Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Entangled in Story: Narrative Ethics of Memory in Contemporary Irish Fiction Authors(s) Byrd, Brandi Publication date 2017 Publisher University College Dublin. School of English, Drama and Film Link to online version http://dissertations.umi.com/ucd:10197 Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/10615 Downloaded 2021-09-28T16:31:16Z The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) © Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Entangled in Story: Narrative Ethics of Memory in Contemporary Irish Fiction Brandi Byrd 13203192 The thesis is submitted to University College Dublin in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English, Drama and Film Head of School: Associate Professor Danielle Clarke Principal Supervisor: Associate Professor Emilie Pine Doctoral Studies Panel: Professor Anne Fogarty, Chair Associate Professor PJ Mathews Associate Professor Fionnuala Dillane September 2017 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................... 1 1 “Give that Child a Story”: Empathy and Collaborative Remembering in Irish Detective Novels .............................. 18 Brian McGilloway’s The Nameless Dead ..................................... 29 Tana French’s In the Woods .................................................. 47 2 “Midwife to my Own Old Story”: Constructing Life Narratives in Contemporary Irish Fiction ............................ 64 Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture ..................................... 73 Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light............................................... 90 3 “Mortgage Love”: Remembering the Economic Collapse through Family Narratives ............................................. 106 Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart ........................................... 112 Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz ....................................... 135 4 “To Know This, and In Shame to Turn Away”: Institutional Abuse and the Ethics of Witnessing .................................. 159 Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies .................................................... 167 John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness ...................................... 194 Conclusion ..................................................................... 210 Works Cited .................................................................... 215 ii Abstract Memory is not a static or innocuous representation of the past, but a continuing struggle over how best to understand, interpret, and communicate past events for present circumstances. This cultural preoccupation with the ethical work of memory has come to dominate the landscape of Irish fiction. Irish novels, written across a wide range of genres in the post-Celtic Tiger years, take on social, political, and cultural concerns about the way the past should be remembered. This thesis aims to investigate the way that conflicts of memory are depicted in contemporary Irish fiction, taking eight novels by eight different authors as case studies. I argue that these novels negotiate a narrative ethics of memory, whereby remembering as part of a community necessitates critical attention to, and responsibility for, the strategies used to construct, communicate, and respond to narratives about the past. The novel, as a complex narrative project, provides the ideal medium for thinking through the interrelation of multiple perspectives on the past, the communicative frameworks within which testimonies are produced and disseminated, and ethical concerns about aestheticizing painful histories. Through such narrative experiments, these authors explore the relationship between ways of telling the past and the creation of ethical environments for the present and future. iii I hereby certify that the submitted work is my own work, was completed while registered as a candidate for the degree stated on the Title Page, and I have not obtained a degree elsewhere on the basis of the research presented in this submitted work. iv INTRODUCTION In an essay for the London Review of Books, Anne Enright draws on Sophocles’ play Antigone as a way of thinking about sites of contested burials in Ireland: in particular, the unmarked graves of hundreds of children at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, discovered in 2014. Enright stresses that these burials primarily illuminate “the political use of the body after death” (“Antigone”) and, by extension, the political uses of memory. She suggests that the description of the mass grave as a “septic tank” – “the association with sewage, the implication that the bodies were not just carelessly buried, or even discarded, but treated like ‘filth’” (“Antigone”) – is what sparked outrage and public inquiry into the treatment of women and children at Tuam. Thus, Enright argues that the narration of these bodies is a mechanism of power, a means through which social values and official policies are negotiated. Textual analysis, it then follows, is “undoing the riddle of power” (“Antigone”). Enright’s interest in the narrative components of memory, and the social and political functions of those narratives, crystallises a thematic concern in contemporary Irish culture, from Northern Irish peace-building initiatives such as Healing through Remembering, to contemporary art projects like Asylum Archive.1 As these projects and Enright’s essay indicate, memory is not a static or innocuous representation of the past, but a continuing struggle over how best to understand, interpret, and communicate past events for present circumstances. And this cultural preoccupation with the ethical work of memory has come to dominate the landscape of Irish fiction. 1 Healing Through Remembering promotes ethical standards for “storytelling and narrative work [as] the form of remembering most frequently offered as a vehicle for dealing with the past” (“Ethical Principles” 3). Vukasin Nedeljkovic’s Asylum Archive “creates a repository of asylum experiences” in order to facilitate “open… dialogue and discussion” (Nedeljkovic) about the degrading conditions of Direct Provision Centres in Ireland. 1 Irish novels, written across a wide range of genres in the post-Celtic Tiger years, take on social, political, and cultural concerns about the way the past should be remembered. This thesis aims to investigate the way that conflicts of memory are depicted in contemporary Irish fiction, taking eight novels by eight different authors as case studies. I argue that these novels negotiate a narrative ethics of memory, whereby remembering as part of a community necessitates critical attention to, and responsibility for, the strategies used to construct, communicate, and respond to narratives about the past. The novel, as a complex narrative project, provides the ideal medium for thinking through the interrelation of multiple perspectives on the past, the communicative frameworks within which testimonies are produced and disseminated, and ethical concerns about aestheticizing painful histories. Through such narrative experiments, these authors explore the relationship between ways of telling the past and the creation of ethical environments for the present and future. Memory Studies As a field, memory studies is concerned with “[h]ow past events are remembered, misremembered, understood, contested, forgotten, learned from and shared with others” (Kattago 1). While the parameters of this definition are deceptively simple – memory studies is, fundamentally, talking about the past – it also suggests what I consider to be the crux of this interdisciplinary study: memory is always in conflict. The past is never simply told. Its narratives are complex constructions, shaped by political, social, and individual concerns, and are countered, revised, bolstered, and supplemented by other versions. As this thesis contends, memory is an active, subjective process which, even in moments of private recollection, is socially informed. Modern memory studies has its roots in the paradigm-shifting scientific work on memory from the early twentieth century. Maurice Halbwachs, in his 1925 sociological study Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, introduced the term mémoire collective to denote the ways that all remembering is defined by social frameworks, both the literal social interactions in which memories are formed and recollected, and, metaphorically, the socially scripted patterns of thinking that shape individual perceptions. Similarly, psychologist 2 Frederic Bartlett argued for a reconstructive theory of memory in his 1920 study “Some Experiments on the Reproduction of Folk-Stories,” suggesting that memories are “distorted” according to the rememberer’s social schemata. When art historian Aby Warburg posited a parallel between early work in the neuropsychology of memory storage and retrieval – Richard Semon theorised in 1904 that memories are stored in the brain as engrams which are later activated by an ecphoric stimulus or associational cue (The Mneme) – and the use of symbols as a kind of cultural memory storage (Mnemosyne), the groundwork had been established for an interdisciplinary reimagining of memory as an active, subjective, and social project. These revolutionary ideas developed over the next several decades into what has been termed the “memory boom”