History’s Leftovers Irish History and the Question of Identity in Sebastian Barry’s Revisionist Writings Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Universität Greifswald Carl-Christian Raloff Dekanin Prof. Dr. Monika Unzeitig Erstgutachter Prof. em. Dr. Jürgen Klein Zweitgutachter apl. Prof. Dr. Michael Szczekalla Datum der Disputation 16.10.2019 List of contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 I Setting the stage – modern Irish nationalist history in a nutshell.................................... 6 I.1 Parnell, Redmond and Home Rule ............................................................................... 7 I.2 Ulster Volunteers vs. Irish Volunteers and Protestant ascendency .............................. 8 I.3 Larkin, the Dublin Lockout and the Sackville Street Riot ......................................... 10 I.4 The First World War and the Easter Rising ............................................................... 12 I.5 The Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War ............................................................ 15 I.6 The Treaty, civil war and a new constitution ............................................................. 17 I.7 Blueshirts, the Second World War and economic reform .......................................... 19 I.8 The Northern Ireland conflict ..................................................................................... 20 II. The complex relationship between nationalism, identity and revisionism ................. 22 II.1 The Irish nation – an imagined community .............................................................. 22 II.2 Identity as an incentive in the creation of nations ..................................................... 27 II.2.1 Identification as a bio-psychological imperative ....................................... 28 II.2.2 From identity to national identity and personality breakdown .................. 31 II.3 Irish historical revisionism – discussing the unreliability of history ........................ 36 III. The treatment of history and identity in Barry’s writings ......................................... 50 III.1 The structure of Barry’s works ................................................................................ 51 I III.2 Identity as the key plot structuring element in Barry’s works ................................. 61 III.2.1 Early identifications – a common ground to start from ............................ 62 III.2.2 Causes and symptoms of identity diffusion in Barry’s texts .................... 74 III.2.2.1.a Thomas Dunne faced with change .......................................... 76 III.2.2.1.b Thomas Dunne – rage and madness ........................................ 79 III.2.2.2.a Willie Dunne faced with change ............................................. 83 III.2.2.2.b Willie Dunne – total disillusionment ...................................... 87 III.2.2.3.a Dolly Dunne faced with change .............................................. 94 III.2.2.3.b Dolly Dunne – extreme paranoia ............................................ 94 III.2.2.4.a Annie Dunne faced with change ............................................. 98 III.2.2.4.b Annie Dunne – paranoia and bitterness ................................ 100 III.2.2.5.a Eneas McNulty faced with change ........................................ 106 III.2.2.5.b Eneas McNulty – wandering in exile .................................... 108 III.2.2.6.a Roseanne Clear faced with change ....................................... 115 III.2.2.6.b Roseanne Clear – another form of exile ............................... 120 III.2.2.7.a Jack and Mai faced with change ........................................... 124 III.2.2.7.b Jack and Mai – slaves to the bottle ....................................... 126 III.2.2.8 Mrs McNulty – a life ruled by fear .......................................... 134 III.2.3 Barry’s ‘trademark’ identity-based plot structure ................................... 139 III.3 Barry’s characters as vehicles of Irish historical revisionism ............................... 153 III.3.1 The presentation of nationalism in Barry’s works .................................. 155 III.3.2 The presentation of religion in Barry’s works ........................................ 172 III.3.3 The presentation of history in Barry’s works ......................................... 183 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 194 Register of illustrations .................................................................................................. 207 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 208 II Introduction “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” (Joyce 43) “-A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. -By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years. So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it: -Or also living in different places. -That covers my case, says Joe. -What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen. -Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.” (Joyce 430) Ever since its publication in 1922 James Joyce’s “Modernist masterpiece” (Nowak 546) Ulysses has given rise to countless volumes of literary criticism, and Joyce as a or maybe even the major Modernist Irish author has been an influence on generations of novelists, dramatists and poets. Through its at the time revolutionary narrative style, incorporating a stream-of-consciousness narration for great lengths, Ulysses touches upon a vast range of socio-political issues of Irish life still relevant today, not least among them Irish history and Irish national identity. For example, Stephan Daedalus’s comment on history in the first quote invites readers to a critical examination of Irish history and even the very nature of the concept of history itself. With Leopold Bloom’s inability to come up with a satisfying definition for the term ‘nation’ in the second quote, Joyce posits the question of what it is that constitutes a nation. Bloom’s blatant uncertainty carries social, cultural and political implications closely connected to narratives of the Irish past. In the year of the book’s publication, 1922, just six years after the Easter Rising and with the Irish Civil War barely at an end, nationalist Irish history had just culminated in years of violence and bloodshed, and so Bloom’s answer to the quarrelsome citizen - that merely one’s birthplace decides one’s national identity - must have seemed problematic to say the least. 1 Almost a hundred years later these same questions with their historical, political, philosophical and psychological implications reverberate strongly as central themes throughout the oeuvre of another Irish author, Sebastian Barry. Although modern Irish history is a major theme in Barry’s writings, especially Irish history from the turn of the century to the Second World War but also up until the present, his characters are the type of people who do not typically feature in history books. They do not stand at the head of armies or revolutionize their country’s political landscape. Barry’s characters are the small, the poor, at times even the mad, but nevertheless, people who like so many thousands of others find themselves crucially affected and altered by the rapid changes in their country in the twentieth century. In his introduction to Sebastian Barry’s first collection of plays, Plays: 1, Irish literary critic Fintan O’Toole stresses Barry’s choice of characters as a major distinguishing feature of his plays. O’Toole describes them as “men and women defeated and discarded by their times” (O’Toole vii). “History’s leftovers” (ibid.) he dubs them; in their case it is a history revolving around interwoven and often interdependent pairs of opposites: unionist/loyalist versus nationalist/republican, Protestant versus Catholic, British versus Irish. Judging solely by Barry’s choice of characters, even without having read his plays and novels, one may easily guess that Barry’s writing will not present a typical, uncritical and unquestioning view of Irish history or, for that matter, a straightforward definition of ‘Irishness’. It is the aim of this paper to discern in detail how this Irish author uses these two concepts, history and identity, in his writing and how he presents the impact they had and still have today on thousands of Irish men and women, and hopefully, to show how this can add to our understanding of how these concepts influence our lives in general. Having published a coming-of-age novel and a children’s novel as well as two novellas and two volumes of poetry in the 1980s, it was as a playwright that Barry gained increasing popularity during the 1990s, especially with The Steward of Christendom, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre London in 1995 (cf. Harte 197f.). In recent years, however, while defending his place in the world of Irish theatre, Barry has become increasingly popular as a novelist publishing seven novels between 1998 and 2016. Although a certain amount of literary criticism regarding Barry’s work already exists, much of it is focused mainly on his plays. Barry’s novels – not surprisingly maybe due to