Out of History

Acknowledgements

As the editor of Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry I would like to thank the publishers, Carysfort Press, in the persons of Dan Farrelly and Lilian Chambers, for fostering a thoroughly pleasant and productive working environment. Similar thanks, also, to Alan Bennis of Bennis Design, whose highly creative talent resulted in such an excellent cover design. Thanks to David McGonagle and Beth Benevides at The Catholic University of America Press, colleagues of many years with whom I forged a new professional relationship upon the co-publication of this volume.

Acknowledgement and thanks for permission to reprint photographs to - Amelia Stein, John Haynes, Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library, and to the Abbey Theatre, Out of Joint Theatre Company, The National Theatre, London and the Royal Court Theatre; and to Eire-Ireland for permission to reprint the essay by Elizabeth Butler Cullingford. My personal thanks to Graham Cowley, John Fairleigh and Max Stafford-Clarke of Out of Joint Theatre Company for helpful information on several occasions.

To Nora Mahony for help with indexing the volume and for tolerating a Dublin roommate for a term; to Robert Mahony for good-naturedly taking over the reins in Washington; to Lucinda Bray for supplying transportation and lodging; to Nicholas Grene and Bruce Stewart for practical help and inspiration; to Roy, Aisling and Nora Foster for London lodgings, and to all my excellent contributors. Most of all, my thanks to Sebastian Barry for his patience and good will, and, most importantly, for his artistry.

Christina Hunt Mahony

Washington and Dublin 2006

Illustrations

Cover: Courtesy of Out of Joint Theatre Co./Royal National Theatre Photograph: John Haynes

1 | Introduction

Christina Hunt Mahony

Sebastian Barry was born in 1955 and therefore celebrated his fiftieth birthday shortly before this volume went to press. It is the first volume of essays on his work to be published, and seems a belated offering as such. The contributions reflect Barry’s achievement in various genres and highlight his unquestioned success as a contemporary Irish dramatist.

Barry began as a poet, and remains a poet. His earliest work, and that for which he is credited in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, published only a decade ago, is as a lyric poet. In The Water-Colourist (1983), The Rhetorical Town (1985), and Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever (1989) the reader finds the seeds of his continuing life’s subject – an investigation of his family in its complex relationship to Ireland as an emerging and evolving nation. Peter Denman’s analysis of the poems provides the first comprehensive view of this work in its relation to the drama and the narrative prose which followed. Denman assesses the journeyman writer and noteworthy poet who began to be published at a very early age. The task of finding a voice is a prerequisite for a writer, and Barry found his early, making the decision to expand his work beyond the lyric parameters.

Bruce Stewart approaches Barry’s early move to narrative fiction for adults. His study of The Engine of Owl-Light benefits from their shared student experience and places this early prose work into the context of the maturing writer and his experimentation with multiple narratives and linguistic dialects both old and new. The ambition and scope of this early work proves a daunting read, and while the book is not entirely successful in its aims, it is more than sufficient evidence of a major writer in the making. Based in part on the same autobiographical setting as Barry’s children’s fiction, The Engine of Owl-Light journeys far into the colonial landscape and the underside of New World adventures undertaken by young male protagonists which reappear, transformed, in Barry’s prose and drama in more recent years.

Barry’s gentle character portrayals are unique in the harder-edged reality with which contemporary Irish writing must contend. It is a given that Irish society is riven with rapid changes, and is still reeling from the shock of these. It is the task of contemporary writers to record these seismic indications of cultural upheaval and to record that loss which is an integral part of change. Although Barry writes many characters who are Victorian in upbringing and whose world changed violently in the early decades of the twentieth century, he also creates others who dwell in an Ireland that is more recent, but still irrevocably gone. Barry infuses these with an innocence that can seem at first at odds even with the earlier reality of their lives. He makes his innocents credible by coupling their unshakeable belief in the goodness of others with their adherence to their own belief systems. Barry’s people don’t simply carry on and bear their burdens (which are at times insupportable) they can rise to moments of illumination and clarity which the more fortunate among us can envy. In my own essay, ‘Children of the Light amid the Risky Dancers’, I have argued that these are not exercises in fantasy nor escapism from existentialist awareness, but fleeting moments of vision which place human aspiration and endeavour in a broad, nearly cosmic, humanist perspective which is both historical and postmodern. Barry’s humanist naïf is best exemplified by the eponymous hero of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), a homeless and condemned wanderer who journeys through the morass of much of the twentieth century peculiarly unarmed for the fray.