The Presence of the Past

Figures

Figure 6-1: Note from J. J. Elliott May 1916

Figure 6-2: Elliott Sisters’ Memorial Plaque and new road name

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the contributors of this volume, for their insights and their collective effort to bring the project to fruition. Our thanks go to all the participants of the 2023 conference of the SOFEIR which took place at the University of Lille and who made these conversations possible, and to the research group CECILLE (ULR 4074) which supported the project from its inception.

We are immensely grateful to visual artist Jesse Jones and theatre and performance artist Olwen Fouéré for agreeing to have a photograph from “The Tower” (2022) reproduced as the cover image.

We would like to extend our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their attentive reading and their insightful comments.

Our warmest thanks also go to Anthony Mason, here at Peter Lang and to Eamon Maher for their enthusiastic support.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Société Française d’Études Irlandaises (SOFEIR) for its intellectual and financial support.

INTRODUCTION The Presence of the Past: Problematising Temporalities in Irish Studies

Claire Dubois, Hélène Lecossois, Fiona McCann, Helen Penet

This collection of essays is the continuation of a dialogue which started in March 2023 at the University of Lille at the annual French Society for Irish Studies (SOFEIR) conference which saw the gathering of more than fifty researchers from France, Ireland, the UK and various parts of continental Europe. At the time France was in the grip of a major strike movement, which lasted for several months, and which was the expression of a strong, popular opposition to yet another neoliberal means of ‘modernising’ the French social welfare system. At stake was a question of time, of labour time to be more precise, as the government imposed a lengthening of the number of years people are to work before being able to claim for a pension. The strike put the country on hold for a while, disrupting the flow of goods (oil, for instance) and the circulation of people. The transport strike prevented a few researchers from attending the conference. On the other hand, those who succeeded in making it to Lille were galvanised. The excitement was heightened by a general sense of joy at being able to attend a conference in person after the COVID years, another period which threw the linear, supposedly ‘natural’ flow of time into disarray. The context in which the conference took place and the topic under discussion chimed with each other as the circumstances begged for a critical engagement with temporality.

The Presence of the Past: Problematising Temporalities in Irish Studies: the title owes much to T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in which Eliot famously redefines tradition and highlights the importance of the ‘historical sense’ for the writing and the understanding of poetry. Eliot’s ‘historical sense’ encompasses a conception of the ‘pastness of the past’ but also, more importantly, of its ‘presence’. Eliot’s essay invites a reappraisal of the relation of the present to the past, and of the past to the present, arguing that the new cannot free itself completely from tradition and that any new work of art modifies the old ‘order of tradition’. The title is also an invitation to engage with Ireland’s specific postcolonial history.

Guy Beiner wrote that ‘Ireland is deeply troubled by evocative memories of its past’, and that some past events – such as the Easter Rising or the Battle of the Somme – ‘inhabit a mythic time and space reverberating with resonances that range far beyond the events of that year’.¹ The commemoration of such events proves to be controversial, not least because of the political appropriation of national memory. For instance, the ‘Decade of commemorations’ provoked public criticism because it originally omitted the final months of the Irish Civil War. This reflects official attitudes towards the realities of the civil part of the conflict, characterised as an ‘absence within the historical narrative’,² and reveals a ‘will to forget, a retreat to a type of silence that erased all but the victory’.³ However, as Jay Winter has shown, such traumatic and subversive memories have survived alongside public commemorations – albeit ‘underground’, not least through vectors like fiction and memoirs.⁴

The dialogue which emerged in Lille in March 2023 and which is developed throughout this volume reflects the understanding, both within Ireland and internationally, that contemporary Irish culture is framed by the remembrance of things past. This dialogue did thus not emerge in a vacuum, but builds on and prolongs a number of ongoing reflections on this theme. The inauguration of the Irish Memory Studies Network in 2013, and the subsequent publication of the four volumes of Memory Ireland edited by Oona Frawley are precursors to the reflections engaged in this volume. These volumes, devoted to History and Modernity, Diaspora and Memory Practices, The Famine and the Troubles and finally, James Joyce and Cultural Memory, were published between 2011 and 2014. In her introduction to Volume 1, Oona Frawley commented that ‘courses introducing students to Irish history and literature emphasize the “presence of the past” in Irish culture; historical and anthropological studies assess “tradition” and “the hold of the past” on the Irish present’.⁵ In this light, another founding member of the Irish Memory Studies Network, Emilie Pine edited a special issue of the Irish University Review in 2017 entitled Moving Memory – The Dynamics of the Past in Irish Culture which contains examinations of the ways in which a variety of contemporary cultural formats, including fiction, poetry, videogames and television, continue to engage with the past. After this flurry of academic work engaging with the theme during the 2010s, more recently, in Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (2024), Paige Reynolds commented in the introduction to her chapter on Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Deirdre Madden that ‘one of the dominant characteristics of contemporary Irish writing in all genres [is] a deliberate engagement with past forms to depict current conditions’.⁶

As in other countries, Irish literature of the long twentieth century has often displayed a sustained interest in textualised remembrance of past defining moments yet has equally frequently revealed itself to be a fertile space within which various temporalities can be revisited, reappraised and, if necessary, skewed.⁷ David Lloyd has called attention to the vexed tendency displayed by ‘the historical revisionist’ to ‘embrace the idea of Ireland’s modernisation’ in what he calls an ‘orgy of public narcissism’ and a celebration of having ‘left behind us all the symptoms of an uncured backwardness’.⁸ But Irish writers have in many cases resisted such discourses and are, in fact, often moved to play with and critique them. This continues right up until the present moment, as Anne Mulhall has shown in relation to contemporary author Paul Murray,⁹ whose novel The Mark and the Void (2015) she reads as pinpointing ‘the parameters of a new Irish subjectivity’ and ‘calling into question the power of an accelerated, chrono-maniac temporality linked with global finance structures’.¹⁰

From Gretta Conroy’s recollection of the song ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ (1914) to the dialogue of corpses in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (1949) and the evocation of Eibhlin Dubh Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-century caoineadh in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020), from the 1916 Easter Rising to the preceding risings it evokes and draws on (such as those of 1798 or 1848, for example), Ireland’s pre-independence and postcolonial history is marked by an impression of past performances that haunt the present (whenever that present may be situated), mock socio-political convention, and demand a reaction. Moreover, as David Lloyd and Luke Gibbons have argued, popular ballads such as ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ are understood and interpreted in different ways at different times, ranging from the literal to the allegorical depending on the cultural and socio-historical context.¹¹

What then should be the scholarly approach to such practices and the disruptively recalcitrant positions that they establish in relation to a failed contemporary modernity? What, if any, is the radical political potential of such hauntings? What new spaces within Irish studies (incorporating literary studies, history, politics, sociology, race, gender and sexuality studies) as well as contemporary Irish artistic practice does the presence of the uncanny and the uncanny presence of the past open up for critical reflection? How do we remember the past without consigning it to realm of the pluperfect? How do such ideas of the past figure in the work of contemporary activists and artists? And in what ways are all historical, social and discursive practices, from the Early Modern period right through to our contemporary moment, informed, shaped, questioned or undermined by the past?

Thinking against the clock, upsetting ideas of teleologically driven chronology, changing human time into geological time, as well as folding futures into the present and presents into the past are defining features of Irish imaginative art past and present: from the sculptures of Dorothy Cross to the novels of Mike McCormack to the plays of Marina Carr. In Ireland whose 300-year experience at the receiving end of English colonialism and imperial power made imagining different temporalities a mere fact of existential survival, discombobulations of ordinary time are especially charged. Acts of remembering and imagining time frames that allow for a world of justice and equality necessarily contradicts the normative, productive time of colonial capitalist extraction. By the same token and as outlined in books by Michael Cronin (Time Tracks: Scenes from the Irish Everyday) and Conor McCarthy (Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992), an important aspect of post-independence thinking in Ireland was the notion that the country required a turbo-charged programme of socio-political and economic modernisation: a speeding up in order to catch up with an elusive European modernity.¹² For these reasons alone, a scholarly investigation of problematising temporalities in various spheres in Irish cultural life remains an important project. To that end, this book brings together a collection of essays written by historians as well as visual art and literary and cultural critics. Its purpose is to stimulate forms of reading and approaches that are more accommodating both to Ireland’s colonial history and to a contemporary present dominated by immigration and the spectre of racism.

The book brings together fifteen essays written by scholars of Irish studies from France, Hungary, Ireland, and the United Kingdom and is divided into four parts – ‘Political Discursive Regimes’, ‘Legacies’, ‘Troubled Pasts’, and ‘Heterogenous Temporalities’. The first part considers the problematising of Irish temporalities from various disciplinary angles – that is cultural and visual studies, literature and history – in order to highlight the crucial role of representation in reconfiguring the relation of the present to the past and of the past to the present. Zélie Asava looks at the impact of the representation of racial and ethnic minorities in Irish film and television and notes that while the Irish screen has become more ethnically diverse, there have been no corresponding changes to the structure of representation. ‘Along with Travellers’, writes Asava, ‘Black Irish communities face the worst outcomes of any minority’. What is needed according to Asava is a three-pronged approach: a theoretically informed attention to the representation of racialised minorities in Ireland that is simultaneously informed by the practices of Black, Asian and mixed-race Irish creatives, as well as close attention to the ways in which mainstream European/Irish cultural archives are underpinned by a deliberate forgetting of the experience of the colonised. Asava describes this as ‘colonial aphasia’ and her opening essay to this volume demonstrates something of the ambitious critical project required both by Ireland’s colonial history and the country’s contemporary experience of migration and anti-Black racism. Thierry Robin’s narratological analysis of a sample of contemporary Irish crime fiction (by Tana French, Brian McGilloway and Stuart Neville) explores the tensions between the chronology of the events described and their representation and argues that this tension allows for the expression of emotional truth. Robin underlines the power of the novel to unhinge chronological time and produce deliberate effects of anachronicity. He highlights the fundamentally dual nature of crime fiction, which, he shows, is both enigmatic and cathartic; while it ‘revel[s] in past mysteries through the tropes of underground worlds and labyrinthine connections to past events’, it also, simultaneously, provides an opportunity for repossessing past traumas and integrating them into a narrative form. Anne-Catherine de Bouvier’s essay looks at the way in which historical time was suspended in the course of the publication of one of the most popular nationalist newspapers of nineteenth-century Ireland, The Nation. Seized and suppressed in July 1848 under the powers of the British Treason Felony Act, The Nation was not allowed to resume publication until 1 September 1849. De Bouvier ponders the effects of this one-year gap in publication by focusing in particular on the September to December 1849 issues of The Nation and contemplating how events from the previous year were either retained, reconsidered or entirely discarded.

The chapters in the second part – ‘Legacies’ – explore echoes of space and time in Ireland, and how they nourish the present, and influence the future. All four chapters bear testimony to the enduring effect of the Irish-British relationship and address the ghosts of the colonial past in Ireland, while acknowledging that there has been a form of blindness and amnesia to that past, and a failure or refusal to confront it.

Patrick Duffy’s essay investigates the emergence of an Ulster Protestant identity in the pre-Home Rule era, a period earlier than historians had previously acknowledged. Studying the works of Anglican clergymen and Presbyterian ministers in the 1820s and 1830s, Duffy demonstrates how they contributed to the creation of an Ulster identity separate from the rest of Ireland, using religion, collective memory and territory. Emphasising the role of Ulster in resisting Jacobitism during the Williamite Wars, their publications provided northern Protestants with a historical narrative that gave them ‘a sense of imputed common ancestry and origins’, distinct from the southern Catholic population during the O’Connellite era. This selective interpretation of history was used to create a territorial-based Protestant identity centred on Ulster, a distinctive geographical entity.

Studying the case of Trinity College Dublin, Rhody-Ann Thorpe addresses the imperial legacies in higher education in the post-independence era, and the ‘inherent complexities’ due to the position of Ireland as both coloniser and colonised. The Irish university system has its origin in British colonial policies and Trinity College Dublin remained colonial Ireland’s only university for centuries. Portrayed as an ‘outdated relic of a discredited imperial past’ following independence in 1921, TCD lifted the ‘Catholic ban’ in 1970, and slowly shifted away from practices of the colonial era. In 2021, in a context of broader public debate, it established the Trinity Colonial Legacies Project and addressed issues such as the returning of stolen imperial artefacts and the re-naming of the college library. Thorpe argues that confronting the imperial past and addressing our ‘blindness’ to empire is essential for the decolonisation process, in higher education and elsewhere.

Also engaging with the presence of the past, Imelda Elliott, Ewen Lecuit and Déborah Vandewoude explore sites of memory during commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising from 1917 to 2016. Until the late 1950s, commemorations of the Rising reflected the divisions and controversies around the Treaty and the Civil War, and successive governments used them to legitimise their policies. In 1966, however, the government looked to the future and sought to represent Ireland as an independent country, ‘open to international cooperation and business’. After the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the commemorations were renewed and became more inclusive, introducing new sites of memory and developing online archives, to the point of commodifying the memory of 1916 for tourists. The authors argue that even in 2016 there remained controversies, notably on the commemoration of the deaths of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), British soldiers and Black and Tans. Historical commemorations hold relevance for the present and the future, but ‘unfinished business’ from the past still highlights deep divisions on a local and national level.

In the final chapter of this part, Marion Bourdeau explores the story of Frankie, a depressed aspiring artist facing a deep personal crisis in A Line Made by Walking by Sarah Baume (2017). At a loss with what to do next, paralysed by the spectral presence of both the past and the future, the character may be seen as an embodiment of her country, post-colonial and post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. A confusing character, Frankie both embodies and interrogates ‘contemporary mutations and the human reactions they generate’. The novel can be read, Bourdeau argues, as a ‘morality tale’, questioning Ireland’s individual and national practices, and showing that the country is ‘at risk of losing contact with its past, present and possible futures, if that contact is not handled with care’.

The third part, which focuses on ‘Troubled pasts’, sheds light on the ways in which present-day Ireland is necessarily informed by key moments of the past, in particular the Troubles in the North and their weighty aftermath. In Irish Times, a Field Day publication dating back to 2008, David Lloyd calls attention to the ‘forms of unevenness’ so evident in colonial and postcolonial Ireland which enable Irish history to be supplemented by ‘the recognition of the internal contradictions of modernisation with the apprehension of other forms of unevenness, forms of awareness that call into question the historicist narrative that understands modernity as the progress from the backward to the advanced, from the pre-modern to the modern’. As Lloyd demonstrates, ‘[s]uch a narrative is already contained within the modernising process historicism takes as its object’.¹³ Two articles in this part of the book analyse contemporary novels which revisit the Troubles and one provides a reappraisal of the 1981 hunger strikes. All three of them attempt to break free of this pre-determined narrative of an ineluctable modernising process. Louise Gerbier’s article on republican ghosts and corpses in the 1981 hunger strikes looks at both the political and material dimensions of that pivotal moment in the Troubles. She demonstrates the ways in which the prison protests, which began in 1976 and culminated in the death of ten hunger strikers in 1981, disrupt temporalities and in particular the notion of ‘progress from the backward to the advanced’¹⁴ showing how the political and cultural legacy of former hunger strikes irrigated the one led by Bobby Sands. She unpacks what mythologies and political aspirations the hunger strikers’ physical bodies come to embody, charting the significance of the strike as a collective which, although admittedly played out on individual bodies with all of the attendant grief for the families concerned, construct a formidable political body which Margaret Thatcher’s government ultimately was unable to undermine.

Sara Romero Otero’s article analyses Anna Burns’ 2018 prize-winning novel Milkman through the prism of Seamus Deane’s concept of ‘emergency aesthetics’ and Slavoj Zizek’s work on violence. These mutually reinforcing conceptual frameworks enable her to demonstrate the innovative manner in which Anna Burns tackles the question of coercive control, sexual harassment and the power of corrosive rumour within a republican community during the Troubles. Otero investigates Burns’ playful approach to temporalities where the reader is left to infer that the setting is 1970s Belfast while accompanying Middle Sister, the narrator, as she plunges into eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels as a form of escapism deemed unacceptable by locals, and shows how this toying with time and narratives highlight reclaimed agencies. These ‘gender[ed] emergency aesthetics’ which are deployed through two narrative temporalities (an older Middle Sister narrates the events of that period through the focalisation of her younger, inexperienced self) chart a complicated path to political agency for this character and reveal the insufficiencies of language in naming violence and trauma.

The novel which is the focus of Nathalie Lamprecht’s article, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (2022), also makes use of a double narrative framework with a much older Cushla revisiting a traumatic moment in her past in the 1970s from the vantage point of a time after the end of the Troubles. Lamprecht’s article unpacks the ironies implicit in the use by one of the characters of the cliché ‘the good old days’. Both articles resonate with what David Lloyd writes in Ireland After History (1999), published just after the Agreement: ‘The force field of violence which emerges on the interface between the modern or postmodern state and non-modern social formations, an interface characteristic of colonial situations, is precisely one in which the narratability of the events enters into crisis’.¹⁵ Otero shows how Anna Burns’ complex narrative monologue overtly foregrounds this crisis of narratability identified by Lloyd, while Lamprecht shows how Louise Kennedy ensures her novel departs from hackneyed representations of the 1970s through the use of chiaroscuro and the foregrounding of pleasure in spite of the omnipresent conflict and pain.