomers of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. The Gamal received wide critical acclaim: it was praised by Edna O’Brien, Colum McCann, John Boyne or David Vann.

6 A gamal is a retard, a moron, a simpleton. It is from an Irish word, gamalog. In this case, the gamal is Charlie McCarthy, 25, the narrator of the novel. Reckoned to be on the autistic spectrum, Charlie is always standing or sitting apart, so as to watch others and listen to them, particularly a bunch of peers living in Ballyronan, a village of County Cork. This position makes him the witness of a tragedy caused by these individuals whose malicious intents bring about the deaths of his only friends, Sinead and James. After being exposed to the traumas of rape, suicide and murder, Charlie suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: he lies on his bed for two years and listens to pop-rock music at full blast. In the wake of this long period of isolation, he is encouraged by his shrink, Doctor Quinn, to narrate his story and type one thousand words a day as part of a writing therapy. In this case, writing is not only telling a story, but also expressing emotions in order to recover from a bout of depression. Yet, writing so many words everyday is torture for Charlie, all the more so as, as he says himself, he is not a writer, but only a gamal…

Mary Costello

7 Mary Costello is originally from Galway but lives in Dublin. Her stories have been published in New Irish Writing, The Stinging Fly and in several anthologies including Town and Country – New Irish Short Stories (Faber and Faber) edited by Kevin Barry. She taught for many years. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled The China Factory,

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was published in 2012 by Stinging Fly Press and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and the Irish Books Award. Mary Costello published her first novel, Academy Street, in 20142.

8 In Academy Street, we first meet Tess Lohan in the 1940s, on the family farm in Ireland, dazedly mourning her mother, who has died of TB. Tess is so young that she barely knows how or why to grieve; Costello evokes the child’s fantasies and confusions — she thinks the hearse will return with her mother in the front seat, smiling, “a terrible mistake put right.” This evocation of the child’s confusions shades into a heavier melancholy as she and her siblings drift apart. Costello moves with a light step across the years, and we are soon on Academy Street in New York City, where Tess rents an apartment with another Irish nurse. For two women their age, there are many social opportunities, but Tess’s childhood traumas have rendered her awkward and fearful around new people, and while she manages to connect with one man, their encounter ultimately plunges her into a more profound solitude. The beauty of her young son offers some relief, but the child soon grows up and grows distant; by early adulthood he has “locked his heart against her,” and Tess is as alone as she has ever been.

Michèle Forbes

9 Michèle Forbes was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and graduated in English and Psychology from Trinity College, Dublin. She worked as Script Reader for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and subsequently began acting with the Abbey Theatre Company, touring worldwide with such productions as the award-winning ‘The Great Hunger’ and ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’. Her film work includes ‘Omagh’, written by Paul Greengrass and Guy Hibbert and directed by Pete Travis, which opened the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at the Lincoln Center in 2005 and for which she won Best Actress Monte Carlo and was nominated Best Actress at the Irish Film & Television Awards. Other film work includes ‘Inside I’m Dancing’, ‘The Playboys’, ‘Dorothy Mills’; her television work includes the BBC productions ‘Best: his Mother’s Son’, ‘Journey to Knock’, ‘Holby City’, ‘Loving Miss Hatto’ and ‘Jack Taylor’. Michèle’s theatre work also includes ‘Footfalls’ and ‘Come and Go’ for ‘Beckett in the City’, ‘Too Late for Logic’, ‘No Escape’, ‘Amazing Grace’ at the Abbey Theatre. She won both the Bryan MacMahon and the Michael MacLaverty Awards for her short stories3. She recently published her second novel – Edith & Oliver (2017). Her first one, Ghost Moth, was one of the most acclaimed debut novels of 2014.

10 During the hot Irish summer of 1969, tensions rise in Belfast where Katherine Bedford, a former actress, and her husband George, a firefighter, struggle to keep buried secrets from destroying their marriage. Throughout the events which unfold, the bonds of family are tested and forgiveness is made possible through two parents’ indomitable love for their children. An exploration of memory, childhood, illicit love, and loss, Ghost Moth portrays ordinary experiences as portals to rich internal landscapes: a summer fair held by children in a back-yard garden exposes the pangs and confusion of a first crush; an amateur theatre production of Bizet’s Carmen hires a lonely tailor who puts so much careful attention into the creation of a costume for his lover that it’s as if his desire for her can be seen sewn into the fabric. All the while, Northern Ireland moves to the brink of civil war. The lines between private anguish and public outrage

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disintegrate in this tale about a family—and a country—seeking freedom from ghosts of the past.

Paul Lynch

11 Paul Lynch was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Co Donegal, and lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter. He was the chief film critic of Ireland’s Sunday Tribune newspaper from 2007 to 2011, when the newspaper folded. He has written for many Irish newspapers and has written regularly for The Sunday Times on film. Paul Lynch is the prize-winning author of The Black Snow (2014) and Red Sky in Morning (2013). His debut novel was published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a finalist for France’s ‘Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger’ and was nominated for the ‘Prix du Premier Roman’. In the US, it was an Amazon.com Book of the Month and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, where Lynch was hailed as “a lapidary young master”. It was a book of the year in The Irish Times, The Toronto Star, the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post4.

12 The story of Red Sky in Morning starts in Spring 1832, in Co Donegal. Coll Coyle wakes to a blood dawn and a day he does not want to face. The young father stands to lose everything on account of the cruel intentions of his landowner’s heedless son. Although reluctant, Coll sets out to confront his trouble. And so begins his fall from the rain-soaked, cloud-swirling Eden, and a pursuit across the wild bog lands of Donegal. Behind him is John Faller – a man who has vowed to hunt Coll to the ends of the earth – in a pursuit that will stretch to an epic voyage across the Atlantic, and to greater tragedy in the new American frontier. Red Sky in Morning is a dark tale of oppression bathed in sparkling, unconstrained imagery. A compassionate and sensitive exploration of the merciless side of man and the indifference of nature, it is both a mesmerizing feat of imagination and a landmark piece of fiction.

***

B.C.: Welcome to the four of you, and thank you for accepting to answer my questions. Could you tell me first if writing is your only activity or if you have another job: do you have to share your time between writing and something else? P.L.: No, I just do this. So I work most days. Writing a novel is a huge job. It’s exhausting. There are two aspects in trying to actually write: produce writing that actually meets standard, but it is also just the idea of psychology that you have to keep yourself. You have to keep yourself fit for the job. You have to keep your self- belief at a high level, otherwise you collapse with it. That’s the big task. M.F.: Well, my background is in theatre. I’m an actress, but primarily, now I’m writing, unless an acting project comes up that I’m really interested in, but otherwise I’m writing all the time. C.C.: I wish I could be a full-time writer but I’m a full-time secondary teacher of English and Irish. M.C.: I used to be a teacher, so I just gave up about six years ago when my first book came out. It was a collection of short stories, The China Factory, and I wrote most of those over ten or twenty years. I published a few stories when I was young, in my early twenties and they were shortlisted for awards, but then I got married when I

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was 23 and I was teaching full-time, so writing slipped a little bit into the margins of my life, but I kept writing and reading and I was into my forties when I sent out some stories and the publisher liked them and that’s how my first book came about. So then I took a career break from teaching and I wrote my novel and that was well- received, thankfully, and published, and I’m working on my second novel now.

B.C.: What is most difficult for you in writing? P.L.: Writing. There’s a standard that has to be met, an ideal, and I’m not happy until the writing finds that place. Every day I’m tempted to reach for something almost impossible to try… M.C.: The most difficult thing in writing, I think, for me: it changes but right now, I suppose, it’s self-belief. Sometimes, I have a lot of doubt: will I be able to do this? Sometimes I lack confidence. I read something I’ve written and I think ‘it’s so weak’... My eyes almost bleed with first drafts or second drafts I ever saw. I work hard to get it, to rewrite them, but I also feel that sometimes I might not deliver what is in my mind, and might not deliver the story. I don’t really care about reviewers or publishers or agents or selling the book. My only allegiance is to the story and the characters. And I feel burdened with responsibility to bring that out of me as well as I can, and I can be very self-critical, and I don’t show the work to anyone until I’m happy; so it’s many, many drafts. C.C.: I guess, for me, it’s being ready to go to very dark places of the human heart and live there for a period of time. After writing The Gamal you know, I think I needed a break because if you’re living in that world, in the intensity of it, in your imagination and in your heart for a very long time, to me, I think of it like Hamlet going off to see the ghost, you know… it’s almost a place where most people don’t go, because they have sense, you know… So it takes a bit of bravery to go to that place, but sometimes when you go there, you could bring back something magical for humanity. That’s why I look at it. To me, it’s a hard thing to do. That’s a vocation. It’s self-sacrifice. If you take writing seriously, you can know that’s what you’re getting into. That’s the hardest thing. You have to say goodbye to the living world and hibernate away and just disappear from humanity, just to focus on your work. M.F.: One of the most difficult things for me in writing is I have a family. My children now are 18 and 23, but when they are busy, I have time to write. But the process that I find most difficult is that I tend to overwrite. I need to be careful: I need when I’m editing to comb through the manuscript and try to cut it down because I tend to overwrite, so I’m learning…

B.C.: Do you have a specific reader in mind when you write? P.L.: Myself. I write for myself. So when I have a book and it’s nearly finished, I know that it’s finished when I can read through it and forget that I’ve written it, and when I’m satisfied with what I’m reading in the text. The text has surpassed me and has become something else and so, when I’m reading it, because I have high standards when I read, so I look for this in my own work: if the work speaks to me in a way – a work would speak to me by another writer whom I admire – then I’m happy. M.F.: No, I don’t have a specific reader in mind when I write. I also don’t necessarily have the self-consciousness of my own voice. I mean I’ve just published my second novel and it’s an uneasy-learning process of finding your own voice. My life as an actress was always collaborative work, so your own voice can be deleted, diluted, and

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also, you’re working with someone else’s words. You’re interpreting their words. So, through writing now, I’m discovering my solo voice, which is one of the main reasons why I wanted to write. What do I sound like alone and will that work? So I’m still discovering that. I’m not thinking of these known writers – James Joyce is not over my shoulder or Alice Munro, whom I love… I don’t need to clear the room of everyone and just find what’s here. M.C.: I don’t either, no. My partner is a writer as well, but I don’t give it to him until it’s very far. You know, recently, I finished a short story and I didn’t give it to him until I was very happy. I couldn’t. So I think doubt, self-doubt is my hardest problem. C.C.: Hum, no. I think everybody who’s properly literate should be able to appreciate the truth of good art, you know.

B.C.: What are your literary influences? M.F.: I mentioned Alice Munro and I have written short stories as well, which I’m hoping to publish. She would definitely be one of my main influences, but I love, you know, the poetry of Seamus Heaney and I love Shakespeare also, through my work, and also playwrights have influenced me – Irish playwrights like Brian Friel, Tom Murphy… I worked with them. When their words sustain an actor night after night, you know, there’s something very strong there. That would begin influence in my work. And I love – artists love reading them – Richard Ford, I adore George Saunders, so yes, there would be voices that I would turn to, to remind me of what I want to achieve. M.C.: I suppose one cannot leave behind the Irish influences: I do love Joyce, I love McGahern, I love Edna O’Brien and Irish writers of the 60s, 70s, 80s onwards – very famous – but I suppose they’re not necessarily Irish. I do love J. M. Coetzee: he’s my favourite novelist. Everything he writes, he writes with such integrity and he investigates. You know, there’s no shirking of the self; there’s no escape from the truth with Coetzee. Some people think he’s quite cold, but he dives into the lives of all creatures, not just humans, but animals as well, and he gives them their due, you know. He writes older women very, very well: Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello (Elizabeth Costello) – she wears my name… - and he writes them with such depth and unforgivingly sometimes, on the contrary. What they are, really, you know, they don’t avoid anything, they cogitate on life and death and the soul. The number of times Coetzee uses the word ‘soul’ in his fiction is amazing. Once Elizabeth Costello is at the gates of heaven, being asked to write a report of her life and she keeps going back saying ‘I was a writer, that’s all I was, there’s nothing else’, she’s not allowed to be admitted, and then she goes back and says the one thing that she remembers of all her life is when the mud-flaps in Australia dried up and the frogs were parched and dehydrated, and that pained her deeply. And that is what Coetzee does: in a moment he can bring us back to the innate suffering of humanity and animal creatures in a very beautiful moment. I also love Marilynne Robinson, the American writer; she writes about transient life, poor lives: the homeless, the migrant workers of the 1930s, and she also gives them very human dignity, no matter how poor they are, they cannot be robbed of their human spirit and she gives them their due. She writes about philosophical things and religious things, but she doesn’t let God or religion or theologies off the hook: she questions them. She writes beautifully about these people who have never heard of God or who are poor, you

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know. She writes beautifully about childhood as well. Two of her characters – Lila and Silvian Ruthie – beautifully evoke childhood. And, I love Camus, I love his nonfiction. I love his essays on Algeria where he was growing up.

B.C.: Do you feel indebted to the Irish writers of the past? C.C.: Hum, I feel indebted to Joyce in terms of the novel, certainly, and the way I’d approach the novel. I feel very hugely indebted to Joyce, but I think I’d feel that way about him if I was English or French or American, you know…

B.C.: AE is quoted in the epigraph of Red Sky… P.L.: There is a dash for sure and I think the best way to describe that is an inheritance of freedom. That writers who, like Joyce – Beckett is a more tricky conversation to have because he ran away from Hiberno-English – but writers – Yeats, Joyce and others – deliberately embraced the strain, the idiom of English that we speak, which is called Hiberno-English, that there are slightly different grammatical structures, there are reversals in sentences, there’s a music in the sentences in the way we speak English and these writers seized that and used it for their own artistic freedom in a way that English writers, British writers don’t. There’s a lot of conservatism in the style of English writing, of course not all of it, there are some really great stylists, but Irish writers in particular seem to just take it as a given that they can use a bit of the freedom they like and that is an inheritance and I have taken that and I try to do my own thing in English. I try to create my own sound.

B.C.: How far is your fiction influenced by Irish writers? P.L.: I’m not very much influenced by Irish writers. Most of the writers who influence me would be American and writers in translation, writers like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.

B.C.: In Red Sky in Morning, the story is told by different narrators, which is reminiscent of Faulkner’s technique indeed: are such connections deliberate? P.L.: Yeah. I mean, Cormac McCarthy said the inescapable factor was that books were made from other books, and so we are what we read. I’m what I’ve read. There’s something in the sensibility of writers like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy that speaks to me very deeply to parts of my own sensibility, but you know there are other writers as well that I’m as much interested in: Mexican writers or Portuguese writers like Saramago… And perhaps their influence is less obvious in a book like Red Sky in Morning because I wrote that book seven years ago, I finished that seven years ago – I was 33 or 34 then.

B.C.: What is your opinion, Ciaran? C.C.: Connections are not always deliberate. So, yeah, I know that without Shakespeare, without Joyce, even probably without the work of Bob Dylan, my novel wouldn’t have been created in the way that it is. So, of course, there’s such a huge part of my consciousness that certainly… I couldn’t imagine being alive without them having lived, if you know what I mean, you know? So, anything that I write will always be indebted to them, I think.

B.C.: The beginning of Academy Street reminded me of John McGahern’s fiction, with the mother’s death and the father’s bad temper in the Irish 1940s. Is there something deliberate here, Mary? M.C.: I suppose everything that one reads influences us. We take it all in and it affects everything we write but that particular story in general, the story of my novel, has a

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family connection: my own mother grew up in the west of Ireland in a big old house just like Easterfield. I modeled, in the story, Easterfield and her family home. It wasn’t called Easterfield. I fictionalized it, and her family bought that old house and farm in the early 20th century. When my mother was three, she lost her mother who died suddenly of pneumonia, and the older sisters were away in boarding-schools at the time. They were taken out to mind the little ones. So when I was very young, I roved in the country and the farm. I was very close to my mother. I still am. She’s in her late 70s, but I was very close to her in the way that some children often are. It’s like being in love with your mother. I adore her and went everywhere with her, and I had brothers and sisters but, at some point, early on, I learned that she had lost her mother when she was a little girl and I would look at her and say ‘You had no mother?’ It used to fill me with sadness to think that she was deprived of what I had. I couldn’t imagine… what a terrible fate not to have a mother like I had, and then when I got older and, you know, knew more about the family and everything, it struck me, when I became an adult, how catastrophic the death of a parent is in a family – especially a mother – and how it can change the whole trajectory of that family, because my mother went to secondary school, but she didn’t go to university. Her sisters would have been destined for university because they were in boarding- schools; their friends became teachers and doctors and everything, but they didn’t. They came out of school to mind the little ones and got married locally and I thought about how different everything could be and even my life, you know, if my mother had gone to university, how different down the generations, how one moment in fate, one catastrophic moment can change the trajectory of a whole family. So the childhood of Tess in the novel is modeled quite closely on my mother: this is rural Ireland in the 1940s. Ireland was quite poor in those days, even though, in the story, they have a good farm and a big house, but things are still quite backwards and the father is strict and Tess is hyper alert to the world. She’s one of those children whose gap between perception and imagination is ajar. I think it is in all children, that’s why we’re alert to the world. You’re close to animals when you’re a child. You can almost hear the grass growing, that’s what I think of them, and we meet Tess as a child at the opening, she’s 7, her mother has just died, but her personality is really formed largely at that point. It’s not her mother’s death that makes her fit for an adult really, and makes her sense of a child. This is her nature; this is her inborn nature. She was born like this.

B.C.: Likewise, Ghost Moth is reminiscent of John McGahern’s fiction… M.F.: Oh, really? Oh yes…!

B.C.: …a woman of the Irish countryside suffers from cancer and finally dies at the end of the book. Is such a connection deliberate? M.F.: No, it wouldn’t be. And I’m thinking Ghost Moth really was a personal journey. The two time-frames come from a very personal thing. I grew up in Northern Ireland. The time-frame begins in 1969. And the character of the young girl is 9 then. I’m writing from her point of view, primarily to describe that world on the brink of what we now know as the Troubles, and the previous going back twenty years. The story within the family is added too, you know, and I thought ‘I’m going to use that’. So it was a personal journey and I wasn’t necessarily referring to other stories or other writers.

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B.C.: What about the literary references in The Gamal? C.C.: I knew exactly the story I was going to tell, and I knew how I was going to tell it. And I guess I would have assumed that things that were big in my consciousness would feature, you know – Bob Dylan or Joyce or any of the artists… Shakespeare, obviously…

B.C.: You quote the Bible too… C.C.: Yes, of course! You grow up in Ireland, so I think that’s certainly unavoidable if, in a Catholic world, Christianity features in how you think, unavoidably, yes.

B.C.: Academy Street quotes Albert Camus in the epigraph, but also the Gospel; it refers to Joyce and Celtic legends… Mary, did you choose to quote or refer to a specific text? How does it work? M.C.: They very much arrived in an organic fashion as I was writing. I’m a big fan of Camus. I love that quote in Camus and it suited. I didn’t have that epigraph at the beginning, you know, by the time I’d written the novel. It became evident that it was very much suited to Tess – “In the depths of the winter, I finally learned that there lay in me an unconquerable summer” – and even in Tess’s tragic life, I think she comes out with hope and she goes forwards, putting one foot in front of the other, because her heart is enlarged. She has known great tragedy, but she has also known great love and lived a full life. So her consciousness has been expanded. Her heart has been enlarged. Nothing is ever wasted. If I met Tess now, I think she would say “nothing is wasted”. You live a long, full life, embrace it all and you learn and grow, and your heart is enlarged, but as regards texts, no… I’m interested in not so much religious things, but things that allow us to imagine the divine or the numinous or something like paradise. In a way, Tess is always longing for home; she has a great longing to go back to Ireland, but it’s not just a physical home she’s reaching for. It’s a metaphysical home. She’s longing to belong and it’s almost like she’s reaching, try to put something on higher and higher note, something numinous, sublime, maybe divine. Some people get that: that’s our human urges. We’re always reaching towards something that gives us meaning. For some people, it’s art, it’s love, it’s God, they find it in those areas. Tess finds glimpses in the mass, she finds glimpses in her poetry; she’s reading texts, glimpses in books. She gets a glimpse of it, constantly. She has her little epiphanies, her moments of glory, and I think the religious texts that I quote, the bits of poetry I quote fitted as I came onto a piece of writing with Tess. They automatically fit in for instance in the mass, the requiem mass, and the music soars to her. Church music is beautiful, profound, if you’re bereaved or you’re in love, those things touch the soul and Tess has a susceptible soul to those things.

B.C.: “St Matthew Passion” by Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly… M.C.: Yes indeed, St Matthew Passion. All of those things return. She’s a non-educated girl largely, but that doesn’t mean she cannot be reached.

B.C.: Before writing your book, did you choose who you were going to quote, refer to or allude to, Michèle? M.F.: I don’t think. That is not my style. My instinct is an emotional one and what I think is very important as well, and it’s a feminine voice. I mean I’m quoting a lot of people, apart from Alice Munro, but when I was at the university, and also at school, a lot of the voices I would hear were in literature and poetry and playwriting. So this is my way of digging deep and expressing from a feminine point of view.

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B.C.: Feminine and Irish? Does it make sense for you to be considered as an Irish writer? M.F.: That’s a very interesting question, because I feel the whole idea of the Irish identity is often about re-defining yourself through another language which is English, but for me, from the North of Ireland, my connection with the Irish language was nothing. I didn’t have any connection with the Irish language. So, primarily, English is the place where I stand and the language that I use. So I didn’t see myself within an Irish tradition necessarily. There was no self-consciousness of that.

B.C.: Would you define yourself as an Irish writer? P.L.: It’s inescapable, isn’t it? It’s a problem, it’s a classic problem for all writers, you know. Writers write from within a culture, they write from within a language and the language is the culture; the language is inhabited, the language weighs down on history. You cannot escape these things. So you choose the language – the writer and his language. It’s loaded with that. At the same time, I see myself just as a writer. I’m not really interested in Irish concerns. You know some nooks are deeply Irish. I write about universals. I’m interested in universal truths and human truths. The only thing I think about when I write is trying to get close to some idea, some metaphysical, psychological aspect of what it is to be alive, the problem of living, what it is to be alive. This is a universal problem, the same in every culture: what is being alive on earth? That, for me, is what I’m interested in, but books come out of the culture I’ve grown up in… C.C.: It’s not an easy one for me to answer… I know that it’s a commonly used idea that there’s a type of writer from Ireland that I would certainly think in terms of my own reading… If I was to spend most of my time reading, Joyce would be up there. Shakespeare would be up there. Then we might have Eugene O’Neill and lots of American writers, some French. John McGahern would feature. Edna O’Brien, ok. So well, it’s part of who I am, I think, where I live… In terms of my own writing or art, I don’t see myself as needing to fit into any notion of what an Irish writer is. I think writing is about humanity and all valid art for me can be approached by anybody, anywhere in the world, because they feel.

B.C.: How far does Ireland influence your fiction? M.C.: I was born there. I was born in the West of Ireland, so I am Irish. It’s inevitable that the language, the cadence, the music of the language comes out in me. It’s who I am. I’m of the ground, I’m of the earth there. So, of course, one’s family heritage first speaks, one’s race and culture is laid down and imprinted on the DNA. So it’s inevitable; it comes out of us. However, I don’t necessarily regard myself or identify myself as an Irish writer. I’m a writer first; I’m a woman; I’m Irish. But that just happens chance. I think if I had grown up in Russia, America, I might be a writer too, and I think it’s one’s own sensibility that’s the dominant factor in becoming a writer. It’s one’s inner landscape rather than the landscape around them that determines the way they write. I think for me, most of my characters are rather introverted and, you know, they tend to live quiet, inner lives.

B.C.: They also feel guilty because of sex… M.C.: Yes. They live lives of trepidation in many regards and introverted look inwards. They get their energy from within. That doesn’t mean they’re not active and living very turbulent and interesting lives just because they’re turned inwards… So I don’t ever consider myself that I have an Irish voice in the sense that I feel obliged to

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comment on Irish society and traditions or mores, but it’s inevitable. It’s there in me. It’s laid down on my DNA and Irish history, whether we like it or not, you know, we lost our land, let’s say – and I’m not at all political – but we lost our land, we lost our language, so over years and generations, that must leave a mark on the Irish psyche. There must be a wound, a psychic wound there. Irish writers are often told they have a lonely voice, that they are very dark and very sad, and maybe that’s how it manifests, and maybe it will take many more generations before we’re daring, innovative, brash and extraverted.

B.C.: What about Ghost Moth, Michèle? The Irish Troubles are in the background of the plot. M.F.: Yeah, yeah… That was important for me. The characters in the book, Catherine and George Bedford, are coming from Catholic and Protestant sides and seem to be reflecting my own family. They’re like hybrid people who don’t follow the edicts of a religion, but they live in a society which defines them solely by their religion and I found that very difficult when I was growing up, because we had two sides: the Protestant and Catholic sides were within the family. We knew the two traditions. So, to be defined as one or the other I found that very problematic. So it’s kind of like a cognitive distance and you’re gonna fold in those two ideas and I think Ghost Moth was part of that process of trying to see not necessarily where I fitted in, but just trying to give a voice to people in the margins of that society.

B.C.: The plot of Red Sky in Morning takes place in the 19th century: Paul, why are you so interested in that period? P.L.: Well, writers often say: “Oh I had this in mind” or “I had that in mind”. I don’t work that way, you know. The work comes to me intuitively and there are a whole of reasons why I wrote the book. Initially, it was the story of colons and Americans, and it created very powerfully within me. This moment in history was silenced. These people didn’t make it; they were the immigrants who didn’t succeed. So their voices were silenced and they were erased by history and then their story emerged. They were buried in a mass grave and nobody knew about it, nobody knew where they were, nobody knew it existed and then it emerged that perhaps they were murdered and so suddenly a door in history opened up, allowing these people to be heard again. I wanted to speak for them. I could hear something that used to be spoken. I grew up in that area where they came from. So I felt very powerful… I’m very interested in a form of using the past to distil human truth. If we write in the present moment, a lot of writers make the mistake of trying to describe the present moment. They want to describe what it is like to be alive now and I think that’s too close to journalism for my taste. I’m interested in removing all the clutter and debris that is modern life and creating situations where we get very close to truth and however that may be about what it is to be a human being. And so when I write about the past, all of this stuff disappears and I can get closer and closer to these problems, so that’s one of the useful things for me.

B.C.: Are darkness and violence in the story inevitable? P.L.: Did you notice that life is dark?

B.C.: You mean everybody has to make do with violence anyway? P.L.: Life is violent, you know. It’s dark. We all die. This is inevitability… And we just choose to not think about it for most of our lives, but if you’re a writer, you think about this and you confront it. Writing is perhaps a daily confrontation with these

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kinds of truths, you know, struggling with them. This is why writers can’t cope at some level with facts of what life is and, you know, Rilke said: “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”. I like that because it reminds us of death, and so, I try to make my books as beautiful as possible. I try to startle people with how beautiful they are because life is also very beautiful, and beauty can slow life down and be wonderful. That’s an important thing but, at the same time, the more beautiful something is, the more we understand the road of terror because we know that beauty cannot last.

B.C.: Is being an Irish writer today easier than in the past? P.L.: I don’t know. The truth is that every writer thinks that the period preceding him was a glorious period for literature and that writers had better, higher quality of respect, of being reviewed in a more intelligent and profound way than writers feel that they have now. They think that literature was taken more seriously but, you know, I was reading the other day that Pope considered literature was not so well received in his own days, and I think that the mistake writers make is that, when we look back, the land and history remove all of this stuff and we just see the great names – we see Joyce… Whatever the country, you see the great writers in a sort of great proximity to each other and it looks like something magical was happening, but the truth is that they were just as miserable and unread and poorly paid as the rest of us are now, and I don’t think anything really changed.

B.C.: What’s your opinion about today’s Irish fiction? C.C.: I think it’s wonderful. I’m very excited to be here in France with other Irish writers, but I think I’m more excited to be here in France with some wonderful writers. The fact that they’re Irish is, I think, for people who may not be from Ireland to judge, because it’s very hard for me, as an Irish person, to know if we, as a group, are bringing something particular to the feast, if you know what I mean. M.F.: I think today’s Irish fiction is wonderful too. There’s a whole wave of new writers. It’s really heartening and it’s vibrant, you know. You have writers like Claire Keegan and Claire Kilroy and, of course, Anne Enright. It’s just this great muscle in the writing and it’s very diverse, as well. It’s not kind of what Ireland is and what a woman in Ireland is. It’s looking outward all the time and it’s also playing with form. That’s great!

B.C.: Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Johnston were pioneers in that field… M.F.: Completely, completely: Edna O’Brien, absolutely right the way down. People like Maeve Binchy as well, who might not be considered in the same sort of tradition as Edna O’Brien but… what a wonderful story teller! They were the pioneers, absolutely, you know, and they have inspired generations after generations of young writers.

B.C.: Your books would have been banned if they had been written fifty years ago… M.F.: I think so, yes…! P.L.: Yes, exactly!

B.C.: Do you feel free to write whatever you want today? M.F.: Yes I do, actually. I do. P.L.: Yes, of course! In fact, I would say that there is complete indifference...

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C.C.: I do, yeah. You know, I’m a teacher in a Catholic school, but I think as an artist, as a writer, everything should get published. I have stories that I’ve written at home, that I wrote for myself, and some day, I may publish them, everything I write, because I feel that it’s the right thing to do, that I should for myself. The thing I’m most pleased about with The Gamal is that I followed the vision I had. As it is published, it remains exactly the same as the initial draft that I had sent off, in terms of the first fifty pages that I sent off; because I came across it recently and nothing has changed, which is nice. It means that I haven’t been corrupted by any notion of what the reader might want… M.C.: I feel free to write whatever I want today. I do. Towards the end of my book, there is a huge catastrophe in Tess’s life, a great loss, and some interviewers said to me: how did you feel Tess has lived in America all her life and the great signature events of American life – Vietnam, JFK, 9/11 – are mentioned in the book, they do have a bearing on her life, and some interviewers said ‘how did you feel as an Irish woman about owning a large American event like 9/11 or Kennedy’s death? How do you feel about getting permission to own that?’ And I said I considered those very much global events and that the outpouring of grief that happened at 9/11 was felt by the whole world, including Irish people and a lot of Irish Americans. A lot of American people are Irish; it’s an international society, so I didn’t feel that it was owned by America alone, nor did I feel I wasn’t entitled to write about it, and because the imagination doesn’t recognize international borders surely and if I in any way turned down that story just because I was sensitive to politics, I would be self- censoring and I would not be a writer. I would not self censor, I would not set out to hurt people either. I would write what the story demands, I would write only what the story demands, and I won’t hold back or censor and damage the integrity of the story. I don’t want to hurt anyone either, but I think it’s a difficult one for some writers, but all one can do is what one’s own conscience allows.

B.C.: Do you consider that anything can be written today? M.F.: Hum, I do. I think the job of a writer is to embrace that, no matter how difficult that might be. You know, you’re not writing to please other people. You’re writing for yourself and also, you’re commenting on your own sense of existence in your society, so, yeah, that means that can be a very tricky question because we’re very sensitive now to cause an offence, but that keeps pushing things down. So we need to be free to say what we really feel. P.L.: Anything can be written, yeah. There’s no such thing as outrage any more, but there is possibly an argument that despite what I was saying to you, that we are living a time with enormous acceleration and change, technology has changed; it’s actually rewiring our brain toward distraction and people are more distracted now and, you know, people find it hard to read novels. And I look on the bus, I look on the train and nobody’s reading books anymore and that has changed because people were reading books in the past. I think what happens is people perhaps, because they’re not reading books now, the reading muscle has weakened and so, they’re less able to read challenging books now and so they prefer to read fiction, it’s much more comfortable for them. In the past, there was a large work of literature that was being talked about. People would make an attempt to read it. Now I think people don’t really bother.

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B.C.: What about yourselves as readers: what are you reading now? C.C.: Right now, on the plane, I brought over a collection of essays on Eugene O’Neill. That’s a very old book. I read some critical writing as well, just to learn more about art, probably more than anything else, and where the ideas of their work would have come from, and the things that are going on in the world, at the time that might influence how they work, how did they join that… P.L.: I’ve just finished Beckett actually. I was reading some Beckett, just for fun. I was reading some Marina Carr: she’s extraordinary.

B.C.: What did you read by Beckett: his novels or plays? P.L.: I read Endgame, reread it. I admire greatly how he abandoned the heritage of the luggage of language and wrote in French to escape all of this stuff. So he could get closer in his way to metaphysical truths. I’m reading Alice Oswald’s new book of poetry, Falling Awake. She’s an incredible writer. At the moment, I’m reading a lot of poetry, possibly because redrafting a work of poetry has certain standards. I think it’s useful when, redrafting your fiction, you can borrow from something like poetry. It reminds you that there’s a standard of precision.

B.C.: If you wrote an essay or a nonfiction book, what would it be about? P.L.: I don’t know. There is too much… There are too many facts in the world…

B.C.: Mary, you wrote essays yourself, didn’t you? M.C.: Yes, I’ve written a couple of essays about our most famous poet, Seamus Heaney, who died a few years ago. He grew up in rural Ireland, and several generations before him. His poetry and a lot of his stuff speak to me a lot because he’s able to often integrate the personal with the universal and the mythical – often referring to Greek gods. I didn’t study classical literature growing up, but I read Greek mythology and I love the way that everywhere we see signs: we see signs of the same patterns reappearing over and over, whether it is loss or love, or anger or fear or war. The same archetypes repeat themselves and poets especially can do that. They can bring the mythical into the everyday… how things suddenly flood in and give meaning to the moment…

B.C.: Well, thank you so much to all of you for ‘playing the game’... C.C.: You’re welcome, Bertrand. P.L.: Pleasure. M.C.: Thank you. M.F.: That’s lovely, Bertrand. That’s a nice warm-up for the conference…

***

13 After these interviews, authors were asked to sign their books. A round-table discussion was led by Christine Ferniot, a journalist for Lire and Télérama. And at the end of the day, after the deliberation, Ciarán Collins was delighted to hear that he was awarded the Prize ‘Escapades 2017’ for his novel, The Gamal.

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NOTES

1. See the author’s official website : http://www.Ciaráncollinsauthor.com/index.html 2. See website: http://www.artscouncil.ie/Interviews/Literature/Mary-Costello/ 3. See the writer’s official website: http://www.micheleforbesauthor.com/home/ 4. See the writer’s official website: www.paullynchwriter.com/

AUTHOR

BERTRAND CARDIN Bertrand Cardin est professeur des universités dans les départements d’études anglophones et de langues étrangères appliquées de l’Université de Caen Normandie. Spécialiste de littérature irlandaise contemporaine en prose, il est l’auteur de Colum McCann's Intertexts: 'Books Talk to One Another' (Cork University Press, Cork, 2016), de Colum McCann. Intertextes et Interactions (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 2016), de Lectures d’un texte étoilé. ‘Corée’ de John McGahern (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2009) et de Miroirs de la filiation. Parcours dans huit romans irlandais contemporains (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2005). Il a co-dirigé avec Claude Fierobe l’ouvrage Irlande, écritures et réécritures de la Famine (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2007), avec Sylvie Mikowski Ecrivaines irlandaises / Irish Women Writers (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2014) et avec Alexandra Slaby un numéro spécial de la revue Études irlandaises : « Enjeux contemporains en études irlandaises. In Memoriam Paul Brennan » (N°40-1, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Printemps-été 2015). Il a également dirigé la publication collective d’un numéro spécial du Journal of the Short Story in English / Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle consacré à la nouvelle irlandaise du XXIe siècle : “The 21st Century Irish Short Story” (N°63, Presses de l’Université d’Angers, Autumn 2014). Enfin, il est l’auteur de nombreux articles pour des revues scientifiques françaises ou étrangères.

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The Irish Female Migrant, Silence and Family Duty in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

José Carregal-Romero

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The research carried out for this article was funded by the Autonomous Government of Galicia, Spain (Axudas Posdoutorais, ED481 2017/042). This essay is part of the projects FFI2017-84619-P AEI/FEDER, UE and ED431D2017/17, Rede de Investigación de Lingua e Literatura Inglesa e Identidade III, Xunta de Galicia.

1 In this analysis of Brooklyn1, I will tackle the ways in which, both in Ireland and in the diaspora, moral obligations, gender limitations and questions of family duty often stifled Irish women’s autonomy, silencing their own wishes and experiences. Unquestionably, the issue of emigration and the social expectations it entailed have proved to be a most relevant factor in Ireland. As Piaras Mac Éinri explains, between the years of the Great Famine and the 1950s, more than six million people left Ireland, a dramatic event which constituted a serious demographic anomaly, “a unique case in the world2”. In the first half of the twentieth century, economic and social conditions were harsh for the majority of people in Ireland and this situation did not improve after independence in 1922. Emigration was a very common phenomenon in the lives of young women. Although national independence was “expected to signal the end of emigration through the provision of employment”, the truth was that “women’s employment stagnated or declined from the 1920s to the 1980s3”. As has been noticed, women’s emigration was primarily the consequence of unemployment and the low marriage rate in the Republic, since “as soon as young Irish women realised that there was ‘no husband and no job at home’, they departed in greater numbers4”.

2 Women’s migration clearly contradicted the ethos of the newly independent Irish State, where nationalist groups promoted that the Irish woman’s proper place was the home:

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“Until the 1950s at least, women’s migration was variously constructed as a loss of national breeding stock, a threat to women’s ‘purity’, and potentially undermining of their national and religious identities5”. In order to stop Irish women from migrating, the Government studied drastic measures of containment. Fintan O’Toole relates that: At the beginning of 1995… State papers revealed that, in 1948, the Church and the then Government had seriously discussed the idea, put forward by the Archbishop of Tuam, of banning young women from leaving Ireland at all, so as to protect them from ‘moral, national and social perils6’.

3 Proposals such as the one mentioned by O’Toole were eventually deemed impractical in a nation where, due to widespread deprivation, many “Irish parents continued to dispatch daughters in their mid-teens to a foreign country in the expectation that their remittances would help support the family back home7”. Forced migration or exile thus proved to be another determinant factor in the lives of many women in mid-twentieth century Ireland for varied reasons, which include family duty, poverty or lack of marriage prospects. Additionally, many other women were also compelled to migrate due to the morally conservative nature of Irish society: “Irish women’s migration throughout the twentieth century was also a response to the regulation of women’s sexuality and of pregnancy outside marriage8”.

4 Many representatives of the Church and the State continually expressed their concerns on the “moral dangers” that awaited Irish female emigrants in foreign lands. However, Irish women’s experiences, opinions and anxieties were often silenced. Aidan Arrowsmith draws attention to the fact that: At the heart of the Irish emigrant experience itself there is a marked silence… This silence is particularly notable with regard to Irish women. Despite consistently outnumbering male emigrants from Ireland to England, women’s voices are absent from the texts and debates surrounding the issue9.

5 Tellingly, as I argue here, this cultural silence surrounding the subjectivity of the female emigrant reverberates in the complex manner in which Tóibín constructs his central character in the novel, the highly observant but restrained Eilis. In fact, one of the most salient characteristics of Tóibín’s narrative is the tensions between Eilis’s inner reflections and her missed possibilities for self-assertion. As Tory Young rightly puts it, “the reader is privy to Eilis’s feelings and is often tormented by her inability to voice them10”. Unable to assert herself, Tóibín’s protagonist is “without voice11” and “her choices can hardly be described as free12”.

6 Among his Irish contemporaries, Tóibín is not alone in his intellectual and artistic exploration of female experiences of migration and exile. In Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, Ellen McWilliams observes: “Whilst historically women have frequently been overlooked or made to serve an emblematic or symbolic function in the portrayal of exile in Irish writing, more recent treatments of exile and migration show a keen interest in reclaiming the history of the Irish woman emigrant and in explicitly addressing this lacuna13”. As McWilliams suggests, the topics of exile and homecoming have featured prominently in the Irish literary tradition, but not from a female viewpoint. María Amor Barros-del Río also addresses this issue in her analysis of recent Irish novels focusing women and migration, including Edna O’Brien’s The Light of Evening (2006), Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side (2011) and Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015). Like McWilliams, Barros-del Río highlights that, in recent years, “[this] profusion of migrant fiction suggests a need to express cultural identity negotiations, a matter still unresolved, in particular those of women abroad14”.

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7 Tóibín began to write his emigration novel in 2006 partly as a reaction to Irish xenophobia and the result of the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum15, which removed the right to automatic citizenship to children born to immigrant parents. As Tóibín acknowledges: “Some of the impulse for [Brooklyn] is entirely political. There were times… where I felt alone in my views on immigration16”. In his writings and public lectures, Tóibín has repeatedly expressed his deep dismay at the result of this referendum, regarding it as a regressive decision that transgresses basic individual rights. In a recent interview, he declared that: “If you are born here [in Ireland] then where else could you be from other than the place where you were born? Blood, maternity, paternity –those issues are very abstract compared to ‘I was born here … that’s what I know17’”. According to Tóibín, citizenship laws should appropriately account for the fact that the individual’s sense of belonging extends beyond questions of descent or parentage. Thus, for Tóibín, the enforcement of an exclusionary model of Irish citizenship based upon notions of bloodline can only serve to increase social divides and perpetuate racist attitudes. Curiously, in Brooklyn the protagonist’s inability to build a decent future and a family life in the moralistic society of 1950s Ireland strikingly compares to the struggle of many immigrants in a much more liberal but racist contemporary Ireland.

8 In Brooklyn, Tóibín presents readers with a central character, Eilis Lacey, who leads a placid existence in 1950s Enniscorthy, co. Wexford, enjoying her social life and having an easy relationship with both her mother and her sister, Rose. Unfortunately, Eilis faces a situation similar to those of young Irish people who, because of the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s18, had to leave Ireland: “There was, at least for the moment, no work for anyone in Enniscorthy, no matter what their qualifications19”. Eilis only finds employment as a part-time shop assistant, working for the exploitative and fastidious Miss Kelly, who keeps a servant, Mary, whom she treats with contempt. Understandably, Rose, Eilis’s sister, is worried and comments that: “[Miss Kelly] has a little slave, doesn’t she? She took her out of a convent” (15). With no family connections and nobody to protect her, Mary finds herself at Miss Kelly’s mercy. Interestingly, Tóibín alludes here to the harsh socio-economic realities of female employment throughout the first half of twentieth century Ireland. In fact, it has been noted that the conditions in which many female shop assistants worked compared to a “system of slavery20”.

9 At home, Eilis shares stories of her “weekly humiliation at Miss Kelly’s hands” (24), but little does she suspect that this prompts Rose to secretly arrange her settlement in New York with the help of Father Flood, an Irish priest on his holidays from America. Symptomatically, nobody asks Eilis whether she wants to leave Ireland. Commenting precisely on the issue of Eilis’s powerlessness, Young takes the view that the protagonist’s “behavior is bound by assumed conventions21.” When comparing Joyce’s “Eveline” (1904) and Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Young calls attention to the two young women’s role as daughters in a patriarchal society: Eveline and Eilis are alike in pondering over decisions, or the inability to make them. This is unsurprising: as young, unmarried women in Ireland, even fifty years apart, a lifetime of obeying parental rule meant that they had no experience of taking responsibility. When considering their departures, Eveline and Eilis are good at thinking about staying in the world they know, and less good at imagining the untold story of their future22.

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10 Though I agree with Young, I would also suggest that Tóibín’s protagonist (and Joyce’s, as well) is simply not expected to make such decisions in the first place23. Early in the text, we learn that Eilis had once the intention to migrate to England, but her mother had rejected her idea outright. When Father Flood visits the family, he does not address himself to Eilis, but to her mother. On seeing her mother’s positive response, Eilis discovers that the plans for her migration will go ahead: “Her mother had been so opposed to her going to England that this new realization came to Eilis as a shock” (23). Tóibín, then, shows how Eilis’s familial role connects with her lack of authority to assert her own will, which leads her to remain silent about her own wishes: “She would have given anything to be able to say plainly that she did not want to go, that Rose can go instead, that she would happily stay here” (31). As Laura Elena Savu succinctly explains, “in Brooklyn, as in Tóibín's other novels, intimations of attachment are strongly felt but rarely spoken… Much of the action, in fact, takes place below the surface, in the resonance of tone, gesture, and silence24”.

11 Equally relevant to Eilis’s self-suppression is the family dynamics of silence, caused by the death of the father and the emigration of the three brothers. In his analysis, Eibhear Walshe puts forward the idea that “one of the central elements in the novel is the repressed and unspoken emotional life of the Lacey family, depleted by death and exile, and this habit of silence, inherited by Eilis, haunts the most important decisions of her life25”. Since the brothers live now in England, the two sisters and their mother had already endured the pain of losing family to emigration. Liam McIlvanny suggests here a link between the social and personal silences pervading the Irish experience of emigration: For much of the history of the Irish state, emigration was a national embarrassment, something it was difficult to talk about. This was equally true, Tóibín’s novel suggests, at the level of the family. Eilis Lacey is leaving, perhaps for good, but her mother and sister can’t talk to her about it26.

12 Eilis remembers that, in the days before her youngest brother departed for England, “they would do anything to distract themselves from the thought that they were losing him” (28). The same silence surrounds Eilis’s imminent emigration. Along with this silence comes the resignation that, after all, emigration “was part of the life the town” (24). Thus, significantly, Tóibín does not present his character’s future emigration to New York as an act of freedom or emancipation. Instead, her departure is viewed as an almost inevitable situation that brings enforced displacement.

13 Once she is in New York, Eilis is placed under the care of the Irish diasporic community, strongly characterised by its parochialism and norms of female respectability. Here, Tóibín –who seems to have carried out extensive research into 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn and the Irish diaspora– reproduces a detailed account of what life might have been like for a young Irish woman at that time. In her study of Irish immigration to 1950s New York, historian Linda Dowling Almeida notes that Irish migrants entered “established and maturing ethnic communities and in some way needed the existing community to facilitate their transition to America27”. Almeida further remarks that “family, church, and ethnic organizations dominated community life among the Irish… The parish to which one belonged typically defined social and neighborhood boundaries28”. This type of community life had a greater impact on the experiences of young unmarried women. Though the diasporic Irish community grants a sense of both security and identity, it can eventually limit the individual’s desires for self-invention

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and autonomy. As Breda Gray has also argued, even though migration entailed an element of romanticism and individual freedom, “there is some evidence that Irish migrant women’s experiences were also dominated by the cult of domesticity and Catholic Church efforts in their countries of destination to prevent the development of individualism and the occupation of the sexual self29”.

14 Even if Tóibín does not portray the Irish community as being blatantly oppressive, clear norms of behaviour exist for young women like Eilis. As soon as the protagonist arrives, Father Flood finds lodgings for her at Mrs Kehoe’s, an “Irish place” (193), where she lives with other women either from Ireland or descendants of Irish immigrants. Within the four walls of this Irish home in Brooklyn, the pious and self-righteous Mrs Kehoe acts as the guardian of strict standards of female decency and the so-called “Irish manners”. In one of their dinners, she makes it clear how her lodgers should behave: “She did not like the girls talking among themselves, or discussing matters she knew nothing about, and she did not encourage any mention of boyfriends” (54).

15 Another figure of great importance for Eilis is Father Flood, who not only sponsors her migration and secures her a job as a shop assistant, but also enrolls her in night classes in accountancy at Brooklyn College. Interestingly, even though Tóibín characterises the priest as truly benevolent, he also portrays him as exerting great control on Eilis’s life. Grateful to the priest for all his guidance, the protagonist cannot avoid asking him why he is being so generous. Father Flood’s response –“we need Irish girls in Brooklyn” (78)– certainly adds some ambivalence to the apparently altruistic nature of his actions. Hence, whilst receiving the genuine kindness of the priest, Eilis is at the same time “position[ed] as an object of exchange between cultures30”. As a young woman living in the diaspora, she is expected to adapt to the moulds of her Irish Catholic background.

16 In her analysis of female migration in contemporary Irish novels, Barros-del Río notes that the “social networks of Irish migrants abroad functioned as active social forces that framed their limited scope of agency. Consequently, these novels witness the pressure exerted upon the female migrants as ineluctable forces that molded their position in the new society31”. What is relevant about Tóibín’s character is that, through her strategic use of silence, she manages to evade some of values and moral codes of her diasporic community. For example, at the Irish dancehall –where Irish women are expected to dance with Irish men– Eilis meets the Italian Tony, with whom she starts a relationship. Aware of the racist attitudes of some of her roommates32, Eilis maintains a self-protective silence about Tony at the beginning of their relationship. Later on, when Eilis’s boyfriend is introduced to Mrs Kehoe, he knows that he has to put on his best manners and pretend to be Irish. Tony’s ploy certainly succeeds, since Mrs Kehoe will consider him a proper suitor for Eilis, “with nice old-fashioned Irish manners” (135). Eilis’s landlady, who worries about Italians going to Irish dancehalls and spreading “immorality” (104), becomes easily fooled by Tony’s performance. In short, Tóibín ironically brings to light the inconsistencies of fixed ideas on what it means to be Irish, as Mrs Kehoe’s prejudices are mocked.

17 Yet, Brooklyn also shows that, at the time, a woman’s personal independence was often threatened by familial obligations. After the sudden death of Rose, “Eilis’s mother wrote and mentioned how lonely she was and how long the day was and how long the night” (191). Mrs Kehoe also expresses her compassion for Eilis’s “poor mother” (175) and the protagonist’s brother, Jack, writes a letter to urge her to travel to Enniscorthy to be with her: “I know she’d love to see you, she keeps saying that is the only thing she

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is hoping for… I think she wants you to come home” (180). Due to her grief and social pressures, Eilis’s appreciation of her time away from her family drastically changes: “It changed everything Eilis thought about her time in Brooklyn; it made everything that had happened to her seem small” (177). As Costello-Sullivan aptly argues, Eilis is manipulated by her family and thus “reverts to familial patterns, the pull of the space she traditionally holds in her family and culture proving too strong to resist33”. This traditional space for a woman like Eilis means that she is morally obliged to disrupt her life abroad and take care of her lonely mother in Ireland. This type of familial behaviour was characteristic of traditional rural life in Ireland, when one of the daughters was always “pressurised to stay and care for an ailing parent34”.

18 Thus, the tragic news of Rose’s death provokes in Eilis a moral dilemma, as she now has to choose between her planned future in Brooklyn and her familial obligations towards her mother in Enniscorthy. When Eilis shares with Tony the content of Jack’s letter urging her to travel to Ireland, she becomes convinced that she “had made [Tony] see where her duty lay” (183). Tóibín characterises Eilis through her typical indecisiveness as she faces her dilemma: she is sure that she would like to stay with Tony, but she then reasons that the letter “made plain to him that she belonged somewhere else, a place that he could never know” (184). Because he senses that they will break up, Tony demonstrates his grief openly, and this, in turn, helps Eilis reach for him and express her need for emotional closeness. This situation leads to their first sexual relationship, as Eilis invites Tony to spend the night together in her room at Mrs Kehoe’s. Surprised by her “unspeakable” transgression, Eilis ponders: “In all the outrages that could be committed by the lodgers, this had never been mentioned as a possibility by the lodgers themselves or by Mrs Kehoe. It was in the realm of the unthinkable” (187-188).

19 Interestingly, though this diasporic community has its strict rules of female behaviour, Eilis –Mrs Kehoe’s favourite lodger because of her “manners” (99)– defies social expectations by dating an Italian and having premarital sex with him in her own bedroom. Despite the readings that consider Tóibín’s protagonist as being utterly passive, or a “spectator in her own life35”, I would argue that the writer constructs a much more complex character. Eilis is, thus, presented as a young woman who at times employs tactics of silence and concealment while allowing herself some autonomy away from the expectations of others.

20 Nonetheless, as Tóibín is careful to show in his fiction, his protagonists are always tied to their time, place and personal history. Tóibín’s characters often have a rich inner life, but public factors influence them irremediably, affecting their decisions and self- image. Before she departs for Enniscorthy to visit her mother, Tony persuades Eilis to secretly marry him as a means of securing her return to America. According to Dilek Inan, the protagonist submits to Tony’s wish because “she does not have a strong sense of herself, but she has a strong sense of what others make of her36”. Though Inan’s argument remarks the actual fact that Eilis is constantly manipulated by others, I would also argue here that her strong attachment to Tony cannot be ignored, nor her sexual inexperience and her fear of being pregnant. Before Tony proposes, marriage is also mentioned by a priest when Eilis goes to confession: “What had happened between her and Tony… was maybe a sign from God that they should consider getting married and raising a family” (191). Marriage is thus seen as the means to make up for the “sin” of their premarital sexual relationship, a way to placate the possible danger of pregnancy and illegitimate motherhood. Hence, I would argue that it is not only Tony’s

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persuasion that drives Eilis to a hasty marriage, but also the sexual morality of her time.

21 Newly arrived in Enniscorthy on her visit, Eilis finds herself strangely distanced from her mother. She laments that, in all those days, “her mother had not asked her one question about her time in America, or even her trip home” (204). Eilis is not encouraged to speak about her American experience, but neither is she eager to do so. Readers soon learn that, whilst Eilis does not mention Tony, the mother hides her motives of wanting Eilis to remain in Enniscorthy. Mother and daughter are, in fact, alike in being dishonest to one another. This picture attunes with Tóibín’s other fictional families, fraught with secrets and obstacles to communication, with private feelings that are hard to explain and personal interests that remain unsaid.

22 On the occasion of a friend of Eilis’s wedding, the mother subtly machinates her daughter’s extended period in the town: ‘When is the wedding?’ ‘On Saturday, 27 June.’ ‘But I’ll be gone back,’ Eilis said. ‘Your mother said you’ll still be there. She wrote and accepted the invitation on behalf of the two of you.’ (210)

23 From the beginning, Eilis senses her mother’s unspoken claim on her, which discourages the protagonist from breaking her silence about Tony. Another reason for her silence on Tony connects with social sensibilities and the protagonist’s need to keep up with appearances. There is one moment in which Eilis’s two friends, Annette and Nancy, ask her whether she has someone waiting for her in New York. Eilis decides not to speak about Tony, as her friends would ask her about the circumstances of their engagement: “They would respond with silence and bewilderment. It would seem too strange” (211).

24 What is also true is that Eilis does not mention Tony because of her newly found illusions of remaking her life in Ireland. This situation causes much psychic strain and Eilis begins to feel “as though she were two people, one who had battled against two cold winters and hard days in Brooklyn and had fallen in love there, and the other who was her mother’s daughter” (218). Her two family roles, her mother’s daughter and Tony’s wife, belong to two distinct spaces that cannot be brought together. Arguably, because of her cultural upbringing, Eilis still sees herself primarily in relation to her family roles. This self-perception implies moral obligations that restrict her freedom and agency.

25 In the course of her extended time in Enniscorthy, Eilis falls into a romantic relationship with Jim Farrell, whom the neighbours view “as a great catch” (234). Despite her initial reticence, Eilis lets herself be carried away by his attentions: “She smiled at the thought that she would go along with most of it. She was on her holidays and it was harmless” (223). Because of Jim’s openness towards her and his desire to build a future together in the town, Eilis’s appreciations rapidly change and she seriously considers staying in Ireland. To complicate matters further, Eilis’s mother becomes exultant at the prospect of her daughter marrying Jim. On seeing Jim and Eilis together at Nancy’s wedding, a neighbour approaches them and remarks how “delighted” Eilis’s mother will be if they marry (238). Moreover, as time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult for the protagonist to mention her American marriage, as this would only bring disappointment, incomprehension and moral judgment.

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26 No matter what new opportunities she may be given now, Eilis’s independence is already compromised by her marriage to Tony, whose warm presence has now become “merely a shadow” (237). The idea of divorcing him comes to her mind, but divorce is seen as foreign and outrageous in 1950s Enniscorthy: “The only divorced people anyone in the town knew were Elizabeth Taylor and perhaps some other film stars” (236). Furthermore, when the protagonist thinks about Jim’s reaction were she to tell him about Tony, she believes that “it could not be said; his response to her deception could not be imagined. She would have to go back” (242). Eilis’s worst fears are confirmed when knowledge of her commitment in America reaches Enniscorthy. Acting as a guardian of “Irish propriety”, Miss Kelly, the protagonist’s former employer, has a private conversation with Eilis implying that she knows about the double life she is leading. Miss Kelly gloats over her victory against “immorality” when she tells the scared Eilis that “you can fool most people, but you can’t fool me” (245). It is then disclosed that Miss Kelly is Mrs Kehoe’s cousin, a discovery which fills Eilis with terror should her marriage with Tony be discovered in the town. In spite of the distance between the two places, Eilis cannot evade the transnational surveillance of Irish Catholic morality, personified here by both Mrs Kehoe and Miss Kelly. Therefore, in Tóibín’s novel, as Eve Walsh Stoddard eloquently puts it, “the transnational linkages between Ireland in Enniscorthy and Ireland in Brooklyn turn into ties that bind, and perhaps strangle37”. Eilis has no option but to leave Enniscorthy and escape scandal.

27 The final scene of Brooklyn concerns Eilis’s confession to her mother, when she informs her that she is married and must go back to America. Shocked by the news, the mother stays evasive and apparently indifferent to her daughter’s distress, though she does reveal some of her repressed anguish: “If I say any more, I’ll only cry” (249). As the protagonist heads towards America, she does not know what situation she will meet on her arrival38. Eilis imagines the years ahead, when this final break with the mother and her separation from Enniscorthy “would come to mean more and more to her” (252). In her reading of the ending, Marisol Morales-Ladrón rightly notes how “both her real mother and her allegorical (mother)land will callously dispatch Eilis, incapable as they are to accommodate the uncertainties and ambiguities that have molded her39”. Eilis, as Morales-Ladrón contends, is forced to leave because of the social mores of her native Enniscorthy. In fact, the protagonist’s last actions in the novel are propelled by sentiments of fear and anxiety. With this ending, Tóibín powerfully symbolises how, at that time in Ireland, women’s lives were constantly marked by the threat of social exclusion.

28 To conclude, if Eilis’s first migration is caused by her lack of opportunities in Enniscorthy, her second one is induced by the danger inherent in a sexual scandal which could cause this young woman’s stigmatisation and marginalisation. Tellingly, in both cases, the protagonist remains reluctant about her departure –thus, in the figure of Eilis, Tóibín dramatises “the failure of emigration as liberation40”. Furthermore, just as women’s voices in Ireland were absent in public discussions about emigration, so is Eilis’s voice in the novel when it comes to her interactions with others, as she is seldom asked about her own needs and experiences. Consequently, in Tóibín’s Brooklyn, the reader is confronted with a protagonist whose experiences are shaped by a personal history of silence and self-suppression. Throughout the novel, Tóibín makes readers share his central character’s insecurities, indecisions and renunciations in the face of external circumstances that reduce her options in life.

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29 In his novel of emigration, Tóibín effectively exposes the restrictions of the limited constructions of gender, sexuality and the family in Irish society. According to the moral standards of her time, Eilis becomes a transgressor who defies the norms of “female decency”. Yet, Tóibín sets these transgressions against the repressive control of a patriarchal society that seriously restricts Eilis’s agency. Though the protagonist deceives her mother, Tony and Jim, Tóibín also shows how the manipulated Eilis accepts the wishes and decisions of others even if these affect her life in irrevocable ways, as demonstrated by her first migration to America and her marriage to Tony. Eilis leads a secret life on her return to Enniscorthy because of her necessity to explore new possibilities other than those demarcated by her moral obligations to others. Nonetheless, it is also true that, by remaining silent about her commitment to Tony, Eilis ironically conforms to her role as a dutiful daughter who fulfills her mother’s expectations. In the end, her family duty to her husband prevails due to questions of social respectability and the impossibility to build a decent life in a society that would judge her transgression harshly.

NOTES

1. Brooklyn was adapted into film in 2015 by John Crowley. The film became a major commercial success in the United States. According to Pat Brereton, Crowley’s film “succeeded in winning audiences in the US, speaking to and for the deeply held emotions of a diasporic Irish population who have made America their home”. See Brereton, Pat. “Review of Brooklyn”, Estudios Irlandeses, 11, p. 285-287, 287. 2. Piaras Mac Éinri, “From Clare to Here”, Études Irlandaises, 25:1, 2000. Available at http://migration.ucc.ie/claretext.htm (Accessed 3 March 2014). 3. Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd and Bernardette Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714-1960, Liverpool, Liverpool UP, 2013, p. 106. 106. 4. Ibid., p. 95. 5. Breda Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 2. 6. Fintan O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin. Dublin, New Island Books, 1996, p. 17. 7. Mary E. Daly, “Irish women and the diaspora: why they matter”, in MacPherson P.A.J. and Hickman, M. J. (eds.), Women and Irish diaspora identities: Theories, Concepts and New Perspectives, Manchester, Manchester UP, 2014, p. 17-33, 18. 8. Gray, op. cit, p. 2. 9. Aidan Arrowsmith, “M/otherlands: Literature, gender, diasporic identity”, in Scott Brewster and David Alderson (eds.), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space, London, Routledge, 1999, p. 129-144, 129. 10. Tory Young, “Brooklyn as the ‘untold story’ of ‘Eveline’: Reading Joyce and Tóibín with Ricoeur.” Journal of Modern Literature, 37:2, 2014, p. 123-140, 131.

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11. Ibid., p. 131. 12. Ibid., p. 131. 13. Ellen McWilliams, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, London, Routledge, 2013, 3. 14. María Amor Barros-del Río, “On Both Sides of the Atlantic: Migration, Gender, and Society in Contemporary Irish Literature.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies, 6:2, 2016, p. 83–89, 85. 15. Historically, Ireland had been a country of mass emigration, and this pattern changed radically during the years of economic prosperity of the so called Celtic Tiger (1995-2008), when large numbers of workers from Eastern Europe, China and Africa were drawn to the country’s prosperous economy. Xenophobic attitudes flourished in Ireland, and the so-called “non-nationals” began to be perceived as a threat to the country’s well-being and prosperity. There were also stories in the media about “non- national” pregnant women expressly travelling to Ireland to give birth to their babies, who would then acquire an Irish and European citizenship. For a detailed analysis, see especially Brandi, S, “Unveiling the Ideological Construction of the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum: A Critical Analystical Approach.” Translocations, 2:1, 2007, p. 26-47. 16. Paul Morton, “An Interview with Colm Tóibín.” Bookslut. Available at: [http:// www.bookslut.com/features/2009_06_014545.php]. Accessed: 14 March, 2015. 17. Carly McLoughlin,“‘Images of Ireland that Matter Now’: Colm Tóibín in Conversation”, in Carmen Zamorano Llena and Billy Gray (eds.), Authority and Wisdom in the New Ireland, Bern, Peter Lang, 2016, p. 73-79, 75. 18. Ironically, Brooklyn was published in 2009, at the outset of another major economic crisis in Ireland, which led to the departure of a new generation of Irish migrants. A recent report states that “in the wake of the collapse of the Irish banking system in 2008 and the subsequent economic crisis, emigration rose substantially. The number of Irish people leaving more than tripled between 2008 and 2012.” See Irial Glynn, Tomás Kelly and Piaras Mac Éinri, The Re-Emergence of Migration from Ireland, Dublin, Migration Policy Institute, 2015, 5. Available at: [https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/ reemergence-emigration-ireland-new-trends-old-story]. Accessed 5 July 2018. 19. Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 11. Further page references occur in the main text. 20. Meaney, O’Dowd and Whelan, op. cit, p. 97. 21. Young, op. cit, p. 138. 22. Young, op. cit, p. 133. 23. For another comparative analysis between Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and Tóibín’s Brooklyn, see Carregal Romero and Caneda Cabrera, “Female Mobility in James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’ and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.” Papers on Joyce 19/20, 2013-2014, p. 55-74. 24. Laura Elena Savu, “The Ties that Bind: A Portrait of the Irish Immigrant as a Young Woman in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.” PLL: Papers on Language & Literature 49:3, 2013, p. 250-272, 255. 25. Eibhear Walshe, A Different Story: the Writings of Colm Tóibín, Sallins, Irish Academic Press, 2013, p. 131.

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26. Liam McIlvanny, “The Coldest Place on Earth.” London Review of Books 31:12, 2009. Available at: [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n12/liam-mcilvanney/the-coldest-place-on- earth]. Accessed: 23 May 2017. 27. Linda Dowling Almeida, Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945-1995, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 2001, p. 4. 28. Ibid., 37. 29. Gray, op. cit, 28. 30. Claire Bracken, “Review of Brooklyn.” Estudios Irlandeses 5, 2010, p 166-167, 167. 31. Barros-del Río, op. cit, 87. 32. For instance, the racist Miss McAdam readily complains that she “didn’t come all the way to America, thank you, to hear people talking Italian on the street or see them wearing funny hats” (56). 33. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín, Bern, Peter Lang, 2012, p. 214. 34. Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change, London, MacMillan, 1986, p. 33. 35. Bracken, op. cit, p. 166. 36. Dilek Inan, “Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn: Caught Between Home and Exile.” Philologist: Journal of Language, Literary and Cultural Studies 5, 2012, p. 96- 104, 101. 37. Eve Walsh Stoddard, “Home and Belonging among Irish Migrants: Transnational versus Placed Identities in The Light of Evening and Brooklyn.” Eire-Ireland, 47:1&2, 2012, p. 147-171, 154. 38. John Crowley’s Brooklyn (2015) adds a final sequence in which Eilis returns to New York and reunites with a welcoming and loving Tony. Thus, whereas Tóibín’s story finishes with a tone of uncertainty, Crowley’s filmic adaptation opts for a happy ending. According to Brereton, Crowley’s decision is understandable, as it reflects “the screen medium’s demand for narrative closure”. Brereton, op. cit, 286. 39. Marisol Morales-Ladrón, “Demistifying Stereotypes of the Irish Migrant Young Woman in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 68, 2014, p. 173-184, 180. 40. Edward A. Hagan, “Colm Tóibín’s ‘As Though’ Reality in Mothers and Sons, Brooklyn, and The Empty Family.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 16:1, 2012, p. 31-47, 42.

ABSTRACTS

Set in the 1950s, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) traces the life experiences of Eilis Lacey, who is urged by her family to migrate to Brooklyn due to the lack of opportunities for young women in her native Enniscorthy, a small town in rural Ireland. Just as she begins to establish a new life in America, a tragic event at home calls her back to Ireland. During her visit, Eilis faces the terrible dilemma of having to choose between her sense of familial duty and the fulfillment of her own desires. In his novel, Tóibín provides a subtle and complex portrayal of the socio-familial

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pressures affecting the life of the protagonist, whose unverbalised thoughts speak for the decisions she is not allowed to make. In this way, Tóibín denounces the historical and cultural silences surrounding the subjectivity of the Irish female migrant.

Colm Tóíbín’s Brooklyn (2009) traces the experiences of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who lives with her widowed mother and her older sister Rose in 1950s Enniscorthy, a small town in Ireland. Unfortunately, in the economically depressed Ireland of mid-twentieth century, opportunities for young women like Eilis are scarce. Even if the protagonist would like to remain in her hometown, her resolute sister arranges her settlement in New York, where an Irish priest secures her a job and a place to live within the diasporic community. Just as she begins to establish a new life on the other side of the Atlantic, a tragic event at home calls her back to Ireland. During her visit, Eilis faces the great dilemma of having to choose between duty and the fulfillment of her personal desires. She is finally forced to leave Enniscorthy once again, due to a prior engagement in America.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn, Irlande, migration, silence, genre et sexualité Keywords: Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn, Ireland, migration, silence, gender and sexuality

AUTHOR

JOSÉ CARREGAL-ROMERO José Carregal-Romero obtained his PhD from the University of Vigo (Spain) in 2016, with a dissertation on Colm Tóibín’s fiction, which received the Inés Praga Terente Award by the Spanish Association of Irish Studies (AEDEI).He is now in receipt of a post-doctoral fellowship awarded by the Autonomous Government of Galicia, Spain (Axudas posdoutorais 2017), and is conducting part of his research at University College Dublin (2017-2018) and University College Cork (2018-2019).

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L’échec du mythe de la virilité dans The Ultras d’Eoin McNamee

Anne Duflos

Introduction

1 Dans The Ultras, McNamee retrace la vie et les derniers moments de l’officier britannique Robert Nairac, homme qui suscite encore de vives polémiques. Les circonstances de sa mort restent aujourd’hui encore énigmatiques1. Pour certains, c’est un assassin, impliqué dans plusieurs meurtres de civils et de membres de la PIRA, et pour d’autres, c’est un homme héroïque et courageux, sauvagement assassiné par la PIRA. Officiellement, la dernière interprétation prime : il reçoit, de façon posthume, la croix de Georges, l’un des honneurs les plus élevés pour les civils2. C’est autour de ce personnage très controversé, cristallisant les tensions entre communautés, que l’auteur de The Ultras tisse son intrigue. La propre quête de McNamee pour découvrir la « vérité » sur Nairac est mise en abyme dans les recherches obsessionnelles d’un ex- policier corrompu, Agnew, qui tente de percer à jour la véritable identité de Robert Nairac : il est persuadé d’accéder à une forme de rédemption en découvrant la vérité sur son implication dans divers homicides (le paramilitaire républicain John Francis Green, les membres du groupe de musique country, The Miami Showband) et en levant le voile sur les circonstances de sa disparition.

2 C’est donc à travers ce cheminement que Nairac apparaît comme un héros, artefact mythifié d’une virilité toujours en perte de vitesse. Ce protagoniste devient alors symbole d’une virilité perdue, expression qui tient du pléonasme tant la notion de virilité s’appuie sur un idéal réactionnaire qui ne s’actualise jamais vraiment dans le présent. Constamment en crise dans la mesure où elle représente un idéal, cette norme n’est jamais tout à fait réalisable, mais pourtant toujours identifiable en ce qu’elle reste une position de pouvoir. De ce processus de sacralisation émerge une fiction de la virilité, comme expression d’une crise profonde de l’autorité. L’anthropologue Jean- Jacques Courtine rapproche la lecture du mythe3 par Claude Lévi-Strauss de la virilité pour en dégager des caractéristiques communes : « Comme le mythe, la virilité ‘se

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rapporte toujours à des événements passés, ‘avant la création du monde’, ou ‘pendant les premiers âges’, en tout cas ‘il y a longtemps’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978)4 ». Nairac incarne cette figure du passé, symbole d’une autre époque, d’avant les traités de paix, ce moment où le compromis n’existe pas, où les agences britanniques fourmillent dans le nord de l’Irlande et cherchent chacune à s’illustrer comme acteur majeur dans le conflit. Six ans après la signature du Good Friday Agreement, The Ultras d’Eoin McNamee, loin de s’inscrire dans le discours optimiste de la « propagande de la paix5 » pour reprendre l’expression de McLaughlin et Baker, est un roman résolument tourné vers le passé qui, en témoignant d’un présent sinistre et lugubre, laisse émerger une voix dissidente.

3 Tout d’abord, il s’agira d’examiner les stratégies littéraires qui mettent à l’épreuve ce mythe de la virilité. La pratique de l’estompage conduit à un éclatement référentiel qui jette un voile d’opacité sur le réalisme de The Ultras. Puis, l’analyse du brouillage des différentes strates de narration ainsi que des points de vue des personnages permettra d’interroger la fiabilité du récit. Grâce à ces divers procédés d’écriture, émerge une virilité fantomatique qui met à mal l’optimisme6 du récit de paix exhortant à se détourner du passé sans se questionner sur les conditions nécessaires à la réalisation de cet impératif.

Estompage et éclatement référentielle

4 « ‘Who do you think Nairac was?’ Agnew said. ‘Fucked if I know.’7 ». La réponse de Mallon, un ancien collègue d’Agnew, est sans appel. Tout au long du roman, Nairac est désigné tour à tour par une multitude de dénomination : « army boy », « Army Int », « a major », « A captain », « A Guards captain […] Attached to SAS », « the British captain », « an Englishman in a donkey jacket », « the lost captain », « that English bastard », « the English boy », « the boy soldier », « a deadly boy8 ». Il y a une pluralité de dénominations pour une même référence. Au fil du récit, on se rend compte qu’il n’y a pas véritablement d’unification du discours sur lui : les témoignages concernant la personnalité de Nairac ne concordent pas et régulièrement même se contredisent. Robert Nairac est l’expression du paradoxe :

In college years Robert is described as popular, charismatic. But the impression persists that he is already beginning to evade scrutiny, that he is beginning to drop out of sight. There are contradictions with later accounts, anomalies. He is described as without guile and incapable of a ‘biting or satirical jest’. But his capacity for cruel practical jokes is recorded by witnesses later on. Contemporaries talk about his charm and wit. Later on his capacity for foul language, for gratuitous obscenity is noted. You have a sense of a violent and equivocal undertow9.

5 De ses années universitaires aux années suivantes, les discours jalonnant sa vie sont marqués par des incongruences, qui traduisent une profonde ambiguïté. Cet effet de paradoxe, généré par des témoignages divergents, donne l’illusion d’être en présence d’un individu spécial qui navigue entre des zones opposées. Ainsi, l’oscillation entre des portraits antagonistes donne une représentation déroutante qui laisse perplexe et suggère l’insaisissabilité d’une quelconque vérité concernant Robert Nairac. Cet

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éclatement référentiel est renforcé dans la diégèse par les techniques développées au cours des guerres contre-insurrectionnelles10 qui favorisent un brouillage des finalités, engendrent une dissémination des responsabilités et un évitement des questions éthiques.

6 Par ailleurs, de The Ultras émerge une dissension entre un réalisme forcené – dû au fait que la plupart des événements sont empruntés à l’histoire et que la majorité des personnages ont véritablement existé – et une impression de flottement et de brouillard qui atténue l’expérience réaliste. En effet, au lieu d’avoir recours à l’hypotypose, c’est-à-dire à cette description précise qui transmet la vivacité de la réalité, la narration déploie une technique d’écriture qu’on appelle l’estompage : « Procédé par lequel l’auteur cherche à donner à la réalité un aspect vague11 ».

7 Cette technique est produit grâce à l’emploi d’estompes qui sont mises en œuvre dans le récit. Les formules impersonnelles associées à des termes lexicaux qui contiennent à chaque fois le sème du flou et de l’indétermination sont très répétitives : « there was a sense of », « there was a tendency towards », « there was an undercurrent of secret record », « there was an atmosphere », « there was a smell », « there was a theme of », « there is the impression of », « there were unwanted undertones of erotic possibility », « there was the accumulation of […] there was rumours of12 », etc. Imprégnant la totalité du récit, ces locutions impersonnelles, telles que « there was/were », sont des présentatifs dont la fonction d’assertion est en partie ébranlée par les compléments des présentatifs (« sense », « impression », « atmosphere », « tendency ») qui traduisent l’imprécision. Ainsi, les postulats ne sont jamais tout à fait identifiables et restent toujours vagues. Les substantifs utilisés marquent l’abstraction et mettent à mal le réalisme du roman : « a/the sense of », « atmosphere », « a/the feeling of », « an air of », « an/the impression », « an/the idea of13 ». Cette isotopie de la nébulosité participe de l’estompage qui s’étend à tout le roman, enveloppant le réel d’un filtre brumeux. L’alternance entre article indéfini et défini indique à quel point l’indéfini a envahi le champ référentiel. Ce qui est indéterminé à l’origine devient une sensation connue du locuteur si bien que se créent des anaphores associatives. L’indétermination se répand : l’inconnu devient une composante habituelle et familière de l’univers narré. Cette présupposition d’existence d’un vague absolu, d’une abstraction toujours déjà-là, gagne les lecteurs et complexifie l’identification référentielle : la réalité s’enveloppe d’un voile, un filtre floute le contour des objets et des situations. L’incertitude généralisée s’étend aux personnages et aux lecteurs qui remettent systématiquement en question la fiabilité du narrateur.

8 Cet estompage est littéralement représenté sur une photo satellite de Belfast que David, chargé des opérations psychologiques au sein des services secrets britanniques, a accroché sur l’un des murs de son bureau : « It had a blurry feel to it. The streets were indistinct in places, shadowy and ill-defined. The purpose of the image was to provide a clear strategic overview, but in fact it suggested shadowy activity, something barely discerned flooding in from the suburbs, the far-flung industrial estates14 ».

9 Comme on l’a vu pour les substantifs tels que « sense », « atmosphere », « tendency », il y a dans The Ultras le recours très explicite à des termes dont le signifié évoque littéralement l’imprécision et propage directement le flou. C’est le cas encore de l’utilisation extrêmement récurrente du pronom indéfini « something » qui favorise l’indétermination référentielle générale concourant à rendre cet effet brumeux, l’impression d’un réalisme vague et un effet d’oralité. À ce pantonyme se joint l’emploi

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foisonnant du verbe d’état « sembler » (« to seem ») qui marque clairement la modalité de l’énonciation et laisse transparaître à la fois la subjectivité du narrateur et son champ limité de connaissance qui paraît se borner à celui des apparences et des hypothèses. De même, l’expression comparative « as if » est utilisée de manière particulièrement fréquente dans le roman. Le stylisticien Henri Morier appelle « estompe » l’image impressive ou hypothétique, [i]mage qui ne repose pas sur la comparaison objective, valable pour chacune de deux réalités connues, mais sur la comparaison subjective, établie entre un objet connu et un second objet sans rapport formel, de poids, de masse, ni de couleur avec le premier, mais qui produit sur la sensibilité de l’auteur une impression analogue à celle que produirait le premier15.

10 L’expression comparative « as if » foisonne dans The Ultras. C’est le cas lorsque Nairac, pendant son entraînement de boxe, se scrute dans le miroir jusqu’à ce qu’il éprouve la sensation qu’il observe une illustration d’un livre d’anatomie appartenant à son père16. On a accès à l’image de Nairac tel qu’il se perçoit : il a l’impression de correspondre au modèle de virilité transmis par la figure paternelle. Le sujet a la sensation d’incarner l’image souhaitée. De même, plus loin, David éprouve le sentiment que Nairac est autorisé à entrer dans son bureau17, mais cela reste impalpable et intuitif.

11 Ce que dit Henri Morier à propos de ce procédé rhétorique est éclairant dans le cas de Nairac : « l’image hypothétique18 établit un rapport avec l’invisible ; elle ouvre la porte à toutes les intuitions de l’au-delà : elle ne peut se déployer que dans un espace mystique19 ». Le recours à cette estompe transmet ainsi un caractère transcendant à Nairac et contribue à la mythification de ce dernier.

12 La stratégie textuelle de l’estompage consolide simultanément le mythe de la virilité de Nairac tout en le troublant, comme dans cet extrait, qui pointe l’inauthenticité de ce dernier :

Agnew noticed that Robert swore continuously but that there was something awkward in the way he swore, stilted, as if he had learned the words late in life. That he would sometimes insert the swearwords into the wrong part of the sentence. You had the feeling that he was working too hard at the sentence. The constructions seemed laboured over and unwieldy20.

13 L’impression d’Agnew suggère que la façon de parler de Robert Nairac est artificielle et peu naturelle, ce qui révèle l’échec de sa performance. Ce passage associe les différentes estompes vues précédemment : image impressive/hypothétique (« as if »), le « you » générique, le substantif à la connotation vague et subjective « feeling » et le verbe d’état « seem ». L’estompage a pour effet d’introduire une incertitude sous- jacente, toujours latente, sur la réalité/vérité de cette virilité et une tension incessante entre l’irréel et le réel.

14 À toutes ces estompes qui créent ce brouillage référentiel viennent s’ajouter des imprécisions notables et récurrentes sur des éléments factuels propres au passé historique. Au début du roman, les témoignages sont unanimes pour rapporter que la nuit de l’enlèvement de Nairac, il était au Three Steps Inn21. À la fin du roman, il rentre dans le Mountain Inn avant de disparaître22. De même, alors que le meurtre des membres du Miami Showband est, à deux reprises, daté le 31 juillet 197523, l’épisode relaté plus loin place l’événement la nuit du 14 juillet24. Ce brouillage des lieux et des dates, d’une

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part, génère la suspicion et a pour effet de mettre en question la fiabilité des témoignages et des faits, et d’autre part, signale l’impossibilité d’une reconstitution du passé comme une histoire cohérente. Ces événements symbolisent, allégoriquement et de façon métonymique, les différentes interprétations du passé dans le nord de l’Irlande et l’impossible réconciliation autour d’un passé commun. Elmer Kennedy- Andrews explique clairement ces divergences d’interprétations dans le rapport à la violence entretenu par des positions antagonistes : « Within Nationalist history, violence is sanctioned, resistance is self-legitimating, to the extent that it is successful in contributing to the founding of the state. Thus, one man’s ‘terrorist’ is another man’s ‘freedom-fighter’; ‘criminal murder’ in one context is ‘the armed struggle’ in another; an ‘outrage’ at one historical moment is ‘heroic action’ at another. There is state terrorism as well as paramilitary terrorism25 ».

15 Par ailleurs, à mesure que l’histoire se déroule, on assiste à une confusion des points de vue des personnages. Lorsque Knox, un agent britannique des services de renseignements extérieurs (MI6), rend visite à son ex-collègue David, agent britannique chargé des opérations psychologiques (PSYOPs) avant son internement dans une institution psychiatrique, ce dernier observe la tenue vestimentaire de son visiteur : « Knox was wearing a Barbour jacket and a check shirt and looked as if he had just come from a day’s stalking on the moors. Stalk meaning approach under cover. Stalk meaning to steal26 ». La manière de s’exprimer en définissant les différents termes à l’aide de courtes phrases, attribuée jusque-là à Nairac, semble avoir contaminé David. L’instance narrative se perd dans le récit : l’Agnew du temps de la narration abandonne sa reconstitution et sa présence se fait sentir dans le temps de l’histoire racontée. En outre, Agnew commence à s’exprimer de la même façon que Nairac précédemment dans le récit27.

16 Concernant le personnage de Nairac, cette indécision quant au référent dans le réel nous amène à penser que nous sommes bel et bien en présence d’une virilité mythifiée. Dans cette entreprise qui cherche à combler les lacunes autour de Nairac et de sa mort, l’esthétique du mythe est perceptible notamment à travers l’estompage qui donne au passé des allures indistinctes caractéristiques d’un passé mythologique jamais réellement discernable, jamais exactement situable, toujours reconstitué dans un projet présent : « La référence des récits peut paraître appartenir au passé, elle est en réalité toujours contemporaine de cet acte. C’est l’acte présent qui déploie à chaque fois la temporalité éphémère28 ».

17 On observe une nostalgie des temps passés, un engouement pour une époque révolue. Cette virilité apparaît comme l’objet d’un deuil sans fin : McNamee donne à voir des personnages masculins dont le deuil de la virilité est inachevé. Malgré la fin des métarécits propres à la postmodernité29, The Ultras montre finalement que, concernant la masculinité stéréotypée, on se heurte à un mur, car le culte pour la virilité ne s’affaiblit pas30.

Virilité fantomatique et pessimisme

18 L’esthétique d’un réalisme altéré, comme c’est le cas dans The Ultras, est propice à faire surgir l’expérience traumatique. En effet, les personnages n’ont souvent pas clairement conscience d’être touchés par le trauma et l’écriture de l’estompage est un procédé qui permet de rentre compte de ce sentiment diffus. En donnant un aspect flottant et vague

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à des événements supposés réels, The Ultras développe une esthétique réaliste estompée qui suggère l’impossibilité de reconstituer véritablement les événements passés en Irlande du Nord. Ce mode de représentation n’est pas seulement un moyen pour montrer la tentative de ressusciter un mythe de la virilité dont les hommes n’auraient pas fait le deuil, il est également propice à la création d’un espace obscur qui voit resurgir les fantômes du passé. Henri Morier distingue deux aspects à l’usage des estompes : celui du « voile », auquel il donne une valeur onirique plutôt positive – il permettrait le développement de l’imagination dans des espaces inoccupés – et celui de la « pénombre », auquel il prête une atmosphère gothique : « Cette fois l’estompage creuse des abîmes, des espaces noirs ; il jette comme une mante de ténèbres sur les apparences, cherchant à provoquer les questions de l’angoisse en présence de l’inconnu31 ». La « pénombre », décrite par Morier et développée dans le roman d’Eoin McNamee, constitue un terrain favorisant les réminiscences des expériences traumatiques du passé. Comme le souligne Gaïd Girard, [l]’utilisation du genre « noir » dans cette vision post-moderne permet à McNamee de s’émanciper du discours humaniste forcément bipolarisé sur l’Irlande du Nord, et Belfast en particulier. Elle lui permet également de s’approcher au plus près d’une représentation de la violence sectaire dégagée des appartenances idéologiques habituelles tout en maintenant la référence au réel32.

19 Les nombreux témoignages concernant Nairac et les recherches autour de lui sont des traces d’un passé traumatique collectif dont la part d’inconnu apparaît irréductible. L’esthétique de la pénombre imprègne le roman dans son intégralité : « You had a sense of a shadowy apparatus being brought into play, opening the whole episode to levels of meaning, giving structure to the dread that people felt, the shifting unease33 ». Rares sont les moments de grâce dans lesquels la lumière pénètre les interstices de cette atmosphère lourde et pesante. Quand la lumière fait une apparition, elle n’est jamais véritablement tangible, ni associée à une forme d’espoir. Elle est mélancolique, comme quand Angela, l’ex-femme d’Agnew, lui rappelle la perte de son statut de policier en utilisant le passé : « These things are the beacons in the bleak post-marital landscapes they occupied. They shone a melancholy light34 ». La lumière ne perce qu’au moment où Agnew retrouve le corps de sa fille Lorna sur la plage : « the blue-black clouds interspersed with dense, silvery light. […] The light glistened off the roofs of the caravans […]. Thunder rolled beyond the mountains. There were intimations of unseen lightning35 ». Cette lumière est abondante mais furtive ; elle vient se jouer de la tristesse d’Agnew et disparaît aussitôt pour devenir intangible, réduite aux fugaces éclairs d’un orage.

20 Ces procédés littéraires élaborent un univers intemporel, flou et indistinct qui favorise l’esthétique du mythe. Nairac symbolise un sauveur pour les hommes qui le côtoient : « They needed Robert to help them dream their way through this36 ». Bien qu’il soit un pronom représentant, « they » renvoie à un antécédent vague et indéterminé (« There were those who did not believe […] There were those who believed […] Unnamed eyewitnesses37 ») qui peut constituer une foule d’individus et faire allusion à une conception collective. Cette phrase implique que ces hommes ont perdu toute forme d’espoir mais que Nairac leur permet d’affronter les difficultés liées au conflit, de contrer le pessimisme ambiant et de lutter contre leur désespoir. Robert Nairac est alors leur héros inespéré et tant attendu, celui qui incarne leurs aspirations et désirs les plus profonds et qui leur permet de dissoudre, du moins pour un temps, leur angoisse. Grâce à lui, ces hommes se vivent comme des héros dont la mission est indispensable à

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la survie de leur nation. Il exalte leur sentiment de grandeur. Il apparaît à de nombreuses reprises dans le roman comme un personnage permettant aux protagonistes de réaliser leur virilité. Il occupe cette fonction de médiateur de manières différentes pendant les deux périodes principales durant lesquelles se déroule le récit : lorsque l’intrigue se situe au cœur des Troubles dans les années soixante-dix, il est un élément vital et nécessaire à la performance de la virilité des protagonistes, mais aussi a posteriori la découverte de sa véritable identité symbolise pour Agnew une quête qu’il pense salvatrice. Elle lui permet de pallier son sentiment de crise de la masculinité.

Destinée tragique et brouillage des strates de narration

21 Plusieurs fois dans le roman, il semblerait que Robert Nairac suive une trajectoire prédestinée et qu’il soit privé de son libre arbitre. Dans la tragédie grecque, les héros sont souvent empruntés à l’univers de la mythologie. Ils sont donc connus des spectateurs avant même que ne commence la pièce. Robert Nairac n’est pas un personnage fictif et, à ce titre, la connaissance de son décès prématuré par les lecteurs ne fait pas de doute. Sa mort est d’ailleurs relatée dès les premières pages de The Ultras. Tout au long du roman, l’impression qu’il marche inéluctablement vers sa mort confère une tonalité tragique à ce personnage.

22 Dès le début du roman, cette idée que Nairac n’est pas maître de ses actions est exprimée : « There is a theme of popular band music running through Robert’s narrative. […] Robert seemed to be drawn to the places where you heard country music38 ». Ces lieux ont une connotation morbide dans le récit de vie de Nairac, qu’il s’agisse de sa propre mort – le soir de sa disparition, il assiste à un concert de musique country dans le pub The Three Steps – ou de son implication supposée dans le meurtre des membres du groupe de musique country The Miami Showband. Une force supérieure – relayée par l’emploi de la structure passive « to be drawn », associée au verbe d’état « to seem » –, dépouille Nairac de son autonomie et le pousse à accomplir ce qui semble relever de son destin.

23 Surprenant à cet égard, le passage qui relate sa mort dans l’un des derniers chapitres laisse entrevoir un homme las, désolé et profondément triste, ayant connaissance des termes de sa propre mort et suggérant même une forme de suicide tant il avance consciemment vers sa mort : « The phrase wars of attrition came into Robert’s mind. […] He could feel the sadness growing in him now, the desolation. […] He knew that they would be waiting for him outside. He knew that he would meet his sorrow with their own39 ». Cette prescience (« knew ») ainsi que cette impression de n’avoir aucune échappatoire (le modal « would » ayant valeur de futur dans le passé : « he would meet ») participent de la prédestination de cette mort prématurée et ancrent le récit dans un registre tragique, d’autant qu’il avait déjà évoqué ce pressentiment à plusieurs reprises40.

24 À la fin de la soirée, l’un des membres du groupe qui a joué dans le bar propose à Nairac de le ramener. Dans la première version de ce passage, narrée dans le premier chapitre du roman, les moteurs de ses choix sont explicites : Nairac ne veut pas laisser son arme à l’intérieur de la voiture, pour ne pas devoir en référer à son retour à la caserne. En

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revanche, à la fin du roman, dans une redite de ses derniers instants, son refus est énigmatique et le mouvement de résignation de Nairac initié au début de cette séquence se poursuit. Il participe à l’action et, dans le même temps, la subit. Il sait qu’il va mourir et avance inexorablement vers sa mort dans une acceptation de son sort qui est mise en scène avant une justification d’ordre générique – Robert Nairac doit mourir pour respecter une forme de pacte de lecture :

He shook his head. There were narrative conventions to be observed. Closure of a kind was to be effected by means of the obscured episodes, the dream sequences. The struggle in the car park. The abduction. The report of a wounded man being removed from outside a nearby hotel by men with English accents. The attempted escape. The man kneeling and weeping. The body, if there was a body, being removed, being conveyed through the darkness in delinquent cortege. Cortege meaning procession. Nocturnal meaning night41.

25 Les premières lignes de cet extrait mêlent différentes strates temporelles de narration qui se rencontrent et se répondent. À la focalisation interne succède un commentaire du narrateur : le récit doit obéir à une forme de prescription dictée par les conventions narratives. Mais cette affirmation est un paradoxe car elle est justement une manière de se jouer des codes auxquels elle prétend se soumettre. Le dévoilement de l’importance de la vraisemblance, caractéristique propre au réalisme historique de cette littérature, met à mal l’illusion romanesque. Différentes séquences temporelles fusionnent dans l’espace de ce court paragraphe et les points de vue s’entremêlent. D’abord, le passé le plus lointain de l’intrigue correspond à l’année 1977, quelques heures avant la mort de Nairac. Ensuite, le temps du récit principal se déroule en 2001, année au cours de laquelle Agnew tente de restituer les événements. Enfin, le temps d’énonciation, celui d’un narrateur omniscient qui organise les différentes focalisations, est indéterminé. Cette intrication des temps du récit et des perspectives est ambiguë, ce qui contribue à jeter le doute sur l’origine de ce commentaire. Si ce dernier émane de Nairac, l’anticipation de son sort à venir tend à lui concéder des qualités de visionnaire, ce qui corrobore finalement le portrait d’un homme doué de qualités que seul un être supérieur possède. Mais il pourrait tout aussi bien s’agir d’Agnew, qui est à l’origine de la reconstitution du point de vue de tous les personnages, ou alors d’un narrateur, qui rend apparentes ses volontés et contraintes d’écriture, ou encore d’une autre instance – comme Knox, membre des services secrets britanniques, par exemple, qui exprime à plusieurs occasions la nécessité de manipuler les récits –, qui cherche à cultiver le mystère autour de Nairac. Le fait que ces diverses interprétations restent, une à une, plausibles, sème le doute sur les faits historiques mentionnés par les phrases suivantes : « The struggle in the car park. The abduction. […] ». Ces données issues de différents témoignages posent question. Si on retient la dernière version interprétative proposée, c’est-à-dire la manipulation des informations par Knox (ou quelconque autre personnage) celle-ci serait alors partie intégrante des stratégies et propagandes de communication des techniques contre-insurrectionnelles de guerre ? La dimension fictive que le roman réaliste imite se révèle au sein même de l’ancrage référentiel. La frontière entre vérité historique et mensonge romanesque devient floue, pour ne pas dire inexistante.

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26 Ce commentaire sur les moyens à disposition pour clôturer le récit (« by means of the obscured episodes, the dream sequences ») met en question la véracité des renseignements résumant les indications connues à propos de la mort de Nairac et suggère une volonté d’opacifier l’événement. Après l’interpénétration des temps et des points de vue, on assiste à un effet d’accélération produit par l’énumération qui produit un effet-liste – accumulation de phrases courtes composées uniquement de groupes nominaux. Le tempo romanesque s’en voit bousculé. La mort de Nairac représente alors le point d’orgue de cette (con)fusion entre histoire et fiction. Mais cette liste traduit surtout l’abandon de la narration, l’usure et le sentiment d’échec face à l’aporie que représente la tâche entreprise, manifestement démesurée.

27 À la suite de cette série d’informations sur les circonstances de la mort de Nairac, sa présence se fait à nouveau sentir à travers les énoncés définitionnels « Lacrimae meaning tears » et « Nocturnal meaning night42 ». Déjà présentes au début du roman lors du premier récit de la mort de Nairac, ces deux phrases impriment une trajectoire circulaire dans la structure narrative et rappellent l’enfance de Nairac ainsi que les premières instructions de son père. La nuit symbolisant la mort, sa mention au début du roman, dans les premiers moments au cours desquels on a accès au point de vue de Nairac, indique aussi sa condamnation par avance, le fatum qui pèse sur lui. Cette reconfiguration temporelle en structure tragique circulaire suggère un système clos sur lui-même : sans possibilité d’ouverture, le temps est dès lors statique, tourné vers le passé, rétrospectif en même temps qu’introspectif, voué à être ressassé sur un mode répétitif. La mise en récit dit l’expérience traumatique en ressuscitant un fantôme, en pratiquant la redite mais sans jamais aboutir à une clôture ou à une forme quelconque d’apaisement. À l’inverse, elle conduit à la tragédie dans le présent narratif : le suicide de Lorna, la fille de l’enquêteur Agnew. Cette deuxième écriture de la mort est terrible car elle n’apporte aucune véritable nouvelle information. C’est comme si l’enquête d’Agnew n’avait servi à rien : le mystère de la mort de Nairac reste entier et le désinvestissement d’Agnew de sa propre vie a des répercussions irréversibles.

28 Jusqu’à la fin Nairac abrite cette tension entre le normal et l’exceptionnel : doué d’une conscience supérieure en étant capable de déceler l’instant de ses dernières heures à vivre, il n’en reste pas moins un être mortel. Sa mort contrecarre l’idéal de puissance et de contrôle qu’est censée incarner la virilité. Dès lors, en mourant il est rendu vulnérable. Le mythe tombe en même temps qu’il se réalise. En effet, en succombant, il est renvoyé à sa condition de simple mortel mais il échappe, du même coup, à la dévirilisation de l’âge et reste à jamais cet homme vif, ce boxeur dynamique. David est conscient de ce mouvement : « He didn’t want to start seeing him as a legend now that he was gone. David knew how that worked, the processes of it. The charisma of premature death43 ». Cette mort en martyr à une cause mal définie achève de le sacraliser : le mystère de sa disparition participe du processus mythologique. La dimension tragique tient en partie au fait qu’Agnew, comme les lecteurs, sait que Nairac va mourir. La fin doit coïncider avec l’Histoire. L’écriture se négocie entre les limbes de la vraisemblance, des rumeurs et faits rapportés au sujet de Nairac.

Virilité défaillante

29 Par ailleurs, les motivations du héros ne sont jamais claires et sont toujours le fruit de l’imagination des personnages qui l’entourent et rapportent les informations à son

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sujet. En ce sens, il cristallise idéaux, aspirations et rancœurs. Certains éléments viennent perturber l’image de la virilité. D’abord, le viol dont Nairac est victime à Ampleforth par un personnage qui deviendra par la suite son mentor, Walmsley44. Ce passage évoque le spectre de la pédophilie par des prêtres en Irlande. Même si l’éducation de Nairac se fait en Angleterre, cette agression dévoile certaines pratiques violentes qui ont lieu en toute impunité dans les grandes institutions, maisons-des- hommes, fabricatrices de solidarité masculine et de virilité. Le viol de Nairac expose la défaillance d’un tel modèle de virilité. Plus tard, Nairac subit une relation sexuelle forcée par un inconnu sur le chemin des toilettes dans un bar45. L’homme forcera sa langue dans la bouche de Nairac et le relâchera violemment. Encore une fois cette agression est narrée comme inévitable : « the encounter gave all the signs of something that would have come to pass no matter what was ordained by the participants46 ». En sachant que la vie de Nairac est une reconstitution, qui, à travers différents points de vue, cristallise beaucoup de désirs de personnages, on peut se demander à quel point cette scène dans les toilettes d’un bar ne témoigne pas du spectre de l’homosexualité qui hante toujours l’hétérosexualité. Butler observe : As a set of sanctions and taboos, the ego ideal regulates and determines masculine and feminine identification. Because identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition. This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire. […] But clearly not all gender identification is based on the successful implementation of the taboo against homosexuality. If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of that taboo, and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity47.

30 L’association de l’agression sexuelle et de l’homosexualité apparaît à deux reprises dans la vie de Nairac comme une projection de cette intériorisation de la prohibition chez les autres personnages masculins à l’origine de la construction de Nairac en figure mythologique. Ainsi, chez Nairac, il existe parfois une tension avec des éléments considérés comme non-virils – ici l’homosexualité – qui reflète l’obligation de l’hétérosexualité en tant que système rigide. Dans une interview réalisée par Peter Osborne et Lynne Segal, Judith Butler explique : « I think that crafting a sexual position, or reciting a sexual position, always involves becoming haunted by what’s excluded. And the more rigid the position, the greater the ghost, and the more threatening it is in some way48 ». Lorna est la seule qui émet explicitement l’hypothèse que Nairac puisse être homosexuel49, parce que, selon elle, il n’est fait mention de pratiquement aucune femme dans les documents concernant Nairac. Elle ajoute qu’à l’époque, l’homosexualité est encore pénalisée, ce qui expliquerait éventuellement l’absence totale d’informations à ce sujet. Même si la valeur de tabou de l’homosexualité joue probablement plus dans son occultation que sa pénalisation juridique.

31 Ces différents éléments vont de pair pour exposer les doutes et les failles d’une virilité par définition essentialiste et toute puissante. Dans cette écriture tragique du personnage, il y a clairement une volonté de mise à l’épreuve du mythe de la virilité. Le récit de ce personnage déchaînant les passions pourrait permettre une catharsis et mener à la purgation d’Agnew et des lecteurs sur le mode aristotélicien. Mais cette médiation par le symbole et le récit n’a pas les effets escomptés. La narration de la lente

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déchéance de Robert Nairac coïncide avec celle d’Agnew, qui n’arrive pas à faire la lumière sur la mort de ce dernier et dont la réhabilitation s’enlise et se brise à la découverte de la mort de sa fille. Profondément pessimiste et sans espoir, The Ultras relate une histoire dans laquelle le protagoniste principal, enchaîné au passé, est dans l’incapacité de vivre au présent. Loin de louer l’avenir comme c’est le cas dans la « propagande de paix », le roman met à mal ce discours dominant.

Conclusion

32 Avec ce fourmillement de données vraies et moins vraies, de rumeurs avérées et d’éléments fictifs, The Ultras montre la difficulté d’accéder à la vérité notamment en raison des techniques psychologiques, de communication et de propagande utilisées pendant le conflit. Le roman expose aussi le processus mythologique mis en place concernant Nairac et qui a permis de passer de l’histoire à la légende. La fabrication du héros est collective : chacun des personnages participe à sa manière à étoffer le mythe. Agnew échoue dans sa quête de la « vérité » et, avec elle, la conception stéréotypée de la masculinité achoppe : le mystère de Nairac reste intact – la vérité des événements qui jalonnent sa vie demeure insaisissable –, l’aporie sur laquelle débouche cette tentative de restitution montre les limites d’un système oppressif. La transformation de Nairac en mythe n’aura pas eu les fonctions libératrices et compensatoires attendues. Ainsi, contrairement aux récits mythologiques, il n’y a pas de grande révélation ou de dénouement satisfaisant, pas non plus de fonction éthique. En réponse à l’injonction à dépasser le présent, à se projeter dans l’avenir et à faire fi du passé du discours hégémonique de la paix, McNamee met en scène une impasse où les personnages sombrent dans la mélancolie du mythe de la virilité.

NOTES

1. Mark Hilliard, « Fate of undercover British soldier Robert Nairac still a mystery », Irish Times, 25 Jan. 2018, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/fate-of- undercover-british-soldier-robert-nairac-still-a-mystery-1.3368677 Consulté le 02/07/2018. 2. Aaron Edwards, The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007, Oxford, Ophrey Publishing, 2011, p. 50. 3. « ‘Les mythes, écrit Claude Lévi-Strauss, sont in-terminables (p. 14) et leur interprétation ne peut se développer qu’à la façon d’une nébuleuse, sans jamais rassembler de manière durable ou systématique la somme totale des éléments d’où elle tire aveuglément sa substance’ (p. 10) ». Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le Cuit (Mythologiques I), Paris, Plon, 1964, p. 402. In Jean Pouillon, « L’analyse des mythes », L'Homme, 1966, tome 6 n°1. p. 100. https://doi.org/10.3406/hom.1966.366759 Consulté le 02/07/2018.

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4. Jean-Jacques Courtine, (ed.), Histoire de la virilité. 3. XXe-XXIe siècle. La virilité en crise ?, Paris, Points, 2015, p. 474. 5. Greg Mclaughlin et Stephen Baker, The Propaganda of Peace - The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process, Bristol, Intellect, 2010. 6. « When it was signed, the Belfast Agreement was heralded as an historic compromise that would enable and encourage the ‘two communities’ in the region to transcend their differences and enter a new era of mutual appreciation and co-operation », Colin Coulter et Michael Murray, (ed.), Northern Ireland After the Troubles: A society in transition, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, p. 15. 7. Eoin McNamee, The Ultras. London, Faber & Faber, 2004, p. 13. 8. McNamee.op.cit. 9. McNamee.op.cit., p. 149. 10. La guerre contre-insurrectionnelle désigne une nouvelle forme de guerre menée par les agences étatiques pour contrecarrer les groupes non-étatiques qui mettent à mal le pouvoir en place. Elle diffère de la guerre traditionnelle qui se caractérisait par un affrontement d’État à État. Au cours de ces guerres contre-insurrectionnelles s’est développée une véritable doctrine qui vise à obtenir le soutien de la population locale en employant diverses techniques, notamment psychologiques. 11. Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique, Paris, PUF, 1975, p. 435. 12. McNamee.op.cit. 13. Ibid. 14. McNamee.op.cit., p. 44. 15. Morier, op. cit., p. 524. 16. McNamee, op.cit., p. 24. 17. McNamee, op.cit., p. 43. 18. Selon Morier, l’image impressive dérive de l’image hypothétique, qu’il associe au romantisme et dont le concepteur est plus spécifiquement Chateaubriand. Reposant sur cette même « comparaison subjective », l’image hypothétique inclut l’usage de tournures telles que : « on dirait », « comme si », « une espèce de », « on eût dit », etc. Dans l’ensemble de son dictionnaire, Morier utilise les deux adjectifs qualificatifs, « impressive » et « hypothétique », de manière interchangeable. p. 443-525. 19. Morier, op. cit., p. 525. 20. McNamee, op.cit., p. 173. 21. McNamee, op.cit., p. 3. 22. McNamee, op.cit., p. 236. 23. McNamee, op.cit., p. 9, 198. 24. McNamee, op.cit., p. 207-8. 25. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (De)Constructing the North, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2003, p. 12. 26. McNamee, op.cit., p. 244. 27. McNamee, op.cit., p. 216. 28. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne : rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1979, p.42.

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29. Lyotard, op. cit. 30. Olivia Gazalé, Le mythe de la virilité : un piège pour les deux sexes, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2017. 31. Morier, op. cit., p. 444. 32. Gaïd Girard, « Eoin McNamee n’est-il qu’un provocateur ? Entre film noir et post- humain », Études irlandaises, n°36-2, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011, p. 109. 33. McNamee, op. cit., p. 13. 34. McNamee, op. cit., p. 108. 35. McNamee, op. cit., p. 251. 36. McNamee, op. cit., p. 13. 37. Ibid. 38. McNamee, op. cit., p. 22. 39. McNamee, op. cit., p. 235, 237. 40. McNamee, op. cit., p. 8, 45. 41. McNamee, op. cit., p. 237. 42. McNamee, op. cit., p. 237. 43. McNamee, op. cit., p. 243. 44. McNamee, op. cit., p. 82. 45. McNamee, op. cit., p. 205-6. 46. McNamee, op. cit., p. 205. 47. Judith Butler, Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, New York, London, Routledge, 1999, p. 79-80. 48. Judith Butler, « Gender as Performance », Radical Philosophy, n°67, été 1994, pp. 32-39. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/judith-butler Consulté le 02/07/18. 49. McNamee, op. cit., p. 214.

RÉSUMÉS

Dans cet article, je me propose d’analyser les procédés d’écriture qui permettent à Eoin McNamee dans The Ultras de dévoiler l’échec de la tentative de rétablissement d’une virilité mythifiée. Par le réinvestissement d’une figure controversée de l’histoire des Troubles nord-irlandais, Robert Nairac, l’auteur souligne la persistance d’un mythe de la virilité dont le deuil entamé ne semble pas fini. Les techniques d’estompage et la juxtaposition des points de vue brouillent non seulement les frontières entre réalité et fiction, mais attestent aussi du caractère fictif du réel. En révélant la hantise du présent par le passé, le roman met en question les récits officiels de la période post-conflit nord-irlandaise, fait surgir l’expérience traumatique et déboulonne l’optimisme de la « propagande de la paix », pour reprendre l’expression de McLaughlin et Baker.

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This article examines the writing strategies used by Eoin McNamee in The Ultras to unveil the failure of the attempt to rebuild a mythologised manliness. The reshaping of a controversial figure of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Robert Nairac, enables the author to underline the persistence of a myth of manliness, of which the period of mourning is not yet completed. By shading the realism of the novel and by intertwining several points of view, McNamee is not merely blurring the lines between facts and fiction, but also revealing the fictional aspect of reality. The obsessive nature of the characters’ preoccupations with the past questions the post- Troubles official narratives and leads to the eruption of the trauma eschewed by the optimism of the hegemonic discourse, which flourished after the peace agreement in Northern Ireland – a discourse dubbed the ‘propaganda of peace’ by McLaughlin and Baker.

INDEX

Keywords : Northern Ireland, post-conflict, mythologized manhood, fiction, trauma Mots-clés : Irlande du Nord, post-conflit, virilité mythifiée, fiction, trauma

AUTEUR

ANNE DUFLOS Anne Duflos est affiliée au laboratoire CECILLE (Centre d'Études en Civilisations, Langues et Lettres Étrangères) de l’Université Lille 3. Elle enseigne dans le secondaire et à la FLSH (Faculté de Lettres et Sciences Humaines) de Lille. Elle a récemment soutenu sa thèse sur l’écriture des masculinités dans la fiction nord-irlandaise contemporaine sous la direction d’Alexandra Poulain. En 2014, elle a publié un article intitulé « Les Subversions de l’écriture des masculinités dans trois romans nord-irlandais : The Second Prison de Ronan Bennett, Eureka Street de Robert McLiam Wilson et Little Constructions d’Anna Burns » dans Comment faire des études-genres avec de la littérature, Masquereading, sous la direction de Guyonne Leduc paru chez L’Harmattan. À l’automne 2016, un article paraît dans la revue Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Vol. 39, No. 1), « Dealing with ‘the Spores of the Past’: Masculinities in David Park’s The Truth Commissioner ». Elle publie également, en juin 2016, l’article « Alienated Masculinities in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street: Between Stereotypical Forms of Masculinity and Rejection of Essentialized Male Identities » dans Masculinity in Crisis: Depictions of Modern Male Trauma in Ireland, sous la direction de Catherine Rees chez Carysfort Press.

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John Banville’s “Overman”: Intertextual dialogues with Friedrich Nietzsche in Shroud

Mehdi Ghassemi

Introduction

1 A defining aspect of John Banville’s fiction is his narrators’ preoccupation with the nature of their subjective experience as well as the (in)authenticity of their perceptions and representations. Often staged as first-person autobiographers, these narrators strive to find a way to explore and simultaneously enhance knowing and being. These concerns turn their narratives into extended interrogations of the relation between reality and imagination, on the one hand, and explorations of the (im)possibility of authentic subjective experience. Among the more recent publications, notably, Eoghan Smith’s John Banville: Art and Authenticity (2013) and Elke D’hoker’s Visions of Alterity (2004), deal with these issues extensively. At the same time, the Banvillian narrator is fully aware that there is no way out of language, that he is forever imprisoned by it, that language, as a system in its own right, imposes its rules, out of which there is no meaning. In the absence of direct access to “reality” these narrators embark on a journey of subjectivity in search of reality and stable self through writing and reminiscence. This, too, of course has been recognized by the majority of Banville scholars. Laura Izzara, for instance, rightly considers Banville a “critical writer” whose fiction “lies on the border between two genres, the novel and critical theory”1. Moreover, far from indulging a “postmodern” sense of liberation following the deconstruction of truth and stable self, Banville's protagonists seem to demonstrate a feeling of disappointment, if not disillusionment. To put it in Joseph McMinn’s words, although “Banville can deconstruct with the best of them,” “the exposure of constructed myths about identity and nature” is never “a simple cause for celebration” 2. Rather, as John Kenny has it, it is a “modernist nostalgia misplaced in a postmodernist chaotic world”3.

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2 Banville’s fiction, in this sense, is in constant search for an aesthetic expression that can adequately match his narrators’ epistemological crisis. It is an evolving philosophical fiction that, ever since Gabriel Godkin’s struggle with finding “the thing in itself”4 in Birchwood, has gone through various phases of concern. Although these questions have stayed constant throughout Banville’s oeuvre in one way or another, his fiction has very broadly moved from language and science in the seventies and metaphysics, art and ethics in the eighties to poststructuralist literary theory in his later period. Over the years, these shifts have resulted in an extraordinary number of perspectives and the quantity of the scholarly work devoted to Banville’s fiction alone is a testimony to how fertile these perspectives have been.

3 The aim of the present study is to examine Shroud as a key text from Banville’s later period in which the writer offers his most vivid engagement with deconstruction, on the one hand, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other. As the second book of a trilogy (together with Eclipse and Ancient Light) Shroud features Axel Vander, an aging literary theorist residing in the United States, grappling with his wife’s death as well as his difficult past. After receiving a letter from Cass Cleave who threatens to expose his “true” identity as an imposter, Vander leaves for Europe to meet his exposer during a conference in Italy. His life, work, and controversial past are informed by that of Paul de Man’s—one of the founders of deconstruction. Yet, Banville’s mise en scene of de Man’s life in Shroud is at best very loose. Unlike de Man, Vander’s past is not revealed posthumously, but during his lifetime. Moreover, Vander and de Man do not entirely share the same secret. While de Man’s reputation has been tarnished by his anti- Semitic articles written at a young age under Nazi occupation, Axel’s ultimate secret is that he had purloined the identity of the person who wrote the problematic articles. Most significantly, perhaps, Vander openly confesses his secret in his narrative —something de Man never did (at least directly) in his lifetime.

4 Alongside de Man, Friedrich Nietzsche is the other strong presence in Shroud. Turin, where much of Shroud takes place is also the city where Nietzsche lived and finally went mad. What is more, Vander and Cass Cleave visit the philosopher’s house during their stay in the city. Indeed, Nietzsche’s philosophy has long appealed to Banville’s narrators, at least since Freddie Montgomery’s Nietzschean extra-moral stance in The Book of Evidence.5 Yet, this paper argues, it is in Shroud that Banville articulates his most sophisticated version of Nietzsche’s Overman. Through elaborate metaphors Banville creates an intertextual dialogue with Nietzsche’s conception of the self, one that ultimately provides his narrator with the necessary tool to capture (or frame) a sense of selfhood that lies outside the linguistic predicament posited by de Man. It starts by examining the way in which the discourse of autobiography fails to produce a coherent sense of self in Vander’s narrative and, instead deprives him of a sense of “presence” and reduces him to a spectre. Moreover, in this section, Jacques Lacan’s conception of Symbolic existence is mobilized to aid us in understanding Vander’s problematic identity. As such, the first part sets the scene for Vander’s two-fold recourse to Nietzsche in order to salvage a sense of self. The second part of the paper thus traces the ways in which Vander, following Nietzsche, incorporates the body as part and parcel of his project to capture the ever-elusive self. Finally, the third section demonstrates how Banville reinvents Nietzsche’s conception of the Overman as a being located at an “edge” via complex and creative tropes. Here, Lacan’s crucial distinction

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between reality and the Real will also prove fruitful as it enables us to elaborate on the significance of Banville’s Nietzschean move in its complexity, ambition and scope.

Inauthenticity, lack of presence

5 Axel explains the aim of his narrative in the opening pages of his narrative: “I am going to explain myself, to myself”6, echoing Nietzsche’s announcement “And so I tell my life to myself” in the semi-autobiographical Ecce Homo7. Jacques Derrida reads the latter in his Otobiographies according to which the autobiographer first and foremost “tells himself this life and he is the narration’s first, if not its only, addressee and destination —within the text”8. As Robert Smith comments, autobiography is related to “auto- affection” as a process of solipsistic self-containment achieved in “hearing oneself speak”9. The latter entails a process via which the subject creates a close circuit between the mouth and the ear, resulting in a “solipsistic umbilicus of completion”10. The most “categorical” by-product of hearing oneself speak, says Smith, is the sense of self-presence11. Nevertheless, for the process of hearing oneself speak to be effective in producing presence one must inevitably produce speech from the mouth to ear. In other words, utterances must be verbalized, expressed as well as ex-pressed (pushed outside), so they can be heard. The message has to be first “detached at large” for it to be received by the ear. In this sense, the process cannot be an entirely closed circuit, but instead, always partly open and exposed12. It is exposed to what Derrida calls the “aleatory or chance elements at work in every kind of message”13. That is to say, for subjectivity to exist, a discourse of exchange must be established through verbalization, one that is never fully self-contained but irrevocably mediated. The self- unity solipsistic umbilicus solipsistic umbilicus of the speaking/writing “I” is marred precisely because by uttering, I exposes itself to the other, the you, the generic interlocutor. Consequently, the self can no longer be the sole proprietor of the message. Rather, by addressing oneself, the I also addresses “an antecedent you”, a “not yet anthropomorphized you”, an irreducible otherness whose existence provides the very condition of possibility of the I’s verbal auto-correspondence14. According to Derrida, in autobiography the “text is signed only much later by the other”, “it is the ear of the other that signs”15. This is why autobiography is in fact “Otobiographie”, a text destined to be received and endorsed by the other’s ear (Oto-). The latter provides the ground on which the autobiographical signature takes hold, the agent for whom the process of signing is performed.

6 In Shroud, the narrator hears himself breathe rather than speak: “I heard myself breathing in the mouthpiece”16; “I could hear myself breathe”17. It is not so much his speech Axel hears, not a textual message, not even a voice, but a shadowy sound of air. The process of hearing-oneself-speak in Axel’s narrative does very little in creating a subjective loop, a closed circuit between mouth and ear as a result of which he can achieve self-presence. In fact, presence is precisely what he lacks. Like the air he breathes, he is transparent: Cass is depicted as “looking through me as though I were not there”18 and his “presence did nothing to tone down the rabid talk” 19. In parallel, after admitting to having stolen the name “Axel Vander”, the narrator never discloses his real name throughout the novel. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the proper name functions as a signifier that guarantees the subject a unique space in the Symbolic order, that is, according to Lacan, “the locus of the signifier” 20, the register that

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guaranties the possibility of any meaningful signification. The proper name thus serves as a singular point, which defines one’s singularity as a speaking (existing) subject. Nevertheless, adopting a Symbolic identity entails giving up something irreducible to the Symbolic because the latter is not a complete system. In fact, one can never be reduced to his/her Symbolic “existence”. Therefore, adopting a Symbolic identity always involves a splitting that divides the subject into his/her Symbolic existence, on the one hand, and the Real, the aspect of his/her being that lies beyond Symbolization21. The subject is thus required to make a sacrifice with regards to his/her (Real) “substance”. S/he has to give away “something” so that s/he can have a place in/ through the Symbolic. This is why his/her (Symbolic) existence will always be marked by a lack, a negativity.

7 Therefore, one can postulate, by not giving his “true” name, Shroud’s narrator aims at resisting the name’s Symbolic splitting. Insofar as he is unnamed, the narrator aims at positing himself as the hors texte (to use Derrida’s famous phrase), as that which is outside the process of symbolization. By remaining an unnamed entity that lacks positive existence—so long as existence is only possible via the Symbolic—the narrator seeks unmediated being, but the price he has to pay is that he becomes a spectre. This is illustrated very well by Axel’s counterpart, Alexander Cleave in Eclipse where Cleave notices Axel’s paradoxically absent presence: “at the core of it all there is an absence, an empty space where once there was something, or someone, who has removed himself” 22. In what follows, I attempt to examine the strategies Axel Vander implements to resolve the predicament of his lack of presence through a creative recourse to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy.

The Nietzschean option

I have begun to feel that I am falling off myself, that my suety old flesh is melting off my skeleton and soon will all be gone. I shall not mind; I shall be glad; I shall rise up then, bared of inessentials, all gleaming bone and sinew smooth as candle wax, new, unknown, my real self at last23.

8 This key passage illustrates how Axel’s quest for a stable core of selfhood independent from his incompatible body leads to a dualism of body and mind reminiscent of Descartes’s cogito. In contrast to the depiction of the body as a troublesome extension, the “I” is emphatically reiterated several times, rendering the dualism all the more explicit. For Descartes, while the nature of corporeal substance is constituted by material extension, the mind is made of non-physical substance. However, while Descartes famously uses the example of wax24 to demonstrate the necessity for an independent mind to ascertain its “nature”, Axel takes wax as an analogy for both his body as well as his self. On the one hand, his disintegrating body, his flesh, is “melting” like candle wax. By melting the wax of corporeality, then, Axel hopes to rid himself of the inessentiality that it represents in an attempt to attain the true essence of his self beyond (or beneath the cover of) the body. On the other hand, he considers the formlessness of melted wax as a metaphor for the self he is hoping to find, the original “smooth” self that has not been yet hardened into a shape. In this sense, although Axel distances himself from deconstruction by assuming the existence of the essential self, he does not fully subscribe to a fully-fledged Cartesian dualism in order to ascertain its nature. Instead, by using the same metaphor for both (the self and the body) he arguably seeks to redefine the relationship between the two, to find a relationship that

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is not based on a binary opposition (mind/body) but, rather, based on the inter- relatability of the two. This adds a new dimension to Axel’s perception of his body as it is no longer viewed as merely dysfunctional and incompatible, but, instead, it reveals a potential for the disclosure of the self.

9 This is arguably a Nietzschean move on Axel’s part. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet defines the self as “a mighty commander, an unknown wise man”, an entity stemming from the body and not an abstract consciousness above it: “’I,’ you say, and are proud of this word. But the greater thing […] is your body and its big reason: it does not say ‘I,’ it does ‘I’”25. The self for Nietzsche has the capacity to transcend the ego precisely because it does not discard the body, but embraces it. The form of selfhood Nietzsche vouches for is not a metaphysical “I” or a transcendental subject. In other words, it is not a True self that can be excavated from underneath false appearances. In fact, the “I” and the self for Nietzsche do not constitute the same thing. The former is an illusion, which comes to be created as an effect of the processes of perception and interpretation (which are not mutually exclusive for Nietzsche). The “I,” says Nietzsche, “only contains an interpretation of the event and does not belong to the event itself”26. The self, in contrast, is constituted as a result of one’s acknowledgement and exploration of a potential creativity. It is, for Nietzsche, not the equivalent of the mind but rather a conglomeration of one’s physiological perceptions that are constantly subject to change not to say transformation. It is not solely based on a set of mental activity that produces consciousness, nor is it an essential, unique core of selfhood, but “is, rather, a multiplicity”, “an assemblage of heterogeneous elements for which the word ‘body’ must stand as a rather attenuated and insufficient summary” 27. Axel, on the one hand, “believe[s],” “insist[s]” that “there is no essential, singular self”28. On the other hand, he is unable to “rid [himself] of the conviction of an enduring core of selfhood”29. In this sense, Nietzsche’s idea (that relying on one’s ability of creativity, the self can be formed, made, by incorporating the bodily dimension) provides Axel with a way out of the deadlock. Smith remarks that “[b]ehind the pose, Vander truly yearns for the restoration of the essential value,” and his narrative is the “fetishization of the ‘Idea’ that is asserted in Shroud, as the assertion of the ideal over the corporal”30. Yet, in parallel to his idealization of the self over the body, I argue, in likening his “real self” as well as his “bone and sinew” to the smoothness (i.e. malleability) of “candle wax”31 Axel effectuates a transition from the quest for the ideal self to an exploration of selfhood accessible only through corporeality: Cass observes how Axel smells of “candle wax”32, evoking the idea that his body is literally transformed into it.

10 Axel uses a similar set of adjectives to describe the “enduring” resilience of his self33, on the one hand, and the resilience of the eye as a bodily organ: “the eyeball is one of the toughest, most resilient muscles in the human body”34. In this light one can discern the interrelation of the body and the self in a rereading of the actor’s mask in Attic drama: The white clay from which [the mask] was fashioned has turned to the shade and texture of bone […] He takes to wearing the mask at home, when no one is there. It is a comfort, it sustains him; he finds it wonderfully restful, it is like being asleep and yet conscious. Then one day he comes to the table wearing it. His wife makes no remark, his children stare for a moment, then shrug and go back to their accustomed bickering. He has achieved his apotheosis. Man and mask are one35.

11 The white colour of clay merges with the similar colour of bone and the mask acquires the contours, the shape of the face, becoming indistinguishable from it. Traditionally,

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the function of a mask is to conceal a discrepancy, a difference that, albeit temporarily hidden, remains. Yet, what is evoked in the imagery above is a sense in which the mask and the face (the body) merge. That is to say, insofar as one takes the mask as Axel’s metaphor for his identity, this means he is aiming at bridging the gap between the Symbolic (identity) and the Real (of the body), hoping to resolve the incongruence between the two. In fact, this passage in part stages the way Nietzsche relates mask and truth: there is not only deceit behind a mask – there is so much goodness in craft […] A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant […] [He] insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his place in the hearts and heads of his friends […] Every profound spirit needs a mask36.

12 Nietzsche’s seemingly paradoxical claim—that the mask does not so much hide a truthful self as offers the possibility of creating a profoundness of self through simulation—is part of his overall toppling of the traditional privileging of truthful reality over apparent superficiality. In Nietzsche’s terms, there is no truth to be discovered by unveiling the shroud, or the mask, but rather, all one can peer through it is another mask, another shroud. Truth is but the effect of the masking act, posited as a result of it. Profundity of selfhood, then, is not to be sought in removing the mask but, on the contrary, in elaborating it: “around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, SUPERFICIAL [sic] interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests”37. Axel admittedly engages in the Nietzschean celebration of the façade: “I had made myself adept at appearing deeply learned”38. In his writing as a literary critic he always demonstrates an elaborate “prose style” rather than “grasp of theory” and “scholarship”39. What is more, after admitting to having stolen the name “Axel Vander,” the narrator never discloses his real name throughout the novel. His reluctance in disclosing his real name is to be read as his attempt to make his mask, that is, his artistic poses and articulate style, his signature.

13 According to John Kenny, by evoking the Shroud on multiple occasions Axel seeks to “identif[y] himself directly with Christ and Nietzsche” “through the Shroud”40. I claim it is not so much Christ that Axel wants to identify with as it is with the Shroud (of Turin) itself. This is emphasized when a mysterious “red-haired fellow”41 repeatedly says to him something that “sounded like signore”42. He later refigures, again calling him “signore”43. At the same time, reminded by Kristina that the Shroud’s other name is sindone, Axel’s memory readjusts and he realizes that what the red-haired man had actually said was “sindone, not signore”44. Axel refers to the man as “the punster” 45, emphasizing the way in which signore (mister) becomes a pun for sindone (the shroud). The equation of the two in Axel’s perception evokes a sense in which he is one and the same as the shroud (mask). In other words, like the Attic thespian, he too achieves his “apotheosis”, the culmination of his aesthetic self-recreation. Elsewhere, Axel admits: “There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text”46. The metaphor of the text as a body underlines two points. Firstly, it illustrates the textuality of the body, that is, just as the text can be likened to a body, the body itself is constructed textually (linguistically, metaphorically). Secondly, the text as a body (and the body as a text) highlights Axel’s own role as the writer of the body-text. That is to say, insofar as he is

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the writer of his self-representation, his function is irreducible in the type of body-text that is represented in his account. He is its creator.

14 Under the Nietzschean imperative, Axel heeds his bodily calls: “Headaches, stomach cramps, a constant churning in the gut, these were the body's protests at the insupportable strain of living always in fear”47. The word “protests” indicates Axel’s view of his body as an entity to be reckoned with, as a force that exerts a power on him that he cannot neglect. What is more, Axel’s immediate relationship with the world is regulated by sensory feelings rather than intellectual reasoning. He speaks of experiencing “the sense of being sealed off from the world”48, he has “the sense of [Cass] spinning on her toes”49, and feels “a sense of splendour and communion”50. He further emphasizes the physical, sensory nature of his experience when he links the word “sense” to smell: “I have a sense of something torpid, brownish, exhausted; the smell is the smell of re-breathed air”51. Axel’s emphasis on the senses (as the faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus and not the faculty of meaning and understanding) resonates with Nietzsche’s attack of the ascetic ideal. The latter, says Nietzsche, is opposed to the world of becoming governed by bodily senses that should be favoured over “reason” since the senses “do not lie at all52.” That which lies is what one “make[s] of their testimony”, a “falsification” that could lead “the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence”53.

15 The Nietzschean overtones of Axel’s enunciations are in congruence with the philosopher’s presence throughout the novel. Pier Paulo Piciucco gives a detailed account of the relationship between Axel’s narrative and the city of Turin where “the figure of Frederick Nietzsche” presents a “powerful picture that contributes to both the making of Axel Vander and to his strong connection with the city of Turin” and sees Shroud as “a fertile soil where allusions, references and connections with the German philosopher mushroom”54. Kenny, in his turn, proposes that the fact Axel is “one-eyed” “may be a partial reference to ‘the Cyclops of culture,’ the frightful energies that Friedrich Nietzsche, the ghost that haunts the novel, argued were the innovators for humanity [sic]”55. Piciucco convincingly links Kenny’s observation to the way Axel represents his uncommonly large “size and stature” that at times transforms him into “a gigantic creature of mythical dimensions”56. Axel’s unusually large mass, Piciucco notes, is reminiscent of, or a variation on, Nietzsche’s famous Übermensch. Yet, despite his sound analyses, Piciucco’s emphasis on other aspects of the relationship between Shroud and Turin limits his analysis of the significance of Nietzsche’s Overman in Banville’s novel.

Overman as going over

16 Axel meets a “doctor” in Turin whose name “sounded like Zoroaster”57, a reference to Nietzsche’s text, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which the philosopher introduces and discusses in detail the idea of the Overman as the culmination of his life-affirmative philosophy, a being free from reactive beliefs and ressentiment58. As Lee Spinks remarks, Übermensch, on the one hand, signifies Overman “in the sense of height and self- transformation,” that is, “the elevation of mankind’s highest self into an experience of being that has no trace of moralism or the fiction of free will59.” On the other hand, Over- “can also suggest ‘across’ or ‘beyond’ and Nietzsche employs this second resonance to characterize ‘man’ as a bridge we must pass across toward a life free of

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ressentiment and negativity”60. This is why the Overman’s key feature, according to Nietzsche, lies in crossing, “going over”: Man is a rope suspended between animal and Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous going-over, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great about man is that he is a bridge, not an end: what can be loved about man is that he is a going-over and a going-under61.

17 Nietzsche’s idea of the self’s crossing over is evident in Axel’s narrative on multiple occasions. At the beginning of his narrative, on the day he receives Cass’s premonitory letter, he had the certain sense of having crossed, of having been forced to cross, an invisible frontier, and of being in a state that forever more would be post-something, would be forever an afterwards. The letter, of course, was the crossing point62.

18 Though the words “afterwards” and “post-something” conjure up the Nietzschean transformation in which man moves forward, advances to the Overman, the fact that it is the content of Cass’s letter threatening to reveal his rogue past that causes the crossing over, the movement is rather backwards. That is to say, he crosses over to the realm of the spectral past in which his old demons come back to haunt him. As a result of this passage, he is “cloven” between what “I had been before the letter arrived” and “this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar”63. The transformation results, not only in his uncanny bifurcation, but in the tilting, sloping, hence, a destabilized sense of self emphasized by the italicization (i.e. the literal tilt) of the second “I.” Elsewhere, “[t]he corner of the square with the plane trees”, Axel’s says, “was the crossing point from my world into” the world of the real Vander64. What is emphasized in the description is not so much the process of the self’s crossing over, nor is it the other side, as it is the very site where the crossing takes place: “When I think of that spot the weather in it is always grey, the luminous, quicksilver grey of an early northern spring, the colour for me of the past itself [emphasis added]”65.

19 In the description above, the passage from the narrator’s identity to that of Vander takes place “on the corner.” The word “corner” intriguingly figures repetitively throughout the narrative. To cite a few examples, Axel sees someone “sitting hunched at the corner of a table”66; he goes to a “flower seller” located “at the sunlit corner”67; he “had to stop at a street corner to consult the crumpled map” while he “registered the girl, on the corner opposite, looking in my direction”68; and in his youth, he used to live a “corner basement room”69. Even Cass is depicted as “hiding in the corner of a couch”70 and “sitting at a table in a cramped corner by the window” 71. Insofar as a corner is seen as an angle where two sides or edges meet, it connotes a spatial border, a crossing point from one space into another. Therefore, by systematically representing himself—as well as his perceptual field—taking place at a corner, Axel shows how he is liminally stuck between two spaces, at the very edge of two worlds without quite pertaining to either. “For the most part,” Axel says, “I was kept firmly off at the outer edge of things”72. The passive voice Axel uses in his enunciation evokes the sense of him being forced into the marginal position, as if a force was keeping him “firmly” at bay, away from accessing “things.” The sense of being forced is further emphasized when Axel uses the word edge as a verb again in the passive voice when he remembers his late wife Magda: “I felt I was being edged around by a large, wary ruminant”73. Indeed, the very word corner can evoke such a sense as in to be cornered, that is, to be pushed into a

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position by force. In a sense, one can argue, Axel’s metaphors of liminality primarily highlight his lack of direct access to the “real” thing, indicating that his access to truth is barred by a force beyond him. Being cornered to the edge, so to speak, illustrates his perceptual (and representational) predicament. In this sense, Axel transforms Nietzsche’s metaphors for man as “rope” and “bridge” into man in corners and edges. Banville arguably provides a variation on the philosopher’s idea of Overman, presenting an in-between-man. As to what this move on Banville’s part represents in terms of his overall aesthetics, a brief detour through Alenka Zupančič’s reading of Nietzsche is illuminating.

20 In The Shortest Shadow, Zupančič identifies two fundamental, philosophical positions with regards to the Real. On the one hand, there is “the classical or metaphysical position,” according to which, the Real is posited as “the material basis or a touchstone” for speech74. On the other hand, there is “the so-called ‘sophistic’ position” that aims at dismissing “the very notion of the Real,” advocating the idea that “‘speech is all,’ that the Real does not exist, that it all comes down to a question of conventions, different language games, different perspectives and interpretations”75. Nietzsche’s writing, says Zupančič, offers a third stance that surpasses the aforementioned “couple”; it is based on “a specific duality”76, one that is “perhaps best articulated in the topology of the edge as the thing whose sole substantiality consists in its simultaneously separating and linking two surfaces”77. Zupančič claims that Nietzsche’s specific articulation of duality as edge distinguishes his thinking from both the “realist” and “nominalist” positions in that it proposes a fresh position regarding the relationship between representation and reality since it brings to the equation the role of the Lacanian Real. Insofar as the Real is not reducible to reality, and insofar as reality itself is constituted through a fantasmatic scenario, that is, as a specific configuration of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary, the traditional binary opposition between reality and illusion no longer presents a sufficient framework to distinguish truth from untruth. At the same time, insofar as the Real does exist, or, rather, subsists (though as an impossibility, as a limit), total dismissal of anything beyond textuality (and linguistic construction) misses the role of the Real. Nietzsche’s conception of duality as edge, according to Zupančič, “suggests that the Real exists as the internal fracture or split of representation, as its intrinsic edge on account of which representation never fully coincides, not simply with its object, but with itself”78. Ultimately, “what is designated as ‘beyond good and evil’” is located at this edge. It is “a beyond that is not really a realm, and is thus not a ‘beyond’ in the common sense of this term, but rather, has the structure of an edge”79.

21 If one agrees with Zupančič’s reading, one can postulate that Banville’s Nietzschean turn in Shroud does not so much lie in his multifarious, anecdotal references to the philosopher throughout the novel (and throughout his oeuvre), but it arguably lies in constantly situating his narrator on edge, at an edge, that is, within a specific distance from the Real where he periodically comes across the impossibility of a truthful self- representation while simultaneously insisting on the existence of truth. Shroud is a sophisticated dialogue with the deadlock outlined by deconstruction, a dialogue supplemented by a Nietzschean subtext in order to locate, to lay bare, the inherent points of impossibility at the heart of representation rather than a mere illustration of that impossibility. The edges and corners at which Axel constantly finds himself are, in

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a way, the contours of his subjective frame. They are the spatial tropes for Banville’s mise en scene of his narrator’s perceptual as well as representational crisis.

NOTES

1. Laura Patrícia Zuntini Izarra, Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths: the Process of a "New" Aesthetic Synthesis in The Novels of John Banville, International Scholars Publications, 1999, p. 159. 2. Joseph McMinn, The Supreme Fictions of John Banville, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 7. 3. John Kenny, John Banville, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2009, p. 15. 4. John Banville, Birchwood, London, Picador, 1998, p. 13. 5. In a recent interview Banville confirms: “Nietzsche is my philosopher—is my poet. I can find few things in his work, and I’ve read most of it, that I disagree with” (Hedwig Schwall, “Interview of John Banville with Hedwig Schwall”, The ESSE Messenger, 26 (2), 2017, p. 74.). 6. John Banville, Shroud, London, Picador, 2002, p. 5. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trad, R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992, p. 74. 8. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, Peggy Kamuf (trans.), New York, Schocken Books, 1985, p. 13. 9. Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 76. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 78. 13. Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 108. 14. Robert Smith, op. cit., p. 78. 15. Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 50-1. 16. John Banville, op. cit., p. 38. 17. Ibid., p. 167. 18. Ibid., p. 110. 19. Ibid., p. 211-12. 20. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Bruce Fink, (trans.), New York, Norton, 2006, p. 688. 21. Lacan defines the Real as “that which subsists outside of symbolization” (Ibid., p. 324). It is the realm of the impossible, because it is impossible to signify yet it

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paradoxically underlies all aspects of our reality. It is the unknown kernel of jouissance that needs to be repressed, excluded, so that “reality” becomes possible. In this sense, in Lacan’s terminology the Real is distinct from reality. The Imaginary is the third register of the Lacanian triadic model and consists of images, ones that regulate one’s sense of self by mediating his/her interactions with the self as well as others. 22. John Banville, Eclipse, London, Picador, 2000, p. 211. 23. John Banville, Shroud, op. cit., p. 8. 24. René Descartes, Méditations Métaphysiques, Marc Soriano (eds.), Paris, Larousse, 1950, p. 39-41. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Thomas Wayne (trans.), New York, Algora Publishing, 2003, p. 25. 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, R. J. Hollingdale (trans.), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, p. 48. 27. Peter. R Sedgwick, Nietzsche: The Key Concepts, London, Routledge, 2009, p. 140. 28. John Banville, op. cit., p. 286. 29. Ibid., p. 27. 30. Eoghan Smith, op. cit., p. 128. 31. John Banville, Shroud, op. cit., p. 8. 32. Ibid., p. 185. 33. Ibid., p. 27. 34. Ibid., p. 292. 35. Ibid., p. 286-7. 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, op. cit., p. 34-5. 37. Ibid., p. 35. 38. John Banville, Shroud, op. cit., p. 60. 39. Ibid., p. 61. 40. John Kenny, op. cit., p. 174. 41. John Banville, Shroud, op. cit., p. 47. 42. Ibid., p. 48. 43. Ibid., p. 287. 44. Ibid., p. 156. 45. Ibid., p. 287. 46. Ibid., p. 329. 47. Ibid., p. 224-5. 48. Ibid., p. 36. 49. Ibid., p. 52. 50. Ibid., p. 73. 51. Ibid., p. 205. 52. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth (Trans.), London, Penguin, 1990, p. 2.

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53. Ibid., “‘Reason’,” says Nietzsche, “is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses” (Ibid.). Nietzsche, here, is making a case for his idea that “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one; the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie” By emphasizing sensuality over reason Nietzsche directs his attack on Platonic metaphysics that fundamentally distinguishes between appearance and reality (Ibid.). 54. Pier Pauo Piucucco, “Thus Spoke Axel Vander. Pictures of Turin in John Banville's Shroud”, in L'immagine dell'Italia nelle Letterature Angloamericane e Postcoloniali, Paolo Bertinetti (Eds.), Trauben, Edizioni Trauben, 2014, p. 57-72. 55. John Kenny, op. cit., p. 163. 56. Pier Pauo Piucucco, op. cit., p. 66. 57. John Banville, Shroud, op. cit., p. 288. 58. Ressentiment is Nietzsche’s term for the nihilistic, rancorous attitude manifested by the weak as a result of their incapability to punish the strong. The weak (or the slave, as Nietzsche liked to put it), in turn, engage in “imaginary revenge” in order to make up for their incompetence (On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, Carol Diethe (trans.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 21). For Nietzsche, the figure of the priest is the ultimate manifestation of ressentiment that incessantly propagates Sklavenmoral (slave morality). 59. Lee Spinks, Friedrich Nietzsche, London, Routledge, 2003. p. 120. 60. Ibid. 61. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, op. cit., p. 9. 62. John Banville, Shroud, op. cit., p. 12-13. 63. Ibid., p. 13. 64. Ibid., p. 201. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., p. 42. 67. Ibid., p. 43. 68. Ibid., p. 52. 69. Ibid., p. 55. 70. Ibid., p. 93. 71. Ibid., p. 144. 72. Ibid., p. 211. 73. Ibid., p. 18. 74. Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2003, p. 12. 75. Ibid., p. 12. 76. Zupančič emphasizes, it is “a duality that has nothing to do with the dichotomies between complementary oppositional terms (which are ultimately always two sides of the One): this duality is not (yet) multiplicity either” (Ibid., p. 12). 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., p. 28. 79. Ibid., p. 17.

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ABSTRACTS

This paper proposes to read John Banville’s Shroud (2003) as an example that most aptly illustrates the writer’s dialogue with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. It traces the ways in which Banville’s narrator incorporates Nietzsche’s conception of self and demonstrates how Banville reinvents Nietzsche’s idea of the Overman through elaborate metaphors. It argues that it is Nietzsche who ultimately provides Banville’s narrator with the necessary tool to frame a sense of selfhood that lies outside the linguistic predicament posited by deconstruction.

Cet article propose de lire Shroud (2003) de John Banville comme exemple qui illustre le mieux le dialogue de l'écrivain avec la philosophie de Friedrich Nietzsche. Cette étude tente de retracer les manières dont le narrateur incorpore et ensuite réinvente la notion Nietzschéenne de l’homme (Übermensch) à travers de ses métaphores élaborées. Ce projet soutient également que c'est bien Nietzsche qui fournit finalement au narrateur banvillean l'outil nécessaire pour encadrer une conception du “moi” qui serait immune à la crise linguistique proposée par la déconstruction.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Banville, Shroud, Nietzsche, authenticité, déconstruction Keywords: Banville, Shroud, Nietzsche, authenticity, deconstruction

AUTHOR

MEHDI GHASSEMI Mehdi Ghassemi is Adjunct Lecturer-Researcher in English at the University of Lille where he previously completed a doctoral thesis on John Banville’s fiction. His research explores the intersections between subjectivity, masculinity and style in contemporary Irish fiction. His publications include “Authorial and Perceptual Crises in Banville’s Shroud” (2015), “Uncanny Corporeality in John Banville’s Eclipse” (2016), “Aesthetics of Hysteria in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence “ (2018). He has also co-edited La Représentation du Corps dans La Littérature (2016). His forthcoming publications examine Gothic tropes and ekphrasis in Mefisto, The Sea, and Ancient Light.

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The Queen’s two bodies: Panti at the Abbey

Alexandra Poulain

1 This article is part of a fledgling project that tries to connect notions of shame, queer identities, postcolonial identities and performance. It is grounded in the substantial and growing body of queer theory and queer activism which has been engaged in an effort to resignify shame not just as a normative force of social regulation and censorship, but also as a potentially liberating emotion capable of releasing creativity and of providing an impetus for theatrical self-(re)construction. One point of origin was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s oft-quoted article “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’ The Art of the Novel”, first published in 1993 in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies1 and republished in David Halperin and Valerie Traub’s 2009 edited volume Gay Shame. Other landmark publications which look at a specifically Irish context include Sally Munt’s Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (2009)2, and more recently Joe Valente’s article “Self-Queering Ireland” in the “Queering Ireland” issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies in 20103. In this article I return to a well-known piece of queer Irish autobiographical performance, one which occurred on the stage of the national theatre but was captured on video and, as the hackneyed phrase goes, “went viral” in 2014: Panti’s “Noble call” at the Abbey theatre4, in the wake of the public scandal known as “Pantigate”. What, I ask, is the particular significance of this queer Irish autobiographical performance? What work does it perform within Irish culture? To continue with clichés, I suggest that the drag queen’s performance on the Abbey stage holds a (facetiously distorting) mirror to the nation, that under cover of being “about” the intimate, subjective experience of internalised shame which is constitutive of queer identity, it also says something both disturbing and liberating about the performative nature of heterosexuality.

2 The context of Panti’s performance needs to be recalled briefly. In January 2014, in the midst of the campaign for marriage equality, Rory O’Neill, performer and gay rights “accidental activist”, as he defines himself, best known as his drag persona Panti, was invited to appear on RTE’s popular talk-show Saturday Night Live, hosted by Brendan O’Connor. When asked to comment on his experience as a gay man in contemporary

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Ireland, O’Neill said he considered certain prominent people in the media and political circles to be homophobic. After the show those who had been named, including high profile Irish Times reporter John Waters, threatened both RTE and O’Neill with legal action, prompting RTE to edit that part of the interview from the RTE archive, to issue a public apology and to pay out some 85000 € to offended parties, thus, as Fintan Walsh comments, “effectively imply[ing] that homophobia could not be called out in public”5. While traditional media in Ireland barely documented the event, the story was widely shared by the social media and evolved into a global furore which became known as “Pantigate”. These events, in January 2014, coincided with the beginning of the decade of commemorations of the revolutionary events which led to the independence of Ireland a hundred years ago. One early celebration was the production at the Abbey of James Plunkett’s 1958 play The Risen People which chronicles the Dublin Lockout of 1913. After each performance, the cast invited a surprise guest to give a “Noble Call” in the form of a short address reflecting on the play’s relevance to the state of contemporary Ireland. On the night of the play’s final performance on 1 February 2014, three weeks after Rory O’Neil’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, Panti was invited to give her Noble Call, and she gave a resonant speech in response to “Pantigate”, drawing on her own experience of homophobia in Ireland and exposing the redoubled violence inherent in the attempt to silence anyone who dares to speak of homophobia in the public sphere. The speech was greeted with a standing ovation, and the video hit the internet and achieved instant, massive success. How instrumental it was to the eventual success of the Equality campaign can only be a matter of speculation; but I want to suggest that it also works at another level, not just as a (brilliantly effective) piece of gay rights activism, but also as a sympathetic comment on the performative nature of what has become known, after Adrienne Rich, as “compulsory heterosexuality”6.

3 When she is called on the stage at the end of the performance, Panti appears in a fur- lined, high-necked burgundy dress in the usual high heels and curly blonde wig, towering above the rest of the cast who stand behind her on the Abbey stage in their 1913 workers’ costumes. She then introduces herself, redundantly making sure that everyone in the audience is aware of the constructed nature of her gender: “Hello, my name is Panti, and for the benefice of the visually impaired or incredibly naïve, I am a drag-queen”. What produces both a certain epistemological anxiety and the unique performative strength of the Noble Call is that the rest of the performance proceeds as if this was Rory, rather than Panti, telling very intimate stories of his experience of homophobia as a gay man in contemporary Ireland. Though she is, in her own words, “painfully middle class” and has never experienced the “abject, grinding poverty” represented in the play, she feels legitimate to give a speech about “oppression” because, she says, “I do know what it feels like to be put in my place”—an important phrase that I’ll return to shortly.

4 The speech starts with the evocation of a foundational, traumatic yet banal event, to which Panti relentlessly returns subsequently—the story of how she once stood at a pedestrian crossing and was abused by a “bunch of lads” in a passing car: Have you ever been standing at a pedestrian crossing when a car goes by, and in it are a bunch of lads, and they lean out of the window as they go by, and they shout “Fag!” and throw a milk carton at you? Now, it doesn’t really hurt. I mean, it’s just a wet carton, and in many ways, they’re right: I am a fag. So it doesn’t hurt, but it feels oppressive. And when it really does hurt is afterwards. Because it’s afterwards

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that I wonder and worry and obsess over, what was it about me? What did they see in me? What was it that gave me away? And I hate myself for wondering that. It feels oppressive. And the next time I’m standing at a pedestrian crossing, I hate myself for it, but I check myself to see what is it about me that gives the gay away. And I check myself to make sure that I’m not doing it this time.

5 Then she goes on to evoke other banal experiences of homophobia, but always returns to this crucial moment: “but the next time I stand at a pedestrian crossing, I hate myself for it, but I check myself.” The pedestrian crossing thus becomes the metonymic space of trauma, instantly inducing feelings of fear, shame and internalised self-hate, and a reflex of self-discipline. In his 1999 book Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (transl. 2004)7, Didier Eribon argues that the experience of being insulted is an inevitable and crucial part of the identity-making process of gays and lesbians; that it is in fact, by necessity, a foundational experience: “It all begins with an insult”, he claims (15). An insult, he goes on to argue, does not aim to convey any informative content, to tell me anything about myself, but aims only “to hurt me, to mark my consciousness with that hurt, inscribing shame in the deepest levels of my mind.” (16) In doing this the insult pins me down and tells me where I belong in the social hierarchy: “Insult is a linguistic act — or a series of repeated linguistic acts by which a particular place in the world is assigned to the person at whom the acts are directed.” (16) Panti’s speech captures both the foundational character of insult and its performative, place-assigning power: “I do know what it feels like to be put in my place”. The scene is made brilliantly real with a few, vivid touches: the vulnerable space of the pedestrian crossing, the untroubled masculinity of the “young lads” in the car, the grotesque choice of projectile — a “wet carton of milk” — with its humiliating connotations of abject femininity, limpness and wasted fluids, and the monosyllabic insult that defines and confines: “Fag!” But the reason why the speech is so resonant is that the isolated incident is metonymic of the constant exposure to insult which LGBT people suffer. As Eribon points out, “Insult can be found anywhere: linguists have expanded this category of performative utterances to include allusions, insinuations, irony, metaphor, and so on.” (16) In fact, he argues persuasively, the stigmatising, place-assigning power of insult pervades the whole structure of language, which is always already shaped by heterosexual prejudice: Thus do gay people live in a world of insults. They are surrounded by a language that hems them in and points them out. The world insults them; it speaks of them and of what is said about them. The words of day-to-day life as well as of psychiatric, juridical, and political discourse assign each of them individually and all of them collectively to an inferior place within the social order. And yet this very language preceded them: the world of insults preexisted them, and it takes hold of them even before they know what they are. (56)

6 Insult is foundational in the constitution of LGBT identity because it precedes the emergence of the self: it is always already there, in the very texture of the language with which I will apprehend the world around me and articulate a sense of who I am. Having related the “pedestrian crossing” incident Panti goes on to give other instances of feeling “oppressed.” Each story starts with the anaphoric phrase “Have you ever”, which makes the point that the experience of an audience which can reasonably be assumed to be largely straight, however sympathetic to LGBT people, diverges radically from the lived experience of insult which is constitutive of LGBT subjectivity. Her other examples include being the object of a whole range of “expert” discourses and uninformed yet publicly expressed opinion, travelling on a crowded bus with her best

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friend and cringing because he is “being so gay”, and being aware at all times that in other countries LGBT people may be beaten up, imprisoned and even killed for being what she is. Every story thus reveals the homophobic violence at work in the very fabric of LGBT experience, a violence of which the foundational incident of the pedestrian crossing is only the most visible and quintessential manifestation.

7 Obsessively, Panti returns to the traumatic incident, and to her subsequent attempt to fend off the violence of insult by normalising herself: “I check myself” (in both senses: inspect, and restrain). Life as a gay man is described as a poignantly ineffective struggle to act straight. Like a Method actor, she submits her body to constant training, but the body refuses to be disciplined and always threatens to “give the gay away”. There is one particularly interesting moment in the performance, when she is talking about her distressed self-inspection after the incident: “what did they see in me, what was it that gave me away?”, and a few people in the audience laugh, but with a split second’s lag, and she looks briefly unsettled, as if she hadn’t anticipated the laughs here, hadn’t intended this to be funny—and indeed it isn’t funny as such: she is talking about a moment of extreme anxiety. The reason why some people do laugh, I argue, has to do not with what she is saying but with who is saying it: the man who is telling us that he is constantly trying to look as straight as possible, as inconspicuous as possible, is wearing high heels, a fur-lined burgundy dress, a Dolly Parton-style wig and enough lipstick to paint the Abbey building red. The radical dissonance between the performing body and the spoken body, neither of which is a more authentic version of Panti/Rory than the other, is a striking metaphor of the impossibility of self- adequation which Eribon sees as a characteristic of gay subjectivity. This inevitable split is induced by heterosexual domination and the way it pervades all social relations and institutions, proclaiming that civilisation itself rests on the principle of “sexual difference” and thus relegating same-sex relations out of juridical institutions and of cultural intelligibility itself8. Social institutions thus “work to establish and to reproduce an uncrossable divide between the norm and homosexuality—and another form of self-division within a gay person.” (116) Being divided from themselves, LGBT people must therefore strive towards the unreachable goal of identity, and embark on a lifelong course of self-fashioning. This was perhaps most flamboyantly expressed in Wilde’s determination to make his life a work of art, a project taken up by Panti who in her earlier, eloquently titled show A Woman in Progress, defined herself as “a big, drunk, devastatingly attractive, theatrical device,” adding in true Wildean fashion: “I am my own life’s work. The fruit of my own creative endeavours9.” The buried pun on “fruit” facetiously drives home the point that you can never be a “fruit” unless you have grown it yourself. Eribon’s analysis of the paradoxically creative effect of insult intersects with Sedgwick’s reading of shame as a transformative force intrinsically linked with performance: Shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performance. I mean theatrical performance. Performance interlines shame as more than just its result or a way of warding it off, though, importantly, it is those things. Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity. (Gay Shame, 51-52)

8 The performativity of insult, encapsulated in the stigmatising phrase “Shame on you!”, makes me cast down my eyes and turn away my face in shame—it makes me lose face.

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But in the process it invites me to recreate my face, my persona, to perform my chosen, ever inchoate version of who I am or will be. As both Sedgwick and Eribon point out, queer identities, anchored as they are in the experience of shame, are bound to emerge theatrically, as invisibility is reversed into exhibitionism (Eribon 106).

9 However, what Panti’s Noble Call makes poignantly clear is that there is no alternative to theatricality: “Panti” may be a gloriously histrionic “theatrical device”, but the other body she conjures up in her speech, the body of the gay man who is desperate to act straight, is no less the product of a performance—if a failed one. As I suggested earlier, the act of “checking himself” evokes the discipline of the Stanislavski tradition, or indeed of the sort of restrained naturalism which the Fay brothers cultivated in the early days of the Irish Literary Theatre. As Adrian Frazier has shown, what became known as “the Abbey style of acting” evolved largely as an attempt to counter the perceived vulgarity of the English acting tradition, which gave free rein to star actors and tended to encourage overacting and facile, emphatic effects. By contrast, the Fays cultivated ensemble rather then solo performances, and imposed a form of gestural minimalism on their actors. Frazier quotes the English critic E. C. Montague: Throughout one half of Lady Gregory’s Rising of the Moon there is scarcely a movement: merely that no-one should strut or fret tickles you. Miss Maire O’Neill, as Nora, in The Shadow of the Glen, stands almost stock still through a scene where most English actresses would pace the stage like lionesses in a zoo. The result is that when she does move you can see the passion propel her like a screw. In Mr Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan the average stage-manager would have thought everything under-acted10.

10 However, as Lionel Pilkington has argued, this self-imposed discipline contrasts not just with English histrionics, but also with alternative Irish performative practices which were perceived as incompatible with the modern norms of bodily restraint that the Abbey embraced as part of its modernising agenda: One valuable effect of the naturalistic style of acting championed in the 1900s by the Fay brothers, Frank and William, and for which the Abbey theatre was so famous, was its presentation of Irish actions and forms of behaviour as decorously familiar. […] In striking contrast, for example, to the weird gesticulations of a ululating funeral keener, the straw-masked performances of a mummer or the grotesque and often crudely sexual and violent indecorousness of a wake game, acting in the institutional theatre rendered behaviour that was reassuringly and instantly recognisable as modern11.

11 As it achieved a hegemonic status, the Abbey’s embrace of modern norms delegitimised and marginalised those alternative performative traditions which remained, in David Lloyd’s felicitous phrase, “recalcitrant to modernity”. The bodies that were allowed on the Abbey stage were bodies that did not “strut or fret”—restrained, disciplined bodies, modern bodies—normal bodies. In conjuring up her repeatedly failed performance of heterosexuality, however, Panti denaturalises the norm and exposes it for what it is: another performance, which depends on the painstaking internalisation of dominant codes. Her failed performance, and the shame that attends to it, nevertheless produces in return the flamboyant drag queen who struts and frets upon the Abbey stage. If “queer” is, as Michael Warner defines it, “resistance to regimes of the normal”12, than it could be argued that Panti metonymically performs the return of the repressed queer. Inviting the Abbey audience to recognise that their (assumed) normality is a performance like hers (and one which is just as susceptible to failure), she queers the institutional space of the national theatre, and metonymically revives the repressed

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performative traditions which resisted absorption into the normalised idioms of modernity.

12 There is something openly confrontational about the performance: this is not confessional theatre, as in most autobiographical performances which rely on the creation of a special intimacy between performer and audience (the size of the Abbey stage, and the presence of the whole cast of The Risen People, would make this very difficult anyway). Rather, at the end of her speech Panti states her belief that “almost all of you are probably homophobes” and, evoking yet again her self-loathing for “checking herself” at pedestrian crossings, she blurts out, “and sometimes I hate you for doing this to me.” However I would argue that in confronting the audience with her painful story of stigma and internalised shame, she offers an empathetic mirror-image of their own perpetual endeavour to perform the norm, a task inherent in the project of heterosexuality everywhere but perhaps particularly mandatory in a postcolonial context, where the narrative of the young nation still needs to be stabilised by an on- going process of policing of bodies. As Helen Munt comments in the context of Irish- American nationalism: The concept or figure of a nation depends upon an account of ‘oneness’ that requires by default compulsory heterosexuality. Because heterosexuality is naturalised and assumed, accordingly homosexuality is read as antithetical to the nation and its political embodiment within nationalism13.

13 Finding one’s place within the national narrative is thus dependent on one’s ability to perform the heterosexual norm, an arduous task of constant self-policing to which everyone, not just the impossibly conspicuous gay boy, must submit themselves. Yet in confronting the audience not with the shamed body who fails to achieve invisibility, but with the most conspicuous body of the drag queen born out of this shame, she ushers them, too, towards a liberating performativity which needs not be perceived as antithetical to the national narrative, but rather reconnects metonymically with a whole body of repressed Irish performative traditions.

NOTES

1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’ The Art of the Novel”, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Vol. 1-1, 1993, p. 1-16. Republished in David. M. Halperin and Valerie Traub (eds.), Gay Shame, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 49-62. 2. Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007. 3. Joseph Valente: “Self-Queering Ireland”, Queering Ireland, special issue of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Sean Kennedy (ed.), 2010, p. 25-44. 4. The performance can be seen online at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=WXayhUzWnl0. Accessed 18 February 2018.

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5. Fintan Walsh, Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016, ebook [1043]. 6. Cf. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, New York, Norton, 1986, p. 23-75. 7. Didier Eribon: Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, transl. Michael Lucey, Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2004. 8. French edition: Réflexions sur la question gay (1999), Paris, Flammarion, 2012, p. 176. The passage is omitted in English. 9. Panti, A Woman in Progress, in Queer Notions. New Plays and Performances from Ireland, Fintan Walsh (ed.), Cork, Cork University Press, 2010, p. 245. 10. C.E. Montague, qtd. by Adrian Frazier, “Irish Acting in the Early Twentieth Century”, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, 231-45, p. 236. 11. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2010, p. 67. 12. Michael Warner, “Introduction”, in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Michael Warner (ed.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. p. xxvii. 13. Op. cit., p. 56.

ABSTRACTS

This article reads Panti’s Noble Call at the Abbey theatre on 1 February 2014 in the light of Didier Eribon’s work on the experience of insult as constitutive of gay subjectivity. However, it goes on to argue that Panti’s narrated experience of stigma, internalised shame and failed self-discipline also reflects the young Irish postcolonial nation’s self-imposed task of performing heteronormative modernity. The drag queen’s performance, turning shame into exhibitionism, points to alternative ways of performing Irishness which reconnect with traditional, non-modern forms of Irish performative practices.

Cet article propose une lecture de la performance de Panti sur la scène de l’Abbey Theatre le 1er février 2014 à la lumière du travail de Didier Eribon sur l’insulte comme expérience constitutive de la subjectivité gay. Il suggère que l’histoire de Panti, qui parle de stigmatisation, de honte intériorisée et de son échec à discipliner son corps selon la norme hétérosexuelle, ne reflète pas seulement une expérience spécifiquement homosexuelle, mais fait aussi écho à la performance de la modernité hétéronormative à laquelle est confrontée l’ensemble des membres de la jeune nation irlandaise postcoloniale. La performance de la drag queen, qui renverse la honte en exhibitionnisme, montre qu’il existe d’autres manières de jouer l’Irlandicité, et renoue ainsi avec des pratiques performatives irlandaises traditionnelles qui n’ont pas trouvé leur place dans la modernité hétéronormée.

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INDEX

Keywords: Panti, Abbey, shame, insult, performance, body Mots-clés: Panti, Abbey, honte, insulte, performance, corps

AUTHOR

ALEXANDRA POULAIN Alexandra Poulain is Professor of postcolonial literature and theatre at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (France). She has published widely on modern and contemporary Irish drama and performance, with a special focus on Yeats and Beckett. Her latest book Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (Palgrave, 2016) looks at rewritings of the Passion narrative as a modality of political resistance in Irish plays from Synge to the present day. She is President of the International Yeats Society and Vice-Chair for Europe of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). Her current research focuses on queer disruptions in postcolonial drama, performance and the visual arts.

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A Big House Divided: Images of Irish Nationhood in Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation

Jennifer A. Slivka

1 Demands for stronger borders are often framed as preserving and unifying national culture, but in actuality, operate as a way to allay fears of invasion from an external antagonist. But as Edna O’Brien’s fiction demonstrates, the antagonist is not always foreign, nor do borders simply control who enters or leaves. Kathryn Conrad notes that borders are “way[s] to imagine the limits of power, mobility, and the body in space”; in particular, the body borders of Irish women have long been “site[s] of ideological battle1”. Similar to other postcolonial nations, Irish women have a long history of being “bearers of national culture”; indeed, Elleke Boehmer observes that “woman-as-sign buttresses national imagining […] gender has been to date, habitual and apparently intrinsic to national imagining” for postcolonial nations, to the extent that “nationalism and gender have been deployed mutually to invoke and constitute one another (while at the same time being constituted […] in relation to other categories of difference also)2”. What results from this perverse symbiosis, then, are nationalist gender ideologies that police, silence, and/or simplify women’s lived experiences in order to support the engendering of a “national imaginary.” O’Brien’s fiction seeks to dismantle nationalist conceptions of Irish womanhood, most notably in her later trilogy—House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1997), Wild Decembers (2001), and thematically, I am including In the Forest (2002)—which exposes Ireland as a nation in crisis by portraying the home-as-nation as an unhomely one.3 These crises are brought about through the uncanny, which Freud defines as “everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open4”. In O’Brien’s fiction, this surfaces across three spatial registers of “home”: the self, the familial home, and the nation.

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A Divided Nation, Home, and Self

2 In House of Splendid Isolation (1994), O’Brien traps two marginalized figures under a state of emergency in a dilapidated Big House, with the isolated house serving as a microcosm for the imagined community of the nation. The house and its occupants reflect the borders between North and South, past and present5. O’Brien emphasizes spatiality over temporality in order to subvert the authority of dominant history, especially regarding Irish women’s history and the conflict in the North. In this regard, the novel can be read as an indictment against what Joe Cleary defines as the “revisionist critique of revolutionary nationalism”, which attempts to integrate the state into the global capitalist economy and the European Union [by] redefining the “Irish nation” in order to make it coterminous with the Southern Irish state—thereby divesting that state of the awkward “supplement” of the Catholic nationalists in the North6.

3 Through O’Brien’s rounded depiction of McGreevy, an IRA gunman on the run, she also critiques the Republic of Ireland’s “strategies and ideologies of containment designed to downplay as much as possible their own involvement in the struggle and to suggest that its roots lay exclusively in the intractable sectarianism of Northern Ireland’s hostile communities7”. Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the Freudian uncanny provides another way to address the conflict presented in O’Brien’s novel by stressing how: the narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien double, uncanny and demoniacal [...] the strange appears as a defense put up by a distraught self: it protects itself by substituting for the image of a benevolent double that used to be enough to shelter it the image of a malevolent double into which it expels the share of destruction it cannot contain.8

4 In House, the Irish nation operates as the “narcissistic self” still trying to define or “demarcate” itself in the global community. As a result, it expels “dangerous or unpleasant” figures such as Josie O’Meara and McGreevy out of its dominant culture. On a larger scale, McGreevy, as a symbol of the chaotic North, is rendered a “demoniacal” double by the press and the gardaí. According to Jean and John Comaroff, the “spectacle of policing” is staged in postcolonies “to make actual, both to its subjects and to itself, the authorized face, and force, of the state—of a state, that is, whose legitimacy is far from unequivocal9”. In other words, the “benevolent double” image that Ireland creates to sustain itself is not enough; it must visibly vilify and sacrifice the Other within (e.g., Josie and McGreevy) as a way to purge its own demons.

5 Spaces are never neutral; they are ideological sites where dominant cultural paradigms are conceived, perceived, and contested. According to Sara Mills, “space is a question of relations: perceptions of and actual relations between the individual, the group, institutions and architecture or access10”. In House, the different registers of home can be read through Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre’s “trialectics of spatiality” in which social space comprises three dimensions: perceived space (Firstspace), representations of space (Secondspace), and spaces of representation (Thirdspace). In House, the Firstspace, or “repetitive routines of everyday life” include that which “can be measured”, such as the house itself as well as Josie’s body11. Secondspace, or conceptualized space, is “entirely ideational, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived/imagined geographies” which Soja asserts tend “to become the ‘real’ geography, with the image or representation coming to define and order the

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reality12”. In O’Brien’s novel, these “mental spaces”, or what “[Lefebvre] called the dominant space, surveying and controlling both spatial practices and the lived spaces of representation13” are the gender ideologies that police and oppress. But it is Thirdspace, or “space as directly lived” that is the “terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces,’ spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning”, in which Josie and McGreevy’s characters are used to critique the oppressive nationalist ideologies which manifest in “Firstspace and Secondspace modes of thought14”.

6 In O’Brien’s novel, the home-as-nation becomes a contested borderland when an isolated widow and an IRA gunman from Northern Ireland are forced to live together when he holds her hostage in order to use her home as a “safe house”, which assumes multiple, and often ironic connotations in the novel. Gloria Anzaldúa defines borderlands as being present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy15.

7 Although race is a critical aspect to Anzaldúa’s theory, this essay expands her concept by defining borderlands as spaces where subjects differing in age, gender, and place come into contact16. Through a relationship transcending their differences, they free themselves from societal strictures that have been imposed upon them. These figures are what Anzaldúa would characterize as “border” people, as they are marginalized by the patriarchal state because they defy laws of state and gender. As these figures cross literal and figurative borders, a crisis occurs when the personal trauma of the characters collides with the social trauma of the Irish homeland, thereby dispelling the fantasy of a stable, national narrative. What I want to argue, then, is that although new or denied identities have the possibility to emerge, spatial and temporal crossings expose the fragility of the nation, the familial home, and ultimately, the self. Although O’Brien locates a possibility of understanding and reconciliation through their brief contact, the violence of the patriarchal state closes down the sustainability of their border crossing. By elaborating the ways in which O’Brien’s dilapidated Big House becomes an uncanny borderland, this essay critically unpacks the ways in which the Irish nation attempts to define itself by “evicting” those who disrupt the laws of state and gender.

8 The inequities of the prevailing gender ideology, despite shifts in time periods, are revealed in the contrast between public and private spheres, as Soja asserts that “space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life17”. The exteriority of the Big House belies a private abusive prison when Josie’s husband’s initial magnanimity gives way to oppressive brutality. O’Brien revises the Big-House subgenre associated with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class—the decline and eventual destruction of the house and the paternalism of its new Irish Catholic owner reveal that independence merely resulted in “a reconfiguration of oppression18”. For example, Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Justice in the mid-1920s, said, “a few words in a Constitution do not wipe out the very real differences between the sexes, either physical or mental or temperamental or emotional19”. Catherine Nash notes how the “discourses that confined women within the domestic sphere simultaneously conferred on them the responsibility of maintaining the national population”; their function was to “reproduce the bodies of the ‘body politic’ represented as masculine20”. Josie’s initial

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visions of becoming her own mistress of an expansive house dissolve quickly with the realization that she is merely an object of exchange, as her marriage to Jamie ensures her aunt and uncle land usage. Here, control of landscape is directly linked to control over the female body. When Josie does not bear him an heir, Jamie drinks heavily and becomes sexually vicious in order to assert his authority. Danine Farquharson and Bernice Schrank describe Jamie’s duality: Having rejected imperialism in the public domain, Jamie, in many ways a typical Irish man of nationalist sympathies, reenacts the imperial impulse in sexual terms, appropriating for himself the role of colonizer in his bedroom21.

9 During the 1920s, “where a wife was found to be barren (and it was believed that this was the wife’s problem solely), it was perfectly acceptable for the husband to beat her22 ”. But Jamie does not simply beat Josie; “He has taken to holding her lips shut with one hand [...] he likes the power he has over her [...] as he endeavours to prise her apart, go right into her [...] as what, a babby maybe23”. “Holding her lips shut” silences any sort of refusal and “pris[ing] her apart” denies Josie sexual pleasure. Yet she refuses to completely submit to the function of Irish womanhood by producing future sons of the nation. Instead, she aborts Jamie’s child in an effort to control her body and to rebel against his abuse by denying him an heir. In aborting her only child, Josie’s character can be read as a satirical revision of Kathleen ni Houlihan, the young/old woman symbolizing Ireland who lures young Irish men to die for her. But in this case, the sacrifice is not for the nation that she is supposed to represent and reproduce, it is in rebellion against it.24 Still, O’Brien reveals that abortion is not an easy solution either, as Josie is burdened with a lifetime of guilt and is further isolated within her marital home.

10 The house, as “spatialization of patriarchal power25”, entraps and isolates its female occupant, paradoxically serving as haven and prison for her, much like her own body. Here, O’Brien purposefully conflates the house with Josie’s body in an ironic re- visioning of the woman-as-nation trope through what Barbara Hooper calls “somatography”: It is a concrete physical space of flesh and bone […] it is a highly mediated space, a space transformed by cultural interpretations and representations; it is a lived space, a volatile space of conscious and unconscious desires and motivations—a body/self, a subject, and identity: it is, in sum, a social space, a complexity involving the workings of power and knowledge and the workings of the body’s lived unpredictabilities26.

11 The fact that both Josie and the house are uncannily awakened by a young priest’s arrival makes visible sexual desire that is supposed to be suppressed and repressed according to the Catholic Church. O’Brien’s conflation of Josie with the home of the nation further satirizes Josie’s character as a representation of Mother Ireland, a supposedly chaste maternal symbol of the nation: “The drawing room had never heard such words and the silverware and pewter responded to them, and in the grate a swag of orange gold fluttered merrily up the chimney” (H, 136). Upon discovering Josie’s wish to marry to Fr John, Jamie traps her as she attempts to escape from the house.27 Josie, “naked and cut, asprawl a windowsill” is violently caught along the threshold between the prison of the house, i.e., Firstspace and Secondspace, and the exterior landscape, which represents the possibility of a different life or Thirdspace, free from such oppression.

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12 McGreevy’s invasion also causes her to escape from the prison of her body. But unlike the sexualized effect of Fr John, McGreevy’s “coming has brought menace into the air”, as the “landscape seems alien, sod and grass feel different” (H, 87). Josie’s body mirrors the landscape’s uncanny changes, too. In the beginning of the novel, Josie is physically weak and dependent, as the 1937 Constitution says she should be. Yet McGreevy’s arrival awakens a strength she was not supposed to have, as she “was now dragging the brown chest of drawers across the floor” to keep him out of her room (H, 71). There are several ways to read this scene. On the one hand, McGreevy is portrayed as the stereotypical “figure of the archfelon” from the North, but his presence is simultaneously productive since violence “usurps representation, reveals the limits of order28” within the Irish state. And on another level, McGreevy’s presence causes an uncanny doubling to occur within Josie: “There are two hers, the one who does not dare to admit that […] there is a dangerous man [...] and the other her, which contends that she is mistress of the house” (H, 77). Freud posits that the figure of the double reveals the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will29.

13 Unlike her willful silence toward her husband’s abuse, i.e., her “illusion of free will”, Josie voices her defiance against McGreevy’s authoritarianism by hoping the Guards will take him alive so that he will “relive every second of every crime” (H, 119).

14 But O’Brien demonstrates that men are also (mis)shapen by nationalist gender ideologies. Known as both “the Beast” and as a perverse Cúchulainn traveling the length of Ireland eluding capture, McGreevy is transformed into something Other than human. Cleary states there are essentially two kinds of nationalism […] that promote two corresponding understandings of nationhood […] the good civic conception of nationhood [that] is based on common citizenship and the bad ethnic kind [that] is based on common ethnic descent […]30.

15 The latter is viewed as the “badlands of modernity” that aggressively undermines “the saner civic nationalisms of the industrially developed word31”. Thus, the media’s depictions of McGreevy as primitive and mythical render him an “unfortunate persistence into the modern of a recalcitrant pre-modern tribalism32”. Ironically, McGreevy is a pariah of the national community for which he fights; he is “Wanted on all sides […] A bit of a soloist in his deeds” (H, 113). Nothing remains for him in the North: “The certainty” of his cause is “all he has left” (H, 14). As I have argued elsewhere33, McGreevy is similar to the marginalized male characters who follow him in O’Brien’s oeuvre, in that he reveals the paradox of the exile who exists outside of the community and goes to extreme measures (even destroying that homespace) in order to possess it and the identity he hopes to locate there. According to Kristeva, this type of obdurate fanaticism only surfaces for the exile “when he becomes attached—to a cause […] What he finds there is more than a country; it is a fusion, in which there are not two beings, there is but a single one who is consumed [...] annihilated34”. In his quest for a unified homeland, McGreevy loses his personal identity to a nationalist one. Cleary notes that fragmentation is so extensive that it could be argued that since the 1970s the partition of Ireland no longer stopped at the interstate border: the militarization of

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local territorial boundaries and the increased segregation of its two communities have effectively produced a whole series of internal partitions within Northern Ireland as well35.

16 The trope of partition can be seen through McGreevy’s dissociation from his own body, telling Josie “hunger is the last thing you feel” (H, 206). This loss of individuality is represented by the national branding epitomized in his tri-color tattoo “and by his name: Mc meaning ‘son of’ and Greevy, a homonym of ‘grieve’ or ‘grief’. Thus McGreevy is the son of grief emanating from the land and its violent history36”.

17 However, O’Brien’s depiction of McGreevy resists the snares of the hypermasculine “freedom fighter/terrorist of the Northern Irish tradition” who “has a tendency to appear as a macho-man in love with guns, [is] naturally violent, [and] sexually disturbed37” by portraying him as a round character who has killed in cold blood, yet panics at the sight of his daughter’s coffin and is oddly nurturing and domestic. He cleans Josie’s kitchen, fixes her stove, and makes bread; he was also a “model prisoner” and “did the sewing for the others […] and patched their jeans”, but also “arranged for […] a ton of explosives to be brought in on a digger” to escape from prison (H, 198-199). Through these depictions, O’Brien’s text avoids either mythologizing or vilifying him, and suggests that there is more to him than his public persona.

Crossing Borders into (Dis)comfort Zones

18 The manner in which the protagonists initially occupy the house is spatially compartmentalized and recalls colonial hierarchy. McGreevy distances himself from Josie because he thinks she is a wealthy Anglo-Irish Protestant, and she capitalizes on his misperception by occupying the top floor bedroom while relegating him to the bottom floor kitchen in order to maintain her authority. Michael Harris suggests that Josie and McGreevy’s relationship: ironically resembles the complex pattern of attraction and repulsion that Bhabha and Robert Young have identified as characteristic of the colonizer-colonized relationship [...] the colonizer’s unconscious desire for the colonized Other is expressed through a pattern of sexual attraction and repulsion38.

19 Although a definite attraction and repulsion exists within their relationship, readings such as Harris’s limit other possibilities and reduce the significance of their contact. O’Brien revises the popular “romance-across-the-divide” narrative popular in Troubles literature, which focuses heavily on republican violence, portrays the republican nationalist as a “‘problem’ to which the texts attempt to find ‘solutions’” without doing so, and “meld[s] erotic and patriotic desires in narratives that imagine the reconciliation and assimilation of different national constituencies cast as lovers39”. Though some of these features are present in the novel, Josie and McGreevy are not Romeo and Juliet; instead, their friendship is mutually productive in aiding their quest for subjectivity. The novel seems to criticize these traditional literary expectations when the Guards are repulsed at what they perceive is lovemaking when Josie and McGreevy fall to the ground at the sound of a bee that they mistake for the Guards. And spatially, the staircase links the social spaces the characters inhabit within the house, while also linking temporalities between the dead and the living, as Jamie had always heard “chains of the dead” on the last flight of stairs (H, 78). Homi Bhabha asserts, “the un-spoken, unrepresented pasts […] haunt the historical present40”. O’Brien’s novel

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expresses such temporal hauntings by giving voice to silenced histories, but does so through spatialization.

20 The fact that McGreevy is able to penetrate the supposed inviolability of the house’s isolation, points to the inescapability of the public sphere invading the private sphere. It also draws attention to the “discursive invisibility” of the Irish border promulgated by social forces eager to distance the South from the North by rendering “Northern Ireland as a wholly detached space without a contentious land-border41”. At one point, Josie feels the need to help McGreevy in his fight for justice, personal identity, and truth, or as Josie rephrases it—“community” (H, 105). O’Brien’s diction is careful and deliberate, as “community” is a flexible term that can be read various ways, e.g., the imagined community of the nation, or a group of individuals with similar or different interests all living together. In this way, “community” can be read as a radical Thirdspace that proffers other modes of lived social space. But O’Brien’s fiction never offers easy solutions; their border crossing does not occur easily, as neither Josie nor McGreevy readily yields to the other’s viewpoint. Josie gives McGreevy her uncle’s diary to show him they share their country’s “woes” (H, 91), but she differentiates the War for Independence from McGreevy’s war. This causes him to invoke geographical distance; as a child, McGreevy believed the South was a promised land where “everything was better” (H, 106). But as an adult, he is “aggrieved” that “The South forgot us” (H, 107). Sophia Hillan notes that O’Brien touches “upon a sore place in the Irish psyche, voicing the generally unspoken view that little was done in 1969 by the Dublin government to help the beleaguered and bewildered people of the North42”. The gap between them does not diminish until Josie gives McGreevy Jamie’s tackle box, and “Everything happens then; his eyes grateful and shy [...] and something soft and yielding in her bearing” manifests (H, 99). The personal sentiment behind this gift exchange overcomes the fragmentation of geo-political borders.

21 O’Brien undermines another idealized image of the nation, the Irish family, by depicting Josie more at ease as McGreevy’s hostage than as a prisoner within her marriage. This is largely due to McGreevy’s masculinity, which directly contrasts to Jamie’s violent hypermasculinity. When Josie discovers the guns on his bed McGreevy feels obligated to explain himself in a letter, even though it is “against military rules” and apologizes for making her “sick” (H, 121). His vulnerability is laid bare in the “black capitals so small, so helpless” (H, 122). The IRA persona is represented by the dark capital letters (often used for emphasis or authority), yet the size of the letters reveals the fragility underpinning that persona. Josie becomes disoriented when she chases after him “like a mother for an errant but much-loved child43”. She literally and figuratively becomes lost in the fog, falling and stumbling through a “timeless, placeless, featureless world that could be the beginning or the end of creation” (H, 123). She loses her bearings in the borderland existing between strictly defined sides of the war, the law, and gender norms. In order to fully realize her subjectivity, a border figure like Josie has to ‘cross over,’ kicking a hole out of the old boundaries of the self and slipping under or over, dragging the old skin along, stumbling over it. It hampers her movement in the new territory dragging the ghost of the past with her44.

22 Indeed, McGreevy finds Josie feverish in the fields, raving about her childhood. Josie cannot navigate this “new territory” by herself; she must rely on another for help, which echoes the joint nature of their Thirdspace “community.” McGreevy takes her to

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a safe house where she regains her physical and emotional self, and thereby reenters the present temporality.

23 The border crossing occurring within the house undermines each protagonist’s identity that they believed to have been solidified within them, though not necessarily by them. Among the women at a local shop, Josie “feels estranged from them all, a criminal” (H, 164). Similarly, McGreevy’s accomplices accuse him of “cracking” when he suggests they leave their target to his own demise (H, 175). Like Josie, he also becomes disoriented; “Everything is getting to him, the boundaries of his night askew” (H, 196). He does not understand why he returned to the house instead of working out the details of the plan, “a duplicate of himself” (H, 197). Within the borderland of the house, McGreevy has the freedom to become more than a cloned persona. Josie discovers him “defenceless and muttering and insignificant. He had changed his lair to the shoe closet and lay under a shelf doubled up,” as if the closet is a surrogate womb around him (H, 197). The fetal position represents the vulnerability of the self rendered “insignificant” by powerful social forces that (mis)shape it into being.

24 Anzaldúa describes the process of finding “a way to a new consciousness” as leaving the “the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once”, or writing “it off altogether […] and cross[ing] the border into a wholly new and separate territory45”. This “new consciousness” plays out spatially in the novel, as Josie now allows McGreevy to sleep in one of the upstairs rooms—the border of the staircase no longer separating them (H, 217-218). His longing to escape captivity and start a family is a catalyst for Josie, as she feels a “Great lunatic fork of longing [...] to be young again, to have wains” (H, 210). Because this is no longer viable for Josie, she maps out an alternative form of motherhood through non-filial caretaking. McGreevy’s desperate quest for home inspires her to bequeath the house to “young people […] for those who travel” (H, 194). Even though her decision is a heteronormative one, it still challenges the idealized family cell, and is of her own choosing. She also desires “to be [her]self again [...] to die whole” (H, 85). McGreevy also considers making a change when Josie prompts him to abandon the war, and he ponders over the two possibilities “the fields and the sheds and the guns; or the inside, a safe inside” (H, 205). These contrasting spaces represent the geography of his psyche; the former represents his public persona, while the latter represents a Thirdspace where his vulnerable self can emerge safely.

25 But this Thirdspace is thwarted by the arrival of the Guards, who destroy the house and its new possibilities, as the police “embody a nervous state under pressure46”. As the Guards enter the house, Josie becomes an ambiguously gendered figure when she cuts her hair and dons a trench coat in defiance of gender expectations. This causes the Guards to pursue her as a possible outlaw, which is accurate considering she violates the law of gender norms. Josie does not “die whole”, at least not physically. She dies as part of the house, being caught between floors when the ceiling gives way with the Guards’ shooting. Josie’s fall through the ceiling can be read as her crossing borders of class, age, gender, and place, but is killed in the process because she cannot remain a border figure successfully within the home of the nation. Border figures challenge concretized conceptions of national and gender identity, and thus must be eliminated to maintain the status quo. Josie dies, and McGreevy is re-captured and imprisoned.

26 O’Brien subverts a major symbol of national authority by reversing the threatening figure of the nation; the gardaí invade and damage Josie’s house, whereas the criminal

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is respectful and protective. When McGreevy first invades Josie’s home, she imagines the Guards will rescue her with a “helicopter […] being hoisted up in some kind of cradle” (H, 84). But the Guards only bring her down to her grave. Similarly, their destruction of the nation is portrayed as an uncanny, personified death: “In the back where the explosive went off, wood, metal, and glass are in weird configurations, remainders of wall wobbling like loose teeth in a gum” (H, 226). The Guards seem to grieve more for the ruined house, a microcosm for the nation, than for the dead woman. Before they raid the house, Cormac comments it is a “pity to hurt her”, i.e., the house (H, 218). And the main detective is angered at how “the beauty and lineaments of the house [are] utterly destroyed, a woman dead, and another notch in the so-called struggle” (H, 227). Despite the loss expressed, Josie is reduced to the gender signifier “woman”, unlike the house, which is valued for its “beauty and lineaments.” David Lloyd states that political thinking on both sides of the border “perpetuate not only nationalist ideologies, but their articulation along sectarian and, effectively, racial grounds”, when the roots of the struggle are the socio-economic conditions of the postcolonial state which have been “systematically obscured47”. This “obscurantism” further perpetuates the notion that Irish history is repetitive due to “the nature of Irish identity48”. Although the narrative of repetitive bloodshed appears in the novel, it seems that British imperialism and Irish Revisionism are held accountable when Josie pronounces there are still two wars: “one with the English and one with ourselves” (H, 107). After the shootout between the Guards and the IRA, the garda “would never see the face properly; he had not seen it when they tried to slay one another in the crossfire and he does not see it now, match after match sputtering out in the wet” (H, 192). The garda symbolizes the Irish state, which has turned a blind eye to the North and its accountability for the conditions there.

27 O’Brien leaves us with a cycle of violence by bookending the novel with the voice of Josie’s aborted “Child.” Though giving subjectivity to an unborn fetus may be read as reifying anti-abortion discourses of the state, the fact that it is an aborted fetus who is speaking is subversive if we consider “the fantasy of the fetus as an uncorrupted and autonomous entity in Irish nationalist, anti-abortion discourse is also a fantasy of the security and autonomy of Ireland.49” Thus, by enclosing the narrative with the aborted Child’s voice, O’Brien denies an easy reproduction of Irish nationalism. In some ways, O’Brien’s novel appears to reify “the circular and cyclical traumatic paradigm of Irish history” that has been “adopted by many Irish writers50”, but her text offers a Thirdspace for escaping this cycle in the border crossing of Josie and McGreevy, which challenges and reimagines the trialectics of spatiality, historicality and sociality. O’Brien’s novel contests the “narrative of Irishness”, which seems “self-evident, normative, truthful”, but in actuality, control of these narratives is a crucial function of the state apparatus since its political and legal frameworks can only gain consent and legitimacy if the tale they tell monopolizes the field […] The state does not simply legislate and police against particular infringements, it determines the forms within which representation can take place.51

28 By bringing marginal “infringements” to the center of her narrative, O’Brien demonstrates how the threats of difference have the potential to re-center knowledge formation and the social spaces built around it in order to create a more open and pluralistic national community.

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NOTES

1. Kathryn A. Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, p. 70-71. 2. Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005, p. 4-5, 7. 3. This is apropos considering the 1937 Constitution of the Irish Republic linked women to hearth and home. 4. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, David McLintock (trans.), New York, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 132. 5. The novel was published the same year the IRA declared a cease-fire in Northern Ireland. 6. Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Oxford/New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 102. 7. Ibid., p. 100. 8. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez (trans.), New York, Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 183-184. 9. Jean and John Comaroff, “Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder,” Critical Inquiry 30.4 (Summer 2004), p. 805. 10. Sara Mills, Gender and Colonial Space, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005, p. 23. 11. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p. 66. 12. Ibid., p. 79. 13. Ibid., p. 80. 14. Ibid., p. 67-68, 80. 15. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition, San Francisco, Aunt Lute Books, 2007, p. 14. 16. Though Soja briefly acknowledges Anzaldúa’s work as an important “postmodern spatial feminist critique”, he does not actually explore the ways in which her work radically opens up new avenues of analyzing Thirdspace. 17. Edward Soja, qtd. in Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, p. 28. 18. Danine Farquharson and Bernice Schrank, “Blurring Boundaries, Intersecting Lives: History, Gender, and Violence in Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation”, Lisa Colletta and Maureen O'Connor (eds.), Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, p. 116. 19. Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, “Engendering Citizenship: Women’s Relationship to the State in Ireland & the United States in the Post-Suffrage Period”, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women & Irish History, Dublin & Niwot, CO, Wolfhound Press, The Irish American Book Company, 1997, p. 161.

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20. Catherine Nash, “Remapping the Body/Land: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender, and Landscape in Ireland,” Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (eds.), Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, New York: The Guilford Press, 1994, p. 237 21. Danine Farquharson and Bernice Schrank, op. cit., p. 120. 22. Elizabeth Steiner-Scott, “To Bounce a Boot Off Her Now & Then...”: Domestic Violence in Post-Famine Ireland”, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women & Irish History, Dublin & Niwot, CO, Wolfhound Press, The Irish American Book Company, 1997, p. 143. 23. Edna O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994, p. 47. Henceforth this novel will be referenced in the body of the text. 24. O’Brien has written on the various female tropes used to represent Ireland in her memoir Mother Ireland (1976). 25. Soja, op. cit., p. 110. 26. Barbara Hooper, quoted in Soja, Ibid., 114. 27. Women’s writing usually leads to miscommunication and often results in violence elsewhere in O’Brien’s trilogy. 28. Comaroff, op.cit., 808. 29. Freud, op.cit., p. 143. 30. Cleary, op.cit., p. 23. 31. Ibid., p. 23. 32. Ibid., p. 23. 33. See Jennifer A. Slivka, “Irishness and Exile in Edna O’Brien’s Wild Decembers and In the Forest”, New Hibernia Review 17.1 (Spring 2013), p. 115-131. 34. Kristeva, op. cit., p. 9. 35. Cleary, op.cit., p. 99-100. 36. Michael Harris, “Outside History: Relocation and Dislocation in Edna O'Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation”, Kathryn Laing, Sinead Mooney, and Maureen O'Connor (eds.), Edna O'Brien: New Critical Perspectives, Dublin, Carysfort Press, 2006, p. 128. 37. Laura Pelaschiar, “Terrorists and Freedom Fighters in Northern Irish Fiction,” The Irish Review, 40/41 (Winter 2009), p. 58. 38. Harris, op. cit., p. 130. 39. Cleary, op.cit., p. 110-111, 113. 40. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home”, Social Text No. 31/32, Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992), p. 147. 41. Cleary, op.cit., p. 98. 42. Sophia Hillan, “On the Side of Life: Edna O'Brien's Trilogy of Contemporary Ireland”, Lisa Colletta and Maureen O’Connor (eds.), Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, p.149. 43. Ibid., p. 150. 44. Anzaldúa, op. cit., p. 71. 45. Ibid., p. 101. 46. Comaroff, op.cit. p. 803.

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47. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 19. 48. Ibid., p. 19. 49. Conrad, op. cit., p. 78. 50. Pelaschiar, op.cit., p. 53. 51. Lloyd, op.cit., p. 6.

ABSTRACTS

In Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation (1994), the house, a microcosm for the nation, along with its marginalized occupants, reflect the borders between North and South, past and present. By critically interrogating the ways in which O’Brien’s dilapidated Big House becomes an uncanny borderland, this essay unpacks the ways in which the Irish nation attempts to define itself by “evicting” those who disrupt the laws of state and gender.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Edna O’Brien, corps féminins, spatialité, littérature post coloniale, identité nationale, Irlande du Nord Keywords: O’Brien Edna, women’s bodies, spatiality, postcolonial literature, national identity, Northern Ireland

AUTHOR

JENNIFER A. SLIVKA Dr. Jennifer A. Slivka is Associate Professor of English and Women's & Gender Studies at Virginia Wesleyan University, where she is also Director of the Women's Resource Center. Jennifer researches the politics of identity, place, and trauma in contemporary Irish women's writing and teaches British and Post-colonial Literatures, along with Gender Theory. Her publications include "Irishness and Exile in Edna O'Brien's Wild Decembers and In the Forest" in New Hibernia Review and "History and the ‘I’ Trapped in the Middle: Negotiating the Past in Roth's The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America" in Philip Roth Studies.

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‘A lament for the Fianna in a time when Ireland shall be changed’: Prospective/Prescriptive Memory and (Post-)Revolutionary Discourse in Mythological Gate Plays

Ruud Van Den Beuken

With special thanks to the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland Galway

1 In his discussion of the mythologisation of revolutionary sacrifice in Irish politics and literature, Richard Kearney observes that “myth often harbours memories which reason ignores at its peril. Myths of motherland are more than antique curiosities; they retain a purchase on the contemporary mind and can play a pivotal role in mobilizing sentiments of national identity1”. While Kearney mostly focuses on the politics of prose and poetry, his discussion of the potency – as well as the risk – of literal myth-making is implicitly confirmed in a theatrical context by Richard Allen Cave’s comprehensive analysis of W.B. Yeats and George Moore’s Diarmuid and Grania (1901), Æ’s Deirdre (1902), Yeats’s Deirdre (1906), J.M. Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), and Lady Gregory’s Grania (1912), for he notes that in early twentieth-century Ireland, “[d]ramatising the lives of Deirdre or Grania was fraught with creative and moral dangers2”. While Cave convincingly argues that, for example, Synge’s posthumous play was “skirting close to the winds of outrage and disapproval” in depicting “[t]he healthy joys of sensuality” and thereby questioning “the intricate moral climate in Dublin at the time of the play’s conception”, this article will show that Irish mythological drama that was staged after the watershed of the revolutionary period (1912-1923) engaged with equally contentious matters – albeit in the political rather than the moral realm3.

2 Micheál macLíammóir’s Diarmuid and Gráinne (1928) and An Philibín’s Tristram and Iseult (1929), two original plays that were produced by the Dublin Gate Theatre Studio during

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its first seasons at the Peacock Theatre, serve to illustrate this point. Rather than adhering to the conventional Revivalist mode of recreating something of the grandeur that was Éire, these plays reimagine the function of mythology in the Free State by exploiting the genre’s malleability as they infuse these ancient tales with Irish revolutionary discourse of a much later period. Indeed, their politicised representations of undesirable marriages that might be contested through rebellion feature anachronistic cultural memories of the Easter Rising, which serve to vindicate the nation’s sovereignty and construct a postcolonial teleology.

Politicised marriages and prospective/prescriptive memory strategies

3 These nuptial and mnemonic elements both require some initial remarks. With regards to the politicisation of traditional female gender roles, it should be noted that the colonial connotations of political marriages in Irish literature have been well- documented. In her study of the ways in which the Act of Union was metaphorically represented in literary texts, Mary Jean Corbett, for example, observes that “colonial discourses in the nineteenth century were always gendered insofar as they naturalized the subordination of some peoples and races to others by a pervasive rhetoric of feminization4”. Her subsequent analyses establish the primacy of marriage tropes in representing Anglo-Irish relations by showing how “[t]hroughout post-Union fiction, the marriage plot operates as a rhetorical instrument for promoting colonial hegemony in making the private relations of romance and reproduction central to the public and imperial good5”.

4 However, dissenting voices employed similar nuptial metaphors to decry the Union as a violation of spousal relations: as Jim Hansen has observed, contemporary pamphlets and caricatures depicted Ireland as a “confined, threatened, terrorized female”, while England was portrayed as “her terrorizing, avaricious, and lustful captor-suitor6” – more recent texts such as Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union” (1975) exemplify the persistence of this metaphor. Likewise, Richard Kearney has charted how such imagery of “a vulnerable virgin ravished by the aggressive masculine invader from England” developed into allegories in which the nation became “personified as a visionary daughter or spéirbhean threatened by the alien marauder (or inversely, following the same logic, as a shameless hag – meirdreach – who lifted her skirts for the invader’s pleasure)7”. As my analysis of two original Gate plays will show, this topos was also employed in a post-revolutionary context to articulate a retroactive vindication of rebellion: by representing Ireland’s colonial subjugation in terms of an unhappy marriage to a cold-hearted husband, the native bride is shown to have been forced to solicit the help of a valiant warrior, who must then choose between romantic love and loyalty to his liege lord.

5 In recent years, scholarship in the fields of cultural memory theory and collective trauma theory has also come to reflect on the inevitable impact of colonial subjugation on collective memory, as Edward Said posits in his afterword to Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (2003): “How can we assume that one phase of history does not imprint the next ones with its pressures, and if so, how are they to be discerned, recalled, rebutted, resisted if they are not admitted in the first place?8”. Postcolonial studies which give affirmative answers to such questions facilitate an understanding of the multifaceted

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mnemonic structures that underlie the ways in which an oppressed people may implicitly articulate and explicitly commemorate traumatic periods in its shared history. In this way, they acknowledge such episodes – and, in many cases, the enforced silencing thereof – as enduring formative influences that continue to generate identities, since, as Ian McBride has observed, “[i]n Ireland, perhaps more than in other cultures, collective groups have […] expressed their values and assumptions through their representations of the past9”. Such reconfigurations of cultural identities, however, are not straightforward; indeed, McBride contends that “[t]he past has to be reconstructed over and over again, with all the attendant transferences, short-circuits and distortions which that process involves10”.

6 This malleability is intrinsic to – if not constitutive of – the praxis of drama, for, as Chris Morash and Shaun Richards have argued, “[o]nstage, space becomes place when a specific site is defined by events that occurred there in the past”, so that it is precisely “[t]his tension – between the ontological presentness of performance and the contradictory need to allow the past to inform the present – [which] is one of the definitional structural qualities of the theatrical11”. Such interactions are not limited to a confluence of past and present, but also endow the stage with an additional prospective dimension, since “[p]lace presupposes an understanding of time in which past, present and future can melt into one another, in which the space occupied in the present is also the active site of memories of the past, and anticipations of the future12”

7 Indeed, one of the most prominent dramatic tactics that macLíammóir’s and An Philibín’s plays will be shown to have in common is their explicit articulation of the function of remembrance. In a break with the Aristotelian unity of time, these plays do not simply depict a series of dramatic events that are temporally encapsulated; instead, they problematise the concept of memory in an attempt to designate the future relevance of those events as they unfold. As a result, the historical action of these plays is explicitly endowed with the quality of something that should be remembered. This temporal conflation yields a mnemonic strategy that is both prospective and prescriptive: rather than embodying the persistence and continuing relevance of past events (as many of the mnemonic strategies that cultural memory theorists describe do), it is orientated towards the future and attempts to enforce very specific manifestations of the memories that it is propagating13. Although this conceptualisation would seem to imply a linear temporality – the narrative present is to be recollected in the narrative future – it is actually circular: the vindication of the mnemonic imperative occurs precisely through the act of writing the lines that posit its permanence in the first place. In this sense, prospective/prescriptive memory presents a historiographical Möbius strip in which the prophecy occurs both after and through its fulfilment: it is a mode of memory that is imbued with a retroactive – and, in the plays discussed below, revolutionary – teleology14.

“Those that are in my secret thoughts will be remembered in Ireland forever”: Micheál macLíammóir’s Diarmuid and Gráinne (1928)

8 There are several examples of this complex mnemonic strategy in Diarmuid and Gráinne, the very first original play to be performed at the Gate. After their debut at the Peacock Theatre in October 1928 with Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1876) and Eugene O’Neill’s The

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Hairy Ape (1922), Edwards and macLíammóir produced the latter’s Diarmuid and Gráinne in English – the original Irish version had served as the inaugural play of the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe only a few months before15. MacLíammóir’s version of the myth condenses Lady Gregory’s classic account from Gods and Fighting Men (1905) to four major scenes: the wedding of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and Gráinne in the first act, which ends with Diarmuid’s reluctant betrayal of his liege lord; Diarmuid and Gráinne’s flight to a woodland dwelling (presumably at Doire-da-Bhoth) and to a cavern at the shore, where he breaks his promise to Fionn and makes love to Gráinne, in the second act; and the hunt for the Boar of Beann Gulbain in the final act, which results in Diarmuid’s death and Gráinne’s dejected submission to Fionn16.

9 The play is not only remarkably lavish in its use of the future tense when referring to events that occur within its narrative arc, but also abounds in instances of prospective mythologising, especially in its opening and closing scenes – and in several instances, this narrative strategy is imbued with revolutionary discourse. At the beginning of the first act, the process of myth-making itself is made ironically explicit when the Wise Woman explains how Diarmuid received his magic star: Gráinne’s nurse comments that “[y]ou’d think it was out of an old tale17”. The transformative power of stories being told and retold is likewise accentuated in a more condensed form by Sadhbh, Gráinne’s servant, who states that “in Tara every word that is spoken over the fires at twilight has grown to be a fabulous story at the dawn of day18”. The (post-)revolutionary potency of such aggrandisements is revealed when the Nurse is speculating which of the guests who are present at Fionn and Gráinne’s wedding are being contemplated by a Wise Woman. Her initial guesses – the High King and Queen – are incorrect: “Ireland will not remember them”, the Wise Woman claims, whereas “[t]hose that are in my secret thoughts will be remembered in Ireland forever19”. This intertextual reference to W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), in which the Old Woman sings of how the men who die for her “shall be remembered for ever, / they shall be alive for ever” underscores the political power of mythology: as Kearney observes, “Yeats offered the myth of Mother Ireland as symbolic compensation for the colonial calamities of history. The mythological motherland served as a goddess of sovereignty who, at least at imaginary level, might restore a lost national identity by summoning her sons to the sacred rite of renewal through sacrifice20”. In this sense, macLíammóir’s enigmatic strategy of embedding the future mythologisation of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Gráinne, and Diarmuid in historically circumscribed revolutionary discourse offers a temporal variant of the equally paradoxical spatial multiplicity that Morash and Richards observe with regards to the Old Woman’s strongly metaphoric role in Yeats and Gregory’s play, which allows her to “enter[…] what is effectively the mimetic onstage place of the stage from an offstage space that is conceptual, not mimetic”, even as she embodies an “ambivalent temporality21”.

10 Just as the play’s opening scenes project themselves beyond the confines of the narrative proper, its conclusion, while seemingly bringing an end to Diarmuid’s tale in a darkness that is both literal and moral, tries – and fails – to provide closure in a more distant narrative future. Diarmuid’s deathbed scene focuses only partially on his own passing, for in a vatic monologue, the fallen hero begins to foretell the deaths of his fellow warriors Osgar, Caoilte, Goll, Cuan, and Oisín. Especially the latter’s demise offers a bleak vista of the future, for Oisín, Diarmuid avows, “will live after all of them, an old withered man, making a lament for the Fianna in a time when Ireland shall be changed,

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an old white broken man bending low with the burden of his sorrow beneath the heavy clouds, listening to the voice of bells22”. This sudden leap into the future is, in fact, eerily similar to the audience’s recent past, for Yeats’s famous lines from “Easter, 1916” (1921) – “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born” – echo in Diarmuid’s prophecy23. Moreover, in conjunction with Gráinne’s earlier observation that “[m]en, when they fight willingly, fight for dreams and for the shadows of dreams”, the play thus reaffirms Yeats’s resignation in stating that “[w]e know their dream; enough / To know they dreamed and are dead24”. As such, Diarmuid’s temporally projected representation of the decline of Ireland’s most famous mythological band of warriors may be interpreted as an ex post facto vindication of the Easter Rising: at a time when the Fianna was no more and even Oisín’s powers had waned, the only thing that he still waited for was the tolling of the bells on Easter Monday, 1916.

11 A final example of this dramatic strategy, which retroactively endows mythological characters with an awareness of Ireland’s later revolutionary history, is the contradictory characterisation of Gráinne: in the beginning of the play, her servant Sadhbh is berated by the Wise Woman as a “child without knowledge without wisdom [sic]”, and her mistress, too, characterises herself as “[a] good child! Yes that is [...] what they all want me to be in this place25”. Gráinne decries this patronising attitude and her unequal marriage to Fionn, bitterly proclaiming that it is a “strange and wonderful thing to be the Bride of an old man whose fame is ranted and raved over the fire by the companies of bloody and brutish hunters or of the gray-haired lisping women” – a vision which she contrasts with her dreams of “see[ing] the clouds that are free chasing each other on the hillside without26”. Gráinne’s powerlessness is also evoked through a pastoral image of Ireland: Diarmuid describes her as “a young girl more beautiful than a bough of the apple tree under blossom, one lighter and more swift than a golden fawn of the woods, softer and more sweet than the honey of the bees, wilder and more frail than the cold clouds of dawn27”. Fionn, to whom Diarmuid is speaking, is of a different mind altogether: he experiences a terrible dread at beholding his fiancée and wonders at Diarmuid’s choice of words; his friend then explains Gráinne’s fragility by referring to “the glance of her eyes that tells of fleeting wishes and of passions lighter than a moment’s thought28”. This image establishes Gráinne as a fatal paradox: she is both vulnerable and powerful, feeble and terrible; and as such, she functions as a rejuvenated incarnation of the Sean-bhean Bhocht, which, in a contemporary context, had proven to be an incendiary emblem of Irish republicanism.

12 In Diarmuid and Gráinne, then, the titular characters repeatedly transcend their mythological roles to figure as historicised symbols of revolutionary struggle. Gráinne’s marriage constitutes an individuated equivalent to Ireland’s colonial subjugation, while Fionn’s dread underlines the capriciousness with which she accepts the martyrdom of future generations for her revolutionary cause. Diarmuid serves to embody this sacrifice, but he, too, exceeds the bounds of the narrative proper by prophesying Ireland’s future through imagery that is readily associated with the Easter Rising. This innovative rendition of the tale of Diarmuid and Gráinne thus illustrates how mythological tropes could be retroactively imbued with implicit historical markers to provide the newly independent nation with a redemptive teleology.

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“The gods, in divine equality, / Shall touch with immortality / Their names, that these may nowise pass”: An Philibín’s Tristram and Iseult (1929)

13 This (post-)revolutionary intersection of marriage and rebellion is also a key plot element in another early Gate play, Tristram and Iseult (1929), which likewise reinforces this problematical combination through very specific memory strategies. The author of this play was An Philibín, a pseudonym of the pathologist J.H. Pollock, whose “dramatic poem” had originally been published in 1924 by the Talbot Press but was only performed for the first time by Edwards and macLíammóir in conjunction with John Galsworthy’s The Little Man (1915) and Nikolai Evreinov’s A Merry Death (1908) during their second season at the Peacock Theatre in 192929. Pollock depicts only a very concise episode from the famous legend: his one-act play is set on the ship that is taking Iseult, an Irish princess, to Cornwall, where she is to marry King Mark, the uncle and liege lord of Tristram, who is escorting her. During the voyage, Iseult and Tristram have fallen in love with each other, and Iseult has come to regret her betrothal. In an attempt to bolster her spirit and restrain his own feelings, Tristram tries to convince Iseult of King Mark’s virtues, but she remains unhappy. Afterwards, Brangwaine, her servant, tells her stories about King Arthur’s knights to comfort her, but her efforts, too, are to little avail. When Iseult retreats, Brangwaine sings to the audience: she reveals that she possesses a love potion that she will give to Iseult and Mark after their wedding so that they will win each other’s affections. In the next scene, however, Tristram tells Iseult that he is thirsty; unwittingly, she brings the love potion, and both drink of it to fortify their respective oaths to King Mark. The potion’s effect is swift: the lovers swoon, only to wake up in the throes of their impossible love. At the conclusion of the play, Brangwaine returns to contemplate their tragic yet divinely sanctioned fate.

14 In several ways, Tristram and Iseult mirrors Diarmuid and Gráinne: in both plays, a young girl is forced into an undesirable marriage that is averted through magical means, with Gráinne feeling herself being dragged “[f]rom one prison to another” on her wedding eve, and Iseult realising that she has lived a sheltered existence that has made her delicate yet passionate, stating that [...] all my life Lay fenced about with care, like some frail plant In a walled garden, whose bright flowers burn Against a constant sun; being plucked from thence, The roots are bleeding30.

15 Iseult’s longing for her native land might likewise be gleaned from her reaction on seeing swallows flying around the ship: she wonders whether they “have looked upon the tumbled roofs / Of Dublin, or have even bred beneath / The shadow of my turret” – indeed, her greatest desire is to turn the ship around and sail back to Ireland31. Taking these pastoral yearnings into account, Iseult’s fear of “a throne / That hath and unknown quality and a king / I have no knowledge of” resembles the sense of oppression that also frustrates Gráinne before she becomes enthralled by Diarmuid’s star. Indeed, this initial subjugation is reinforced by another parallel with macLíammóir’s first play, when Brangwaine describes her mistress Iseult as being “but a child32”.

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16 While Iseult does not choose to rebel against the marriage that has been imposed upon her, she loses this sense of duty when she drinks of the love potion. In light of her subsequent denial of her betrothal and her elopement with Tristram, both Gráinne and Iseult thus manifest Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s revolutionary potential: their youth and frailty turns into a powerful magic when they become threatened, which allows them to rally the true heroes of Ireland (Diarmuid, Tristram) against the encroachment of their liege lords (Fionn, Mark), and they must break their feudal bonds in doing so. More specifically, Brangwaine’s song combines these ostensibly contradictory elements – a forbidden love that seeks to wed masculine martyrdom with the feminine promise of national rejuvenation – through an intertextual link to W.B. Yeats’s “The Rose Tree” (1921). Brangwaine describes how “[t]he subtle women, in their wisdom haste, / To pluck out of the sacrificial sod / A blood-red flower” – an image of martyrdom that Yeats had imbued with the legacy of the Rising by using Patrick Pearse’s voice to state that it is as “plain as plain can be / There’s nothing but our own red blood / Can make a right Rose Tree33”. In An Philibín’s play, this image is adapted to show how, through druidic magic, women have the power to “chant the birth-song of the springing day” as Ireland becomes young again34.

17 In this sense, Iseult’s elopement becomes emblematic of much larger concerns, for although the story arc of Tristram and Iseult is even more temporally compressed than that of Diarmuid and Gráinne, the ending of An Philibín’s play is similarly characterised by an attempt to transcend the narrative present. It is Iseult who enables this digression: as she leaves the stage with Tristram in the final scene, she declares that her escape from bondage is not merely a personal victory but rather the fulfilment of a teleological imperative: “Come, let the stars, who, with benignant eyes, / Beheld the first espousals of our race, / Look upon this – the sweetest and the last!35”. Her departure is followed by Brangwaine’s return, who ends the play with a song that endows the lovers’ fateful encounter with an almost metafictional quality when she observes how the gods “choose out that hour wherein / We rest, to strike us, who awakening find / Our peace was but the passage of a dream36”. This radical divergence from narrative constraints is further reinforced by Brangwaine’s closing lines, which are both prospective and prescriptive: after foretelling how “in sea-washed Brittany, / As vapour, breathéd on a glass, / These, Love’s poor pensioners, must die”, she declares that “[t]he gods, in divine equality, / Shall touch with immortality / Their names, that these may nowise pass37”.

18 In retrospect, then, the entire play might seem to have been little more than a brief excerpt – Tristram and Iseult’s subsequent adventures, and even their deaths, are reduced to a few lines of verse – yet it is precisely this act of condensation that endows the preceding scenes with an emblematic status. On the ship that bears them away from their native land, Tristram and Iseult rebel against their liege lord – if not a foreign oppressor – but this defiance also marks their submission to a tragic fate that is rendered in terms that evoke the Easter Rising. Brangwaine’s song provides the mnemonic strategy that resolves this paradox: by sketching the future completion of the lovers’ narrative arc and their ultimate demise in the present, her vindication of their impossible love through the future consecration of their names becomes imminent. Her prospective reflection is simultaneously a prescriptive act of memory that is left to the audience – rather than the gods – to perform.

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Conclusion

19 In outlining the memory strategies that complicate several emblematic love triangles in two original mythological plays that were produced at the Dublin Gate Theatre during its early years, this article has shown how such novel reimaginations of the tales of Gráinne and Iseult could absorb the political discourse of Irish republicanism even as the mnemonic artificiality of this process is explored. By infusing these mythological tales with a distinctively modern historical awareness of Irish rebellion in their plays, macLíammóir and An Philibín confronted their audiences with a complex mode of memory that is simultaneously prospective and prescriptive: even as narrative confines are either condensed or expanded to a point that almost effects their abolition, mnemonic imperatives proliferate, transforming the dramaturgical conventions of Irish mythology into a politicised realm of futurity. In this sense, they confirm Richard Kearney’s contention that in experimental postcolonial texts such as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), “[m]yth is revealed as history, history as myth” in a way that “shows us that our narrative of self-identity is itself a fiction – an ‘epical forged cheque’ – and that each one of us has the freedom to re-invent our past38”. Such plays thus extend Chris Morash and Shaun Richards’s argument that the Gate “was producing a conceptual space that refused to be constrained by geography or politics” during the contentious Free State years into the temporal realm.39 This also signals an important shift from pre-revolutionary mythological drama, for if, as Richard Allen Cave has argued, the anguished characters in Lady Gregory’s Grania (1912) “sense that they have stepped out of time without achieving the transcendence which is their goal”, the exact opposite applies to the heroes and heroines who are featured in these two Gate plays: firmly embedded in their distant epochs, they nevertheless articulate a cathartic awareness of their mnemonic potency in shaping Ireland’s postcolonial future40.

NOTES

1. Richard Kearney, Postcolonial Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 120. 2. Richard Allen Cave, “The Dangers and Difficulties of Dramatising the Lives of Deirdre and Grania”, in Jacqueline Genet and Richard Allen Cave (eds.), Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1991, p. 3. 3. Ibid., p. 9. Italics in original. 4. Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 16. 5. Ibid., p. 53. 6. Jim Hansen, Terror and Irish Modernism: The Gothic Tradition from Burke to Beckett (2009), Albany, NY, SUNY Press, 2009, p. 17. See also Nicholas Robinson, “Marriage Against Inclination: The Union and Caricature”, in Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Acts of

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Union: The Causes, Context and Consequences of the Act of Union, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2001, pp. 140-58. 7. Richard Kearney, op. cit., p. 120. 8. Edward Said, “Afterword: Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism” (2003), in Clare Carroll and Patricia King, (eds.), Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 179. 9. Ian McBride, “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland” (2001), in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 12. 11. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 80, 83. 12. Ibid., pp. 85-86. 13. Consider, for example, Marianne Hirsch’s discussion of postmemory, which “strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory”, Poetics Today, Vol. 29 No. 1, 2008, p. 111). 14. This self-consistency also distinguishes prospective and prescriptive memory from Kevin Whelan’s concept of radical memory: although radical memory, too, is orientated towards the future, it is primarily concerned with the emancipation of aborted futures through re-imaginations. Whelan’s “redemptive project to release the unredeemed potential” aims at empowerment: it wants to resolve historical traumas by branching off in new directions, while prospective and prescriptive memories are paradoxical confirmations of historical events precisely as they occurred. For a discussion of radical memory, see Kevin Whelan, “Reading the Ruins: The Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape”, in Howard B. Clarke, Jacinta Prunty, and Mark Hennessy (eds,), Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms, Dublin, Geography Publications, 2004, p. 320; and also his exploration of how “[r]adical memory opens a space for a counterpoint history” in “The Cultural Effects of the Famine”, in Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 152. A better analogy might be found in Chris Morash’s use of André Bernstein’s notion of “backshadowing”, which he adopts to clarify why Abbey’s historiography is rife with the tendency to explain “past events [...] in terms of the futures to which they lead, as if those futures were in some way pre- ordained”. ‘Backshadowing’, however, refers to academic over-interpretation rather than the mnemonic or narratological constructs that this article explores. For Morash’s argument, see “The Road to God Knows Where: Can Theatre Be National?”, in Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash (eds.), Irish Theatre on Tour, Dublin, Carysforth Press, 2005, p. 102. 15. The reviewer for The Irish Times commented favourably on the production, describing Gráinne as “the ‘vamp’ of Hollywood” and stating that it was “the first serious attempt in this country to stage Irish mythology, and it deserves to be as great a success in the commercial as it undoubtedly is in the artistic sphere”. See “A Fianna Play”, The Irish Times, 19 November 1928. Joseph Holloway felt that macLíammóir’s drama was “most impressively played, on the whole, by the company”, and that “[t]he

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setting was excellent and the dressing most artistic”. Overall, Holloway observed that “[m]ost of the speeches shewed careful writing, but many could be shortened with advantage to the dramatic intensity of the tragedy. MacLiammóir has a great gift of descriptive writing, and the text of his play is studded with such” (in Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (eds.), Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, Vol. I, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1968, p. 42). For a discussion of the Taibhdhearc production and macLíammóir subsequent translation, see Katherine Anne Hennessey, Memorable Barbarities and National Myths: Ancient Greek Tragedy and Irish Epic in Modern Irish Theatre, PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2008, pp. 67-79. 16. Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (1905), London, John Murray, 1905, pp. 343-99. In addition to the elision of various (mostly violent) episodes that take place during Diarmuid and Gráinne’s flight from Fionn Mac Cumhaill in Lady Gregory’s account, macLíammóir’s play features several narrative divergences: Gráinne sees Diarmuid’s magic star when he breaks up a fight between two Fianna captains rather than during a struggle with a pack of dogs; Diarmuid and Gráinne are the only ones who do not drink of the sleeping draught at the feast, which means that Osgar does not encourage Diarmuid to follow Gráinne; Diarmuid tries to reason with Fionn (and finally rebukes him) in the forest, while he avoids this confrontation in Lady Gregory’s version; Osgar does not decide to join Diarmuid’s cause; the encounter with Ciach of the Fomor is presented in an almost supernatural setting; and finally, Diarmuid is still alive when he is brought home by the Fianna after the hunt, so that Gráinne is present while Diarmuid pleads with Fionn to heal him with his magic powers. For a philological discussion of various retellings of this myth (albeit one which overlooks macLíammóir’s version), see James MacKillop, Fionn Mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1986. 17. Micheál macLíammóir, Diarmuid and Gráinne, typescript, MS 41,247/1, Dublin, National Library of Ireland, 1928., p. 3. I have opted to spell the characters’ names in accordance with the programme that was distributed during its first run rather than the typescript, which uses Anglicised spellings (e.g. ‘Finn’ for ‘Fionn’). 18. Ibid., p. 5. 19. Ibid., p. 2. 20. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats, London, Macmillan, 1934, 1952, p. 86; Richard Kearney, op. cit., p. 113. For further discussion of Yeats’s ideas about nationalist martyrdom, see, for example, A. Norman Jeffares, W.B. Yeats: A New Biography, London, Arrow Books, 2001, pp. 174-5; Cóilín Owens, “Martyrdom: A Literary Preamble”, in Rona M. Fields and Cóilín Owens (eds.), Martyrdom: The Psychology, Theology, and Politics of Self-Sacrifice, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2004, p. 7; and Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 120. 21. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards, op.cit., pp. 44-45. 22. Micheál macLíammóir, op. cit., p. 111. 23. W.B. Yeats, “Easter 1916”, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, London, Macmillan, 1933, 1950, p. 203. 24. Micheál macLíammóir, op. cit., p. 21; W.B. Yeats, op. cit., p. 204. 25. Micheál macLíammóir, op. cit., pp. 6, 12. 26. Ibid., p. 16.

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27. Ibid., p. 20. 28. Ibid., p. 20. 29. The reviewer for The Irish Independent stated that “‘An Philibin’s’ one-act dramatic poem [...] was a gratifying proof that courage to undertake what is ordinarily regarded as a hazardous experiment does not always go unrewarded” (J.W.G., “New Irish Verse Play”, The Irish Independent, 6 June 1929). Joseph Holloway mentioned that “[t]here were some purple patches of descriptive poetry, but little drama in the episode of the ill- fated pair taking the love potion of ‘Brangwaine’. The staging was fantastical and the lighting excellent. MacLiammóir and Coralie Carmichael made an ideal pair of lovers, though the dawning of their love was rather talked away in long speeches” (in Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (eds.), Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre, Vol. I, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1968, p. 47). The songs that were played during the intervals between the three plays were composed by Dr J.F. Larchet but Holloway felt that they were sung rather badly (ibid., p. 48). However, the play’s setting and lighting were to Holloway’s liking: “The elongated, celtic-ornamentesque-like figures that filled the panels of the pavilion of ‘Tristan’s’ ship were amongst the weirdest shapes imaginable, and filled the eye with the barbaric splendour of the time. It is marvellous what Edwards can do on such a small stage, and his settings and lighting and dressing of plays leave little to be desired” (ibid.). 30. Micheál macLíammóir, op. cit., p. 16; An Philibín, Tristram and Iseult, Dublin, Talbot Press, 1924, p. 12. 31. An Philibín, op. cit., pp. 12, 28. 32. Ibid., pp. 9, 20. 33. Ibid., p. 33; W.B. Yeats, “The Rose Tree”, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, London, Macmillan, 1933, 1950, p. 206. 34. An Philibín, op. cit., p. 34. 35. Ibid., p. 45. 36. Ibid., p. 46. 37. Ibid., p. 47. 38. Richard Kearney, op. cit., p. 117. 39. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards, op. cit., p. 24. This also illustrates Elaine Sisson’s claim that, “[d]uring some of the most turbulent years of the emergence and foundation of the State”, the Gate’s directors “were determined to introduce and promote experimental voices as part of their education as artists and performers, but also as a bulwark against conservatism and increasing cultural isolationism” (“‘A Note on What Happened’: Experimental Influences on the Irish Stage, 1919-1929”, Kritika Kultura Vol. 15, 2010, p. 144.) 40. Richard Allen Cave, op. cit., p. 15.

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ABSTRACTS

This article analyses how Micheál macLíammóir’s Diarmuid and Gráinne (1928) and An Philibín’s Tristram and Iseult (1929) reimagine the function of mythology in the Free State by infusing their dramatic representations of these legendary marriages with Irish revolutionary discourse of a much later period. In both plays, mythological tropes are retroactively imbued with anachronistic cultural memories of the Easter Rising to provide the newly independent nation with a redemptive teleology.

Cet article analyse comment Diarmuid and Gráinne (1928) de Micheál macLíammóir et Tristram and Iseult (1929) d'An Philibín réinventent la fonction de la mythologie dans l'État libre en infusant leurs représentations dramatiques de ces mariages légendaires avec le discours révolutionnaire irlandais d'une période plus tardive. Dans les deux pièces, les tropes mythologiques sont imprégnés de mémoire culturelle anachronique de l’insurrection de Pâques 1916 pour donner à la nation nouvellement indépendante une téléologie rédemptrice.

INDEX

Mots-clés: mémoire culturelle, théâtre, postcolonialisme, mythologie, l’insurrection de Pâques 1916 Keywords: cultural memory, drama, postcolonialism, mythology, Easter Rising

AUTHOR

RUUD VAN DEN BEUKEN Dr Ruud van den Beuken is a lecturer at Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He was awarded the 2015 Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR) New Scholars’ Prize for his research on postcolonial mythological plays, and in April 2017, he received his PhD (cum laude) for his thesis on cultural memory and national identity formation at the Dublin Gate Theatre. He is the Assistant Director of the NWO-funded Gate Theatre Research Network and the recipient of the 2017 Education Award for Best Junior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at Radboud. In February/ March 2018, he held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Moore Institute (National University of Ireland, Galway). He is currently finalising a book-length monograph on the Gate Theatre.

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Recensions

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Mairéad Carew, The Quest for the Irish Celt. The Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland, 1932-1936

Patrick Galliou

RÉFÉRENCE

Mairéad CAREW, The Quest for the Irish Celt. The Harvard Archaeological Mission to Ireland, 1932-1936, Kildare : Irish Academic Press, 2018, 316 p. illus. 2018

1 À l'instar de bien des États-nations en gestation, l'État libre d'Irlande s'appuya, afin de fonder sa légitimité, sur un récit étiologique, mythe des origines glorifiant les racines celtiques et chrétiennes dont le nouvel état était censé tirer sa substance, et qui laissées intactes par le passage des siècles, donneraient à la nouvelle entité politique une authenticité ethnique et culturelle qu'avaient perdue les autres nations européennes, abâtardies par des invasions successives. À cette glorification abstraite d'une Irlande éternelle manquait toutefois une justification scientifique, la mise en exergue de monuments et d'objets archéologiques qui, publiés et exposés, assureraient à ce concept un ancrage définitif dans le réel. C'est à un tel projet que, dans les années 1930, s'attacha le gouvernement d'Éamon de Valera, les différentes mesures prises à cet effet étant détaillées dans le bel ouvrage que leur consacre Mairéad Carew. Elle y montre bien comment l'État prit peu à peu des mains des « antiquaires » bénévoles le contrôle de la recherche archéologique afin de l'orienter vers une mise en relief d'un passé celtique et chrétien largement idéalisé qui servirait de fondement à l'armature idéologique de la République.

2 La nomination (1934), à la tête du National Museum of Ireland d'Adolf Mahr, archéologue autrichien spécialiste du Second âge du Fer, mais aussi militant nazi de la première heure, allait manifestement dans ce sens tout en donnant à la recherche archéologique irlandaise une dimension internationale, Mahr étant un fervent tenant

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d'une celtisation – ou « indo-germanisation » – très ancienne (vers 1000 av. J.-C.) de l'île par le biais d'une invasion, les traits culturels ainsi importés marquant jusqu'à ce jour la civilisation insulaire. Mais, plus remarquables encore furent les missions « scientifiques » menées en Irlande, de 1932 à 1936 par des chercheurs du Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology de l'université de Harvard, missions dirigées par Earnest A. Hooton et subventionnées par la fondation Rockfeller et de riches Irlando-Américains.

3 Ce projet, à trois volets (ethnologie, anthropologie physique, archéologie), visait à une connaissance globale du peuple irlandais, mais plus encore à la mise en évidence d'une « race » celtique pure, d'origine « aryenne », caractérisée par certains traits culturels et physiques (dolichocéphalie), qui, conservés sans « contamination », feraient des Irlandais contemporains les parents proches des « Germains » continentaux et les prototypes d'une « race » blanche pure, non métissée. Du reste, comme le souligne l'auteure elle-même, on ne saurait oublier que, dans une Amérique alors marquée par la pensée eugéniste et un racisme actif, une telle exaltation des « Celtes » ne pouvait que renforcer le prestige des Irlando-Américains, nombreux dans le pays.

4 C'est au volet archéologique de ces missions, dirigées par Hugh O'Neill Mencken et auxquelles l'État irlandais contribua par l'apport d'ouvriers, chômeurs rétribués par le Relief of Unemployment Scheme, que Mairéad Carew consacre l'essentiel de ce travail de recherche. En analysant le choix géographique et typologique des sites fouillés, elle en révèle les options idéologiques sous-jacentes, du dogme de l'origine « celtique » de certains monuments à celui d'une présence humaine très ancienne, indépendante de tout contact avec la Grande-Bretagne voisine. Il apparaît néanmoins clairement qu'en dépit d'affirmations triomphales, mais fondées sur des critères discutables, ou de la découverte de beaux objets, comme le hanging bowl et le plateau de jeu du crannóg 1 de Ballinderry (Co. Westmeath), ces deux pièces n'étant d'ailleurs pas « celtiques », ces vastes enquêtes ne répondirent pas, dans une large mesure, aux attentes de leurs promoteurs, la « celtisation » ancienne de l'Irlande restant, à ce jour, une question ouverte (voir B. Raftery, Pagan Celtic Ireland). Il n'en reste pas moins vrai que l'introduction de nouvelles techniques de fouille par les archéologues participant à ces missions, techniques qui furent rapidement adoptées par les chercheurs autochtones, fut un point positif, permettant bientôt à une véritable école d'archéologie scientifique de se développer dans l'île.

5 Dense, bien structuré et remarquablement documenté, l'ouvrage de Mairéad Carew, s'il est parfois de lecture difficile pour le profane, explore avec talent une page méconnue de l'histoire culturelle de l'Irlande du XXe siècle et mérite, à ce titre, d'être pris en compte par quiconque souhaite en explorer les ressorts.

6 consciousness Banville exhibits elsewhere is less obvious when he uses the Black persona, the same aesthetic agenda finally prevails all the same, preventing his work from being politically or socially motivated.

7 To cut a long story short : fiction or art according to Banville – be it crime fiction or high-brow cryptic satirical historiographic novels – doesn’t and cannot attempt to render reality faithfully. Neither can it produce meaning. But art has to be significant. As a matter of fact, as Murphy demonstrates, reality is always shaped by our imagining minds. Art allows us to catch a glimpse of this counterintuitive but eternal Banvillean truth : the uncanny precedence of imagination over reality.

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8 This book reads well and will certainly help all aspiring or well-established Banville scholars refine or qualify their analyses. There is no doubt it will come in handy to understand this complex and heavily interwoven body of work created by Banville/ Black. It certainly proves to be a useful and up-to-date –not to say indispensable– complement to the previous insightful studies written by Derek Hand, Joseph McMinn, Rüdiger Imhof and others.

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Neil Murphy, John Banville

Thierry Robin

REFERENCES

Neil MURPHY, John Banville, coll. Contemporary Irish writers, Lanham (Maryland, USA), London (UK) : Bucknell University Press, 2018, 236 p.

1 This monograph bearing on John Banville’s work – as its title clearly suggests – is the most recent and comprehensive assessment of the fiction written by a major Irish writer who won the Booker Prize for fiction, for his novel entitled The Sea in 2005.

2 The main achievement accomplished by this study is that it manages to reconcile two seemingly contradictory interpretations or aesthetic agendas observable in Banville’s work : one heading in a postmodernist, experimental, deliberately transgressive direction, the other blatantly retaining the traditional elements of plot and what is more, an elaborate syntax and a florid lexicon usually sysnonymous with or redolent of a far more conventional, not to say conservative or realist brand of literature – two dodgy adjectives by many contemporary critics’ standards.

3 Murphy insightfully identifies the initially playful, postmodernist, innovative roots of Banville’s fiction. He revisits all his early work, from Long Lankin (1970 revised edition published in 1984) and Birchwood (1973) to the scientific tetralogy (Doctor Copernicus 1976, Kepler 1981, The Newton Letter 1982, and Mefisto 1986). To shed light on this early fiction, Murphy uses the enlightening Jamesian concept of the house of fiction to account for novels which essentially mimicked, and played with the codes of historiographical fiction – be it that of Irish history through the Big House motif belonging to the land- owning Protestant ascendancy or that informing the narration of scientific revolutions ranging from the Copernican epistemological breakthrough to Kepler’s astronomical discoveries. Murphy cogently shows that The Newton Letter and Mefisto marked a rupture and already bore testimony to Banville’s growing awareness of the futility of both referential research and of purely metafictional games. Very early in his writer’s career, Banville understood that both narratives that aspire to fully describe reality and those which satirize the aporia constituted by representational literary endeavours

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were equally doomed to an aesthetic/artistic sort of cul-de-sac. Still, as Murphy reminds us “[a]lthough Banville repeatedly affirms the artificiality of art in his work he always retains a belief in the power of art to signify something for life”. (51) Feeding on the notion that art has to be significant rather than meaningful, Murphy explains Banville’s idiosyncratic creative philosophy quoting from an interview given by Banville to Travis Elborough : “All […] art attempts to do is to quicken the sense of life, to make vivid for the reader the mysterious predicament of being alive for a brief span in this exquisite and terrible world” (41). In chapter 2, Murphy goes on to explain how Banville got to deliberately appropriate, recycle and emulate aesthetic processes borrowed from the visual arts, and most notably painting, illustrating this preoccupation through the mentioning of fictional painters such as the near- anagrammatic though brilliantly plausible Jean Vaublin or real ones like Nicolas Poussin or Pierre Bonnard.

4 In his 3rd chapter, Murphy posits –with many other critics– that The Sea is Banville’s absolute chef-d’œuvre. But he goes on to demonstrate why in a convincing manner. To Murphy, The Sea epitomizes the perfect merger of a seemingly realist plot with cleverly reflexive, ambivalent elements underlining the autonomous, gratuitous and graceful beauty of art per se. The careful and painstaking analysis of recurring motifs such as ekphrastic descriptions echoing both real paintings and characters, static descriptions of landscapes turning into moments of eternity or mysterious tableaux, doubled by the leitmotif of twins, Doppelgänger-like figures, reinforced by the ambivalent and indecidable shift and permutation of viewpoints between the unreliable narrator and the author’s diverse alter egos etc. help Murphy make his point in a compelling fashion.

5 Chapter 4 further investigates the playful notion of self-reflexivity, in what has become known as The Cleave Trilogy drawing its revealing name from its ambivalent character actor Alexander Cleave, underlining the reading of the world as a stage, where only the surface is accessible. Chapter 5 explores Banville’s intertexual debt to the German poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist [1777-1811], especially in his 2009 novel The Infinities and in his three plays The Broken Jug (1994), God's Gift: A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist (2000) and eventually Love in the Wars (2005). Here, Murphy aptly identifies the omnipresent trope of puppetry and the key-theme of inescapable confusion at the world’s intrinsic strangeness, which characterize both writers in the midst of what Denis Donoghue appropriately calls the “disinterestedness of the world”, what Murphy rephrases as “the world’s essential indifference” (15).

6 Chapter 6 probably presents the boldest contention in the monograph, asserting that the crime novels written by Banville under the deliberately all too obvious pseudonym of Benjamin Black, far from being “Banville-lite”, actually explore the very same “veiled and deceptive nature of things”, the same radical strangeness of the world, through identical devices and techniques of defamiliarization, as theorized by the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky [1893-1984]. It is to be noted that Murphy always bolsters his reasoning and demonstrations by quoting from the most relevant critics, ranging from Etienne Gilson to Gordon Graham as regards aesthetics and art history. As regards crime fiction, after quoting extensively from John Scaggs to question and redefine the characteristics of the crime fiction genre, Murphy very elegantly reminds the reader of what is usually truly at stake through this kind of fiction by quoting from Jon Thompson : “[…]crime fiction dramatizes the contradictory experience of modernity” (164) To Murphy, though the high degree of self-

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consciousness Banville exhibits elsewhere is less obvious when he uses the Black persona, the same aesthetic agenda finally prevails all the same, preventing his work from being politically or socially motivated.

7 To cut a long story short : fiction or art according to Banville – be it crime fiction or high-brow cryptic satirical historiographic novels – doesn’t and cannot attempt to render reality faithfully. Neither can it produce meaning. But art has to be significant. As a matter of fact, as Murphy demonstrates, reality is always shaped by our imagining minds. Art allows us to catch a glimpse of this counterintuitive but eternal Banvillean truth : the uncanny precedence of imagination over reality.

8 This book reads well and will certainly help all aspiring or well-established Banville scholars refine or qualify their analyses. There is no doubt it will come in handy to understand this complex and heavily interwoven body of work created by Banville/ Black. It certainly proves to be a useful and up-to-date –not to say indispensable– complement to the previous insightful studies written by Derek Hand, Joseph McMinn, Rüdiger Imhof and others.

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Mauyen Keane, Love Without Border in War-Torn Europe : An Irishwoman’s Story

David Shaw

REFERENCES

Mauyen KEANE, Love Without Border in War-Torn Europe : An Irishwoman’s Story, Oxford : The Onslaught Press, 2018, (revised ed. of Hello, Is it All Over? (1984), 110 p.

1 Love Without Borders is a memoir of multiple stories. It is a war-time romance between an Irish nurse and a German Soldier that crossed borders and transgressed societal norms. It is also a story of emigration and a personal recollection of the Second World War.

2 Mauyen Keanei begins her story with her departure from home. There are some hints about what was being left behind. Her family could afford to keep a ‘favourite’ horse, unwittingly revealing the family had enough money and access to land to support multiple animals. They already had experience of emigration, her sister had previously left for the ‘mission fields’. Keane had been accepted to train as a nurse after leaving school. So the family must have been able to afford for her to stay on at school. Her decision to migrate also uncovers the uncomfortable reality that De Valera was failing to meet his promise to lift the ‘doom of exile’. Keane was impatient and unwilling to put up with the long waiting-list for a place to train in Dublin. The social status of the family is uncovered by her choice of destination : Jersey. Her mother’s cousin was a doctor on the Island who had married into a wealthy and influential family. Arrangements were made for her travel to Jersey and commence her training. She left Athenry in 1936.

3 Keane’s decision to leave Ireland was not a McCourt-like tale of escape from poverty and suffering into exile.ii However, the journey on the cattle-boat to Holyhead was something shared by many, regardless of their backgrounds. Upon arrival in St Helier,

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she was met by her cousin Brendan, who had married into the Langlois family, who were originally from Normandy and can trace their lineage back to the 14th Century. Her early days in Jersey, before entering a world of starched uniforms, collar studs and envelope corners were spent in comfort and sunshine. During time off from her training, she would join the Langlois family on their yacht on holiday to St Malo in Brittany.

4 Her training as a nurse was run with military precision by the ward nurses and sisters. Keane was not the only Irish nurse in Jersey, she was joined by nurses from Counties Cavan, Down and Tipperary. In common with many in Britain and Jersey, rumours of war were not, at first, given any serious thought. The declaration of war in September 1939 left Keane ‘dumbfounded’. It was only when ration books and gas masks were distributed did the gravity of the situation begin to sink in.

5 Many began to leave Jersey, including some nurses, so that the hospital had to rely on Red Cross nurses to fill the gaps. Panic set in after the fall of Paris it was obvious that the Channel Islands would be next. To the relief of doctors and patients, Keane and three friends decided to stay and were christened the ‘Three Musketeers’. Those that decided to stay soon realised that they were ‘all in it together’.

6 Keane’s first experience of the German army was the sound of the soldiers boots on the hospital wards. She gives the reader the briefest of insights into her initial reaction to the occupation describing herself as ‘politically neutral’. She does not elaborate on this and fails to make it clear if this is just a statement of Ireland’s status or her own political beliefs. She paints a picture of an occupying army that was relieved to be away from the Russian front and infers that the large number of German fracture cases in the hospital were self-inflicted to avoid being sent East. Whilst Keane humanises the German soldiers, she somewhat ignores that the fact that choices made in Germany had plunged the world into war. This may have reflected that portion of the Irish population that viewed the war as another British war and none of their concern. Keane would later be reminded that many from Ireland chose to fight against Hitler and after the defeat of Germany, she would be grateful for the assistance and care shown by Irish soldiers serving with the British army.

7 In 1942, Keane began a romance with a German Doctor ‘Dieter’, another who was in uniform not by choice and who was always glad to hide it. Her romance with Dieter received a mixed reaction from her friends. All were aware just how unpopular this romance would have been with some on the island. When Dieter had to go back to Germany to complete his final examinations to become a doctor, despite the news of continuous British and American air-raids over Germany, Keane was determined to follow him.

8 Although Keane comments on the deprivations suffered by the population of Jersey, it is only when she travels through France to meet Dieter in Germany that she offers the reader a glimpse of her emotions as she experiences the consequences of the war on the French. Whilst in France she learned of forced labour, ruined cities and the ever- increasing death toll. On her way to Jena to meet Dieter, she had to stop in Paris and found ‘a lonely and hungry city’ that was far from the glamour of the Belle Époque. Finally, after a traumatic train journey from Paris to Jena, she was reunited with Dieter.

9 The grim reality of the war in Germany soon became apparent as she registered for a ration book and was sharply told ‘No Work, No Ration’. She gained employment in a woman’s clinic and after each shift, spent the rest of the day in food queues. This was to

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be her life as a good ‘scrubbed’ Hausfrau. Before they could get official permission to marry, the Nazi regime intruded into their new life. In 1935 the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour had been passed and anyone who did not meet the Aryan ideal would not be allowed to marry a German.iiiThey had to send photographs to a race doctor to ensure the authorities that she was not Jewish. The reply from the Race Doctor was that Keane looked ‘slightly Jewish’, they were refused permission to marry but Keane could stay in Germany. They were married in secret by a sympathetic priest.

10 As the bombing increased and the war got closer to Jena, Keane had their first child. By 1945 German refugees from other cities were pouring into Jena. Fear and panic eventually appeared. The driver of these emotions was the advancing Russian Army. Keane and Dieter made plans to escape being trapped in the Soviet Zone.

11 Having made it to Hamburg, the grind of waiting in line for rations continued. The rations were now so low that people were dying of malnutrition and they had to resort to the black-market, but even the black-market dried up. The spectre of hunger and starvation stalked the family. The decision was made to try to attempt to get to Ireland. But Germans were not allowed to leave. They were lucky though when they met a Dublin man who was a sergeant in the British Army. He came to their aid and provide food and took letters home to Ireland with him on leave. Further help was provided by an Irish nurse who was a Major in the British Army, who arrived with food that they had not seen in a long time.

12 One morning in November 1947 the news they had been waiting for arrived, Dieter had permission to leave for Ireland. In Ireland, Lord Killanin, who had been a major in the British Army and took part in the Normandy Landings took up the case. Also taking up their plight was Lord Pakenham, later to become Lord Longford and would become a controversial figure in British politics. In December 1947, Keane, Dieter and their children finally arrived in Ireland.

13 Keane would often wonder why she chose to stay on Jersey. Her decision to remain in Jersey was courageous but her relationship with Dieter raises the potentially ugly and controversial theme of collaboration. Keane humanises the German population and the effect of war on civilians. However, Keane offers no opinion or commentary on the barbarity of the Nazi regime after describing her visit to the ‘Race Doctor’. Keane’s short biography is an intimate story of emigration and of a potential contravention of war-time sensibilities.

NOTES

i. Mauyen Keane is Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock's mother. ii. F. McCourt, Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir of a Childhood (London: Harper Collins, 2012). iii. M. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp.294-298

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