Études irlandaises, 36-1 - OpenEdition Journals

Études irlandaises

36-1 | 2011Trauma et mémoire en IrlandePerspectives on Trauma in Irish History, Literature and Culture

Anne Goarzin (dir.)

Édition électroniqueURL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/2115DOI : 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.2115ISSN : 2259-8863

ÉditeurPresses universitaires de Caen

Édition impriméeDate de publication : 30 juin 2011ISBN : 978-2-7535-1348-8ISSN : 0183-973X

Référence électroniqueAnne Goarzin (dir.), Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011, « Trauma et mémoire en Irlande » [En ligne], mis enligne le 10 février 2012, consulté le 22 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/2115 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.2115

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SOMMAIRE

Articulating TraumaAnne Goarzin

Histoire et culture : mémoire et commémoration

Politics, Policy and History: History Teaching in Irish Secondary Schools 1922-1970John O’Callaghan

Travellers and Communal Identity: Memory, Trauma and the Trope of CulturalDisappearanceMícheál Ó Haodha

Black Habits and White Collars: Representations of the Irish Industrial SchoolsPeter Guy

The Collective European Memory of 1968: The Case of Northern IrelandChris Reynolds

Vérité et justice comme remèdes au trauma : Bloody Sunday et l’enquête SavilleCharlotte Barcat

Violence et guerre dans la littérature irlandaise

“Snared by Words”: Trauma and the Shoah in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckianShane Alcobia-Murphy

Le long cheminement de la mémoire collective irlandaise : A Long Long Way de SebastianBarry (2005)Sylvie Mikowski

Exorcising Trauma: Uncanny Modernity and the Anglo-Irish War in Elizabeth Bowen’s TheLast September (1929)Edwina Keown

Trauma et hantise de soi dans The Mai et By the Bog of Cats de Marina CarrHélène Lecossois

Bibliographie

Bibliographie

Comptes rendus de lecture

Here Comes The NightMarion Naugrette-Fournier

Études irlandaises, 36-1 | 2011

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A Fool’s ErrandMarion Naugrette-Fournier

Un Poète dans la tourmenteJacqueline Genet

Territoires de l’étrange dans la littérature irlandaise au xxe siècleMark Fitzpatrick

Out of the EarthSylvie Mikowski

The Politics of Irish WritingAnne Goarzin

Keeping Faith with the Past in Gaelic Prose 1940-1951Clíona Ní Ríordáin

Lectures d’un texte étoiléSylvie Mikowski

The Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish PlaysVirginie Privas

Cinema on the PeripheryEstelle Epinoux

After the FloodAnnick Cizel

Architects of the ResurrectionJulien Guillaumond

Bertram WindleClíona Ní Ríordáin

Irish Women and Street PoliticsNathalie Sebbane

Flown The NestNathalie Sebbane

IrelandPhilippe Cauvet

Ship of FoolsVanessa Boullet


2

Articulating TraumaAnne Goarzin

Trauma and Trauma Theory

1 Trauma may be defined as an original inner catastrophe, as an experience of excess

which overwhelms the subject symbolically and/or physically and is not accessible to

him. This “radical and shocking interruption of the universe, but not its total

destruction1” means that the pain experienced by the subject is forcefully relocated

into the subconscious. As Geoffrey Hartman puts it: “The knowledge of trauma… is

composed of two contradictory elements. One is the traumatic event, registered rather

than experienced. It seems to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls

directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a

perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche2.” This

involves the disjunction and the forever belated, incomplete understanding of the

event, as Roger Luckhurst argues in his recent comprehensive treatment of The Trauma

Question3, thus fostering Cathy Caruth’s designation of trauma as a crisis of

representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time4.

2 “What is the relevance of trauma theory for reading, or practical criticism5?” Hartman

aptly asks. His answer is that, while trauma theory provides no definitive answers, “it

stays longer in the negative and allows disturbances of language and mind the quality

we give to literature6”. Literature is indeed one way to express whatever kind of

memory the traumatic event allows: it appears in the form of perpetual troping of it by

the psyche, and is best phrased through figurative language7. As the subject struggles

within his mental cage, the ineffable memories seek a way out and may take the guise

of seemingly inexplicable and compulsive behaviours (the compulsion to repeat), as

trauma calls for a silence filled with hauntings. The central dialectic of psychological

trauma is “the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to

proclaim them aloud8” to take up Judith Herman’s phrasing.

3 The need to revisit events and “proclaim them aloud” is also exemplified by the

writings of social historians. While they might not stand out as victims or witnesses,

their determination to look back on previously ill-defined or deliberately overlooked


3

events or chronically violent conditions in the history of a nation is central to criticism,

in that it makes sense of the recurring trauma of past traumatizing violent histories

(which in the case of Ireland include colonial invasion, war, terrorism, revolution, etc.).

This volume seeks to address some of the narratives that “ghost” Irish history and

culture (about the Travellers, the victims of child abuse or previously unquestioned

interpretations of 1968 in Northern Ireland, for example). It also provides an insight

into how literature perceives, deals with or memorizes inner or collective trauma.

The Modalities of Traumatic Experience

4 In the case of a traumatic event, the subject’s defences are radically called into

question. There is also an overwhelming side to traumatic experience, in that it

questions the usual systems of care and control, or connection and meaning

experienced by the individual. Trauma is thus ambivalent on the individual level, as an

experience of excess that can only be manifested in the lack of a meaningful structure

or form to express this extreme, unbearable moment the self goes through. Trauma is a

death of the subject, Gabriele Schwab says, indicating that “trauma kills the pulsing of

desire, the embodied self. Trauma attacks and sometimes kills language9”. The

traumatised subject is bound to live as the living dead, as someone who struggles to

“disentangle the self from the dead bodies they are trying to hide10” – “Atrocities refuse

to be buried”, as Judith Herman states in her landmark study Trauma and Recovery

(1992)11.

5 The traumatic experience also affects the ability of its victim to deal with his

environment serenely (i.e. linearly), and one may note the following manifestations of

mental or physical disruption among potential symptoms12: hyperarousal (persistent

expectation of danger, startled reaction and hyperalertness); intrusion (during which

the traumatic events are relived “as if they were occurring in the present”); constriction

(numbing, withdrawal, indifference, acute passivity or surrender). Robinett follows

neurobiologist Van der Kolk’s view that people who undergo trauma experience

“‘speechless terror… the experience cannot be organized on a linguistic level’ and thus

becomes not only inaccessible but also irrepresentable13”. Because by nature, trauma is

registered and not experienced, it resurfaces in many different ways. In terms of

Lacanian psychoanalysis, the overwhelming nature of trauma corresponds to the

encounter with the Real: “Trauma is caused by the subject’s close encounter with what

Lacan calls the ‘Real’ – a situation or an event that exceeds the symbolic order and

therefore cannot gain any meaning in the subject’s symbolic framework. Something in

this encounter bypasses the cognitive mental apparatus and is experienced by the

subject as excess. This […] excess is doomed to return as a traumatic symptom and to

haunt the subject in a compulsory manner14”.

6 In his thorough study of the modalities of traumatic experience, Goldberg also points

out its specific, repetitive and belated temporal structure which fails to fit in the more

comfortable linear temporality of the narrative: in a way, one may also say that trauma

theory thus engages one with the “real” world that is outside the symbolic order of

academia and into darker areas of perception and knowledge.


4

Trauma Studies: A Genealogy

7 Roger Luckhurst vividly shows that the concept of trauma emerged with modernity and

matched its “intrinsic ambivalences: progress and ruin, liberation and constraint,

individualisation and massification… perhaps best concretized by technology15”. These

“ambivalences” can be traced “as an effect of the rise, in the nineteenth century, of the

technological and statistical society that can generate, multiply and quantify the

‘shocks’ of modern life16”. In the wake of these shocks17 a series of specialised

approaches including law, psychiatry and industrialized warfare” emerged, all of which

marked the irruption of temporal dislocation and loss of memory in the Western

psyche.

8 Herman’s insight into trauma is related to her involvement in the women’s movement

in the 1970s: she set out “to speak out against the denial of women’s experiences in

[her] own profession [as a psychiatric resident] and testify to what I had witnessed18”.

Within two decades, the work initiated with victims of sexual and domestic violence

came to take in other traumatic experiences, such as those of the war veterans or those

of the victims of political terror. In his thorough chapter which explores “The

genealogy of a concept”, Luckhurst follows in the footsteps of Judith Herman, stressing

that the history of trauma itself is marked by “periodic amnesia19” that is, by a

tendency to obliterate and then rediscover lines of inquiry intro trauma. This is

markedly true of Ireland, where centenary commemorations (of the Famine, of Easter

1916, of the Great War) have led to a renewed interest in events that had become

anathema. David Lloyd’s statement that “Irish memory is at once the memory of

modernity and its catastrophes and that of living otherwise” is aptly illustrated in his

chapter that questions “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery? Mourning the Irish

Famine20”.

9 From the 1960s onwards, interest in trauma shifted to “survivor syndromes” following

nuclear war and Nazi persecution and trauma studies began to be theorized in the

1980s, which was demonstrated by the shift in terms from the vague “nervous shock”

to that of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Central to this theorizing is the

Holocaust: the unthinkable inhumanity of the Shoah, its apocalyptic barbarity,

constitutes an aporia, and is the crux of trauma theory as elaborated by Cathy Caruth

or Dominick LaCapra, while also the premise of further applications of trauma theory.

A good illustration of how the Shoah can be read using the tools of trauma theory is

provided in Amos Goldberg’s article regarding the Jewish subject at the heart of the

trauma of the 20th century – the Shoah, often translated as “the catastrophe21”.

Narrating Trauma: Speaking the Unspeakable?

10 The Holocaust can therefore be understood as an aporetic event, “traumatic enough to

shatter the frame of historiography or representation itself22”, one that escapes the

narrative possibilities of “mémoire ordinaire23” an event which import and massiveness

precludes resolution or registration. “To write after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Theodor

Adorno wrote in Prisms (1981)24 – all of Western conscience is “at once contaminated by

and complicit with Auschwitz, yet the denial of culture is also barbaric25”. Auschwitz


5

thus constitutes a moment of rupture, one which challenges our approach to history

and the rules of knowledge.

11 The first instance of excessive control of the subject consists in the physical marking of

the victim and the imposition of the annihilator’s symbols on them. Marking the

victim, from the Jewish Star of David to the tattoos in the death camps, makes it

impossible to disconnect the pure identity of the individual as self and the concept of

“Jewishness” – there is no distinction between the sign and the real body, and there is a

sense that their fate is thus imposed on the victims. The difficulty for the self is thus to

retain some subjectivity, and to “move beyond fate”, beyond the Nazi assertion that “a

Jew as signifier is a Jew as concept is a Jew as a real material body […] there are no gaps

between the subject and the signifier and between one signifier and another since the

Jew has only one signifier. Central in this is the idea that total identity is reached26”.

Such identity precludes any possibility to differ and denies the ability for the subject to

diverge from the artificial identity that he has been ascribed by the Nazis: “in other

words, the subject’s constant and everlasting search for his or her signifier, or identity,

is blocked27.” Or, to put it slightly differently, what is lacking is lack itself: that is, the

very possibility to lack something or someone – to search for or construct one’s

subjective identity – is denied to the individual. Utter objectification is the end of the

individual and his or her dehumanization.

12 This is undeniably where a Lacanian reading of trauma is convincing.Indeed, narrating

trauma allows for the initial trauma to be “framed so that it will not collapse into two

very much more radical forms of death – the death of the victim subject by the

annihilator’s signifier and the victim’s ‘symbolic death’28”. However this framing, more

often than not, is imperfect, and failures or gaps testify to the difficulty for the

traumatised subject to recall and create knowledge of the past in the present.

Expressing Trauma: Making the Most The Lack

13 How then may trauma be expressed and find a way out of this suffocated voice/self?

What are the different ways to grasp the elusive traumatic event and thus move beyond

the irrepresentable?

14 The language of literature, be it figurative or not, offers the opportunity to tackle those

issues, as Geoffrey Hartman points out:

[I]n literature, as much as in life, the simplest event can resonate mysteriously, beinvested with aura, and tend toward the symbolic. The symbolic, in this sense, isnot a denial of literal or referential but its uncanny intensification […] In short weget a clearer view of the relation of literature to mental functioning in several keyareas, including reference, subjectivity, and narration29.

15 Hartman goes on to say that this need for the symbolic also makes for a very human

and compulsive questioning “that grapples, again and again, with issues of reality, bodily

integrity, and identity30”. Most importantly, he adds, trauma theory does not provide

premature answers to these questions but allows the “quality of time” necessary to

reflect on the disturbances of language and mind. Trauma theory allows us to “read the

wound’ with the aid of literature. This does not mean that trauma theory offers an

infallible, all-encompassing framework for the interpretation of all atrocities whatever

their scale, individual or historical. Gabriele Schwab phrases this reservation most

adequately: “How then do we write what resists representation31?” For the critical


6

theorist, this involves examining how telling and witnessing are steps in the healing of

trauma. Namely, one may wonder how writing a life narrative can compensate for that

lack and come to terms with the event. Trauma theory therefore entails examining

what it takes for a subject to overcome PTSD and return to language, to question or

phrase (even in a fragmentary fashion) the violent trauma he/she has undergone. One

way to come to terms with this lack of form is to reflect the gaping hole of knowledge

or memory caused by traumatic experience in similarly lacking narrative structures

that are “fractured, erratic structures and disintegration of self and society, culture or

world32” and constitute prominent features of trauma, says Jane Robinett.

16 To a certain extent, this is also the paradoxical imperative assigned to the artist in her/

his attempt to phrase the unspeakable event, as well as to the critic – as someone who

narrates what has been obliterated33. Both must make choices as they grapple with the

possibilities of making sense of trauma. All these standpoints provide the self with

more than a mere re-living of the trauma, whether they stand as subject and first-hand

witness who experienced trauma in their body and mind, conveying the intricate sense

of fragmented representation and commemoration, or as a dissociated (distanciated) I/

eye (that of the fiction writer or of the poet, that of the historian or anthropologist),

since they propose ideological choices to the approach of the events.

17 Thus while trauma is never a chosen experience and durably disseminates the sense of

the self, it appears that there might be a possibility for healing in the choices operated

in the narratives of trauma. One of the ways of working through trauma implies

narrating it, whatever form this takes. This corresponds to an intermediary stage on

the path to recovery, which is usually described clinically as follows: first, the

establishment of safety, next remembrance and mourning, which then leads to

reconnection with ordinary life. While the failure to contemplate the past in narrative

form results in trauma, with memories remaining outside the subject altogether and

enacted as drama, at best – as opposed to synthesised and narrated by a subject who

masters them – the narrative appears as one way to recover, and more precisely, to

remember and mourn. It might sometimes achieve the liberating feat of enacting the

original traumatic event.

18 The greatest challenge may even be to take remembering and mourning one step

further. David Lloyd’s writing about the Irish Famine (1845-52) and its consequences

(the disappearance of one quarter of the population of Ireland due to starvation) seems

an apt summary of what is at stake in catastrophic events. Whether the focus is on the

Holocaust or the Famine and even though they are contextually very distinct, both

events are confronted with a crisis of witnessing, that is, with the aporetic difficulty of

representing an event whose witnesses have been eradicated: “the necessity of

testimony derives from the impossibility of testimony34.” Indeed, Lloyd argues that the

post-traumatic discourse involves a degree of risk-taking in confronting the victims’

ghosts:“Mourning is no redress […] Commemoration too is unavailing in so far as it

fixes the dead in the past, where what the dead require is a place in the future that

were denied to them35”. The attempt at healing and redressing events is undeniably a

perilous venture, for “the paradox of redress is that the catastrophic violence of history

can be righted only in relinquishing the desire to set it right, in order instead to make

room for the spectres in whose restlessness the rhythms of another mode of living is

speaking to us36”. These ghosts keep reappearing in unexpected ways in cultural

practices and pointing at the memories of futures not lived and of “paths not taken”.


7

The Blind Spots of Trauma Theory

19 One may wonder however about the power issues reflected by the scale of the trauma

that is narrated. Trauma theory is sometimes said to locate itself in the rather exclusive

field of major-scale traumatic events from which “smaller” traumas are excluded and

collective traumas dominate over “individual” narratives. In other words, what does it

take to interpret violent history? More often than not, it means reading through the

cryptographic dimension of stories, as is the case for instance with a secret covered up

defensively which requires reading against the grain.

20 While most critics acknowledge the pioneering and much-needed nature of Cathy

Caruth’s or Dominick LaCapra’s studies on trauma37, some have stressed what trauma

theory fails to address. Because it works on a specific causal framework (for example,

child abuse, or the Holocaust, or any relevant historical traumatic events), one may

argue that what trauma theory does not take into account should also be considered.

One might indeed contend, along with Greg Forter, that it obliterates the “mundanely

catastrophic”:

I am speaking here of the trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather,say, than the trauma of rape, the violence not of lynching but of everyday racism.These phenomena are indeed traumas in the sense of having decisive anddeforming effects on the psyche that give rise to compulsively repeated and highlyrigidified social relations. But such traumas are also chronic and cumulative, sowoven into the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as “shocks” in theway that Nazi persecution and genocide do in the accounts of Caruth and others38.

21 Victoria Burrows for instance stresses that there is a notable tendency in these seminal

works to not to address the issue of trauma as represented in colonialism and

postcolonialism. The “ability to listen” to the other does not encompass the otherness

of the non-White, non-Western subject, with Eurocentrism one of the most notable

blind spots of trauma theory, Burrows argues, in contradiction with Cathy Caruth’s

approach. For Burrows, Caruth “manifestly ignores power structures39” and there is a

blatant need to reassess the idea of trauma as “temporal disruption of belatedness40” to

address postcolonial trauma as well as ongoing traumas which are, for many people,

related to the changes in power structures: neocolonialism, cultural imperialism and

global capital41.

Trauma, Memory and Ireland

22 Memory Studies, which may be said to be an offspring of trauma theory, make for an

interdisciplinary field in their own right, comprising the politics of memory, individual

and social memory, embodiment and representation. Individual and social memory are

two different approaches: individual memory is often theorized as located within the

mind of one person, and social memory as located externally in sites such as archives,

objects, narratives, or cultural practices42.

23 The first chapter of this volume offers insights into the modalities of cultural memory

in Ireland. While John O’Callaghan’s approach to the way history was taught in Irish

secondary schools between 1922-70 focuses on the ideological functions of an

institutionalized, national(ist) memory, it also lays the basis for a much-needed


8

reappraisal of non-conformist (or one might say heterotopic) discourses. Mícheál Ó

hAodha’s essay on Travellers’ narratives and memory provides additional insight into

the elaboration of a narrative counter-memory that resists hegemonic discourses and

asserts the existence of the Travellers as a liminal group. Much of the vibrant literary

and cultural autobiographical contributions quoted in the essay unearth their long-

forgotten existence as a community that is both “other” and engages with the

questions of Irishness. Peter Guy looks into how the “values” associated with the Irish

State throughout the construction of the nation (i.e. caring for the poor or dispensing

goodness) were distorted to a point where Christian care came to mean horrendous

institutionalized violence in gulag-like “industrial schools”. Guy shows how through

the years of silent abuse, the voices of some victims managed to find a way, if

fragmentarily, into memoirs or novels which indicted the system long before the 2009

Ryan Report exposed the scale of the abuse43.

24 One might claim, as often do the perpetrators of abuse or of terror, that forgetting has

also a central role in social memory – or that remembering the forgotten may have a

role to play in the elaboration of a common history that attempts to do justice not only,

in the case of Ireland for example, to a dreamed collective nation-building but also to

the place of the individual in that process. But forgetting is not on the agenda for those

victims, nor is it for the Bloody Sunday survivors, as Charlotte Barcat shows. In both

cases, collective trauma has been passed on through the generations, taking the shape

of what Schwab calls, quoting Freud, “Schilcksalneurose, that is a ‘fate neurosis’ […]

hidden and intangible, relegated to secrecy and silence44” which consists in living

under a bad spell or curse that often preceded one’s life. The effects of

transgenerational memory or the lack of it, and the transmission of body memories

through somatic manifestations are but variations on this “curse”. It is also quite

palatable in the physical and psychological traumatic aftermath of Bloody Sunday: the

traumatic experience seems to burst at the seams, questioning the conclusions of two

successive inquiries and memorizing obsessively the story of the events. While showing

a concern with the European scale of the Northern Irish events, Chris Reynolds

challenges the customary obliteration of the 1968 Troubles from the historiographic

map by locating Northern Ireland’s pivotal year in the wider body of European (and

specifically, French) revolts, thus redefining the significance of 1968 for Northern

Ireland and offering a much-needed transnational appraisal of the upheaval.

25 The second chapter in this collection entitled “Approaches to violence and warfare in

Irish Literature” addresses the possibility of writing about “an atrocity one did not

really know”, beginning with Shane Alcobia-Murphy’s reading of Medbh McGuckian’s

“Holocaust poems”, which examines poetic strategies to reveal trauma through the

distortions of language. The section also allows the writer to focus on the consequences

of the crucial moment in the traumatic history of Ireland that is colonisation45. Both

Sylvie Mikowski and Edwina Keown’s articles centre on the colonial condition of

Ireland. Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way and Bowen’s novel The Last September

account for the characters’ encounters with violence in the Irish colonial context.

Sebastian Barry’s character, a young Irish soldier fighting on the British side in the

Somme goes through the throes of terror and meets an untimely death in the trenches,

while Bowen’s Anglo-Irish character Lois in The Last September has only a somewhat

hazy perception of the after-effects of colonisation on the Irish people’s yearning for

independence. These novels provide a lens through which the loss of innocence is

represented. They also stress the necessity for a transgressive discourse that suggests


9

how the differing natures and scales of trauma are acknowledged. For even while these

moments in Irish history are indeed central, they are definitely not ideologically clear-

cut and both authors suggest that they foster a critical discourse on ambivalent

moments which do not fit in the convenient progressive mould defined by the

historical revisionist, as says Lloyd, to “embrace the idea of Ireland’s modernization” in

order to contradict the usual “statements on our backwardness”: in that context, the

Great Famine, the advent of independence, or the programmatic modernization of

Ireland since the Whitaker report in 1959 to the present stand as emblematic moments

associated with the upbeat (yet Whiggish) notion that Ireland has “moved on” and “left

behind […] all the symptoms of an uncured backwardness46”– thus obliterating, for

example, the contemporary social consequences of Ireland’s accelerated growth and

ongoing economic recession.

26 Hélène Lecossois’s essay on Marina Carr’s drama and Sandrine Brisset’s reading of

Brendan Kennelly’s “inspired” poetry offer an apposite conclusion to the volume by

affirming the spectral dimension looming above the entire collection. Carr’s The Mai

and The Bog of Cats are peopled by ghosts. Omnipresent memories of the dead hover as

the characters struggle with the impossibility to mourn, and while the stage makes

intimate trauma palatable, it remains unresolved: the modern subject can only die of an

excess of self-knowledge and language fails to liberate him. Brisset, on the other hand,

argues that Kennelly’s poetry converts traumatic disruption into controlled poetic

language by reverting to ancient bardic tradition, thus allowing psychic trauma to filter

through the mind in its visionary violent moments, and into the material/body of the

poem.

27 All the contributions in this collection attempt to isolate the intricacies of trauma in a

specifically Irish context and to examine how the wound, which cannot be

apprehended directly by the victims of historical or institutionalized violence in the

contemporary era, sometimes finds its expression in poetry, drama or fiction. The

volume also offers renewed critical approaches of founding moments in the definition

of the nation, all of which confirm the necessity to go beyond the protective attempt at

forgetting in order to memorize and possibly heal.

NOTES

1. See A. Goldberg, “Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death”, Literature and

Medicine, 25:1, Spring 2006, p. 122-141 (p. 137).

2. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary

History, 26:3, 1995, p. 537-563 (p. 537).

3. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, London and New York, Routledge, 2008.

4. Ibid., p. 4.

5. Geoffrey H. Hartman, op.cit., p. 547.

6. Ibid.


10

7. This is what Geoffrey Hartman argues Romantic poetry also does – it is in a

“perpetual troping”, a compulsive repetition of a tale, as for instance in Samuel

Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”, ibid., p. 542.

8. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992), London, BasicBooks, 2001, p. 1.

9. Gabriele Schwab, “Writing Against Memory and Forgetting”, Literature and Medicine,

25:1, Spring 2006, p. 92-121 (p. 95).

10. Ibid., p. 95-96.

11. Judith Herman, op. cit., p. 1.

12. See Judith Herman, p. 35-43, quoted in Jane Robinett, “The Narrative Shape of

Traumatic Experience”, Literature and Medicine, 26: 2, Fall 2007, p. 290-311 (p. 296).

13. Jane Robinett, “The Narrrative Shape…”, p. 290.

14. A. Goldberg, “Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death”, p. 133.

15. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, p. 20.

16. Ibid., p. 19.

17. The term shell-shock was first coined in The Lancet in 1915. But most strikingly,

Luckhurst devotes a section of his essay to the way in which trauma initially came to be

associated with the expansion of the railways in the 1860s (see Luckhurst, p. 20-26). In

the case of Ireland, those “shocks” include: the Famine of 1845-52; the tragedy of the

Belfast-launched Titanic in 1912, or “shell-shock” as exemplified by the casualties of

the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

18. Judith Herman, op. cit., p. 2

19. Ibidem, p. 7.

20. David Lloyd, Irish Times, Temporalities of Modernity, Field Day Files 4, University of

Notre Dame/ Field Day, Dublin, 2008, p. 6.

21. See A. Goldberg, op. cit.

22. R. Luckhurst, op.cit., p. 65.

23. Ibid.

24. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1981.

25. R. Luckhurst, op. cit., p. 5.

26. A. Goldberg, op. cit., p. 132.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 123.

29. Geoffrey H. Hartman, op. cit., p. 547.

30. Ibid.

31. Gabriele Schwab, “Writing Against Memory and Forgetting”, p. 102.

32. Jane Robinett, op. cit., p. 297.

33. For example, David Lloyd stresses the need, “[i]n the very cusp of catastrophe […]

[to bespeak] the memory of alternative possibilities that live on athwart the mournful

logic of historicize events”(Irish Times…, p. 38). In that sense, the Famine has peculiar

significance because it does not serve only to evince the spectre of Irish misery and

contains a paradoxical and obliterated possibility. One of the paradoxes of the Famine,

Lloyd argues, “is the cultural recalcitrance of the Irish miserable as their conditions of

life were, they clung to them with often vehement resistance, to the despair of English


11

‘improvers’ […] the Irish poor resisted tenaciously and persisted in practices that

British political economists regarded as profoundly irrational and immoral.” Namely,

“their lack of interest in material progress, their idleness, but also their vivacity and

pleasure, qualities that grate on the Protestant sensibility of the English capitalist and

administrator.” (See Irish Times…, p. 45).

34. Feldmann and Laub in Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, p. 7.

35. David Lloyd, op. cit., p. 40.

36. Ibidem, p. 44.

37. See Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question for a summary of Cathy Caruth’s main

lines of thought, i.e.: Adorno; Derrida and aporia; and psychoanalysis (p. 4-10).

38. Greg Forter, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form”,

Narrative, 15:3, October 2007, p. 259-285 (p. 260).

39. Victoria Burrows, “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael

Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Studies in the Novel, vol. 40, nos. 1 & 2, Spring and Summer 2008,

p. 161-177 (p. 163).

40. Ibid.

41. See also Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, “Introduction : Postcolonial Trauma Novels”,

Studies in the Novel, vol. 40, no. 1 & 2, Spring and Summer 2008, p. 1-12. They emphasize

the fact that “trauma studies […] are almost exclusively concerned with traumatic

experiences of white Westerners and solely employ critical methodologies emanating

from a Euro-American context” (p. 2).

42. On the topic of commemoration, see Jay Winter’s analyses. Winter describes three

phases in the process of commemoration for sites as follows: “the creative phase,

defined by a trigger or impetus to remember, implies a debate about the appropriate

forms memory should take: a monument, the production of a memorial site / public

unveiling of sites. The institutional phase: solidifies and routinizes a commemorative

calendar through repetitive rituals and texts. The third phase is that of the

transformation of memory, in which second and subsequent generations inherit sites.

It is a phase of symbolic accretion during which new interpretations are added by new

generations. While this threefold process seems attractive, it may also fall prey to a

biased reading, for example such as one might encounter in a Nationalist agenda” (qtd

in Karen T. Hill’s thorough review on “Memory Studies”, History Workshop Journal, Issue

62, Autumn 2006, p. 325-341, p. 327).

43. Again, in the case of Ireland, recent reports on child abuse, in particular those in

the care of the so-called “Industrial schools” priests and nuns or of Magdalen laundries,

have substantiated the plight of sexual abuse survivors, whose symptoms may include

“symptoms of dissociation, self-harm, multiple and borderline personality disorders or

‘somatization’”, all of which “could be confidently traced back to 97 per cent of cases to

incidents of sexual abuse of childhood” (J. Herman qtd by Roger Luckhurst, op. cit., p.

72).

44. Gabriele Schwab, op. cit., p. 96.

45. Central for making this point is David Lloyd’s analysis: “Trauma entails violent

intrusion and a sense of utter objectification that annihilates the person as subject or

agent. This is no less apt a description of the effects and mechanisms of colonization :

the overwhelming technological, military and economic power of the colonizer; the

violence and programmatically excessive atrocities committed in the course of putting


12

down resistance and intrusion, the deliberate destruction of the symbolic and practical

resources of whole populations. It would seem that we can map the psychological

effects of trauma onto the cultures that undergo colonization.” (op. cit., p. 24)

46. Ibid., p. 2.

AUTHOR

ANNE GOARZIN

Université Européenne de Bretagne, Rennes 2


13

Histoire et culture : mémoire etcommémorationHistory, Cultural Memory and Commemoration in Ireland


14

Politics, Policy and History: HistoryTeaching in Irish Secondary Schools1922-1970John O’Callaghan

1 In the Ireland of 1922 history was very much a slave of politics. The events of the

immediate past, including the partitioning of the country, meant that the course of

Irish history was a matter of current affairs. The government of the Irish Free State had

a vested interest in disseminating its own version of history. This article examines the

role of history teaching in Irish secondary schools in the period 1922-70. It assesses

what objectives were the most important in history teaching and what interests school

history was designed to serve. The emphasis is on the political, cultural, social and

economic factors that determined the content of history textbooks, the history

curriculum and its development. The primary focus is on the politics and policy of

history teaching, including the respective contributions of church and state to the

formulation of the history programmes. It is argued that a particular view of Ireland’s

past as a Gaelic, Catholic-nationalist one informed the ideas of policy makers and thus

provided the basis of state education policy, and history teaching specifically. The

conclusion drawn is that history teaching was used by elite interest groups, namely the

State and the church, in the service of their own interests. It was used to justify the

State’s existence and employed as an instrument of religious education. History was

exploited in the pursuit of the objectives of the cultural revival movement, being used

to legitimise the restoration of Irish as a spoken language.

Policy

2 The administration of education in the south of Ireland became the responsibility of

the Provisional Government of the Free State on 1 February 1922. The Dáil Commission

on Secondary Education sat from 24 September 1921 to 7 December 1922 when it

presented its recommendations to the Free State minister for education, Eoin MacNeill.

Its purpose, according to Frank Fahy of the Ministry for Education, was to determine


15

how best education could be used to aid the revival of “the ancient life of Ireland as a

Gaelic state, Gaelic in language, and Gaelic and Christian in its ideals1”. The report of

the Commission recommended that Irish, history and geography should constitute the

Gaelic core of the curriculum2. The proposal to place Irish at the centre of the

curriculum was a radical departure from the system in operation under the old

Intermediate Education Board that operated under British rule. Equally radical was the

proposal that geography and history should be compulsory and have an Irish

orientation.

3 Patrick Pearse was the foremost pre-independence pioneer of Irish-Ireland education.

Pearse fits Seán Farren’s profile of the ideologue of indigenous culture as an alternative

to that disseminated by the colonial power3. Pearse looked forward to the post-colonial

phase when national identity would be fully restored. He argued that all of Ireland’s

problems originated in the education system. It was “the most grotesque and horrible

of the English inventions for the debasement of Ireland4”. Pearse believed that the

national consciousness was enshrined mainly in the national language5. Before he

converted to political rather than strictly cultural nationalism, Pearse’s primary

objective was the preservation of the Irish language:

when Ireland’s language is established, her own distinctive culture is assured […] allphases of a nation’s life will most assuredly adjust themselves on national lines asbest suited to the national character once that national character is safeguarded byits strongest bulwark6.

4 By 1912, when he wrote “The Murder Machine”, Pearse had taken up the sword as well

as the pen. It encapsulated his main educational ideas and introduced a new political

dimension. He asserted that the education system was a vehicle of cultural imperialism.

It contained no national material. As a result, Irish people were enslaved, and because

the machine was so effective, they were not conscious of their cultural slavery7. Pearse

believed that Ireland needed political independence and the restoration of promotion

of knowledge of the national past in the schools in order to counter the effects of

mental and cultural colonisation. Ideas similar to those of Pearse were invoked in the

formation of education policy in independent Ireland. Michael Tierney, professor of

Greek, and subsequently president of University College, Dublin (UCD), also outlined his

philosophy on schooling with a view to an independent Ireland. Like Pearse, he

considered the British system of education as “grotesque8”. He agreed that it was

designed to destroy separate Irish nationality and to make children disregard that they

were Irish9. Tierney believed that the very purpose of a free Irish State would be to

forge an Ireland through education that linked the Gaelic State of the past to what he

envisaged as the Christian State of the future10. The basis of all teaching would be the

Irish language, history, music and art. As with Pearse (and his father-in-law Eoin

MacNeill), Tierney believed the history and language of Ireland were closely

connected11.

5 Eoin MacNeill, the first secretary of the Gaelic League and professor of ancient Irish

History at UCD, was the minister for Education from August 1922 to November 1925.

This was a decisive period in the determination of the direction of the new Irish

education system. MacNeill declared that for the members of the government to

abandon the attempt to revive Irish would be to abandon their own nation12. He

regarded the language as the distinctive lifeline and the principal thread of Irish

nationality13. The essential element in MacNeill’s Irish-Ireland was the language. He

believed that ignorance of Irish history was the chief cause of want of interest in the


16

Irish language. He felt that to anyone who did not identify himself with Irish history,

the learning of the language would be a mere philology14. In his academic work,

MacNeill identified the basis of the Irish nation in the remote Gaelic past. He showed

that the Irish nation was an ancient historical entity whose formation could be traced

back to the fifth century: “the Irish people stand singular and eminent…from the fifth

century forward, as the possessors of an intense national consciousness15”. He outlined

the continuity of Irish history from pre-Celtic to contemporary times and found the

origin of Irish laws and institutions in the remote past16. In this way, he connected

ancient Ireland with modern Ireland as one constant and timeless nation, establishing

the ancient historical roots of the new state. MacNeill stated that “the business and

main functions of the Department of Education in this country are to conserve and

build up our nationality17”. Thus, MacNeill epitomised both the Gaelic ethos and the

historical perspective of the founding fathers of the nascent state. MacNeill, as a devout

Catholic, also epitomised the religious standpoint of Free State political leaders.

MacNeill’s successors in the education portfolio, John Marcus O’Sullivan, Thomas

Derrig and Richard Mulcahy, held attitudes on the relative roles of church and state in

education, the promotion of the language revival and the ideal of a Gaelic Ireland that

were indistinguishable from his.

6 The first annual report of the Department of Education highlighted the fact that the

central educational aim of the Free State was “the strengthening of the national fibre

by giving the language, music, history and tradition of Ireland their natural place in the

life of Irish schools18”. In the spirit of the recommendations of the Dáil Commission, the

new history syllabi betrayed radical changes in approach and attitude. At both junior

and senior levels, there was a far greater emphasis on Irish history19. Under the

Intermediate Board, British and Imperial history had been promoted at the expense of

Irish history but the opposite became the case. The inclusion of a full outline course of

Irish history in its own right, combined with the exclusion of British and Imperial

history, was in line with the State policy of using education, and history within it, to

create an “Irish Ireland”. The neglect of Irish history under the Intermediate Board had

been interpreted as a deliberate policy of anglicisation, and the cultivation of Irish

history was designed to serve the process of gaelicisation20. In 1925, Joseph O’Neill,

secretary of the Department of Education, wrote to W. T. Cosgrave that education

policy aimed “to redress the balance and to make compensation” for the neglect of

Irish culture under the previous system21. This echoed Pearse’s thinking. In 1931, the

Department of Education argued that until the history of Ireland was properly taught

the work of gaelicisation would be hindered, since there would be “no real incentive to

urge the pupils to the use of Irish as a living speech22”. This echoed MacNeill’s thinking.

The extent of the change in emphasis from British to Irish history was made clear by

the reports of examiners and inspectors, who commented on the ignorance of British

history displayed by many students in matters in which Ireland was directly affected by

Britain:

It is undesirable that teachers should treat Irish history as an isolated phenomenonor should fail to explain the connection between events in Ireland and thecontemporaneous events in Great Britain and Europe23.

7 The tendency, apparent in the syllabi, to study the history of Ireland in isolation was

still an issue in the 1970s, even as the project of European unity gathered pace and

Ireland joined the EEC in 1973. Policy makers intended history to reflect a romantic but

unhistorical ideal of Ireland’s Gaelic past held by many Irish revolutionaries. Pearse, for


17

example, idealised education in pagan and early Christian Ireland and argued that its

character could be revived through an education of “adequate inspiration24”. He

believed that “a heroic tale is more essentially a factor in education than a proposition

in Euclid […] What Ireland wants beyond all […] is a new birth of the heroic spirit25”.

However, the conception of history and history teaching as a method of restoring and

renewing the Gaelic past did not consider those whose past was not a Gaelic one. The

emergence of a new consensus on Irish identity meant that those who did not subscribe

to it, in political, cultural or historical terms, became outsiders in the State. For many

unionists, nationalism and the cultural revival were inextricably linked with

Catholicism. The Catholic Church was suspected of nurturing an extreme nationalism

in its schools. Echoing Canon Law, the Central Association of Catholic Clerical School

Managers had asserted in 1921 that

We are confident that an Irish government… will always recognise and respect theprinciples which must regulate and govern Catholic education […] The onlysatisfactory system of education for Catholics is one wherein Catholic children aretaught in Catholic schools by Catholic teachers under Catholic control26.

8 In 1924, the orthodox Catholic Bulletin declared that “the Irish nation is the Gaelic

nation; its language and literature is the Gaelic language; its history is the history of the

Gael. All other elements have no place27 […]” When the State of Northern Ireland was

set up, the main Protestant churches transferred their ownership of schools to the

State. Irish history was dropped entirely from the curriculum of State schools28. The

Catholic Church retained ownership of its schools. In the south, the Catholic Church

played a dominant role in the management of education. The distinctions were less

explicit than in the north but the dynamics of the system raised issues about

denominational, non-denominational and secular perspectives on education. The

majority of schools were de facto Catholic schools. The Catholic Church claimed the

allegiance of 95 per cent of the Free State population. With the exception of Ernest

Blythe, the first Free State cabinet consisted entirely of Catholics29. In contrast with

southern Catholic nationalists, southern Protestant unionists felt deeply the pressure

of political change. Many schools under Protestant management did not subscribe to

the Gaelicising policies and the historical perspective of the new state. They had to bear

the rigours of a state Gaelicisation policy, or else see their schools deprived of all public

funding. Letters sent to the Taoiseach in 1944 by the Presbyteries of Monaghan,

Letterkenny and Raphoe illustrate the attitude of Protestant schools to the use of Irish

as a teaching medium30. The Presbyteries acknowledged the cultural value of Irish as a

subject of study but argued that it was granted an undue proportion of the timetable

and that the policy of using it as the chief medium of instruction was not educationally

beneficial for children whose home language was English. The letters also recorded

anxieties that the setting of exam papers for entry to teacher training colleges in Irish

only would seriously imperil the supply of Presbyterian teachers31.

9 The significance given to school history teaching by the new government was revealed

in 1922 when it became a compulsory subject in primary schools. The programme

followed from 1925 dealt exclusively with Irish history and changed little until the

introduction of the new curriculum for primary schools in 1971. In 1934, the

Department of Education outlined the approach that it wanted primary school teachers

to take to history:

In an Irish school in which history is properly taught, the pupils will learn that theyare citizens of no mean country, that they belong to a race that has a noble


18

tradition of heroism and persistent loyalty to ideals. In such a school no formalexhortation should be necessary to bring home to every pupil the worth of goodfaith, courage and endurance, and the strong grounds that they are for a belief thata race that has survived a millennium of grievous struggle and persecution mustpossess qualities that are a guarantee of a great future […] Irish history has beenmuch distorted by those who wrote from the enemy’s standpoint. Such writers hadto attempt to justify conquest and expropriation32.

10 The policy of Gaelicisation, then, was aimed mainly at the primary schools and only to a

limited degree at secondary schools. This emphasis on the primary school was due to

the realisation that it was more effective to begin orientation at the earliest suitable

age, and to the fact that secondary schools were almost exclusively in private

denominational hands. It was also the case that a relatively small proportion of

students continued their education beyond primary school level. In addition to these

factors, secondary schools were much more independent of the Department of

Education than were primary schools. Supervision of primary schools by a vast

inspectorate was much more intense than was the case at secondary level. For a

complete understanding of the philosophy underlying the new history programmes

and of the role of history in secondary schools during the early years of the new history

programme, an understanding of the influence of Rev. T. J. Corcoran, S. J., professor of

Education at UCD between 1909 and 1942, is necessary. Joseph O’Neill, secretary of the

Department of Education from its foundation until 1944, regarded him highly: “In the

reconstruction of the Irish State he was from the beginning the master-builder in

education33”. Corcoran championed a traditional Catholic view of education. He did not

accept that history should be a subject of secular instruction. He declared that the

history curriculum was aimed at reversing British modes of historical study, which

were “inimical to the study of the work and development of the Church of Christ34”. He

argued for the teaching of history in the new secondary school curriculum to reflect a

Catholic spirit and outlook35. He urged all Catholic schools to provide a course in

history wherein the Church would occupy its rightful place as the driving force in all

civilisations and progress36. Corcoran explicitly viewed history as a branch of Catholic

religious, moral and sociological training. He believed the critical utility of history in

secondary school was to produce “the class with the Catholic mind, whose members

will later on not be inclined to shirk the use of moral decisions on the facts of public

life” and to “produce the citizen who will not fear to be explicitly Catholic in the field

of social action37”. Corcoran was particularly influential in the formation of educational

policy in the early years of the Irish Free State. He dominated the proceedings of the

Dáil Commission on Secondary Education and he took a central role in determining the

new programmes for primary and secondary schools38.

11 The 1960 report of the Council of Education identified the dominant purpose of

secondary schools as the inculcation of religious ideals and values39. The aim of the

schools was “to prepare their pupils to be God-fearing” so that they could responsibly

discharge their duties to God40. The prevailing curriculum was “the grammar school

type, synonymous with general and humanist education41”. The report endorsed that

role in concurrence with an informal system of vocational guidance42. It acknowledged

the primacy of the humanist subjects and stated that the chief aim of school history

was not the training of scientific historians or the critical spirit, except in a broad way,

but the development of the civic and moral sense43. It confirmed the curriculum as still

on the lines of that adopted in 1924 following the recommendation of the Dáil


19

Commission on Secondary Education. It accepted the status quo and affirmed that little

change had taken place. There had been developments and variations, but the Council

acknowledged that there had been no departure from the fundamental principles

adopted in 192444. The Council’s endorsement of the existing curriculum suggested an

apparent lack of awareness regarding the more analytical and dynamic thinking afoot

which would transform secondary education during the following decade. By the time

the report was finally published in 1962, the pace of change in Irish society had

outstripped it, making the Council seem outmoded and its limited proposals redundant.

Reaction to the report was negative45. The Irish Independent of 26 April 1962 argued that

the Council was not in tune with the spirit of reform evident in the air at teachers’

conferences: “The most outstanding feature of the Council’s report is that it sees no

need for any really far-reaching changes”. The Irish Times of the same date reported

that the Council did not make any firm decision on any potentially controversial issue,

including the teaching of recent Irish history: “The report of the Council of Education

has missed a singular opportunity to give a new direction to the cultural and

commercial orientation of Irish secondary education”. During most of the period from

independence to the 1960s, one of the most remarkable features of Irish education

policy was the reluctance of the state to encroach on the entrenched position of the

Catholic Church. The claims of the Catholic Church were not moderate however: it

actually established for itself a more extensive control over education in Ireland than

in any other country in the world. Political leaders never publicly questioned the

prerogatives that the Church established for itself in education. They were mainly the

products of Catholic schools, were staunchly Catholic and obeyed the rulings of the

church on moral issues. Due to Church-State cooperation on education and the

influence of Corcoran, the role of history in secondary schools was largely in

accordance, and certainly not incompatible with, a Catholic world-view. Changes that

came about in education in the 1960s entailed a sudden increase of state intervention in

a field where the Catholic Church had long been dominant. In 1963, the Minister for

Education, Dr. Patrick Hillery, announced in the Dáil, as he had done in the public

press, that matters of educational policy would be formulated on the sole responsibility

of the minister concerned, with, if necessary, government approval, and that policy

matters would not be submitted to outside bodies prior to their promulgation46.

12 Education was a moribund department until the 1960s. Compared with previous

decades, a feature of the 1960s was a significant increase in government interest in

education. The context was the programme of economic reform initiated by the Fianna

Fáil government under Seán Lemass. The aim of the reform programme was to prepare

Irish industry, commerce and agriculture to meet the economic demands of the EEC.

Reform was also influenced by Ireland’s increasingly strong links with international

organisations such as the Council of Europe and the United Nations. Irish economic

policy was moving from protectionism to free international trade. In 1962, the Minister

for Education, George Colley, in conjunction with the Organisation for Economic Co-

operation and Development (OECD), established a panel to review Irish educational

institutions and goals. In contrast with the Council of Education, its members were not

educationists but leading civil servants, academics and economists. Its broad terms of

reference indicated an intention to frame the development of education within the

wider economic development of the State47. The 1965 report, Investment in Education,

promoted the planned development of education as a contribution to economic growth.

Colley told the OECD that


20

For us in Ireland this report has had an immediate impact on policy. We are nowembarked on the long and arduous task of adapting our educational system andinstitutions to serve the needs of the nation in the age of technology and, we hope,rapid economic growth48.

13 Thus, the direction of educational change was determined by economic factors. Irish

education was pushed away from its former insularity by policy makers and became

more outward looking, as well as becoming more inclusive of internal Irish interests.

The inclusion of such topics as “Life in Presbyterian Ulster”, “The Birth of Orangeism”

and “The End of the Catholic-Dissenter Alliance” was set in the context of improving

relations between the Republic and Northern Ireland, symbolised by meetings between

Lemass and Terence O’Neill, the Northern Prime Minister, in 1965. It seemed to indicate

a move away from traditional narrow Catholic-Gaelic nationalism. Many curricular

changes were introduced into secondary schools in an attempt to satisfy the needs of

an increasingly industrialised economy. History became less important as the sciences

became more important. The decline in the proportion of pupils taking history may be

gauged from the fact that, in 1960, 70 percent of boys and 74 percent of girls took

history; by 1970 the figure for boys had dropped to 42 percent and for girls to 44

percent.

Textbooks

14 Evidence that teachers often failed to discuss the material presented in textbooks

means that their content was of vital importance. In many schools history suffered

from the fact that the teachers were not specialists, and limited the scope of the course

to the contents of meagre texts in which the information was often incorrect and out-

of-date49. Department of Education reports continually referred to excessive

dependence on the textbooks and to memorisation of the textbooks: “There is too

much adherence to the matter in arid little textbooks, and teachers still are found who

substitute the lifeless reading aloud of such books for real oral exposition50”. Following

school visits, inspectors reported that many teachers had no historical knowledge

beyond what they found in elementary textbooks51. If the only history that many

teachers knew was what they had picked up from the same texts that their pupils used,

it is understandable that the opinions of the authors of these books could assume

significant authority. In situations where the textbook was dominant, the only

alternative sources of historical knowledge for children would have been outside the

school. There is evidence that the books carried a spirit of ethnocentric nationalism

and Anglophobia. John Marcus O’Sullivan urged teachers to use textbooks to present an

Irish perspective on events but warned of the dangers of “cultivated chauvinism52”.

However, in 1943 a history teacher in Newtown school in Waterford condemned

textbooks for being biased in outlook and overemphasising the persecution theme:

in Irish history as it is written today every villain is a foreigner and every hero is anIrishman, and if there was such a thing as an Irish villain, his existence must behushed up, for the ancient Gaels lived in the Golden Age53.

15 The textbooks of the Christian Brothers were explicitly nationalistic. The twentieth

century publications of the Christian Brothers legitimised physical force republicanism

by celebrating the acts of Emmet and Pearse. The Senior Reader (1932) told pupils that

that the “national ideal” must be “shielded by every power and faculty… even unto

death”. The banner of freedom was the hallmark of every Irish insurrection: “It was the


21

flag of Davis, Tone and Pearse and it is the flag that Ireland will always stand by, if its

nationality is to be vindicated54.” It has been suggested however, that the influence of

the Christian Brothers’ textbooks should not be overemphasised because they were

“only part of a much wider diffusion of nationalist ideas” and because “the link

between the content of a history textbook and practical action, which by definition

nationalism is, is a tenuous one55”. The precise influence of Brothers’ books is

impossible to quantify but should be seen in the context of the nationalist tone and

ethos of Brothers’ schools.

16 While schools were criticised for using nationalistic texts, complaints that the books

were not nationalistic enough, were weak on fundamental political and religious issues,

and were too sensitive to British sentiments were not uncommon. In 1923, Corcoran

condemned “our Anglicised manuals of Irish history”, which he believed wilfully and

repeatedly disparaged Irish achievements56. Thirty years later, Senator Frederick

Summerfield argued that the benefits of Gaelicisation were still being counteracted by

the “compulsory imperialism” of textbooks, “identical in every respect with the

standardised English secondary school reader”, that taught schoolchildren that

Ireland’s national heroes were those of another country57. Protestants also took issue

with some of the textbooks used in schools, though for different reasons. In 1929, the

General Synod of the Church of Ireland requested stricter Departmental regulation of

national school textbooks on the grounds that several, particularly books in Irish,

included religiously offensive content. Such books were also in use in secondary

schools but little was done about the issue58. Henry Kingsmill Moore, president of the

Church of Ireland teacher-training college at Kildare Place, wrote a number of

elementary histories of Ireland from a unionist perspective. MacShamhráin assessed

these books as a “largely successful attempt to provide an alternative and non-

contentious account of the major issues of religious controversy59”.

17 The textbooks of Alice Stopford Green (1847-1929) and P. W. Joyce (1827-1914) were

widely used in the schools. Roy Foster described Alice Stopford Green as a “zealot” and

a “formidable and virulently partisan advocate of Irish nationalism60”. R. B. McDowell

considered her books to have “provided formidable propaganda for the nationalist

cause61”. The inclusion of two of her works, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing

1200-1600 and Irish Nationality, on the list of books recommended for teachers by the

Department of Education in 1934 indicates that her work was held in high esteem62. The

dominance of the nationalist ideology that prevailed in the years following

independence can be partly attributed to Stopford Green because her emphasis on the

cultural distinctiveness of the Gaelic race and her portrayal of a Tara-based national

sovereignty served to provide a historical rationale for independence and unity. She

introduced The Making of Ireland by explaining how

The invading people effaced the monuments of a society they had determined toextirpate, and so effectively extinguished the memory of that civilisation […] Thereis no more pious duty to all of Irish birth than to help in recovering from centuriesof obloquy the memory of noble men […] who built up the civilisation that onceadorned their country […] It is in the study of their history alone that Irishmen willfind this just pride restored, and their courage assured63.

18 Her work centred on the proposition that the memory of Ireland’s former Gaelic

civilisation was deliberately blotted out by the English as though it had never existed.

Instead they painted a picture murky and savage and stained with every vice and folly.

The growth of this myth through seven centuries was for Stopford Green the most


22

stupendous fact of Irish history64. She dismantled this myth and substituted her own

nationalist allegory. She echoed this theme in Irish nationality when she depicted the

objective of the English as the destruction and wiping out of the whole Gaelic tradition

and all memory of it, with the intent of establishing a new English order65. The

slaughter of poets and historians and the burning of their books and genealogies would

accomplish this66. However, the Irish showed supreme and unselfish loyalty to their

race by continuing to cherish their language, poetry, history and law with the old pride

and devotion. Out of the depths of their suffering, they left to succeeding generations

one of the noblest examples in history67. In her disdain for the British presence in

Ireland, and her belief that the country could only prosper when that link was severed,

Stopford Green, daughter of an archdeacon and wife of the historian, Rev. J. R. Green,

did not subscribe to the conventional Protestant viewpoint. Her work conformed and

contributed to popular belief to the extent that it “entered the mainstream of Free

State culture68”. Her books embodied the Gaelic if not the Catholic-nationalist view of

history.

19 P. W. Joyce, a professor and president of Marlborough Street teacher training college,

was among the most prolific authors of school textbooks. He aimed to write soberly and

moderately, avoiding exaggeration and bitterness and treating all objectively while

sympathising heartily with Ireland and her people69. He concentrated on the valour and

romance of the native character70. His work has been characterised as attempt to steer

a course between nationalist and unionist poles71. A comparison of Joyce’s treatment of

1798 with Stopford Green’s reveals a salient imbalance in their approaches. Both accept

that the people of Wexford were driven to rebellion by the actions of the British

military forces. However, while Joyce acknowledged that they committed terrible

excesses against Protestants in retaliation, Stopford Green failed to make any mention

of the massacres72. This omission is symptomatic of the suppression and denial of

episodes that did not fit in with the popular nationalist history, in which all the Irish

were heroes and all the British were villains. It was not until 1966 that Department

inspectors met with publishers to outline the type of textbooks they wanted.

Fundamental changes in design reflected an equally radical approach in the text.

Widespread use was made of volumes produced in the south in northern schools which

in the past neglected the history of Ireland and treated books from the south with a

great deal of suspicion. It has been suggested that the new books displayed no evidence

of religious or political prejudice73.

20 The issue of the use and abuse of textbooks has been one of the central controversies

surrounding Irish history teaching. A consensus has emerged among scholars that the

views expressed in textbooks tended to reflect rather than form public opinion74. This

interpretation mirrors the relationship between history teaching and national identity

and serves to further distinguish school history teaching from professional academic

history, which aspired to differentiate between historical truth and popular received

myth. The content of Irish history textbooks proved highly problematic. The challenge

of producing textbooks that catered for all loyalties was not of course unique to

Ireland. Doherty argued that what made the Irish predicament so acute was the

difficulty of reconciling the dichotomies of the good Irishman and the evil Englishman,

the poor tenant and the cruel landlord because these dichotomies reflected widespread

Irish prejudices75. The above examples show that not all authors accepted the challenge

of reconciling these dichotomies. That criticisms of textbooks first made by inspectors


23

in the 1920s were not acted on by the Department until forty years later may indicate

that the Department was satisfied to maintain the status quo in relation to what Seán Ó

Faolain called its “fairytale” textbooks76.

21 The fundamental role that history can play in the development of patriotic attitudes

was recognised and exploited in the Irish Free State. History was used in the pursuit of

extra-educational objectives. The political objective was the most important in history

teaching, and, as such, history teaching operated as a political instrument. Its end, in so

far as it concerned the State, was chiefly political; the production of loyal citizens and

the justification and preservation of the State’s existence. As a part of the school

curriculum, the subject of history taught young learners a monolithic nationalist, anti-

British and pro-Catholic history that was heavily dependent upon allegory and

collective memory. School history was a major part in a State project to preserve and

propagate what it meant to be Irish. It was based on the twin aims of developing a State

that was Gaelic and predominantly Catholic in outlook and spirit. The primary

objective of history teaching was the transmission of the distinct nationality upon

which the State was founded. “The past” served the multitude as well as the elite: it

allowed the Irish people to reconcile themselves to contemporary economic and social

woes while taking pride in the self-image it offered them of a people with an inner

spirituality; it distinguished the Irish from the English in terms of race and culture,

thus demonstrating the existence of an Irish nation and validating the existence of the

State. As a critical part of the policy of gaelicisation, history teaching took on an

emphatically patriotic tone and sought to validate the nationalist cause in a teleological

manner that lacked historical perspective. The function of history was to convince

students of the unique qualities of the Gaelic nation and imbue them with that same

Gaelic spirit which had endured centuries of oppression under the British before

coming into its inheritance of independence. Students heard the story of Ireland from

the halcyon days of the pre-Norman era, through a long struggle of conquest,

persecution, endurance and deliverance. The narrative featured martyrs like Wolfe

Tone, Emmet, O’Donovan Rossa, Connolly and Pearse. The young people of Ireland were

taught how a glorious past culminated in and justified the new State. The purpose of

history was to help to transform Ireland back into the Gaelic State that it once was.

22 The chief function of Irish educational policy was to conserve and develop Irish

nationality. Thus, the schools of the Irish Free State were charged with the task of

building Irish nationality. They were the chief mechanism in a continuing cultural

revolution. The idea of a Gaelic Ireland was synonymous with independent Ireland. The

Irish language was central to Irish national identity. The primary function of the

schools was to recreate a Gaelic, Irish-speaking nation. The education system aimed to

develop awareness and appreciation of what made the Irish a unique and great race.

This distinctive and peerless heritage was the foundation for independence. The

function of history was to play a supporting role to Irish by strengthening the national

fibre and illustrating the distinctiveness and continuity of the Irish nation. History was

used to demonstrate the importance of the Irish language in preserving national

consciousness and continuity, and thus legitimise its restoration as a spoken language.

23 The nationalist role ascribed to history in primary schools was not as pronounced in

secondary schools. This was because the type of indoctrination involved was more

effective with younger subjects, and relatively few students went on to secondary level.

Perhaps the most important factor that determined the function of history at


24

secondary level was the Catholic philosophy that permeated secondary education. The

study of history was not a secular pursuit but a branch of religious education and an

instruction in proper Catholic living. As a part of the school curriculum, the subject of

history taught young learners a monolithic nationalist, anti-British and pro-Catholic

history that was heavily dependent upon allegory and collective memory. School

history was a major part in a State project to preserve and propagate what it meant to

be Irish. While there were some discrepancies between what Pearse envisaged for post-

colonial Ireland and the structure that was actually put in place, the education system

of Free State Ireland was, in large part, the one that Pearse had advocated. If the British

“murder machine” had been responsible for the manufacturing of cultural slaves, the

same charge of ideological indoctrination might be levelled at the new regime.

24 The new Free State was a post-colonial State. The development of a distinctly Irish

identity based on the nation’s Gaelic heritage, a heritage that was not recognised under

the British school system, was an understandable objective because of geographical

proximity to England and a history of political and cultural animosity. Leaving aside

the extent to which this objective was achieved, the country paid a heavy price in

pursuing it. The influence of the Catholic Church served to sustain and reinforce

divisions and antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants in the south. The

attempted re-Gaelicisation of society served to widen existing communal divisions and

further alienate the minority Protestant community. It further widened the gap

between north and south. It allowed no room for compromise on the issue of national

identity. If the link between views of history and political thought and action, as well as

the role of the school in the process of socialisation and the creation of historical and

political identity has been exaggerated, the reality was that the Protestant and unionist

communities perceived history teaching as a threat to their interests. Gaelic culture

was proclaimed as not only relatively, but absolutely better than others. Nationalist

history was not only pro-Irish but anti-British.

25 In terms of the function ascribed to history, it was not until the mid 1960s that Irish

education emerged from “Plato’s cave”. Industrial expansion combined with the

prospect of entering the EEC in the near future created conditions in which the role of

history was viewed less in terms of building a Gaelic state and more in terms of

cognitive training and citizenship. School curricula became more closely aligned with

the needs of an industrialising economy. The nationalist role assigned to history at the

foundation of the State was significantly diminished. Non-Gaelic elements of the Irish

nation were acknowledged as relations with Northern Ireland seemed to improve.

However, Ireland was about to reap a harvest, some of the seeds of which may have

been sown in the education system.

NOTES

1. Times Education Supplement, 1 October 1921.


25

2. Dáil Commission on Secondary Education, Report (unpublished, mimeographed in

Library of the Department of Education).

3. See Seán Farren, “Culture and education in Ireland”, Compass, Journal of the Irish

Association for Curriculum Development, 5:2, 1976, p. 24-38.

4. Pádraic Pearse, “The Murder Machine”, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse – Political

Writings and Speeches, Dublin, 1924, p. 6.

5. Ibid., p. 40-1.

6. An Claidheamh Soluis, 27 August 1904.

7. Pádraic Pearse, “The Murder Machine”, Collected Works, p. 8-9, p. 40.

8. Michael Tierney, Education in a Free Ireland, Dublin, date of publication between 1918

and 1922, p. 20.

9. Ibid., p. 29.

10. Ibid, p. 26, p. 98.

11. Ibid., p. 45.

12. Times Education Supplement, 30 October 1925.

13. An Claidheamh Soluis, 5 October 1907.

14. Ibid., 28 October 1911.

15. Eoin MacNeill, The Phases of Irish History, Dublin, 1919, p. 248.

16. Eoin MacNeill, Early Irish Laws and Institutions, Dublin, 1935.

17. Dáil Debates, vol. 13, 11 November 1925, col. 187.

18. Department of Education, Report 1923-24, Dublin, 1924, p. 22.

19. See Department of Education, Rules and programmes for secondary schools 1924-25,

Dublin, 1925, p. 63-6.

20. Department of Education, Report 1923-24, p. 22.

21. National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Department of the Taoiseach (D. T.), S 7801.



24. P. Pearse, “The Murder Machine”, Collected Works, p. 24-25.

25. Ibid., p. 38.

26. Irish Catholic Directory, 1922, p. 577-578.

27. Catholic Bulletin, 14:4, 1924, p. 269.

28. Seán Farren, “Nationalist-Catholic reaction to educational reform in Northern

Ireland 1920-30”, History of Education, 15:1, 1986, p. 28.

29. See E. Brian Titley, Church, State, and the Control of Schooling in Ireland 1900-44, Dublin,

McGill-Queen’s University Press 1983, p. 90.

30. NAI, D. T., RA 98/44.

31. Id.

32. Department of Education, Notes for teachers: History, Dublin, 1934, p. 3.

33. Joseph O’Neill, “The educationist”, Studies, 32, 126, 1943, p. 158.

34. T. J. Corcoran, “History courses and examinations, Belfast and Dublin, 1930”, The

Irish Monthly, 58, 686, 1930, p. 372.


26

35. T. J. Corcoran, “The new Secondary Programmes in Ireland: the teaching of

history”, Studies, 12, 46, 1923, p. 258.

36. T. J. Corcoran, “A highway for Catholic education”, The Irish Monthly, 57, 677, 1929,

p. 570.

37. T. J. Corcoran, “Moral training through history”, The Irish Monthly, 56, 666, 1928, p.

622, p. 624.

38. See Joseph O’Connor; “The teaching of Irish” in Capuchin Annual, 1949, p. 209;

O’Neill, “The educationist”, Studies, p. 153-62; O’Donoghue, The Catholic Church and the

Secondary School. Curriculum in Ireland, 1922-1962 (New York, Peter Lang, 1999) p. 33 and

Titley, Church, State, and the Control of Schooling, p. 99.

39. Council of Education, The Curriculum of the Secondary School, Dublin, 1962, p. 80.

40. Ibid., p. 88.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., p. 82.

43. Ibid., p. 130.

44. Ibid., p. 68.

45. These editorials are included in the file on proposals and recommendations to the

Council of Education in (N. A. I., D. T., S 15015 B/61).

46. Dáil Debates, vol. 203, 30 May 1963, col. 598.

47. See the report of the survey team appointed by the Minister for Education in 1962,

Investment in Education, Dublin, 1965, p. XXIX-XXXII.

48. OECD Directorate for Scientific Affairs, Investment in Education Ireland: Report of the

survey team appointed by the Irish Minister for Education, Paris, 1965, p. VI.


50. Department of Education, Report 1928-29 (Dublin, 1929), p. 60.


52. Dáil Debates, vol. 29, 11 April 1929, col. 485.

53. Eileen Webster, “History in our schools”, The Bell, vol. 7, no. 3 (1943), p. 196.

54. Lorcan Walsh, “Nationalism in the textbooks of the Christian Brothers”, Irish

Educational Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1986-1987, p. 9.

55. Ibid., p. 13.

56. Corcoran, “The New Secondary Programmes”, Studies, p. 254.

57. Seanad Debates, vol. 43, 26 November 1943, col. 147.

58. Gabriel Doherty, “The Irish history textbook 1900-60: problems and development”,

Oideas, vol. 42, 1994, p. 19.

59. A. S. MacSamhráin, “Ideological conflict and historical interpretation: the problem

of history in Irish primary education”, Irish Educational Studies, vol. 10, 1991, p. 234.

60. Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, London, Penguin, 1988, p. 447; idem, “History”

in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, p. 185.

61. R. B. McDowell, Alice Stopford Green: A Passionate Historian, Dublin, Allen& Figgis,

1967, p. 82.

62. Department of Education, Notes for Teachers, p. 27.


27

63. Alice Stopford Green, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 1200-1600, London,

Maunsel, 1919, p. IX-XI.

64. Ibid., p. 467-468.

65. Alice Stopford Green, Irish Nationality, London, 1911, p. 132.

66. Ibid., p. 131.

67. Ibid., p. 141.

68. Roy Foster, “History and the Irish question”, Transactions of the Royal Historical

Society, vol. 33, 1983, p. 186.

69. P. W. Joyce, A Concise History of Ireland from Earliest Times to 1922, Dublin, no date, p. II.

70. See John Coolahan, “The contribution of P. W. Joyce to the Irish education system”

in Oideas, vol. 34, 1989, p. 75-93.

71. MacSamhráin, “Ideological conflict”, Irish Educational Studies, p. 231.

72. Joyce, A Concise History of Ireland, p. 279; Stopford Green, Irish nationality, p. 217-218.

73. Brian Mulcahy, “The concept of Ireland as portrayed in the Intermediate Certificate

history textbooks” in John Coolahan (ed.), Proceedings of the fifth annual education

conference of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland (Limerick, 1980), p. 66-73.

74. See MacSamhráin, “Ideological conflict”, Irish Educational Studies, p. 229.

75. Doherty, “The Irish History Textbook”, Oideas, p. 6.

76. Seán Ó Faolain, “The plain people of Ireland”, The Bell, vol. 7, no. 1, 1943, p. 6.

ABSTRACTS

The teaching of history in Ireland has proved highly relevant to the development of Irish

national identity and continues to be politically and culturally significant. Critics of the approach

taken to the teaching of history in Irish secondary schools between 1922 and 1970 and of the

process of curricular development might suggest that deficiencies in these areas facilitated the

propagation of a prejudiced account of Irish history, and contributed to a phenomenon whereby

a sense of history was replaced in popular memory with a sense of grievance. This article is an

analysis of the social, political, economic and cultural factors that influenced the teaching of

history, the content and tone of textbooks, and the development of the history curriculum in

secondary schools in the half-century following the inauguration of the Irish Free State in 1922.

It charts the evolution of the exploitative relationship between church, state, and history and

assesses the costs involved.

L’enseignement de l’histoire en Irlande entretient un lien étroit avec le développement de

l’identité nationale irlandaise et continue d’être significatif politiquement et culturellement. Les

détracteurs de l’approche adoptée dans l’enseignement d’histoire dans les écoles secondaires

irlandaises entre 1922 et 1970 et dans le processus de développement du cursus, pourraient

avancer que les faiblesses dans ces approches ont facilité la propagation d’un récit préconçu de

l’histoire irlandaise, et ont entraîné un glissement par lequel la perception de l’histoire dans la


28

mémoire populaire a cédé la place à un sentiment d’injustice. Cet article comprend une analyse

des aspects sociaux, politiques, économiques et culturels qui ont influencé l’enseignement

d’histoire, le contenu et le ton des manuels scolaires, et le développement du cursus d’histoire

dans les écoles secondaires dans le demi-siècle après l’inauguration l’État Libre d’Irlande en 1922.

Il prend aussi en considération l’évolution des rapports de force entre l’Église, l’État, et l’histoire

et évalue les implications de ces interactions.

INDEX

Keywords: education, history and memory, national history - teaching, national identity, trauma

Mots-clés: éducation, histoire et mémoire, histoire nationale - enseignement, identité nationale,

trauma

AUTHOR

JOHN O’CALLAGHAN

University of Limerick


29

Travellers and Communal Identity:Memory, Trauma and the Trope ofCultural DisappearanceMícheál Ó Haodha

Autobiography is not something we simply read

in a book; rather as a discourse of identity,

delivered bit by

bit, in the stories we tell about ourselves, day in

and day out, autobiography structures our living1.

We are a different people (Nan Joyce, author of

Traveller [1985]2)

1 This essay explores the manner whereby Irish Travellers, a long-ostracised cultural

minority within Ireland are increasingly exploring their own representation within

Irish public culture and the trauma induced by hundreds of years of discrimination and

“Othering”. It also investigates the manner whereby previous representations of

Travellers and their history were effectively “written out” of the unitary version of

Irish history that was promulgated upon independence in the early 1900s.

2 Irish literature has a long history encompassing various tropes and representative

discourses as relating to portrayals of Irish Travellers and the figure of the societal

“outsider” generally. Indeed, as the long-established quintessential “outsider”, the

figure of the Traveller has long held a strong appeal for the Irish writer, in particular, a

fascination which seems to have come into its own in English from the nineteenth

century onwards, but one which is also evident in Irish language literature, oral and

written, from a much earlier period. The modern era has seen writers as well-known

and diverse as Synge, Yeats, Pádraic Ó Conaire, James Stephens, Liam O’Flaherty, John

B. Keane, Bryan MacMahon, Jennifer Johnston and Richard Murphy employ Traveller

characters and Traveller tropes, the vast majority of which have usually been made to

fit a generic image. This image, a frequent mirror-type of the colonial “stage Irishman”,

has included that of the happy-go-lucky vagrant, the criminal, the drunk, the

storyteller, the fighter and the outcast.


30

3 This literary confluence, often with negative and reductionist undertones as relating to

such minorities, traverses the linguistic divide and is evident in both the literature

produced in Irish (Gaelic) and Irish literature as written in English. Neither is the

tradition of cultural “Othering” as relating to Travellers and other “liminal” or

“outsider” groups one which can be divorced from the European literary context. It is

only in recent decades that this discourse encompassing a received body of “lore” and

stereotype with respect to Travellers and other migrants has begun to be challenged.

An essential element in this counter-hegemonic challenge is the emergence of a small,

but vibrant, canon of literature from within the Irish Traveller community itself, a

literature the core impulse of which is frequently to counter the stale and stereotypical

ways in which Travellers have been reproduced culturally, politically and ideologically

until very recently. This “new” literature has a strong autobiographical or semi-

autobiographical aspect to it and frequently attempts to bring Travellers in from the

margins of public discourse. Its initial impulse is frequently to begin the process of

deconstructing and usurping the monolith that is nineteenth and twentieth century

Irish literary representations of Travellers and acting as a catalyst for the trauma

induced by generations of “Othering” and ostracisation. In the postcolonial context

that is characteristic of the Irish experience there is a strong argument to be made that

the “generic” Western concept of the “Other3”– (i.e. Western history’s denial of

legitimacy to those individuals or cultures considered “Other”, a discourse often

invested in both materially and culturally by the colonizing powers of the West) simply

assumed a different form upon Irish independence. What made this issue more

complex in the Irish situation was the fact that the early twentieth century assertion of

a new national identity as established through social differentiation and the

articulation of the cultural “Other” was subsumed within a reverse ethnocentrism and

reductive essentialism as part of the collective “ideation” that was the nascent Irish

State or nation. Upon independence, the mishmash of cultural conditioning and

labelling that had characterised Britain’s colonial discourse and historical

representation of the Irish e.g. the “Stage Irishman” and its collection of often-negative

constructs – e.g. disorder, laziness, nomadism, begging, superstition – was simply

transferred onto a new “Other” i.e. the Travellers.

4 Irish Travellers also became caught up in late nineteenth century debates concerning

cultural and historical legitimacy, debates which frequently emerged outside the

“native” Irish cultural milieu – e.g. the Anglo-Irish Victorianist, Orientalist and

exoticist debates with respect to such questions as “authentic” Irishness. Such

discourses exhibited strange historical congruences with the folklore-inspired forms of

representation “from without” that categorised Romani/Roma (Gypsy) peoples in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also, thereby positioning certain Irish

literary categorizations of the Traveller “Other” within a broader European literary

framework. The very process of modernity and the fate of immigrants and traditionally

migrant peoples such as Travellers and Roma has continued to throw “into relief the

contingency of all historical and political narratives of possession, origins and

authorship… and… furnish affective rebukes to the complacent digestion of

modernity’s self-validating narratives4”. As with other traditionally migrant and

diaspora peoples, Irish Travellers have seen witnessed the construction and permeation

of a wide range of reductionist representations and stereotypes5 in relation to their

community, many of which have assumed the status of “fact” within Ireland’s

collective conscience. This reified discourse has traditionally been sustained through a


31

series of unequal power relations and has formed itself into what Foucault termed a

“regime of truth”:

Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth – that is, thetypes of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms andinstances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means bywhich each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in theacquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts astrue6.

5 Mary Warde’s memoir The Turn of the Hand (2009) is representative of a newly-emergent

Traveller literature which serves to challenge the static and stereotypical way in which

Travellers have been reproduced culturally, politically and ideologically, however.

6 It joins a fast-growing range of “life histories” and memoirs as produced by Irish

Travellers themselves7 which provide a challenge on two fronts. Not only do they usurp

the “traditional” Western mode of self-representation in historical terms, they are also

characterised by a change of genre and approach, a “cultural turn” which facilitates a

much wider range of diverse and multi-voiced texts8 to be heard.

7 While the confines of an essay prevent an in-depth exploration of this new cultural

impetus, it is possible to recognise a number of themes which have emerged strongly in

Travellers’ autobiographical work, Mary Warde’s included, themes encompassing issues

as diverse as education, social inclusion, the fear of cultural (including linguistic)

disappearance – to name but a few. The necessity to identify and usurp the negative

stereotype tradition as relating to Travellers and as internalised by certain younger

members of the community is also highlighted as is the importance of asserting

cultural “difference” through Traveller self-expression. A strong emphasis is also

placed on documenting instances of abuse and discrimination that led to Travellers’

exclusion from the “majority” Irish population.

8 These writers frequently express bewilderment at the levels of prejudice exhibited by

the Irish “settled” community towards Travellers and the ingrained nature of the

stereotype tradition that is used to define them. They also exhibit a longing for the

acceptance of nomadism, now frequently referred to as the “nomadic mindset”, which

is the kernel of Traveller identity. Such emotions are expressed in beautiful terms by

Willy Cauley at the end of his memoir The Candlelight Painter (2004) when he says:

I was often asked if I was born again what would I like to be. Well, the first thingthat comes to my mind is a swan. Yes, I know it’s a strange thing to say but I havemy own reasons for that answer. When you look at how peaceful a creature theswan is it seems to have no worries, it comes and goes as it pleases. And most of allit has rights. No one tells it to move on, no one tries to control it. So there you haveit, my friend. Peace and freedom. That’s all that I wish for in life. I came into thislife peaceful and I intend to go peacefully. Just leaving my name behind me becauseno matter how tough your life is you always turn to God in the last minutes. It issaid you must be like a child to enter the Kingdom of God. I wonder are there anyhalting sites for the Travellers up in Heaven because if there are they must be asight better than the ones here on earth. The ones down here are like Long Kesh.And the walls keep getting higher and higher. Out of sight, out of mind. Everycountry has different peoples with different cultures. Who is to say that one peopleor one culture is better than the other? Who is to say that one people are moreperfect than another? Are we not equal in the eyes of God? We are all just here onthis earth for a very short while and isn’t it better to leave this life with a cleansoul, leaving your love behind to all mankind, the whole human race, your brothersand sisters. Stéis, The end9.


32

9 That a large element of this stereotype tradition has as much to do with ignorance of

one another’s cultures as it does with the maintenance of the social and cultural

barriers between both the Traveller and settled communities is highlighted by both

Joyce10 and Mary Warde11 in the very first pages of her life history:

We have lived beside each other for centuries on the small island that is calledIreland. They’ve lived within a stone’s throw of one another – within spittingdistance – and yet, there’s never been as much misunderstanding and lack ofcommunication. The same was true in the past and it’s true to a certain extent eventoday. Because myth forms people’s perceptions of one another. It’s all they have,the only mirror where they can see the other who might be a stranger to them.We’ve heard all of the myths going back through the years. – The Travellers marryonly their cousins. The Travellers are all robbers. They love fighting. They haveplenty of money hidden away – buried in a box out the back. They are all secretivepeople – “as thick as thieves”. They don’t want to live in the same way as the rest ofus – they have their own strange ways. They don’t go into the hospital for the babyand they crowd in when somebody is dead so that the fighting can start. They areall “drop-outs” from the Famine fields. They’re not Irish at all but came here oncefrom another country12”.

10 In order to combat the pervasive nature of the tradition that is stereotype reification

books such as Maher’s The Road to God Knows Where13 (1972), Nan Joyce’s Traveller (1985),

Pecker Dunne’s Parley-Poet and Chanter (2004), William Cauley’s The Candlelight Painter

(2004) and Mary Warde’s The Turn of the Hand (2009) all place a strong emphasis on the

educational function which the oral tradition plays within the Traveller community.

The effective dissemination of Traveller cultural values and history as elucidated

through the oral tradition, makes the narratives and memoirs of this tiny minority an

important mode of transmission for the community’s “true” history as both Maher and

Warde make clear: “[…] you must remember that storytelling is our only means of

communication with the past. We on the road can’t write our deeds, but we do

remember them and pass them down faithfully by word of mouth14.”

The older people would sit around the fires at night, talking about who was whoand who was related to who and where the different generations of people and thenames from. Who came from the West of Ireland and who didn’t.I was christened Mary Ellen Ward…and I was born in 1943 – in the fields of Athenry!I have three brothers and two sisters, there was another brother who died at ayoung age. When I was small we travelled around Galway city, Connemara andBallinasloe where one of the oldest horse fairs in the world is held every year… thetruth is that the oral tradition that was handed down to me by my family would belost if I didn’t commit it to writing… the myth is out there for years now that wewere people who took to the road during the Famine… that the Irish Travellerswere just “potato people”… That we were not “real” Travellers at all and that it wasright and proper, and necessary even, to force us to “settle” down again… Those ofus brought up in the real Irish Traveller tradition knew that this wasn’t true. Weknew it wasn’t true but finding the official records that would back up our claimsisn’t easy… Interestingly enough I found out in relation to my own family and manyof the extended families who were married into ours, that a large proportion of theinformation that the old Travellers said with regard to their origins and where thepeople said that they came from was one hundred per cent true. The oral traditionis more reliable than people give it credit for. Why wouldn’t it be? When you thinkabout it, why would somebody forget something that relates to their own familyand their very own flesh-and-blood15?

11 As with certain other traditionally-nomadic groups16, the written tradition may

sometimes hold a certain ambiguity for Irish Travellers, some of whose members (in


33

very recent generations anyway) were wary of the written articulation of cultural

values or records or did not place a big emphasis on it. That the “authenticity” of the

written record as an expression of the community’s “true voice” is very important to

many Travellers today is nevertheless highlighted:

It’s an awful sad thing to have no education… If I knew how to write properly andhad good spelling I wouldn’t have done this book on tape. Anna Farmar [the book’seditor] recorded it and wrote it out for me – if I wrote a book myself whoeverpublished it would need a medal for bravery17!

12 Traveller “life histories” are unique, in my view, for the searing honesty with which

their authors approach “difficult” or fearful questions. A number of Traveller writers

outline in blunt terms the emerging cultural threats that are both “settlement” and

assimilation. This uncertainty as relating to the dangers of potential cultural

disappearance is enshrined in the very title of Maher’s book The Road to God Knows

Where (1972) a book which was the first written Irish Traveller autobiography.

Interestingly, it is two male members of the Traveller community, Cauley and Maher

who are very overt in their intimations of possible assimilation and/or cultural loss:

“You see, son, life is becoming more difficult and the road as a way of life is finished18

…”

13 Cauley, a landscape painter by profession has spoken of the psychological difficulties

induced by Travellers’ forced settlement/assimilation in the absence of transient sites

or any provision for those who wished to remain nomadic. He links the deliberate

blocking off of traditional campsites as used on a seasonal basis by many generations of

the same family with the obliteration of Travellers’ “collective memory”.

I wonder how many older Travellers became depressed because they weren’tallowed to travel anymore? How many of them became depressed when they sawtheir traditional camping places being blocked up and they ended up drifting fromthe countryside into houses and the cities?… A number of my siblings who are nowdead suffered from depression while they were alive. I think the city life may havehad a lot to do with it. Freedom and travelling was in their blood and being coopedup in the city affected them and made them sick. I have heard that the same thinghas happened to many other traditionally nomadic people who have been forced bycircumstance to live in the cities – people like the Native American Indians and theAborigines in Australia… Someday I will try and capture this misery in a painting. Iwill get a huge canvas, the biggest one I can find, and when the painting is done Iwill show it to the press and the government so as to make a statement to them.“Look it, this is how the government ignored us back through time. This is how youhurt these peoples’ minds then, a hurt that later changed into a depression. At alater stage you forced them into houses. You blocked up their roads.” I will put allmy energies into that painting. Everything19.

14 Much Traveller autobiography expresses incomprehension at the level of prejudice that

is often directed against Travellers by certain sections of the “settled” community, the

roots of which frequently lie in ignorance and fear. Both Dunne and Cauley describe an

anti-Traveller hatred that blighted their memories of childhood:

It is funny but no matter how hard you try you will remember to your dying daythose moments when people were prejudiced towards you. Every human beingwants to be respected….The worst part of prejudice like this is when your childhoodinnocence is destroyed by it. I remember seeing people shouting at us when I was achild. “The Tinker isn’t wanted here, go away,” and all the rest of it20.

15 This hostility sometimes went well beyond “name-calling” and the use of language as

recounted by Cauley :


34

I will never forget one incident that took place near the village of Oranmore, aboutseven miles from Galway city when I was only four years of age. We had no wagonat that time and we were camped in our lúbán’s (tents) in against the side of aditch… we made camp for the night my father left the horse into some farmer’sfield without asking permission. He should not have done that of course but thenext thing we knew there were shouts outside our tents and we came out in thedarkness to find a bunch of angry farmers standing around the camp with hugetorches that were on fire. They told us to get out of the area or they would burn usout. I remember being very frightened. When you are a child and you are standingthere in the darkness and all these angry faces around you roaring and shouting. Itwas like a scene from one of those films you see about the Ku Klux Klan and the waythat they used to attack the black people in America once21.

16 Maher also admits to an incomprehension concerning the levels of prejudice and

hostility as displayed against Travellers in Ireland: “You know… I keep thinking about

people. I keep asking myself, why do people have to hate each other 22”?

17 How Travellers responded (often with great dignity) in the face of such “provocations”

is described in the form of a short anecdote, as outlined in Mary Warde’s recently-

published autobiography The Turn of the Hand:

My father was standing at the square in Tuam in the late 60s or early 70s with thisfella from the town who was always hanging around there with the lads. This fellanever had much so my father used to give him a cigarette or buy him a pint everynow and then. That is to say my father was earning a living but this fella was doingnothing. Only a corner-boy. They were talking and somebody mentioned a man whohad died suddenly out the road only a few days before. They were wondering whothe man that died was. “I didn’t know him”, one fella said. He didn’t come to townthat much, his wife mostly came. He only came in to the fair and the mart but otherthan that he was a country man. The other fella said “Ara, sure he was only thebreed of a tinker!” My father thought about what the fella said and he said “Wellthis is one tinker that must go and earn a few bob for himself and he threw his legon the bicycle and cycled off. And that fella wasn’t getting no other pint or fag fromhim because he was throwing a slur on travelling people who earned their livingand all he was good for was a corner-boy. So he never got another pint or a fag frommy father! So that’s the way it was23…

18 In addition to the jettisoning of reified imagery, recent Traveller writings call on

younger Travellers to jettison their feelings of inferiority and for the “settled” Irish

community to make themselves more aware of the minority in their midst:

I would like all the travelling children to have self-confidence and to grow up proudof what they are because they are very special people with their own traditions andtheir own way of life24…I think that the Travelling people are the true Irish people of Ireland and noTravelling person should be ashamed of what we are. We should be proud of itbecause we came from real Irish people. Our ancestors fought for this country andthey had to leave their homes just the same as I’m sure some of yours had to yearsago…Now is the time for the politicians to stand up and realise that we are Irishpeople. We have a right to be in this country. We have a right to say where we wantto live. We have a right to live the way we want to live and it’s not up to anybodyelse to plan how we should live25.

19 Virtually the entire Traveller autobiographical canon challenges the way in which

Travellers have traditionally been precluded from discussions of modern Ireland. This

is unsurprising given that many canonical historical texts, by both nationalist and

revisionist historians alike, have simply excluded all mention of Ireland’s oldest

minority. In the very few cases that Travellers are alluded to at all, they tend to be


35

depicted primarily in the role of passive recipients of the historical process, a group

whose perceived position as drop-outs – i.e. victims of colonial eviction and/or the

Great Famine – rendered them uninterested in such issues as Irish nationalism or the

fight for Independence or uninvolved in Irish history generally. As a consequence,

perhaps, Traveller authors have been at pains to emphasize their Irishness and their

critical role in the development of Irish cultural processes. Cauley cites the Irish

predilection for genealogy and “Where are you from?” to provide a counter to the

manner in which Travellers are ostracised in Irish society. He combines the Irish

obsession with genealogy with a healthy sense of humour in an attempt to obviate the

sense of bitterness that grips him when he dwells on the manner in which Travellers

have been denied a place in the Irish historical “record”:

Sometimes in this country they treat you like an alien because you are a Traveller…That’s how bad-minded some people are towards Travellers… We Travellers are adifferent people so we stand out from the crowd. People think because we have adifferent culture that there is something wrong with us. It is sad but that is the waythat life is. And the strangest thing of all is that Travelling people and settledpeople are often buried beside one another when we pass on. Is that the only timethat we communicate with each other? You have Cauleys in this country forcenturies, for example. There are Cauleys who are settled people and Cauleys whoare Travelling people. Do you mean to tell me that the settled Cauleys and theTravelling Cauleys aren’t related somewhere back along the line? Of course theyare. But so many settled people act as if we, the Travellers, never had anyconnection with them26…

20 Some of this incomprehension and bitterness also has its roots in the denial of the roles

Travellers played in historical agency particularly as relating to the various Irish

struggles for independence, an omission which is highlighted in nearly every Traveller

autobiography produced to date. Mary Warde describes the solidarity and inter-

marriage between Travellers and “settled” people that occurred at times of national

crisis, and rebellion against the British colonial forces that dominated Ireland for

centuries. The following anecdote refers to the Irish rebellion of 1798, a year which was

frequently known as “The Year of the French”:

I’m tracing back now, drawing my way back through the well of the years to wherethe only history is what is passed down – from gather to cam (father to son). This isoral history now because it’s all that we Irish were left with for the many centuries.All that we had. And a Ward family member, a Traveller Ward – he fought at theBattle of Vinegar Hill. He fought in 1798, spilled blood in the place where the bloodflowed like rain. And from death and destruction came rebirth – He met a girlnamed Brigid Keefe.She was a settled girl one of the many women who were involved in the rebellionand often-forgotten. This girl named Brigid Keefe – with her brother and her father– went up to Vinegar Hill in Wexford to try and drive away the tyrants. And afterthe fighting the Irish had their secret meetings, their feasting and drinking andtheir tending to wounds. And Brigid Keefe met and married Patrick Ward whofought at Vinegar Hill. They married in the place which they then called the“hidden Church”.This underground church where they got married at dawn was outside Rosssomewhere and the curlew was only making his way home in the early-morningwhen they were pronounced man and wife. The Catholics had to be careful aboutwho they were then. They had to keep their religion to themselves and so too didthe priests. Because the priests in those days were hunted from place to place bythe occupier. The British were afraid of priest and teachers alike, and their powerover the Irish people. How they might make the people rise up against them. And


36

after they were married the newly-wed Wards continued on the road and camedown around the west of Ireland where they had children. Sons and grandsonsmarried then back into the other Travellers the other Wardes (Irish: Mac an Bháird– Son of the Bard) that were always travelling the roads then. And that’s the way itwent down until it came to my own generation27.

21 Later in the same book an incident against the British Auxiliaries known as the Black

and Tans during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) is also recounted:

[…] my grandfather was up town one day and he heard from somebody else that theTans were looking for a Republican and the Republican had gone into the pub andshe had a gun in his pocket. To avoid being taken, he had to get rid of this gunquickly and what he did was – he passed it over the counter to the woman that wasbehind the bar serving the drinks. And that woman was a quick thinker and shedropped it into the grate – into the black dirt of where the fire would be lit in theevenings. And this fella came out of the door of the pub and he was in a right panic.He was a cold sweat and he was doing his best to stay calm. And he saw my fatheron the way in and they passed a message between one another. He knew that myfather was a staunch Republican and he said to him. “Well he’s in the pub – the gunis in the grate and the place is surrounded and they’re going to search it.” So mygrandfather who was always a very calm man. He said in as calm a voice as he couldmuster. “Alright where is it?” “It’s in the ashes.” “That’s fine”, he replied and hewent in the door. And he did a lot of chimney-sweeping in his day and so he got hisbrushes and he went in and said to the bar manager who was serving the drinks. Itwas a lady who used to work in this pub at the time. I’ve come in to clean thechimney – is the ashes cold?“Oh yes”, said the women behind the bar. “There’s no fire down since last night.”She copped it straight away! She knew by the tone in his voice – people were able tosay things with gestures and the intonations of their voice in those days. They hadto be able to communicate in secret ways in those colonial and oppression days –just so’s they could survive. So the Tans came in and were searching the place forthe gun and my grandfather was inside cleaning away, attaching his different sizebrushes and cleaning away. And although this chimney was always cleanedregularly my father made it appear as if it hadn’t been cleaned for donkey’s years!He made sure the soot went all over the place and he was saying to the customers –as if warning them – “Keep back – it’s an awful dirty chimney!” And as the asheswere coming out, he spotted the gun at the back of the chimney flue and he scoopedthe handgun and all into the soot bag that he always carried when chimney-sweeping. And then – when he was finished, he rolled up everything. Rolled up thecanvas bag and the soot and the whole lot and he said – “Will I throw the soot outthe back or will I bring it?” – “Oh, wherever you want Pat” the woman in the baranswered putting on a brave face – as the Tans were crawling all over the place,frustrated in their search. Up the stairs and down the stairs and below into thebasement where the drinks were kept in storage and where the barrels of porterwere always changed. “There’ll be a pint here for you when you come back in soPat”, the manageress of the pub said as my father made for the back door callingout to her – “I’ll dump it out the back” – as he went. So he dumped the bag and allover the wall where it was picked up by another fella – another Republican who waswatching and waiting and hoping for the best. And that is how that gun got out ofWalsh’s and how the Republican was saved28.

22 Maher and Joyce both refer to the importance of oral tradition in Traveller culture and

point to its importance in assigning themselves a “dinnseanchas” or a “sense of place”

within Irish society. This sense of orality that has been passed down faithfully by “word

of mouth” is set against the official or “written” history of Ireland which would assign

to Travellers a place in the footnotes of Irish history, a place where if they are

considered at all, it is only as helpless victims of poverty and dispossession, the detritus


37

of colonialism and a tragic Irish past who are only a strange nuisance or anachronism

in the modern nation-state. Maher cites the Traveller known as the doll-man – the

strange, shaman-like figure with whom Maher has a dialogue regarding the position of

Travellers in the modern world – as an exemplar of the challenge to the official or

“establishment” view from the oral culture of those who tell their stories “from below”

or from the margins of society: “…The written history is very warped in its composition

and truth. The history that has come down through the travellers, however, is more

than reliable. It is told night after night around camp fires29…”

There’s the history of our country – Ireland – and the history of the Irish peopleand the history of those Irish people who were Travellers and half of it is stillhidden to us. More than half – probably the most of the loaf. All the myths that theEnglish had about the Irish and the Irish had each other – the settled people aboutTravellers and the other way around. And we’re only beginning to see through thefog of memory now, to brush past the misty rain to see where the sunlight isbreaking through. To find our own true history. And like every history it’s a mix oflegend and fact, one story added to another like the layering brick of a house andall we can do is build our own house and construct our history once more in theway that we see fit and true. In our own way30…

23 The urbanisation of Ireland has proceeded apace in recent decades and younger

Traveller writers have focussed on those aspects of modern Irish culture which

continue to be keenly contested in the post-independent and increasingly multicultural

Ireland of today — i.e. questions of identity, nationhood and cultural legitimacy.

Women Travellers such as Joyce, Sweeney31, and Warde reject Travellers’ alleged non-

involvement in the course of Irish history and point to Travellers’ agency in the

political and social struggles that formed the Irish nation while the recent literature of

male Travellers such as Cauley and Dunne has provided new insights into Traveller

language and history which serve to challenge the perception that Travellers were/are

always a homogenous group. As elucidated in these “life history” narratives Traveller

identity is a “constructed” one, a fictitious identity which has evolved through the

longstanding re-articulation of stereotypes with myth as its bulwark. Such Irish

representations of the Other are by now deeply entrenched within a wide strata of

cultural discourses, policies and politics and as this brief exploration of the emergent

Traveller literary canon exemplifies, they necessitate a critical re-engagement with

both the questions of identity and Irishness.

24 A new interrogation with the identity “constructs” that are “Irish” and “Traveller” is

long overdue and would be particularly valuable in unearthing those rich and varied

layers that have contributed to the fashioning of Irish identity in the post-colonial era.

Any such exploration necessitates a re-engagement with the “liminal” aspects our

culture, that “alterity within identity” which has intersignified with the construct that

is Irish identity itself. Such an identity is as distinctive as it is contemporary. It is an

identity analogous with Kristeva’s poetic description of the “stranger” in our midst:

“[…] the stranger is neither a race nor a nation […] we are our own strangers – we are

divided selves32.”


38

NOTES

1. Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative, Ithaca,

Cornell University Press, 2008, p. 4.

2. Nan Joyce, Traveller, Dublin, Farmar Publishing, 1985.

3. For references on this, see Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-memory, Practice:

Selected Essays and Interviews (New York, Cornell University Press, 1977); “The Order of

Discourse” in R. Yang (ed.), Untying the Text; (London, Routledge, 1981); The Archaelogy of

Knowledge (London, Tavistock Press, 1984); The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An

Introduction (London, Allen Lane, 1985); The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality,

Volume 2 (London, Penguin, 1985), as well as Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference

(London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) and Edward Said: Orientalism (London,

Penguin, 1978); Literature and Society (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);

Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto and Windus, 1993).

4. Eoin Flannery, “Rites of passage: migrancy and liminality in Colum McCann’s

Songdogs and This Side of Brightness” in Irish Studies Review, 16:1, February 2008, p. 1-17 (p.

2).

5. Cf. Mary Hayes, The Irish Traveller, Dublin, Liffey Press, 2004, and A. Bhreatnach,

“Travellers and the print media: words and Irish identity” in Irish Studies Review, 6:3,

1998.

6. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,

Ithaca/New York, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 131.

7. E.g. Nan Joyce, Traveller (1985); N. Donohue, Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman,

Dublin, A. and A. Farmar, 1986; W. Cauley (Au.) and M. Ó hAodha (Ed.), The Candlelight

Painter, Dublin, A. and A. Farmar, 2004; P. Dunne, (Au.) and M. Ó hAodha (Ed.), Parley-

Poet and Chanter: A Life of Pecker Dunne, Dublin, A. and A. Farmar, 2004; B. Gorman and P.

Walsh, Bare Knuckle Fighter, Dublin, Maverick House, 2002.

8. As with the literature of many minorities this “life history” genre of literature is

somewhat difficult to classify. Within the scholarly canon, this “new” literature almost

certainly comes under the generic rubric that is postcolonial studies, although it has

many attributes which would also assign it to such categories as Diaspora Studies,

Migration Studies or indeed, Subaltern Studies. Its discourses are those which

challenge traditional narrative incredulities and within the Irish context, it is a small

and growing canon which clearly elides a range of complex experiences, both historical

and contemporary, and makes for a more radical and multifaceted reading of the

legacy that is every form of colonialism, neo-colonialism and post-colonialism.

9. William Cauley and Mícheál Ó hAodha, The Candlelight Painter, p. 109.

10. Nan Joyce, Traveller, 1985.

11. Mary Warde and Mary Hayes, “The Turn of the Hand”: A Memoir from the Irish Margins,

Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

12. Ibid., p. 3.

13. Sean Maher, The Road to God Knows Where, Dublin, The Talbot Press, 1972.

14. Ibid., p. 68.


39

15. Ibid., p. 120-122.

16. Unsurprisingly, given the attempted annihilation of their communities during the

Holocaust – some of this “based” on written (genealogical) records, certain Roma and

Sinti groups have previously expressed an ambivalence with respect to the act of

writing as a form of collective or group memory. This dilemma with respect to the

written world is expressed in terms that are both haunting and artistically-beautiful by

the central character Papuska in Irish writer’s Colum McCann’s novel Zoli (2007).

17. Nan Joyce, Traveller, p. 95.

18. Sean Maher, The Road to God Knows Where, p. 100.

19. William Cauley and Mícheál Ó hAodha, The Candlelight Painter, p. 23-34.

20. Pecker Dunne and Mícheál Ó hAodha, Parley-Poet and Chanter: A Life of Pecker Dunne,

p. 37.

21. William Cauley and Mícheál Ó hAodha, The Candlelight Painter, p. 52.


23. Mary Warde, “The Turn of the Hand…”, p. 98.

24. Nan Joyce, Traveller, p. 118.

25. Traveller Margaret Sweeney in Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics

of Culture, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000, p. 127.

26. William Cauley and Mícheál Ó hAodha, The Candlelight Painter, p. 74, p. 93.


28. Ibid., p. 72.



31. Sweeney (2000) cited in Jane Helleiner, op.cit., p. 245. This is a rebuttal to the alleged

“drop-out” theory of Traveller origins and a re-articulation of Traveller origins and

identity within the discourse which categorised the nascent Irish state.

32. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York, Columbia University Press, 1991, p.

268.

ABSTRACTS

Until now many representations of Travellers and their history have been “written out” of the

unitary version of Irish history which was promulgated during the early 1900s and upon Irish

independence. This essay explores the manner whereby Irish Travellers, a long-ostracised

cultural minority within Ireland have initiated a counter-hegemonic challenge to the “Othering”

discourses and tropes which have categorized them previous to this. Once viewed as the

quintessential “outsider” this marginalizing discourse encompassed a received body of “lore”

and a range of stereotypes with respect to Travellers and other migrants. Recent years have seen

a challenge to this history of representation however. An essential element in this counter-


40

hegemonic challenge is the emergence of a small, but vibrant, canon of literature from within the

Irish Traveller community itself, a literature the core impulse of which counters the

representational traditions of the past. This literature brings Travellers in from the margins of

public discourse and counters the trauma induced by generations of “Othering”, the long-

established reification of image as produced culturally, politically and ideologically.

Nombreuses sont les représentations des Travellers ou de leur histoire qui ont été « effacées » du

récit unificateur de l’histoire irlandaise, tel qu’il fut énoncé dans les années 1900 et à partir de

l’Indépendance irlandaise – et qui le sont encore à ce jour. Cet article s’intéresse à la manière

dont les Travellers irlandais, minorité culturelle longtemps ostracisée, sont en train, en un

mouvement anti-hégémonique, de questionner les discours qui les posent comme « autres » ainsi

que les figures récurrentes qui ont longtemps été liées aux Travellers. Leur position par

excellence « extérieure » et le discours marginalisant qui leur est associé envisageait les histoires

transmises oralement et les stéréotypes comme le réceptacle de l’altérité des Travellers et des

autres migrants. Au cours des dernières années, ceci a été soumis à un questionnement et un

canon de la littérature Traveller se dessine, issu de cette communauté elle-même, qui vise

essentiellement à interroger les représentations traditionnelles du passé. Tirée hors de la marge

vers la sphère publique, la littérature Traveller élabore dorénavant une réflexion sur les effets

traumatisants de cette ostracisation et sur les images culturelles, politiques et idéologiques

véhiculées.

INDEX

Keywords: ethnic minorities, history of representations, national identity, travellers, public

debate, trauma

Mots-clés: minorités ethniques, histoire des représentations, travellers, identité nationale,

débat public, trauma

AUTHOR

MÍCHEÁL Ó HAODHA

University of Limerick


41

Black Habits and White Collars:Representations of the IrishIndustrial SchoolsPeter Guy

1 What were the Industrial Schools? The journalist Bruce Arnold offers us an accurate

summary:

During the greater part of the twentieth century the Irish State owned andmanaged a prison system for children spread across the whole of the Republic […][T]hese were places of shame in the communities where they were located and theywere shameful places. In a country where everyone expected to know the businessof other people and to know what was going on about them, there were thesejuvenile prisons […] the majority of the prisons were known as industrial schools; atiny minority of parallel institutions […] were reformatories. Together with certainother establishments for children who were euphemistically described as being ‘incare’, these institutions in reality constituted an “Irish Gulag1.”

2 Arnold states that the appearance of these children made people uneasy but a more

pertinent question is whether people were fully aware of the systematic abuse that was

perpetuated against these innocent children by the religious orders and lay employees

that ran them thanks largely to State cooperation and funding. Arnold is scathing at

the way in which the Irish State has avoided full responsibility, particularly in the

manner in which they have repeatedly cited ignorance of the horrendous abuse that

occurred in these schools. It is evident that the State is indeed partly culpable, as they

have formed a redress board to compensate victims of institutional abuse.

Nevertheless, they appear as distressed at the prospect of dealing with the trauma of

the revelations as the victims are of dealing with the trauma of the crime perpetrated

on them. Both Fintan O’ Toole, in an article in for The Irish Times, and Eamon Maher, in

Tony Flannery’s Responding to the Ryan Report drew analogies between the Industrial

Schools and the Gulags. For O’Toole:

Ireland sustained a system of prison camps for kids and allowed them to be runwith arbitrary violence, utter depravity and a sense of absolute impunity […] someof the methods used in the industrial schools are queasily reminiscent of imagesfrom gulags or concentration camps: the shaved heads; the use of humiliation and


42

disorientation to destroy the inmate’s sense of personal identity; the turning of firehoses on inmates; the setting of dogs on inmates; the beating of inmates while theywere hanging from hooks on a wall2.

3 And for Maher:

Essentially, we in Ireland allowed prison camps to be created for children, placeswhere male and female religious acted outside of the rule of law. In fact, they wereallowed to establish and enact the laws according to which these corrective schoolswere run, with little or no interference from the State3.

4 This chapter aims to look at the question of culpability and it lays out in exact details

fictional and non-fictional accounts of abuse, the historical context in which this abuse

occurred and why the question of blame is such a complex issue. That is, it questions

the assumption of hindsight. “Had we known, we would have intervened” is an

archetypical response to the revelations that have come out about Industrial schools

thanks to the Ryan Report, but it is a less than honest reaction in my view. Not

deliberately mendacious perhaps, but rather, a reaction to a series of psychological

factors that cannot be ignored. For this chapter, I will be examining the biographical

accounts of life in the schools by Mannix Flynn, Peter Tyrell, Patrick Touher and Paddy

Doyle as well as fictive representations by such writers as Bernard McLaverty, John

McGahern, Pat McCabe and Walter Macken. The accounts of life in the Industrial

Schools, whether they are fictive or biographical, can be placed within the genre of

prison-camp or gulag memoirs. The prison-camp memoir has been perceived as a

codified new narrative genre since the late sixties. They resemble the North American

slave narratives in that they are written either by non-professional writers or by

authors whose talents are revealed in this, their first literary endeavour.

5 In prison camp narratives, an ethical concern tends to prevail over psychological or

socio-political one. The main motivation for the narrator is to attest and give evidence

towards the unspeakable crimes they witnessed. This is often reflected in the titles such

as Vladimir V. Tchernavin’s I Speak for the Silent (1935) or Jerzy Glicksman’s Tell the West

(1948). The artistic merit of biographical accounts over fictive accounts is that,

memoirs published soon after the authors’ release often have a heightened aesthetic

appeal. The experience was still fresh for the authors, still fraught with emotion and

the process of going public with their revelations was cathartic. Certainly, the ethical

integrity of their conduct in the camps or industrial schools can irradiate upon the text

and become a source of aesthetic appeal in its own right. In the Soviet Union such texts

could be smuggled out and posted in the West. In Ireland, given the totemic nature of

the Church, former inmates were more reticent, conscious perhaps of the social stigma

(Macken and McGahern) or thwarted by publishers who had no wish to alienate their

Catholic audience (Tyrell).

6 The fictive accounts are not always ethically orientated; some are there for the

pleasure of narration. Mannix Flynn’s memoir Nothing to Say is highly stylized for

example. To some extent, the story-telling impulse asserts itself in all the writings of

the survivors. Telling a good story, complete with striking particulars, was, moreover,

pragmatically justified by the consciousness-raising agenda – it promised wider-

audiences. Since Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, prison narratives have tended to

combine stories of individual experience with accounts of shared suffering and

common shame. The difference between a memoir and a fictive account is that, the

attitude of the memoirist is as focaliser who shares the common lot of his fellow

inmates whilst a narrative voice belongs to a separate individual with his own biases


43

and affiliations. The focalisers in the biographical accounts have no distinctive personal

features apart from a wide-eyed innocence and the wish to survive. In fictive accounts,

these figures are imbued with a more assured personality. Thus Bill Evan’s in

McGahern’s That They May Face The Rising Sun is something of a composite figure, drawn

up from both the author’s own experience and outlook.

7 A memoir lapses when the author begins to foreground the self in the narrative. Thus

the conclusion to Flynn’s Nothing to Say appears chimerical. A father of one of the boys

is horrified by the bloodied condition of his son and punches one of the Christian

Brothers in the face, calling him a “rotten poxy bastard4.” This is clearly wish-

fulfilment, a crowd pleasing finale where the antagonist gets a taste of his own

medicine. The prison memoir usually contains a specific set of topoi with recurrent

structural features. Beginning with the arrest or conviction, there is then the matter of

deconstruction of the narrator’s dignity. The account is usually written in clearly

defined stages of their period of incarceration. This is especially true in, say, Tyrell’s

memoir. Also inherent in the prison-camp memoir are themes of escape, torture,

moments of reprieve, chance and then a somewhat laconic account of their freedom.

8 There are few fictive accounts of the industrial schools in Ireland. In the novels of

McGahern and Macken, the reference is fleeting. McCabe is more explicit in his

treatment but the tone is carnivalesque and not in keep with the Lenten narrative that

is inherent in the memoir. The critical distance between memoir and fiction comes

down to the tension between the ethical drive and the aesthetic impulse, closely

associated with the bi-functionality of prison camp narratives as acts of witness bearing

and as works of art. That is, the difference between the teller and the tale.

9 The ethical concern is immediately obvious in one such account, Paddy Doyle’s 1988

memoir The God Squad, where he states in his preface:

Many people familiar with the effects of institutional care, particularly IndustrialSchools, will say I have gone too easy on them. Lives have been ruined by thetyrannical rule and lack of love in such places. People have been scarred for life.This book is not an attempt to point the finger, to blame or even to criticise anyindividual or group of people. Neither is it intended to make a judgement on whathappened to me. It is about a society’s abdication of responsibility to a child. Thefact that I was that child, and the book is about my life is largely irrelevant. Theprobability is that there were, and still are, thousands of “me’s”5.

10 The “God Squad” of the title refers to a group of nuns who prepare patients for surgery

and contact the hospital chaplain for those wishing to have their confessions heard.

They play only a brief role in the memoir. In stark contrast are the sisters at St.

Michael’s industrial school, where Doyle spent a year and a half, who are seen as

autocratic and vindictive. Mother Paul, the nun who dominates Doyle’s memoir,

articulates the social role expected of the nuns who run the institution:

When we had finished singing Mother Paul reminded us that as we had no parentsit fell to the nuns to give us the guidance and grace that would make us into fineyoung men. Nuns were married to God she said as she raised her right hand to showa thin silver ring. Nuns did not have children in the way mothers had. “Each of youwas sent to St. Michael’s by God and you will be trained in the manner He wouldlike. Mark my words, you will all one day be proud to have been part of thisschool6.”

11 However, the treatment meted out to the children at St. Michael’s falls far short of

“guidance and grace”. Mother Paul repeatedly reprimands Doyle for his lameness and

the nightmares he has of his father’s suicide. Doyle’s story also makes clear how the


44

taint of sin and the assumption of culpability bore heavily upon the children sent to

industrial schools:

Not all the children inside St. Michael’s were orphaned; many came from brokenhomes or domestic situations into which they simply didn’t fit. Inside the schoolthere was a clear distinction between those who had parents and those who hadnot. Those who did have a father or mother alive who was alcoholic were oftenberated by the nuns. “Is it any wonder your poor father took to drinking. The poorman must have been at his wits end trying to manage you.” I don’t know if any ofthe other children there had parents who committed the mortal sin of suicide. Ifthere were, then like me, they were probably kept in ignorance7.

12 Patrick Touher, in his 1991 memoir, Fear of the Collar, recounts the physical and sexual

abuses exacted on the boys of Artane Industrial School and their persistent sense of

fear, shame and confusion. He recalls an encounter with a brother nicknamed The

Sting, who was later removed from Artane. Touher, nicknamed Collie by his friends, is

caught by The Sting after climbing over a wall to collect chestnuts. The Sting tells

Touher he will deal with him that night at eight o’clock. After the brother leaves, the

other boys warn Touher that The Sting routinely beats and fondles them: “You know,

Collie, he hurt me privates. As he beat me with one hand, he held me with the other

hand. He had me lie across the bed sat beside me, started stroking me bottom, then

beating me at times with his leather8.” That night Touher obediently arrives at the

brother’s room: “The Sting stood in front of me and said, ‘Well, you have to learn how

to keep out of trouble now, won’t you, boy?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will in future, sir.’ ‘I know

you will, boy, I will teach you the hard way. Take off that nightshirt; you will not need it

for a while’9”. The Sting beats and then sexually molests Touher, after which the

brother weeps, holds the crying boy in his arms, promising never to beat him again.

While Touher claims that he was never sexually abused again in Artane, he was – like

the other boys confined in that industrial school – a victim of other forms of abuse and

intimidation.

13 A fictive account of life in the Industrial Schools appeared in 1983 with the publication

of Bernard McLaverty’s Lamb. The first chapter of Lamb takes place in a reform school

for young boys situated in a remote part of western Ireland. The Home, as it is called, is

run by a religious order of brothers, headed by Brother Benedict, a tyrannical

disciplinarian who revels in his clerical power. In his opening conversation with the

younger, more compassionate Brother Sebastian, Benedict espouses his brutal

philosophy:

What we run here is a school for the sons of the Idle Poor. We teach them toconform, how to make their beds, how to hold a knife and fork, and the three Rs.We shoehorn them back into society at an age when, if they commit anotheroffence, they go to the grown-up prison. If they do not conform we thrash them. Weteach them a little of God and a lot of fear. It is a combination that seems to work.At least we think so. There is no room here for your soft-centred, self-centredidealism10.

14 Sebastian decides to leave the school and the Brothers, taking with him a twelve-year-

old epileptic Dublin boy, Owen Kane, with whom he has developed a relationship of

tentative trust. Believing that “the saving of an individual was more important than the

law”, Sebastian, whose real name is Michael Lamb, flees to London, using money willed

to him by his recently deceased father. While in London Michael begins to think of his

life in the brothers and sees it all as a handful of negatives in his life. He also realizes

that he cannot continue to wander around London and escape detection. They decide to


45

return to Ireland, as it will be the place where people will least suspect them to be.

Michael gets a plane to Ireland with Owen and they travel to Donegal. Michael knows

that there is no hope for either of them sustaining this type of lifestyle. He decides to

substitute Owen’s tablets for aspirins and they go to a beach in Donegal. Michael wants

to protect Owen from returning to the brutality of the Home. Owen has a fit and

Michael brings him over to the edge of the water and drowns him there and then

makes a vain attempt to commit suicide. The narrative ends with Michael’s anguished

realisation that what began in love has ended in evil: “He had started with a pure loving

simple ideal but it had gone foul on him, turned inevitably into something evil. It had

been like this all his life, with the Brothers, with the very country he came from11.”

15 Contrarily, the Galway novelist Walter Macken was one of the few writers who wrote of

the stigma of the Industrial School during the high-point of Catholic dominancy. His

1952 novel The Bogman opens with an account of Cahal Kinsella’s homecoming from the

Industrial School and a chance meeting with a neighbour on the road home. The man,

Peader Clancy, tries vainly to identify him at first before finally exclaiming, “’By the

cross of God,’ he shouted then, ‘you’re Nan Kinsella’s bastard!”

Cahal first felt his face going cold and then red and finally the whole complex burstits way out of him in a shout of laughter. Think of the years. Think of the fairy talesin the school, accounting for the fact that you had parents so uninterested in you tofire you into an Industrial School at the age of six. There could only be two reasons,the main ones, poverty and illegitimacy. Think of the romantic tales that you hadconcocted to cover the yearnings and puzzlement. Think of all that and see it soaraway on the wings of a loud laugh at the voice of a drunken old man12.

16 Later in the novel, Cahal attempts to explain away his attachment to his abusive and

malevolent grandfather, Barney Kinsella, by stating that, while he has no love for the

man, he respects him as one of his own:

All me life I have lived at the orders of impersonal men in a tight place. There wererules to keep. We kep’ them. If we didn’t we were punished, impersonally, cold-bloodedly […] I like Barney to say, Come, and I come, and go, and I go. For why?Because he is somebody belonging to me. That’s why. You don’t know what it is tobe live among hundreds and have none of your own, to be comin’ and goin’ at thecall of strangers to whom you mean nothin’ but so many shillin’ subsidy a weekfrom the Government13.

17 Others were so tormented by their experience in the Industrial Schools that they

physically could not speak of what occurred. In John McGahern’s That They May Face The

Rising Sun, we are introduced to the character of Bill Evans, a former inmate hired out

to a sadistic farmer in Leitrim. The protagonist, Ruttledge, a character loosely based

upon McGahern himself, attempts to draw Bill into talking about his past:

“Weren’t you in a place run by Brother’s and priests before they sent you to thefirst farm?” […] [A] troubled look passed across Bill Evan’s face as swiftly as ashadow of a bird passing across window light and was replaced by black truculence.“Before the priests and Brothers weren’t you with nuns in a convent with othersmall boys? Weren’t you treated better when you were small and with the nuns?”This time there was no long pause. A look of rage and pain crossed his face. “Stoptorturing me” he cried out14.

18 Ruttledge recalls an incident where, as a student, he witnessed the beating of one of

these boys: “They were sent as skivvies to the colleges; they scrubbed and polished

floors, emptied garbage and waited at tables in the college Ruttledge attended15.” On

this occasion, one of the boys at serve accidentally careers into the dean of students,


46

“plates and bowls went flying. The soutane was splashed.” The boy breaks the rule of

silence whereupon the brother begins to beat him:

The beating was sudden and savage. Nobody ate a morsel at any of the tables whileit was taking place. Not a word was uttered. In the sobbing aftermath the silencewas deep and accusing until the scrape of knife and fork on plate and the low humof conversation returned. Many who sat mutely at the tables during the beatingwere to feel all their lives that they had taken part in the beating through their self-protective silence16.

19 In Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, the protagonist, Francie Brady, is sent to an

Industrial School which is described as, “the house of a hundred windows17.” Francie

avidly reads up on miraculous visions and hopes to attain some form of favourable

reward by reporting mock visitations of St Joseph, the Angel Gabriel, St Catherine –

“the more the merrier.” A Father Sullivan, nicknamed Father Tiddly, takes him under

his wing and begins to sexually abuse him. In Francie’s skewered vision of reality,

cigarettes and Rolos are sufficient compensation for Tiddly’s depraved attentions:

“Tiddly said wouldn’t it be lovely if we could get married. I said it would be great. I

could buy you flowers and chocolates and you could have dinner ready when I come

home he says18.” When he emerges from the Industrial School, he meets his boyhood

friend Joe Purcell and again, as with other former inmates, cannot fully disclose what

occurred to him:

He kept going back to the other thing so in the end I told him and what does he saythen he says Francie he didn’t really do that did he? I said what are you talkingabout Joe he did didn’t I just tell you? The next thing I knew I was in a cold sweatbecause of the way Joe was looking at me […] it was only for a split second our eyesmet but he knew and I knew. Then I said: I fairly fooled you there Joe. Tiddly!Imagine someone doing the like of that! Tiddly! Rolos – for fuck’s sake19!

20 The accounts of life in the Industrial Schools are unanimous in this – the shame and

fear of speaking out, of being singled out as an aberration. One of the earliest published

accounts of life in the Industrial School appeared in 1983 with Mannix Flynn’s Nothing

to Say. Flynn’s thinly disguised autobiographical character, Gerard O’Neill, is dispatched

to St. Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack after a long history of petty crimes and

truancy. At the court hearing to determine his case, the judge notes:

“Mrs. O’Neill,” said the Judge, “You are a sick woman. You have thirteen otherchildren who need looking after. You cannot spend your life running around afterGerard.” The Judge turned to the Probation Officer and asked for the report […]“Comes from a family of fourteen, the youngest about three years of age. Fatherworks in the cleaning Department of the Corporation. There is also a drinkingproblem from the father and constant marriage break-ups20.”

21 Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, in their authoritative account of life in the Industrial

Schools, Suffer the Little Children (1999), contend that the “Industrial schools were

designed for the children of the poor, who were perceived as a threat to the social

order. It was these children who were inevitably targeted for incarceration21…” Arnold

would state that Letterfrack was “arguably the worst” of all the Industrial Schools and

Flynn’s account of life there confirms this – he was raped, beaten and repeatedly

abused during his tenure there22. In a later interview with the journalist Brighid

McLaughlin he elaborates further on life in Letterfrack :

I was eleven when I was sent to Letterfrack industrial school. Letterfrack inbeautiful Connemara was this State’s idea of a Special School for Special Needs. Theonly thing special about it was its exalted position as the monster terror hole ofsub-human abuse of children. For me, it was a completely traumatic experience… It


47

was like been pulled out of the Rotunda and put into a major war zone. That was thekind of life it was. Every night, we all cried out for our mammies and daddies. I canstill hear the blood-curdling screams. I was in Letterfrack for two years, they don’tlet you out for Christmas until after the first year. Some kids never got out becausethey had no family. Looking back on it now they were tormented. They had nobodyto visit them, to write to them, an awful lot of those boyo’s didn’t survive. All thestories that are coming out about it are true23.

22 Flynn’s autobiographical account is offset with that of another inmate, Peter Tyrrell,

who wrote of his experience in Letterfrack during the period 1924-1931. Published in

2006, Founded on Fear is as harrowing an account as that of Flynn’s but Tyrrell’s work is

without any stylistic flourishes – it is told in a plain, simple style and is all the more

devastating for it – in one episode he recounts the sadistic behaviour of a Brother Vale,

the school’s designated cook:

I went into the scullery a few days ago and there were two boys washing dishes inthe sink, Stapelton and Sharkey, and as they worked he flogged them from behind,as usual I asked Joe Baker, why it is that the rubber is so terribly painful and heexplained that the rubber which Vale is using is the rim of the tyre, and isreinforced with wire which is running through it (steel wire). I have now beenbeaten several times daily for weeks, and when I go to the refectory for meals myhands are sweating. My sight is blurred and I am unsteady in my feet. I feel hungrybut when I eat the food will not stay down. I am now weak, and as I walk along findit difficult to keep my balance24.

23 Tyrrell’s account of life in Letterfrack went unpublished for nearly forty years. He

wrote of his experiences in the late fifties and entrusted the document to Senator Owen

Sheehy Skeffington who attempted to find a publisher for the memoir without success.

Skeffington would die of a heart-attack some two years after receiving Tyrrell’s account

and it remained amongst his unpublished papers. By then, Tyrrell had committed

suicide on Hampstead Heath.

24 On page 62 of Founded on Fear, Tyrell gives a description of the handyman John Cusack,

“who does all the repairs to the property”, describing him as “[V]ery good to the

children and often brings them food from his home […] he is always friendly and has a

kind word for everyone25.” Cusack was my great grandfather. I was born within sight of

the Industrial School and two generations of my paternal family worked there until its

closure in 1974. For a brief period, I myself was a student – by a curious twist of fate I

spent a year there as a student of the Galway-Mayo Technical Institute engaged in

furniture design and production. No-one in my family spoke of the industrial school

though it loomed large in the psyche of the community – Letterfrack village is

dominated by the main building and workshops, the infirmary and monastery where

the brothers lived. The main buildings are now utilized, as I mentioned, by GMIT and

the school has gained an international reputation in the field of wood design and

restoration. The monastery is used as a hostel. The exercise yard where Tyrell first

encounters the brutality of the regime (“a Christian brother now comes running out, he

is chasing the young children with a very long stick and beating them on the backs of

the legs26”) is now home to a café and library. A hundred yards north of the yard a

modern-looking crèche has been built.

25 In the Ryan Report, the section on Letterfrack is a damning indictment of abuse and

official negligence. In one section where a boy was forced to eat his own excrement, the

Brother involved states:


48

“Well the […] thing has haunted me all my life. It should never have happened.Actually he didn’t eat the excrement, he spat it into the basin, that doesn’t matter,it was wrong, totally wrong, and I accept that. I accept full responsibility for it. Itwas cruel.” When asked by the Committee why he did it, he said that he wasstressed by having to cope with boys who soiled themselves, particularly during thenight. He asked colleagues what he should do about one particular boy: “A few daysbefore I mentioned this to some of the staff, ‘what will I do’, I couldn’t get any helpfrom anybody. One of them quite cynically said, ‘make him eat his own shit’”. WhenI think now on this particular morning, he did it right out in the floor in front ofeverybody and I saw red, I saw anger, I thought he was doing it purposefully toridicule me. I think that was the reason27.”

26 In Letterfrack, as in other communities which housed the schools, the sense of guilt is

pervasive. It has become a place of shame and thirty years is insufficient to wipe away

the trauma of the past. The accounts of life in the Schools have a number of discernable

similarities – sexual abuse, the sense of ostracisation, of fear and neglect. However,

there was neither a sympathetic audience nor, it must be said, a tolerant one for such

revelations of abuse. The emergence of such testaments, drip-fed into the Irish psyche

over the course of twenty years, was at first met with scepticism, disgust and, latterly,

anger at such revelations. But what were the conditions that allowed such systematic

abuse to thrive?

27 Catholicism has generally seen sexual desire in a negative light and this became the

hallmark for Irish society from the foundation of the State to the early nineties. The

first instinct of the Church when revelations about sexual abuse emerged was typical:

they simply chose to try and sweep it under the carpet. But the reservoir of repression

and deceit at the sick heart of Ireland had been festering for too long and papering over

the cracks had been a policy that worked only when people were willing to accept

blindly the dictates of the Bishops. By the early nineteen-nineties that was no longer

the case and, like the metaphorical image of Berlin Wall, once the first section

collapsed, the rest followed with astonishing rapidity. Simply put, the Church was

swept away by the scale of the disaster.

28 By the late 1990s there was no social capital to be gained from declaring yourself a

devout Catholic. Young people, who had come out in record numbers to welcome the

Pope to Ireland in 1979, departed in droves and ordinations to the priesthood

subsequently collapsed. During the period when the Industrial Schools thrived, what is

apparent then is that a bargain of sorts was struck between most priests and Christian

Brothers on the one side and the State on the other – each side served their own

purposes. The religious orders could be called on to perform the onerous tasks in

society for a price, to perform the rituals that perpetuated the status quo in return for

certain social and monetary benefits.

29 The cache of having a son in the priesthood or religious orders was sufficient for many

parents to thrust their children into a vocation, irrespective of whether or no they had

a calling. This led to the situation where men, who had no childcare training and no

inclination towards the celibate life, found themselves taking charge of vulnerable or

troubled children. The cache of being in the religious orders was contrasted with the

stigma of leaving those orders and thus, many men remained solely for reason of social

propriety. Their frustration was subsequently taken out on their charges and the State,

unwilling to intervene, inadvertently contributed to the abuse of countless minors in

the care of the Religious Orders. This arrangement helped perpetuate the symbolic

order for a further thirty years, from the nineteen-sixties to the early nineties but each


49

side was obliged to keep up a façade of sorts. Propriety was key and it was a cosy

relationship but with the deluge of scandals in the nineties the Church could no longer

perform in this role. They were utterly discredited and most people found that they

could operate well enough without them anyhow, turning their attention to the vulgar

accruement of commodities instead. Shortly after the airing of the documentary

entitled States of Fear in 1999, the journalist Mary Kenny wrote:

The scale of the cruelty seemed so systematic that it was as though it was inherentin our history: not only were the religious who ran these institutions accused beforethe bar of history, so was the Irish State, which utterly failed to take responsibilityfor those in its care. So, indeed, were the complacent middle classes, who usedthese reformatories as a source for servants, and so too was the media, whichremained indifferent to the punitive regimes around them28.

30 There are no positive portrayals of the Industrial Schools, in either the fictive or

biographical accounts. They were a place of punishment and brute adversity and those

who were sent there suffered needlessly at the hands of people who were charged with

their well-being. From our reading of the Ryan Report, we understand that the

Brother’s were ill-equipped to act as surrogate caregivers to these children – they were

conscious that the prevailing mood was for discipline and conformity and they acted in

accordance to established directives. From our reading of these accounts, we become

aware that the public were equally adapted to an established and unquestioning

orthodoxy. As we saw with McGahern’s fiction, the former inmates were groomed for

subordinate role in our society and as we have seen with Macken and McCabe, they

spent their life coping and often failing to live with the stigma. In October 2001, the

journalist John Waters faced considerable approbation for suggesting that many

children sent to industrial schools in the 1950s and 1960s had criminal backgrounds.

Waters wrote an editorial in Magill that cast doubt on the Laffoy Commission, which

was set up to investigate abuse of children by industrial schools in the 1950s and 1960s.

The most contested part of the article questioned the motives of the “alleged victims”

of abuse, since “many will have been young offenders with all the baggage and possible

motivation that this might imply”. These were people, it continued, “who, as

adolescents at least, had a history of disturbance or even criminal activity29.”

31 Department of Education statistics show that just 6 per cent of children admitted to

industrial schools through the courts had committed any kind of offence. Of that

number, half were under 12 and would scarcely be considered criminal by today’s

standards. Waters, however, stood by his argument and said, “I don’t claim to be pious

but we are developing a culture where there is an omnipotent victim, an atmosphere

where it is impossible for anyone to suggest the possible innocence of the accused.”

Waters’ central point is that people who worked in industrial schools are being

scapegoated by the society that sanctioned abuses in the first place. This is an essential

point. Abuse cannot thrive without at least some form of social acceptance and in

places like Letterfrack, where bystanders witnessed this abuse first hand, nothing was

done. The climate of the time prevented direct action from taking place and it difficult

now to fully appreciate the changing dimension of social concern which occurred over

the period. What was thinly acceptable thirty years ago would, today, be held up as

horrific. The accounts that I have spoken of, in both the fictive and biographical

treatment of the Schools, are united in dismay and disgust at the way in which those

institutions were run, but clearly they were run according to a prevailing climate and


50

sanctioned by a larger community than the Christian Brothers. Eamon Maher suggests

that:

This is exactly what the Irish Church is going to have to do; find “glory in itshumiliation”, admit its past failings and set about rebuilding trust and confidenceand renewing its commitment to the example of Jesus Christ. Perhaps when it doesthis, the victims whose horrors are chronicled in the Ryan Report will find somesolace30.

32 But I think it is equally important that the society, the town, the community, the

household and indeed the individual who tolerated abuse come to terms with what

occurred not by a simple mea culpa but through the appreciation of what happens when

we abrogate our moral responsibility. As McGahern dictates, the students who

witnessed the thrashing of the boy in That they May Face The Rising Sun feel the

repercussions of the event the rest of their lives, condemned by their own self-

protective silence. And I feel the same way every time I return home to a community

still under the pall of its own horrific past. The responsibility begins with ourselves.

NOTES

1. Bruce Arnold, The Irish Gulag, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 2009, p. 2.

2. Fintan O’Toole, “Law of Anarchy, Cruelty of Care”, in The Irish Times, Saturday May

23rd, 2009, Weekend Review, p. 1.

3. Eamon Maher, “Reflections of a Layman on the Ryan Report”, in Tony Flannery (ed.)

Responding to the Ryan Report, Dublin, Columba, 2008.

4. Mannix Flynn, Nothing to Say, Dublin, Ward River Press, 1983, p. 171.

5. Paddy Doyle, The God Squad, Dublin, Raven Arts, 1988, p. 10.

6. Ibid., p. 18.

7. Ibid., p. 67.

8. Patrick Touher, Fear of the Collar: Artane Industrial School, Dublin, O’Brien, 1991, p. 35.

9. Ibid., p. 37.

10. Bernard McLaverty, Lamb, New York, Norton, 1992, p. 12.

11. Ibid., p. 151.

12. Walter Macken, The Bogman, London, Pan, 1981, p. 11.

13. Ibid., p. 48.

14. John McGahern, That They May Face The Rising Sun, London, Faber, 2002, p. 12-13.

15. Ibid., p. 11.

16. Ibid., p. 12.

17. Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy, London, Picador, 1993, p. 66.

18. Ibid., p. 86.

19. Ibid., p. 97-98.


51

20. Mannix Flynn, Nothing to Say, p. 37.

21. Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s

Industrial Schools, Dublin, New Island, 1999, p. 64.

22. Bruce Arnold, The Irish Gulag, p. 43.

23. Mannix Flynn in an interview with Brighid McLaughlin, “Mannix Flynn: To Hell in

Connaught”, in Sunday Independent, December 22nd 2002.

24. Peter Tyrell, Founded on Fear, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006, p. 67.

25. Ibid., p. 62.

26. Ibid., p. 13.

27. CICA Investigation Committee Report, Vol. I, p. 305.

28. Mary Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, Dublin, New Island, 2000, p. 309.

29. John Waters, ‘Editorial’, in Magill, October 2001.

30. Eamon Maher, “Reflections of a Layman on the Ryan Report”, in Tony Flannery (ed.)

Responding to the Ryan Report, Dublin, Columba, 2008.

ABSTRACTS

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) is one of a range of measures introduced by

the Irish Government to investigate the extent and effects of abuse on children from 1936

onwards. It is commonly known in Ireland as the Ryan Commission after its chair, Justice Seán

Ryan. The Commission’s remit was to investigate all forms of child abuse in Irish institutions for

children; the majority of allegations it investigated related to the system of sixty residential

“Reformatory and Industrial Schools” operated by Catholic Church orders, funded and

supervised by the Irish Department of Education. This essay examines the critical reaction to the

revelations and the correlation between the Irish Industrial Schools and the Soviet labour camp

system. The appellation “The Irish Gulag” was coined by the journalist and critic Bruce Arnold

and is apt, for as I demonstrate there are a number of parallels between the memoirs of former

prison inmates in the Soviet Union and those who wrote about their experience in the Irish

Industrial Schools. As a contrast, I also draw upon fictive accounts of life in the schools by writers

such as Bernard McLaverty and John McGahern.

La Commission d’enquête sur la maltraitance des enfants (ICCA) est l’une des mesures mises en

place par le gouvernement irlandais pour enquêter sur l’ampleur et les effets des abus sur les

enfants à partir de 1936. Elle est connue en Irlande sous le nom de Commission Ryan : cette

commission a été chargée d’enquêter sur toutes les formes de violence perpétrées dans les

institutions irlandaises pour enfants, la majorité des allégations sur laquelle porte l’enquête étant

liées au système des soixante institutions appelées « Reformatory » ou « Industrial Schools »

dirigées par des ordres catholiques et financées et supervisées par le ministère irlandais de

l’Éducation. Cet article examine la réaction critique suite aux révélations et opère un

rapprochement entre les écoles industrielles irlandaises et le système de travail des camps

soviétiques. L’expression « Les Irlandais du Goulag » a été inventée par le journaliste et critique


52

Bruce Arnold et elle est pertinente : on montrera qu’il existe un certain nombre de parallèles

entre les mémoires des anciens détenus dans l’Union soviétique et ceux qui ont écrit sur leur

expérience dans les Industrial schools irlandaises. On s’appuiera aussi sur les récits fictifs de la

vie dans ces écoles par des écrivains comme Bernard McLaverty et John McGahern.

INDEX

Keywords: education - industrial schools, children - protection, history of representations,

institutional abuse, justice, trauma

Mots-clés: éducation - écoles industrielles, enfance - protection, histoire des représentations,

maltraitance institutionnelle, justice, trauma

AUTHOR

PETER GUY

National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, Dublin


53

The Collective European Memory of1968: The Case of Northern IrelandChris Reynolds

1 In 1968, all across Western Europe, governments and regimes were rocked by a wave of

protest movements that seemingly shared more than a coincidence of timing1. 2008,

more so than any commemorative period thus far, saw a real drive to go beyond strictly

national perspectives with much attention on the international dimension of revolts at

this time2. The aim, it seems, is to address the question as to the existence of a common

international/European revolt. An ever-growing list of countries and regions from all

around the world that in some way fit the model of what happened in 1968 has

emerged3. Despite the great contextual differences that set so many of these countries

apart, a collective movement is increasingly perceived and described as characterising

the revolts, thus lending weight to the ever-popular representation of 1968 as a year of

international upheaval4.

2 The French revolt has emerged as that which is seen to typify the tumultuous events of

that year5, with, as Gildea describes, the Latin Quarter of Paris as its “epicentre6”. There

are several reasons to explain why this is the case. Amongst them is the fact that,

unlike any other 1968 revolt, the French “May Days” were transformed from what was

essentially a student-based movement into an all-out social crisis that threatened the

hitherto extremely stable Gaullist regime. As such, it can be held up as an example of

the explosive potential of what has been described a revolutionary period. However –

and perhaps more significantly in this age of images, symbolism and aesthetics driven

by technological advances that have led to a certain commemorative mediatisation of

history and memory7 – the characteristics of the conventional representations of the

French events have helped mould an iconic image of what happened and one that is

both romantic and attractive8. So starkly do these images contrast with current-day

concerns that their appeal is unsurprising9. Just as events in Paris have monopolised

the national memory of the 1968 in France – with obvious drawbacks10 – the French

revolt can be described as having done something similar in terms of the collective

European memory of 1968.


54

3 One country that has not commonly been seen to sit comfortably as part of this

international revolt is Northern Ireland (NI). Two possible conclusions could be drawn

from the virtual absence of Northern Ireland from the long list of countries described

as being affected by this international wave of revolt. Firstly, it could be assumed that

there was no significant movement in 1968 in Northern Ireland. This is quite simply not

the case. 1968 was to prove a pivotal year which, for many, marks the beginning of the

“Troubles”. Alternatively, it could be surmised that the movement in Northern Ireland

does not fit the “68” mould. This article seeks to challenge this idea. Through a

comparison with the French events of 1968, it will be argued that Northern Ireland

should be included in the list of countries that make up this international upheaval.

Reasons explaining why this has not been the case to date will be provided before a

conclusion on how and why this is beginning to change.

From repression to election

France, May-June 1968

4 On 3 May 1968, following a period of disruption at the Nanterre campus in the Parisian

suburbs, a band of militant students decided to take their protest to the heart of the

French university system, the Sorbonne11. Reacting to a rumour of an imminent attack

from the fascist Occident movement, they tore up tables and chairs in a bid to protect

themselves. The subsequent decision to have them cleared from the courtyard of the

Sorbonne was to become the starting point of one of the most important events in

recent French history. The perceived mishandling of this situation by the forces of

order sparked a riot in the student quarter and was the first in a week-long series of

clashes12, culminating in the infamous Night of the Barricades on 10 May13. The heavy-

handed tactics were so badly perceived by the public that a general strike was called for

Monday 13 May, marking a transition of the student protest to one of the society as a

whole14. By 20 May France was completely paralysed15. Previously reluctant, unwilling

or completely overcome by the unfolding events, President de Gaulle and his Prime

Minister Georges Pompidou made clear attempts to resolve the situation, and both

failed16, leading to the most dangerous phase of the crisis. However, despite the brief

threat of the revolt finding a political outlet, de Gaulle was eventually able to redress

the situation and seemingly shake the population from its momentary folly17. On May

30, once back from his mysterious trip to Baden-Baden, he decided to address the

population for a second time18 and through allusions to the threat of totalitarianism

and chaos turned the situation on its head. His dissolution of the Assembly and the

calling of legislative elections marked the beginning of the end of the revolt19. The

extraordinary turnaround was confirmed by the landslide Gaullist victory in the

elections of 23 and 30 June 196820.

5 Despite their ephemeral nature, the events of Mai 68 have become a reference point in

French history and are considered as a watershed in the development of French

society21. The French events cannot be considered in isolation to what was happening

elsewhere at the time. In fact, they drew inspiration from, rode the wave of and

contributed to an international revolt. The vast array of contextual differences from

country to country problematises an explanation of what drove the common

expression of frustration. However, one pertinent line is that which refers to the


55

“decline of deference22.” Stefan Collini describes the “sixties” as the culmination of a

process of unprecedented socio-economic and cultural change that brought about

democratisation coupled with significant prosperity. Such seismic shifts led to the rules

and traditions that hitherto governed society being exposed to question and criticism.

The driving force behind this tension that exploded with such enthusiasm for change

was the youth of the time who “realized that recent social changes meant that they no

longer had to wait their turn: they could take over the place immediately23”. Whilst this

interpretation refers to 1960s Britain, it could equally be applied to most of those

Western European nations that experienced revolt in 1968 and points to an important

transnational common denominator. This is particularly important when comparing

France with Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland, October 1968-February 1969

6 On 5 October 1968 the second march for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland took place in

Duke Street, Derry. Attended by upwards of 2,000 people including a delegation from

Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), the march ended in terrible violence as the police –

the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – waded in with a heavy-hand and used brutal

repression to enforce the previously imposed ban on the demonstration. The

broadcasting of footage of the clashes on Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE, National television

network of the Irish Republic) made sure of nationwide and international revulsion24.

This march and the mishandling of it by the police had a profound impact on those QUB

students present and would lay the foundations for the birth and emergence of a

significant movement in the ensuing period of protest25. On 9 October 1968, a

demonstration was organised by the students of QUB in protest against the police

brutality in Derry. A meeting was later held at the University during which the People’s

Democracy (PD) was born. Led by a “faceless committee” which included a university

lecturer26, graduates and undergraduates, this essentially student movement was

officially launched on 11 October 1968. As well as quite specific demands related closely

to those of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA)27, the PD was

concerned with raising awareness and lobbying the government on issues of social

injustice and discrimination. In the initial phase this was achieved via provocative,

non-violent acts intended to embarrass and force government representatives to

consider the issues at hand28. As the movement gathered momentum it was becoming

increasingly difficult to maintain the non-violent approach and therefore continue to

benefit from the public support they had enjoyed thus far29. Tensions were not only

obvious from the exterior. It was becoming increasingly clear that there were

difficulties within the ranks of the PD itself30. It was the episode of the “Long March”

that while, on the one hand would ensure a critical place for the PD in the civil rights

movement, on the other would expose the rifts that would eventually be the

movement’s greatest weakness.

7 The idea of a “Long March” from Belfast to Derry had been discussed and provisionally

planned for 14 December before being shelved. Its postponement was a direct

consequence of a number of proposed reforms and the Northern Ireland Prime

Minister Captain Terence O’Neill’s famous “crossroads” speech31. Many saw this as a

genuine attempt at making progress and an “unofficial referendum32”was organised by

the Belfast Telegraph. Over 75.000 people filled in specially commissioned coupons from


56

the newspaper declaring support for O’Neill. The moderate majority was able to force a

truce during which no marches or direct action would take place33. However, for others

this was proof of what could be achieved via direct action34. Such elements within the

PD were able to force through a reversal of the decision to postpone the long march

which was rescheduled to leave Belfast on 1 January35. The march set off with a very

small number of participants and little public support. However, by the time it reached

the Burntollet bridge on the outskirts of Derry, where it was met by a well organised

and allegedly police-supported ambush36, participation and support had swollen,

elevating those involved to the status of heroes and martyrs for the civil rights cause in

Northern Ireland37. Despite this success, the subsequent violent backlash saw the PD

accused of radicalising the civil rights movement and undermining the “steady, steady

approach” of moderate elements thus far38. It was in the light of such tension and

criticism that the PD decided to scale down its action and turn its attention to the next

stage; the General Elections that Terence O’Neill was forced to call for 24 February

196939. The PD decision to participate in this election was to prove a critical one. By

entering into electoral politics – despite relative success in terms of votes –, the PD had

moved to another stage in its development. Its originality was diluted and a process

began that would end with the PD being subsumed into the more general revolt that

would become the “Troubles”. As Prince argues : “The old conflict over national and

communal identities had been renewed. Northern Ireland’s 68 had ended40”.

8 As well as originating as university-based movements, both periods of protest in

Northern Ireland and in France were triggered in reaction against police brutality. Both

were also brought to a close – in admittedly different ways – by general elections. The

following section will demonstrate that these are not the only parallels that can be

drawn between Belfast and Paris in 1968.

Northern Ireland and France: comparable/commonrevolts?

9 It is clear that movements from around the world looked to each other for support and

inspiration in terms of action, ideas or organisation41. The French movement certainly

drew influence from similar movements in the USA, in West Germany and in Japan42.

There were international issues (particularly the Vietnam War) that cultivated this

notion of worldwide protest and fostered the idea of a shared, international revolt

against a common enemy. In the years preceding 1968, politically active students at

QUB such as Eamonn McCann, Cyril Toman and Michael Farrell had not only followed

the development of this international protest movement but had also participated in

meetings, conferences and demonstrations that had taken place. As Prince describes:

“Northern Ireland was not under quarantine while the revolutionary contagion raged

throughout the West43.” When the students of QUB started the new academic year of

1968-69 they cannot have been oblivious to what had been happening around the world

in the preceding few months. When one considers the way in which the French events

in particular were raked over in their immediate aftermath, it is no surprise that they

“were fresh in the memory44.” Furthermore, the new university year started only three

days following the decisive 5 October March in Derry thus offering the opportunity to

the young people of Northern Ireland to book their place in this international revolt45.


57

Similar root causes help explain why these young people may have felt they too should

be part of this global wave of protest.

10 As had been the case in France in the years leading up to May 68, there had been, in

Northern Ireland, a period described by Gibbon as “deceptively quiet” for “in fact,

beneath the surface, the conditions for a major crisis had been accumulating for some

time46.” De Gaulle’s success in bringing an end to the Algerian crisis meant that in

France the period from 1962-68 was one that saw the 5th Republic lay solid foundations

and provide a long-awaited period of stability. 1962 was not without significance in

Northern Ireland, for it was this year that marked the end of the IRA’s six-year cross

border campaign (operation Harvest)47. In both cases a period of violence and

uncertainty gave way to one of relative calm. Generational and socio-economic changes

at play during this time help explain why the revolts came along and why the

university served as their starting points.

11 Northern Ireland, like France, had been enjoying relative political stability as well as

the benefits brought about by the economic boom and the rise of the consumer

society48. Such changes spurred young people to dare ask questions of and challenge

the state of affairs. As Arthur explained to me, this example of the “decline of

deference” meant that his “generation was not going to take what they [the older

generation] had to take49”. In France opposition mounted vis-a-vis the elder statesman

pacifying the population with consumer products as he pressed on with his notions of

grandeur50. In Northern Ireland a new generation of young people (particularly from

the catholic population) was becoming increasingly unwilling to accept the status quo

of religious discrimination. In both countries, it was the spoils of socio-economic

progress that fuelled the sense of revolt and provided the launch pad for the respective

upheavals.

12 In France, the baby boom together with economic progress saw the university system

opened up to welcome sectors of the society that had hitherto been denied such a

privilege. These changes and the failure to cater for them are correctly cited as

fundamental in explaining why this institution served as the spark for the French

events51. The conditions of the higher education system provided the grounds from

which its swelling masses could contemplate and critique society in general. Faculties

such as Nanterre became perfect breeding grounds for discontent52. Similar changes

can be delineated in Belfast. As Northern Ireland experienced an (albeit brief) spell of

political and economic stability, a new element began to affirm itself in the echelons of

the system of higher education53. A body of well-educated Catholics was now able to

observe the frailties of the NI State and felt as though they were in a position to react.

Gibbon explains how QUB provided an exceptional space from a NI perspective. The

unsegregated nature of the institution meant that students – whilst increasingly aware

of the shortcomings of the status quo – were freed from family/community hatred and

bigotry and thus able to consider their plight from a broader perspective54.

Consequently “[T]he world-wide wave of student revolt could not but have a violent

impact on the one student group in the British Isles daily confronted with the

repressive paraphernalia of a police state55”. With such evidently clear similarities in

mind, it is no surprise then that closer examination of the action, language and general

atmosphere of this period in Northern Ireland highlights even further correlation with

the French events.


58

13 At the inaugural meeting of the PD on 9 October an undercurrent of frustration and

desire for change was channelled through a system that, as Michael Farrell later

admitted, was “considerably influenced by the Sorbonne assembly56”. The room was

open to anyone who wished to intervene and there was no (official) hierarchy. As Levy

details, “Par son fonctionnement, comme par son esprit, la P.D. d’alors ressemblait fort au

Mouvement du 22 Mars57”. A faceless committee made up of students and staff of QUB was

elected. Agendas were discussed and decided on by the meeting itself. Overall this

“ultra-democratic structure” was to be a common feature of how the PD would make

decisions and conduct itself58. Initially, this was one of the movement’s greatest

strengths, however, it was to be at the root of its downfall59. As had been the case in

France60, the novelty of such action was the butt of much criticism from established

bodies that deemed such organisational structures as unmanageable and inefficient61.

These organisational similarities can hardly be viewed as merely coincidental. When

one considers the timing along with the common traits it is clear that a certain degree

of influence was sourced from abroad in similar movements62. As Paul Arthur explained

to me : “A number of us were self-consciously following the French… the notion of

meetings that went on and on, we believed that was part of what had happened in

Paris63.” In order to understand why these tactics were imported with such ease one

has to recognise the role of the media.

14 Radio, newspaper and television coverage was critical in creating the grounds whereby,

Europe-wide, activists could situate themselves and their struggles in an international

perspective64. The specific focus of international coverage on the spectacular elements

of each revolt negated any real understanding of specific local contexts and instead

encouraged militants to search for more general common denominators. The existence

of any differences were glossed over as broader issues (anti-authoritarianism, the

desire for wholesale change, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-war movements,

etc) brought militants together, adding a degree of credibility to the respective

upheavals through the belief that they each formed part of a broader, international

wave of protest. Students in Belfast could not help but be inspired by the events of the

previous spring in Paris – a fact evident when one considers some of the common

action repertoires65.

15 Just as “la rue” was very important in France66, protest marches, punctuated with

slogans and revolutionary songs, helped the rise to prominence of the PD in Northern

Ireland. By insisting on the right to march, the inevitability of clashes with the police

revealed the intention on behalf of certain student elements to provoke a violent

reaction from the police that would in turn heighten the profile of the movement

amongst the population and guarantee a certain degree of public sympathy and

support67. The Nanterre example of “Provocation-Répression-Solidarité” was not lost on

the PD. This provocation at times fed into an element of playfulness and youthful

disdain for authority or “political theatre68” that conjures up images of the utopian,

surrealist label so commonly attached to the French events69. The importation and

adaptation of such tactics can be identified notably in the shared use of the deliberately

provocative CRS=SS/ RUC=SS slogans. However, one of the most visibly striking

similarities concerns the use of posters. The silk-screen prints produced in l’Ecole des

Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1968 were immediately the source of much interest and have

continued to be so, making them instantly recognisable and explaining why they form

such an integral part of 1968 folklore70. Whether it is in relation to the technique used


59

to produce the posters, their form or their content, when one considers several

examples of PD posters the degree of influence is clear71. Those involved in the

production of the posters have acknowledged the influence of Paris. For example, Joe

Mulheron – member of the PD – described how the “images from France struck

[him]”and how “the PD used them, ripped them off72”. The combination of such novel

tactics may have gained some sympathy due to the freshness they brought to the

political scene at the time. However, together with the notion of ultra democracy they

helped isolate the PD from bodies such as the broader NICRA and significantly the

Communist Party of Northern Ireland (CPNI).

16 As had been the case in France73, there was a difficult relationship between what the

CPNI saw as irresponsible and potentially dangerous leftist elements and what the PD

saw as an aging, conservative and incapable political force. Despite this problematic

relationship with the CPNI, students (and particularly the more politically aware

amongst them) were conscious that as long as their movement remained within the

confines of the university milieu its general impact would always be limited74. Paul

Arthur described one particular tactic that reveals the awareness of certain elements of

the need to get the working class on board. He explained how students descended on a

local social security office where hundreds of unemployed Catholics came to sign on for

benefits in a bid to persuade them that their struggle was not simply a “student

movement” but one that had to embrace everyone75. Such anecdotes cannot help but

remind one of the (failed) attempts by Parisian students to strike up relations with

Renault workers at Billancourt76.

17 Another area beyond the university milieu that reveals parallels concerns the

respective states’ reactions to the mounting tension and, in particular, decisions taken

at the top of the governments. Both de Gaulle and O’Neill appeared on television calling

on the “silent majority” in a bid to stem the tide of violence. The French president

addressed the population on two occasions. The first (24 May) was a complete failure

whilst the second (30 May) is widely regarded as the marking the beginning of the end

of the French events77. Whilst the outcomes may have differed, in both instances the

objectives were the same. The General wanted to offer the population a clear choice – “

moi ou le chaos78”. O’Neill’s “crossroads” speech was strikingly similar. He too presented

the population with an ultimatum and like de Gaulle hoped to dispel tensions by

presenting himself and the idea of order and stability as the logical alternative to the

growing instability that had flared up in the preceding weeks79. Such tactics were – in

the short-term – successful for de Gaulle and O’Neill but ultimately were hollow

victories as in both their cases 1968 proved to mark the beginning of their respective

spells at the top. Other parallels can be delineated within the corridors of power in

Belfast and Paris.

18 Divisions at the top of government were important in deepening the crises in both

countries. In France, the fact that the President and the Prime Minister both failed in

their respective (and very different) attempts at putting an end to the crisis helped

exacerbate the sentiment that the State was on the verge of collapse80. Such

precariousness was heightened by – and can help explain – the degree of anxiety

experienced when the General momentarily disappeared on 30 May. De Gaulle’s trip to

Baden-Baden not only sparked a brief period of panic, it also drove Georges Pompidou

to offer his resignation. Whilst his offer was rejected, this episode nevertheless

underlined the extent of the differences between the President and his Prime


60

Minister81. Similar high-level tensions were discernable in NI. In the weeks building up

to his ‘Crossroads’ speech, O’Neill had been coming under increasing internal pressure

– and none less so than from William Craig82. The Home Affairs minister had been

openly and increasingly critical of the PM’s line in a clear attempt to wrestle control of

the Unionist party. Whilst O’Neill was able to dispense with Craig in the light of the

success of his televised address, the evident split revealed the extent of the pressure

and in many respects mirrored what had happened in France.

19 One final similarity is related to the attempts in both cases to portray the revolts as

being conducted by an irresponsible minority in order to undermine the movement

and divert potential sympathisers. This was a common feature of the tactic employed

by the authorities in France83 who at one stage claimed that the upheaval had been

hijacked by what it described as la pègre84. In NI and in particular following the Long

March, O’Neill was keen to play down any resonance this moment had within the

community at large, “We’ve always had extreme Protestants and extreme Catholics –

the anarchists and the Trotskyites are something new. About 95 per cent or even 99 per

cent of the students don’t want violence, but a small minority doesn’t care85”.

20 On many levels, accounts of the time reveal a range of similarities in the language,

atmosphere and conduct of the movement. One particularly pertinent example of this

is the fact that in both Paris and Belfast the student revolt was not limited to a minor

nucleus of hardcore militant students, even if it was being driven on by them. In fact, in

both cases, the conditions were such that students who had until then remained on the

fringes of or completely absent from political activity suddenly found a voice86. Police

brutality incensed the general student population to such a degree that it compelled

the average student to swell the ranks and as such provided an added dimension. Such

commonalities (not to mention the internationalist perspective of people such as Paul

Arthur who was both heavily involved in the PD as well as providing one of the most

detailed accounts of the period) explain why when reading literature on how 1968 was

experienced in QUB one could be forgiven for thinking that it was an account of events

in Paris87.

21 One of reasons why the events in France have been such a focus of discussion over the

last forty years is partly due to their “insaisissable” nature88. Since the immediate

aftermath, commentators, participants and analysts have attempted to make sense of

what occurred by searching for a single interpretation of these exceptional events

leading to what Philippe Artières describes as “un gigantesque événement de papier89”. The

“interpretation” debate has been the focus of much attention and numerous studies,

but has yet to come to a conclusion upon which consensus has been reached90.

However, one of those that comes closest to helping make sense of May-June 1968 is

that which sees it as a “revelatory crisis”; the student revolt sparked and exacerbated

by police brutality and state incompetence provided the platform for the society at

large to express its disenchantment with a social, political and economic situation that

had been hidden beneath a veneer of stability and contentment. As explained above,

the “decline in deference” provided the impetus for young people in particular to dare

expose such frailties in the quest for change. A similar interpretation could be applied

to the contribution of the PD in Northern Ireland. Through its novel approach, its

unorthodox organisation and daring actions, the PD was able to highlight the problems

of a community and boost a struggle that had stagnated for some time. This is a view

shared by some major protagonists of the movement. For example, Eamonn McCann


61

explained, “there was an underlying crisis in Northern Ireland which was hidden and to

a certain extent was brought to the surface by the events of 1968. … When the RUC

attacked the civil rights march on October 5 in Duke Street all of those things suddenly

erupted on to the surface91”. Also, as Paul Arthur indicated, “A number of things were

happening beforehand […] and what the PD did was brought it all out into the open92”.

A justifiable absence?

22 Having established clear parallels between events in Northern Ireland and in France

one is left wondering why – if 1968 in Belfast was so similar to, and in many respects

fits, the mould of the Parisian example – the former is so often absent from

representations of this global revolt. The obvious answer would be to highlight the

great contextual differences that existed between Northern Ireland and the rest of the

world at the time. The very specific circumstances of late 1960s Northern Ireland are

such that it is understandable why commentators have refrained from including Belfast

in the same breath as Rome, Paris, and Berlin93. And yet one cannot get away from the

fact that in spite of such contextual differences, a “68-style” movement took place.

Three elements in particular require consideration in order to understand why Belfast/

NI 1968 is absent from the European collective memory of this year.

23 The first relates to the insular nature of Northern Ireland and its population. Due to

geographical factors, and compounded by the idea that the NI problem was a case

apart, what happens in Northern Ireland tends to be considered simply within its own

context. As Paul Arthur explained, the fact that those involved were not “part of the

metropolitan voice” has kept the NI movement out of the public eye94. Consequently,

little or no effort has been made to frame the events of 1968 in Northern Ireland

alongside those of other European countries. The role of those who spearheaded the ‘68

movement in situating the memory of these events is important nationally and

consequently on an international scale.

24 If we continue to take the French events as an example, it is obvious just how

significant the role of those involved has been in shaping the image of 1968 that has

since permeated the collective memory of it95. In fact, one of the most striking features

of the history of May 68 in France is the fact that even before the crisis ended, a trend

emerged that would see the verbosity that so characterised the revolt itself be

transformed into an avalanche of participants’ accounts96. As the periodic

reassessments of the 10th, 20th, 30th and now 40 th anniversary celebrations have

demonstrated, the participants continue to be a significant vector in how the story of

1968 is told97. People such as Cohn-Bendit, Serge July or Henri Weber appear to revel in

recalling their participation in these events in what Rioux describes as a “gigantesque

mai pride98.” This phenomenon has guaranteed a certain image of 1968 and propagated

a perception of its impact on French society that has secured les événements a

prominent place in the hearts and minds of the French. The same cannot be said for

those that led the student movement of 1968 in Belfast. Such was the fallout of the

1968/69 period that any personal association with the PD created havoc with personal

security and potential career prospects99. Therefore, unlike the French events which,

almost immediately, were commemorated, celebrated and rendered mythical – largely

by their very participants – the history of the PD has not been claimed with the same

enthusiasm. This attitude is directly linked to the third and final reason that lies at the


62

heart of why NI is so often absent from the long list of nations affected by the common,

global 1968 revolt.

25 The events of 1968 are considered as a positive moment in the post WWII development

of French society. This can be demonstrated in a number of ways. Firstly, a survey

carried out in 2003/4 amongst French students demonstrated how almost three-

quarters of young French people questioned believed 1968 to have been a positive

moment for French society100. Furthermore, during the 2007 Presidential election

campaign, the future President Nicolas Sarkozy attacked the impact of 1968 on French

society and declared his desire to have its influence liquidated once and for all101. The

reaction to this attack speaks volumes for the opposition to the notion that 1968 was

anything other than a positive moment102. A 2008 poll103 confirmed the results as borne

out by the 2003/4 survey as well as highlighting the widespread opposition (74% of

those questioned) to the anti-’68 stance propagated by the President. It is clear then

that the events of 1968 in France are considered as a positive moment, something to be

celebrated and commemorated; a situation facilitated by the predominance of

participants who are naturally keen to frame their actions positively, thus perpetuating

the sanguine image.

26 In many respects it is this image of a positive moment that is dominant, not only in

France but also across Europe and the world104. While much debate continues over the

specific consequences of 1968 globally and on a national level, the overriding

perception is one that holds it in a positive light as a watershed that helped move

things forward. Once again however, and very significantly, this model is inapplicable

to the case of Northern Ireland. The year 1968 marks the beginning of the “Troubles”,

i.e., over 30 years of sectarian violence that would so entrench religious divides that

generations of peace building will be required before any genuine talk of normalcy can

be taken seriously. With such a difference between the post-68 years it can be of no

surprise that it is considered in a different light. The enthusiasm with which the French

events have been and continue to be fought over has, not surprisingly, been absent in

the case of Northern Ireland where there has been a distinct lack of the

“commemorative industry” so prevalent in France105. There were no noteworthy 10th,

20th or 30th anniversary celebrations. The context in Northern Ireland was so

particular that inevitably so too were the consequences. The very dark, depressing and

gloomy post-68 trajectory of Northern Ireland is in such stark contrast to the positive,

modernising, liberating representation of the post-68 era on a European level (as

typified by France) that it really does not come as any surprise that Northern Ireland

has been left on the sidelines of the European collective memory of 1968.

Conclusion

27 Nevertheless, as with most things in Northern Ireland in recent times, change appears

to be on the horizon. The success of the NI peace process has altered how the past is

perceived. Last year “The 40th anniversary” of 1968 in Northern Ireland was the focus

of a series of commemorative events106. There was even a clamour amongst the various

political parties to appropriate the memory of 1968. It could be argued that those

involved (principally the SDLP and Sinn Fein) hardly represent Northern Ireland’s

soixante-huitards and that their involvement was one based on the gleaning some

political capital. Nevertheless, the shift has been significant. The fact that genuine


63

participants now feel capable of coming forward and telling the story of Northern

Ireland’s 1968 provides the grounds for the history and memory of the events to be

brought in line with the broader European perspective. With peace now very much a

reality, 1968 can and will be considered in a more positive light, as an important

turning point and therefore able to fit the mould of the European 1968. This has been

reflected in the beginning of academic interest in this question with conference papers

and texts looking at NI 68 from a global perspective107.

28 The contextual changes that will perhaps assist in ushering the Belfast 1968 into the

stable of its European counterparts of the same year are only confirming a reality; that

what happened in Northern Ireland in 1968 should be considered as part of the global

revolt of that year. As was the case in France and around the world, Northern Ireland’s

68 emerged from a sector of the population’s youth no longer willing to accept the

status quo. It shared the forms of action, language and systems of organisation with key

participants clearly drawing inspiration from similar type revolts of that year. Finally,

it was to have a considerable impact over the years that followed and as pointed out by

the “1968 Commemoration Committee”, “Such was the importance of these events, and

what they led to, that it is appropriate and even necessary, 40 years later, to

commemorate them.” While the consequences were very different and in many

respects explain why the memory has been framed otherwise and pushed in an

alternative direction to that of the common narrative, what happened between October

1968 and February 1969 in Northern Ireland not only fits the ’68 mould, in many

respects it exemplifies it. As Eamonn McCann put it, “It is possible to argue that it was

only in Northern Ireland that the events of 1968 left an indelible mark on events which

continue to be played out 40 years later108”.

NOTES

1. Several texts deal with the European/international dimension of 1968. See for

example Ronald Fraser, 1968, a student generation in revolt, London, Chatto and Walls,

1988; Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68, Rebellion in Western Europe and North America,

1956-76, Oxford, OUP, 2008.

2. For example, in France two documentaries were released in 2008 examining the

international element of 1968: Michèle Dominici, “1968 un monde en révoltes”, France

Télévision, 2008; and Patrick Rotman, “’68”, France 2, 2008. Also, several conferences

have been held to commemorate this 40th anniversary that have focussed on the global

perspective of 1968. For example, Memories of 1968: International Perspectives, University

of Leeds, 17-18 April 2008 and Les années 68: une contestation mondialisée, Colloque

international, Nanterre, 19-20 March 2008.

3. As the above documentaries and conference programmes reveal, many countries

were affected by the wave of protest including, Brazil, Mexico, the US, France, Italy,

Germany, Czechoslovakia, Japan, China and many more.

4. S. O’Hagan, “Everyone to the barricades”, The Observer, January 20, 2008.


64

5. One only has to consider the predominance of French iconography in how this year

is portrayed. For example, photographs of the Parisian revolt together with reference

to the famous utopian slogans are prominent in how the British media depict 1968. Cf.

for example, Tariq Ali, “Where has all the rage gone? ”, The Guardian, March 22, 2008;

Robert Gildea, “1968 in 2008”, History Today, May, 2008, p. 22-25; Gerard DeGroot,

“Street-fighting men”, History Today, May, 2008, p. 26-33.

6. Robert Gildea, “1968 in 2008”, History Today, May, 2008, p. 22.

7. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory. Volume 1, Conflicts and divisions, New York, Columbia

University Press, 1996, p. 609-37.

8. As is argued in Kristin Ross, Mai 68 et ses vies ultérieures (Paris, Complexe, 2002), and

Isabelle Sommier, “Mai 68: sous les pavés d’une page officielle” (Sociétés Contemporaines,

no. 20, 1994, p. 63), a certain, narrow “official” history of mai 68 has come to dominate

how the events are portrayed and thus perceived in France.

9. Cf. for example J. Harris, “I wasn’t born in 1968 – but I yearn for its dizzying spirit”,

The Guardian, March 21, 2008.

10. Chris Reynolds, “Understanding 1968: The Case of Brest”, Modern and Contemporary

France, Vol. 16, no. 2, 2008, p. 209-222; Chris Reynolds, “May 68: A Contested History”,

Sens Public, 26 October 2007, [http://www.sens-public.org/spip.php?article472], p. 18.

11. There exists an abundance of chronological accounts of the French events. For

example, Christine Fauré, Mai 68 jour et nuit, Paris, Gallimard, 1998; Mavis Gallant,

Chroniques de Mai 68, Paris, Rivages, 1998; Michel Gomez, Mai 68 au jour le jour, Paris,

L’Esprit frappeur, 1998; Marie-Claire Lavabre, and Henry Rey, Les Mouvements de 1968,

Firenze, Casterman, 1998; Annie Percheron, “Les événements de mai-juin 1968”; Revue

politique et parlementaire, no. 102, 1999-2000; Antoine Prost, “Les grèves de mai-juin

1968”, L’Histoire, n° 110, April 1988, p. 34-47; Laurent Joffrin, Mai 68: Histoire des

événements, Paris, Points, 2008.

12. Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution. Parisian Students and Workers in 1968, New

York, Berghan, 2004, p. 91-113.

13. Laurent Joffrin, Histoire des événements, p. 129-144.

14. Daniel Singer, Prelude to a Revolution, London, Jonathan Cape, 1970, p. 147-51.

15. Roger Martelli, Mai 68, Paris: Messidor, 1988, p. 102.

16. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération. 1. Les Années de rêve, Paris, Seuil, 1987,

p. 87; Chris Reynolds, “May 68: A Contested History”, p. 14-16.

17. Laurent Joffrin, Histoire des événements, p. 259.

18. Chris Reynolds, “May 68: A Contested History”, p. 16-17.

19. Patrick Rotman, Mai 68 raconté à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vécu, Paris, Seuil, 2008, p. 115.

20. Chris Reynolds, “May 68: A Contested History”, p. 16.

21. Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand et al, Les Années 68: Le temps de la Contestation, Paris,

Complexe, 2000.

22. Stefan Collini, “From Deference to Diversity,” Common Reading/ Critics, Historians,

Publics, Oxford, OUP, 2008, p. 270.

23. Ibid, p. 273.

24. Sabine Wichert, Northern Ireland since 1945, London, Longman, 1991, p. 109.


65

25. Jean-François Levy, “La People’s Democracy”, Les Temps Modernes, no. 311, 1972,

p. 2009-2047. See Bernadette Devlin’s account of the personal impact participation in

this march, The Price of my Soul, London, Pan, 1969, p. 99.

26. Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s 68. Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the

Troubles, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007, p. 198.

27. Bernadette Devlin, The Price of my Soul, p. 204. There were initially six basic

demands: One man, one vote; Fair (electoral) boundaries; Houses on Need; Jobs on Merit

Free Speech; and the Repeal of the Special Powers Act.

28. Ibid, p. 108. An example of such action was the 24 October (United Nations Day)

occupation of the entrance hall to Stormont (the NI parliament). The PD carried out a

sit down protest and refused to move until all MPs signed a statement declaring their

support for the introduction of a human rights bill.

29. Ibid., p. 120.

30. Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s 68, p. 204.

31. Ibid., p.190-191; Bob Purdie, Politics in the Streets: the origins of the civil rights movement

in Northern Ireland, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1990, p. 212-213.


33. Bernadette Devlin, The Price of my Soul, p. 115.

34. Paul Arthur, The People’s Democracy 1968-73, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1974, p. 26.

35. Simon Prince, “The Global Revolt of 1968 and Northern Ireland”, The Historical

Journal, 49:3, 2006, p. 851-875 (p. 873).

36. Bowes Eagan and Vincent McCormack, Burntollet, London, LRS, 1969.

37. Bernadette Devlin, The Price of my Soul, p. 125-145; The Cameron report into

Disturbances in Northern Ireland held “an enquiry into and report upon the course of

events leading to and the immediate causes and nature of the violence and civil

disturbance in Northern Ireland on and since 5th October 1968 and to assess the

composition, conduct and aims of those bodies involved in the current agitation and

any incidents arising out of it.” (Cameron Report, Disturbances in Northern Ireland. Report

of the Commission appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland, September 1968, Chapter 9,

paragraph 100).

38. Paul Arthur, Interview with author, 22 March, 2008.

39. Sabine Wichert, Northern Ireland since 1945, p. 110. It is interesting to note that

Michael Farrell later referred to this election as a “Gaullist type strategy on the part of

O’Neill” in Liam Baxter et al., “Discussion on the Strategy of People’s Democracy”, New

Left Review I/55, 1969, p. 3-19 (p. 9).

40. Simon Prince, “The Global Revolt of 1968”, p. 874.

41. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, 1968 in Europe. A History of Protest and Activism,

New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

42. Henri Weber, Faut-il liquider Mai 68? Essai sur les interprétations des ‘événements’, Paris,

Seuil, 2008, p. 37-41.

43. Simon Prince, “The Global Revolt of 1968”, p. 867.

44. Eamon McCann, War and an Irish Town, London, Penguin, 1974, p. 43.

45. Sabine Wichert, Northern Ireland since 1945, p. 110.


66

46. Peter Gibbon, “The Dialectic of Religion and Class in Ulster”, New Left Review, no. 55,

1969, p 20-41; p. 32-33.

47. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland, London,

Longman, 1997, p. 29-30.

48. Sabine Wichert, Northern Ireland since 1945, p. 87-92.

49. Paul Arthur, interview.

50. Maurice Agulhon et al, La France de 1940 à nos jours, Paris, Nathan/HER, 2001, p. 233.

51. Alain Touraine, Le Mouvement de mai ou le communisme utopique, Paris, Seuil, 1968,

p. 84.

52. Antoine Prost, “1968: mort et naissance de l’université française,” in Vingtième

Siècle, no. 23, 1989, p. 62.

53. Paul Arthur, The People’s Democracy, p. 8.

54. Peter Gibbon, “The Dialectic of Religion and Class in Ulster,” p. 33-34.

55. Ibid., p. 34.

56. Michael Farrell quoted in Baxter et al., “Discussion on the Strategy of the People’s

Democracy”, p. 4.

57. Jean-François Levy, “La People’s Democracy”, p. 2011.

58. Paul Arthur, The People’s Democracy, p. 20-21.


60. Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible, Paris, La Découverte, 1998, p. 129.


62. McCann, War and an Irish town, p. 50; Paul Arthur, and Keith Jeffrey, Northern Ireland

since 1968, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988, p. 6.

63. Paul Arthur, Interview.

64. Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s 68, p. 148-149.

65. Niall O’ Dochataigh, “Northern Ireland”, in Klimke and Scharloth, 1968 in Europe, p.

143-144.

66. Danielle Tartakowsky, Le Pouvoir est dans la rue, Paris, Aubier, 1998.

67. Simon Prince, “The Global Revolt of 1968”, p. 872-873.


69. Sommier, “Mai 68: Sous les pavés”, p. 67.

70. Atelier Populaire, Posters from the revolution, London, Dobson, 1969; Ross, Mai 68 et ses

vies ultérieures; Manus McGrogan, “Art on the Street”, History Today, May 2008, p. 34-36;

Philippe Artières, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 68, Une Histoire Collective [1962-1981],

Paris, La Découverte, p. 276-281. Examples of these posters can be found at [http://

achard.info/mai].

71. Examples of PD posters can be found on the following websites; [ http://

www.museumoffreederry.org/index02.html] and [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/index.html]. There is

equally an impressive collection in the Linen Hall Street Library, Belfast.

72. Mulheron, Interview with author, 4 October, 2008.

73. Richard Johnson, The French Communist Party Versus the Students: Revolutionary Politics

in May-June 1968, Yale, Yale University Press, 1972.


67

74. Jean-François Levy, “La People’s Democracy”, p. 2011.


76. Hamon and Rotman, Génération. 1, p. 514-515.

77. Jean-François Sirinelli, Mai 68. L’événement Janus, Paris, Fayard, 2008, p. 263-267.

78. Laurent Joffrin, Histoire des événements, p. 350-353.

79. Bernadette Devlin, The Price of my Soul, p. 114-115.


81. Jacques Foccart, Le Général en Mai: Journal de l’Elysée – II. 1968-1969, Paris, Fayard/

Jeune Afrique, 1998, p. 144-155.

82. Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s 68, p. 191-192.

83. Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution, p. 187-188.

84. Roger Martelli, Mai 68, p. 151-152.

85. Terence O’Neill quoted in Paul Arthur, The People’s Democracy, p. 29.

86. Bernadette Devlin, The Price of my Soul, p. 107; Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible,

p. 125.

87. Paul Arthur, The People’s Democracy, p. 20.

88. Term used by de Gaulle to describe the 1968 events during an interview with Michel

Droit (7 July 1968).

89. Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. 68 Une Histoire Collective

[1962-1981], Paris, La Découverte, p. 7.


91. Eamon McCann, Interview with author, 21 March, 2008.


93. Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, London, Penguin, 1988, p. 57.


95. N. Weill, “Les années 1968 sans folklore ni pavés”, Le Monde, February 26, 2008.

96. Gilles Bousquet, “Où en est-on de mai 68? ”, Contemporary French Civilisation, no.1,

1992, p. 70.

97. One only has to consider the number of 40th anniversary texts authored by the now

famous representatives of this generation such as Gérard Filoche, Mai 68, Histoire sans

fin. Liquider mai 68? Même pas en rêve !, Paris, Jean-Claude Gawsewitch, 2007; Henri

Weber, Faut-il liquider Mai 68?; Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Forget 68, Paris, Editions de l’Aube,

2008; Rotman, Mai 68 raconté à ceux qui ne l’ont pas vécu; Alain Geismar, Mon Mai 68, Paris,

Perrin, 2008. Notable also is the monopolisation of television coverage by a handful of

actors who have come to dominate the image of these events.

98. Jean-Pierre Rioux, “L’événement-mémoire. Quarante ans de commémorations”, Le

Débat, no 149, March-April 2008, p. 4-19 (p. 15).

99. Arthur, Interview.

100. Chris Reynolds, “Current attitudes to the ‘Events’ of 1968: A Questionnaire”, French

Studies Bulletin, no. 98, 2006, p. 8-12.

101. D. Dhombres, “Une victime cachée de Mai-68”, Le Monde, May 2, 2008.


68

102. Sarkozy’s controversial speech sparked a reaction that will almost certainly

guarantee this decennial commemoration as the most productive thus far, E.

Aeschimann, “Oui, Mai”, Libération, February 1, 2008. For example, cf. Filoche, Mai 68,

Histoire sans fin; Raphaël Glucksmann, and André Glucksmann, Mai 68 expliqué à Sarkozy,

Paris, Denoël, 2008; Weber, Faut-il liquider Mai 68

103. M-F. Etchegoin and S. Courage, “Les Français votent 68”, Le Nouvel Observateur,

March 27-April 2, 2008, p. 12-16. CSA poll conducted in conjunction with Le Nouvel

Observateur.

104. Gérard DeGroot, “Street-Fighting Men”, p. 26.

105. Keith Reader, “Joyeux anniversaire! The May 68 industry”, Modern and Contemporary

France, vol. 8, no. 2, 2002, p. 249-252.

106. L. Trainor, “Veterans of civil rights campaign launch 40th anniversary events,”

The Irish News, March 28, 2008. See [http://www.civilrights1968.com/index.html] for details.

107. For example, Manus McGrogan gave a paper which focused on NI in 1968 at the Les

années 68 conference on Nanterre in March 2008 and Simon Prince’s 2007 text is a vital

step towards framing events in NI within the global context.

108. McCann, Interview.

ABSTRACTS

1968 is widely recognised as a year that saw great upheaval around the world. Whether in the

USA, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany or Japan, governments were faced with a tide of revolts and

insurrections of varying degrees and forms. It is clear that the French “événements” were, to a

certain degree, inspired and influenced by what was happening elsewhere, perhaps explaining

why so many similarities can be found on an international scale. Amongst those nations that

experienced 1968 as a turning point in their development is Northern Ireland. This paper,

through a comparison with the French events of 1968, will contend that Northern Ireland should

be included in the list of countries that make up this international upheaval. Drawing on archival

research, existing literature and in particular interviews with some of the major protagonists in

the NI movement, it will investigate to what extent the international malaise and in particular

the upheaval in France influenced events in Northern Ireland. Focussing on the student-based

organisation The People’s Democracy, it will be argued that the French May/June 1968 had some

significant influence on an organisation whose protest over the 1968-69 period was to prove

fundamental in the ensuing Northern Ireland Troubles.

1968 est généralement considérée comme une année qui a vu naître des insurrections

importantes partout dans le monde. Que ce soit aux Etats-Unis, en Italie, en Allemagne ou au

Japon, les gouvernements ont été confrontés à une vague de révoltes diverses et variées. Il est

clair que les « évenéments » en France ont été inspirés et influencés par ce qui se passait ailleurs

et ceci explique peut-être pourquoi on trouve tant de similarités à l’échelle internationale. Parmi

les nations qui ont connu un tournant politique important en 1968, se trouve l’Irlande du Nord.

Cet article, à travers une comparaison avec les événements français, avance l’idée que l’Irlande


69

du Nord devrait faire partie de la liste des pays qui ont contribué à cette révolte globale. Utilisant

des archives, la recherche existante et en particulier des entretiens avec un bon nombre

d’acteurs principaux du mouvement irlandais, il examinera à quel point le malaise international,

et plus particulièrement la révolte française a influencé ce qui s’est passé en Irlande du Nord. Se

concentrant sur l’organisation étudiante The People’s Democracy, cet article suggère que mai-juin

68 en France a été une influence fondamentale pour un mouvement qui, à travers ses actions

pendant la période 1968-69, allait être très important lors des « Troubles » qui ont suivi.

INDEX

Keywords: Franco-Irish relations, Northern Ireland - conflict, public debate, activism, trauma

Mots-clés: relations franco-irlandaises, Irlande du Nord - conflit, débat public, militantisme,

trauma

AUTHOR

CHRIS REYNOLDS

Nottingham Trent University


70

Vérité et justice comme remèdes autrauma : Bloody Sunday et l’enquêteSavilleCharlotte Barcat

1 Bloody Sunday s’apparente à un traumatisme à plusieurs niveaux : si l’on comprend le

trauma comme une blessure aux effets durables, on peut considérer qu’il fut d’abord

infligé, bien sûr, aux personnes directement touchées par le drame : aux blessés, aux

familles des victimes, et aux témoins ; mais également de façon plus abstraite, au

niveau de la mémoire collective, et en particulier de la perception du gouvernement

par la communauté nationaliste.

2 Comme le souligne Eamonn McCann, les circonstances très particulières dans lesquelles

s’est déroulé Bloody Sunday lui ont conféré un potentiel traumatique très important :

La plupart des homicides dans le Nord, comme toujours dans les conflits de cegenre, se produisaient avec la rapidité de l’éclair, dans des rues isolées ou en pleinenuit, généralement lors d’une embuscade furtive ou de l’explosion d’une bombedissimulée. Bloody Sunday s’est déroulé sur une période de peut-être dix minutes,dans une zone urbanisée en plein jour et dans des circonstances où des milliersd’amis et de voisins de victimes étaient massés dans les environs immédiats1.

3 En effet, la communauté des habitants du Bogside étant très soudée et comprenant

beaucoup de familles nombreuses, la mort de treize personnes affecta directement un

très grand nombre de gens. À ce groupe, il faut également ajouter les blessés et les

personnes qui faisaient partie des manifestants, ou habitaient dans les immeubles

alentour, tous susceptibles d’avoir subi un traumatisme. La persistance du trauma était

d’autre part favorisée par le fait que les événements s’étaient déroulés dans un endroit

qui faisait partie de la vie quotidienne des habitants du Bogside : beaucoup d’entre eux

habitaient les Rossville Flats, ces grands immeubles aujourd’hui détruits, aux pieds

desquels avait eu lieu la fusillade. Dans son article sur le lien entre trauma et lieux

géographiques, l’historien Graham Dawson insiste sur cet aspect :

Les sites de cet événement atroce sont – ou étaient – des lieux géographiques réelsdu Bogside, où la vie de tous les jours s’était déroulée avant, et continuait à sedérouler après Bloody Sunday. Après ces événements, cependant, ces endroits


71

devinrent également – et sont restés – des sites de mémoire et de traumatisme dansun paysage culturel transformé2.

4 Bloody Sunday peut donc être vu comme un événement qui a traumatisé une

communauté toute entière, mais il a aussi infligé un traumatisme au niveau de la

mémoire collective, et en particulier de la confiance en l’État du côté de la communauté

nationaliste, qui était déjà mal intégrée dans l’État nord-irlandais. Le juriste Dermot

Walsh affirme :

Bloody Sunday peut être cité, avec l’internement et les grèves de la faim dans les H-blocks, comme un des événements qui a le plus contribué à provoquer l’aliénationdes nationalistes vis-à-vis de l’État d’Irlande du Nord3.

5 Plusieurs témoignages montrent comment les réactions d’horreur devant Bloody Sunday

ont influencé la perception identitaire des nationalistes, en renforçant encore l’image

d’une minorité en lutte contre un État britannique illégitime. Graham Dawson résume

le phénomène en parlant de « cassure identitaire », et explique :

Les catholiques de Derry s’éloignèrent d’une identification souvent ambivalenteavec la Grande-Bretagne pour aller vers une identification qui se construisait enopposition ouverte avec elle, en tant que cibles et victimes irlandaises de lapuissance militaire britannique ; ce qui eut pour effet de renforcer le sentimentd’appartenance à une identité nationale irlandaise et de causer l’aliénation vis-à-visdes fondations de l’État britannique en Irlande du Nord4.

6 Il cite comme exemple les propos de Nigel Cooke, qui avait participé à la manifestation

pour les droits civiques le jour de Bloody Sunday alors qu’il était adolescent :

Bloody Sunday eut un impact très profond sur moi […]. S’il y eut un moment décisifoù j’ai cessé de me penser comme étant plus ou moins britannique, ce fut celui-là.Parce que j’ai immédiatement compris qu’une telle atrocité n’aurait jamais pu êtreenvisagée ailleurs en Grande-Bretagne. Des citoyens anglais, gallois ou écossaisn’auraient jamais pu être classés sans distinction parmi les “ennemis” de l’arméebritannique. Seul les Irlandais pouvaient tenir ce rôle5.

7 On retrouve les mêmes thèmes de la perte de toute forme d’identification à l’État

britannique et de renforcement d’une identité irlandaise construite en opposition à cet

État chez Don Mullan, témoin de Bloody Sunday devenu activiste dans le domaine de

l’humanitaire et auteur du livre Eyewitness Bloody Sunday : The Truth :

Bloody Sunday fut le début de la fin du colonialisme britannique dans mon cœur etdans mon âme. […] Le moindre espoir d’acheter ma loyauté à la couronnebritannique par des réformes superficielles mourut ce jour-là. Mon identité devinttrès clairement définie. Je suis Irlandais, pas Nord-irlandais. La partition a échouépour toujours6.

8 L’implication des forces de l’État, institution qui est censée protéger ses citoyens, était

sans aucun doute l’un des facteurs qui donna à cet événement un tel potentiel

traumatique. L’incapacité de l’appareil d’État à répondre à la demande de justice dans

les mois qui suivirent fut tout aussi importante : le rapport Widgery fut vécu comme un

second traumatisme.

9 L’enquête Widgery fut établie dès le 1er février et les audiences eurent lieu à Coleraine

entre le 14 février et le 20 mars. Le choix de Coleraine était déjà, en soi, une

maladresse : cette petite ville située au Nord de Derry était connue pour sa majorité

unioniste, ce qui ne pouvait manquer de donner aux témoins issus de la communauté

nationaliste l’impression d’un manque d’objectivité. Le rapport qui fut publié le 18 avril

ne fit que confirmer leurs craintes : bien qu’admettant qu’il n’y avait aucune preuve

que les personnes tuées par les soldats le 30 janvier avaient manipulé des armes à feu


72

ou des bombes, Widgery laissait planer le doute en précisant que de « forts soupçons7 »

subsistaient concernant certains d’entre eux. Plus important encore, la conclusion de

son rapport faisait porter à NICRA la plus grande part de responsabilité dans la

tragédie, affirmant :

Il n’y aurait pas eu de morts à Londonderry le 30 janvier si ceux qui avaientorganisé la manifestation illégale n’avaient pas ce faisant créé une situationextrêmement dangereuse dans laquelle un affrontement entre les manifestants etles forces de sécurité était presque inévitable8.

10 Le rapport réussit en partie à apaiser les esprits, du moins au sein de l’opinion publique

britannique9, mais l’enquête Widgery fut vite baptisée le « Widgery Whitewash » par ceux

qui contestaient cette version officielle, le processus tout entier étant perçu comme une

tentative de « blanchir » l’armée de la part du gouvernement. Les nombreux livres de

témoignages publiés dans les années 1990 montrent que les familles des victimes

considèrent souvent le rapport Widgery comme une « seconde mort » pour leurs

proches, ou comme « l’insulte ultime » de la part du gouvernement10. Joelle Gartner cite

les propos d’un(e) des proches des victimes, qui reste anonyme, concernant les effets

du rapport Widgery sur ceux qui avaient encore foi en l’État :

Une onde de choc a traversé la ville le jour où le rapport Widgery a été publié, unevéritable onde de choc. Le refus d’admettre la vérité a fait en réalité plus de mal auniveau psychologique […] que les morts elles-mêmes, parce que naïvement, dans unsens, nous attendions mieux11.

11 Les membres des familles des victimes évoquent souvent le rapport en des termes qui

évoquent le meurtre, l’assassinat, de la vérité ou de la justice. John Kelly, à la tête de la

Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign (BSJC), dit avoir toujours répété que « la quinzième

victime de Bloody Sunday a été la vérité12 ». Don Mullan, quant à lui, parle « d’assassinat

de la justice », et affirme : « Les Paras avaient assassiné des civils irlandais qui n’étaient

pas armés ; Lord Widgery a assassiné la vérité13. »

12 Dans les années qui suivirent, la mémoire de Bloody Sunday fut entretenue notamment

grâce à la marche de commémoration, qui a lieu chaque année depuis 1972, puis grâce à

un certain nombre d’organisations fondées par des familles de victimes ou des

activistes des droits de l’Homme. La Bloody Sunday Initiative fut fondée en 1989 : cette

association de tradition nationaliste militait en faveur de la réconciliation, ainsi que

d’une nouvelle enquête sur Bloody Sunday. En avril 1992, des proches des victimes

s’associèrent pour créer la BSJC, avec trois objectifs : une reconnaissance publique et

sans équivoque par le gouvernement britannique de l’innocence des victimes de Bloody

Sunday, une répudiation publique du rapport Widgery, et des poursuites judiciaires.

13 Malgré la redécouverte dans les années 1990 de nombreux documents ignorés par la

première enquête, et la publication de plusieurs ouvrages contestant la version des faits

de Widgery, le gouvernement conservateur de John Major refusa systématiquement

l’idée d’une nouvelle enquête. Le sujet fut évoqué à plusieurs reprises durant les débats

parlementaires14, avec à chaque fois une réponse similaire : le gouvernement estimait

qu’il n’y avait « à sa connaissance aucune raison » de rouvrir l’enquête, réaffirmait sa

confiance dans le rapport Widgery, et ajoutait qu’il était inutile de « ressasser de vieux

problèmes15 ».

14 Le changement de gouvernement avec l’arrivée des travaillistes sous Tony Blair en

mai 1997 permit d’accélérer considérablement le processus. Sous la pression du

gouvernement irlandais de Bertie Ahern, qui avait fait connaître son intention de

publier un rapport critiquant l’enquête Widgery à la lumière des nouveaux éléments


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récemment découverts, Tony Blair fit le 29 janvier 1998 une déclaration à la Chambre

des Communes qui annonçait l’établissement d’une nouvelle enquête sur Bloody Sunday.

Celle-ci, tout comme l’enquête Widgery, serait régie par le Tribunal of Inquiry (Evidence)

Act de 1921, et serait confiée à Lord Saville, associé à deux juges venus de pays du

Commonwealth.

15 Dans le contexte d’une enquête sur un événement tel que Bloody Sunday, montrer que

l’on reconnaît l’expérience traumatisante vécue par les victimes et les témoins est

fondamental. Pour David A. Crocker, auteur d’un article intitulé « Truth Commissions,

Transitional Justice, and Civil Society », cet aspect est indispensable à toute transition :

[…] on doit offrir aux victimes ou à leurs familles une tribune pour qu’ils racontentleur histoire et que leur témoignage soit reconnu publiquement. Quand les victimessont en mesure de donner leur version des événements et reçoivent de la sympathiepour leurs souffrances, elles sont respectées en tant que personnes et sont traitéesavec dignité plutôt que – comme c’était le cas auparavant – avec mépris16.

16 L’utilité d’une enquête publique telle que l’enquête Widgery est de fournir une telle

tribune. Or, la possibilité de « raconter leur histoire » est précisément ce qui a été

refusé à beaucoup de personnes affectées par Bloody Sunday lors de cette première

enquête. Un des principaux reproches faits à Widgery concerne en effet sa décision de

ne pas tenir compte de certains témoignages, ainsi que sa propension à donner plus de

crédit à la parole des soldats qu’à celle des témoins civils. Kay Duddy fait allusion à ce

sentiment de rejet : « Le tribunal Widgery a tellement limité le nombre de témoins que

les gens n’ont pas eu la chance, l’occasion de s’exprimer devant le tribunal pour

raconter ce qu’ils avaient vu17. » On peut remarquer qu’il utilise parfois en citant

certain témoins civils des guillemets, ou des formules comme « il était convaincu

que… » qui suggèrent une certaine distanciation, voire l’incrédulité, ce qu’il ne fait pas

lorsqu’il rapporte les témoignages des soldats. On trouve un exemple de cela dans son

résumé des propos du prêtre Edward Daly : « Le père Daly a continué de courir et après

quelques mètres il a entendu “une fusillade”, “un très grand nombre de coups de feu”

[…]. Il était convaincu que tous les tirs venaient de derrière et pensait que le reste de la

foule croyait aussi que c’était le cas18. » Au contraire, il accepte souvent de façon assez

arbitraire les justifications des soldats : « Il n’y a aucune raison de supposer que les

soldats auraient ouvert le feu s’ils n’avaient pas d’abord été la cible de tirs19. » Peter

Pringle, journaliste, dénonce un des arguments utilisés pendant l’enquête Widgery dans

son traitement de certains témoignages de civils :

Widgery a dit que le témoignage des civils, qui n’avaient pas vu de bombes à clous,ne constituait que des témoignages « négatifs », et qu’on ne peut pas prouver par lanégative. Mais, comme l’a écrit Bryan McMahon dans sa critique de Widgery en1974, « comment les civils pouvaient-ils prouver qu’il n’y avait pas de bombesautrement qu’en déclarant qu’ils n’en avaient pas vu 20? »

17 Le fait que tant de témoignages, de blessés mais aussi de nombreux civils souhaitant

collaborer aient été ignorés ou discrédités donnèrent à la communauté traumatisée

l’impression que ses récits, ses « vérités », n’avaient pas été pris en compte par le

tribunal.

18 Cela eut pour conséquence l’apparition d’une mémoire parallèle, non-officielle, de

Bloody Sunday. Les livres de témoignages écrits à partir des années 1990 en sont un

exemple : Trisha Ziff, éditrice du livre qui porte le nom de Hidden Truths, explique qu’en

publiant ce recueil de témoignages et de photographies, elle participe au « processus de

guérison21 », reprenant l’image d’un trauma ou d’une blessure à soigner. Ce livre fut


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réalisé à partir d’une exposition photographique éponyme, dont Trisha Ziff disait en

2002 : « L’œil de la caméra a tout saisi. […] Les gens devaient voir Bloody Sunday. Tout

voir. Et c’est ce que nous avons ici. Des vérités qui ne sont plus cachées22. » Cet

insistance sur la « vérité » du document photographique et du témoignage, deux types

de représentation du passé qui apparaissent comme « brutes », sans médiation, est

assez typique de la mémoire non-officielle de Bloody Sunday. On la retrouve dans le livre

de Don Mullan, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday : The Truth, ainsi que dans les livres d’Eamonn

McCann, Bloody Sunday in Derry : What Really Happened et The Bloody Sunday Inquiry: The

Families Speak Out. Le livre de Don Mullan, publié en 1997, reprenait des centaines de

témoignages recueillis après Bloody Sunday par NICRA, que Widgery avait refusé de

considérer en arguant du fait qu’ils avaient été soumis trop tard et n’apportaient aucun

élément nouveau23. Mullan redécouvrit fin 1995 ces témoignages, qui contenaient en

réalité des éléments absents du rapport, susceptibles de remettre en cause l’analyse de

Widgery, et décida de les publier.

19 Tous ces ouvrages ont en commun l’utilisation extensive de témoignages cités

directement, l’auteur se contentant souvent d’écrire l’introduction ou quelques

chapitres intercalaires, sans ajouter de commentaires dans les parties consacrées aux

propos des personnes interrogées. Ils ont également en commun une revendication de

vérité : on voit de par leurs titres qu’ils envisagent leurs ouvrages comme des « livres-

révélations », qui dévoilent la vérité que la version officielle aurait cachée ou déformée.

Là où les représentants de l’État inspirent méfiance, les « gens de la rue », les habitants

de Derry, sont vus comme les gardiens d’une vérité authentique. Quelles que soient les

réserves que l’on puisse avoir vis-à-vis de cette idéalisation du témoignage, il est

certain que la réintégration dans la version officielle de tous ces « fragments de

vérité », auparavant rejetés et relégués à une position de mémoire dissidente, est un

des objectifs principaux de l’enquête Saville, afin d’atténuer le sentiment d’injustice

ressenti par la communauté du Bogside et par tous ceux qui s’identifient à leur

expérience.

20 Le caractère officiel du processus est donc fondamental : le besoin de « raconter ses

histoires » est aussi un besoin de reconnaissance. Une des questions qui a suscité des

interrogations concernait la possibilité pour le gouvernement britannique de régler le

problème en présentant des excuses, comme l’a fait Tony Blair concernant la mauvaise

gestion de la « Grande Famine » de 1845-1849 par l’État britannique24. Jonathan Powell,

qui dévoile dans son livre Great Hatred, Little Room : Making Peace in Northern Ireland les

coulisses du processus de paix auquel il a participé en tant que chef de cabinet de Tony

Blair, raconte :

Le problème a été soulevé début 1998, lorsque Mo [Mowlam, secrétaire d’état àl’Irlande du Nord] a écrit à Tony au sujet de la nécessité d’une enquête. Tony et moipensions tous les deux que des excuses seraient suffisantes. Mais les Irlandais nousavaient dit que des excuses ne suffiraient pas et qu’il faudrait mettre en place uneenquête indépendante25.

21 Du côté des familles, cette idée de présenter des excuses était plutôt ressentie comme

une expression de mépris. Eileen Greene, veuve de Paddy Doherty, affirmait à Joanne

O’Brien :

Nous ne cherchons pas à obtenir des excuses. On ne s’excuse que lorsqu’on a faitquelque chose de mal, et selon le gouvernement britannique, ça n’était pas le cas.[…] Nous méritons plus que ça. Aux yeux de certains, nos proches sont toujours destireurs ou des lanceurs de bombes26.


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22 Joelle Gartner, qui a interrogé plusieurs membres des familles à ce sujet, affirme : « Les

gens ont besoin de vérité, pas d’excuses, [qui] seraient vues comme une insulte et une

tentative de désamorcer la demande de vérité27 ». Les excuses peuvent en effet être

perçues comme une solution facile, une sorte de « politique du geste » qui permet de se

débarrasser d’un problème à peu de frais28. Par contraste, le fait de rouvrir une enquête

similaire à la première est très significatif : bien que le gouvernement britannique ait

refusé de la représenter comme telle, l’enquête Saville est bien une remise en cause de

l’enquête Widgery, ce qui signifie que cette dernière a été désavouée par le mécanisme

même qui l’avait engendrée.

23 Le rapport Saville fut finalement publié le 15 juin 2010, après une très longue attente. Il

qualifiait « d’injustifiable » la décision des soldats de tirer à balles réelles, exonérait

NICRA de toute responsabilité et affirmait qu’aucune des victimes n’était engagée dans

une activité justifiant l’utilisation d’armes à feu contre elle par les soldats29. Le même

jour, le premier ministre conservateur David Cameron fit un discours dans lequel il

présentait ses excuses au nom du gouvernement britannique30. L’accueil globalement

positif que reçurent ces excuses ne contredit cependant pas les déclarations

antérieures des membres des familles : en effet, les excuses n’ont été qu’une sorte

d’épilogue à l’enquête, et non une solution de remplacement comme il en avait été

question sous le gouvernement Blair.

24 La recherche de vérités consensuelles sur lesquelles bâtir une nouvelle société viable et

pacifiée est un exercice auquel se livrent souvent les sociétés dites « en transition ».

Elle est parfois confiée à des « organismes de transition », dont l’exemple le plus

célèbre est sans doute la « Commission pour la Vérité et la Réconciliation » établie par

Nelson Mandela en Afrique du Sud à la fin de l’apartheid31. Ces organismes ont toujours

pour but, comme l’explique Martin Imbleau, « d’établir une vérité, une vérité

historique qui servira de référence pour le présent comme pour le futur », car « aucune

société, aucune transformation ne peut se construire sur des affirmations empiriques

contestées concernant la vérité historique32 ». L’établissement de cette vérité doit tout

d’abord jouer un rôle d’éducation, afin de ne pas répéter les erreurs passées. Elle doit

aussi permettre de rétablir la confiance des citoyens en leur gouvernement : lorsque le

gouvernement a été impliqué dans les violences, l’appareil d’État peut avoir besoin de

montrer sa bonne volonté et son intégrité, afin de permettre à la société de se

reconstruire sur des bases saines. Enfin, elle doit surtout apporter une « résolution33 » :

il faut « refermer » le passé, refermer les blessures qu’il a pu laisser, ou encore clore les

débats qu’il suscite, afin de pouvoir passer à autre chose. L’enquête Saville, bien elle

n’ait pas eu, contrairement aux commissions pour la vérité, l’ambition de passer en

revue tous les événements contentieux d’une longue période de conflit, avait bien pour

but d’établir une vérité officielle sur un événement controversé du passé afin de

faciliter la réconciliation dans le contexte d’un processus de paix, et peut donc être

considérée à ce titre comme un organisme de transition.

25 Ce type d’enquête est toutefois loin de faire l’unanimité : ne devrait-on pas plutôt

oublier le passé afin de préserver l’avenir ? Les partisans de cette solution ont souvent

tendance à considérer les organismes de transition comme des exercices inutiles, voire

néfastes, qui ne font que raviver les vieilles querelles sur le passé. Le journaliste Max

Hastings, par exemple, raille l’enquête Saville qu’il qualifie « d’exercice d’archéologie34

».


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26 Cependant, cette approche est critiquable dans le sens où elle semble rejeter les

Troubles dans le passé, et même dans un passé lointain, alors que beaucoup des

événements traumatiques susceptibles de nuire au processus de paix se sont produits

dans un passé en réalité très récent. Lors de la commémoration de Bloody Sunday de

2009, le député du SDLP Alban Maginness a rappelé encore une fois que « ce qui était le

passé pour certains était encore le présent pour d’autres35 ». On peut raisonnablement

penser que ces propos s’adressaient implicitement à ceux qui critiquent la BSJC et

l’enquête Saville en arguant qu’il est ridicule de continuer à débattre d’un événement

vieux de plus de trente ans.

27 En juin 2007, notamment, deux déclarations ont provoqué un tollé de la part des

représentants des partisans de la nouvelle enquête. Tout d’abord, Maurice Hayes,

homme politique et auteur de nombreux rapports et articles sur l’Irlande du Nord, a

vivement critiqué les enquêtes publiques lors d’une conférence organisée sur le campus

de Magee College le 4 juin 2007, affirmant qu’elles mettaient en danger la réconciliation

en « rouvrant de vieilles plaies », en « réveillant de vieux fantômes » et en « ravivant

les vieilles animosités et les vieux soupçons ». Quelques jours plus tard, lors de

l’Assemblée Générale des Presbytériens, le pasteur presbytérien John Dunlop attaquait

lui aussi l’enquête Saville, affirmant que de telles enquêtes risquaient de « déstabiliser

le futur » et devraient être closes « immédiatement36 ». Ces déclarations ont été très

mal accueillies par les familles des victimes de Bloody Sunday : John Kelly les a qualifiées

« d’insultantes », ajoutant que de tels propos sapaient le travail effectué par la BSJC

depuis des années37.

28 Les demandes de la BSJC représentent en effet la tendance inverse, qui consiste à

penser que pour se libérer du passé, il faut d’abord s’y confronter. Martin Finucane,

membre de la Irish Campaign for Truth, explique : « Si nous devons surmonter notre

passé, il faut d’abord que nous arrivions à l’accepter, et nous ne pouvons faire cela que

si nous savons la vérité sur notre passé38. » Là où d’autres invoquent la nécessité de

préserver la confiance mutuelle entre les communautés comme une raison de ne pas

faire ressurgir les fantômes du passé, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, dans son livre sur la violence

d’État en Irlande du Nord, considère qu’il y a dans les sociétés en transition « un besoin

d’affirmer des vérités, […] en partie pour rétablir un peu de civilité dans une société

civile déchirée, permettant de cette manière d’aller vers une certaine réconciliation

entre les communautés39 ». Les organismes de transition ne sont donc pas nocifs, mais

nécessaires au processus de réconciliation : afin de pouvoir construire un avenir

commun, il est indispensable d’arriver à un certain consensus sur le passé. Il ne s’agit

pas de considérer le passé comme un fardeau dont on doit se débarrasser, mais de

travailler sur lui afin de l’empêcher de nuire au futur, ou comme le dit élégamment Bill

Rolston, de réussir à « tourner la page sans refermer le livre 40 ».

29 Souvent associée à la vérité, en particulier dans le discours de la BSJC, la notion de

justice pose également problème : qu’entend-on exactement par « justice » ? Selon le

philosophe W. James Booth, le procès constitue « le côté rétribution de la mémoire-

justice41 », mais le rétablissement de la vérité est aussi en soi une forme de justice : « la

justice rétablit la vérité morale du passé42. » On pourrait donc distinguer deux types de

justice : la justice-vérité, qui consisterait à laver le nom des victimes des soupçons

formulés par le rapport Widgery, et la justice-rétribution, qui consisterait à entamer

des poursuites judiciaires pour meurtre contre les soldats après la publication du

rapport. Les membres de la BSJC, bien que des dissensions internes existent à ce sujet,


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ont choisi de demander dans leurs revendications officielles à la fois la justice-vérité et

la justice-rétribution.

30 Or, dans le cadre d’une enquête ou d’une commission pour la vérité, ces deux objectifs

de vérité et de justice peuvent parfois se nuire mutuellement. Comme le signale Bill

Rolston :

[…] la vérité et la justice ne vont pas forcément de pair. Comme les événementsdans les pays qui ont eu des commissions pour la vérité l’on montré, la vérité nerequiert pas forcément que l’objectif de justice soit complètement atteint, surtouten ce qui concerne les poursuites43.

31 La plupart des organismes de transition chargés de dire la vérité sur un ou plusieurs

événements sont confrontés à ce dilemme. La peur des poursuites judiciaires constitue

souvent un obstacle de taille lorsqu’il s’agit de faire la lumière sur les agissements de

tous les protagonistes ; doit-on pour autant décider de garantir aux personnes

acceptant de parler une immunité contre les poursuites ? La recherche de la vérité et la

recherche de la justice-rétribution deviennent alors incompatibles, puisque l’une

nécessite le sacrifice de l’autre. Bill Rolston analyse dans Turning the Page Without Closing

the Book : The Right To Truth in the Irish Context plusieurs cas de commissions pour la

vérité, notamment celui de l’Argentine. La junte militaire y avait passé une loi

d’amnistie avant de quitter le pouvoir. Devant « la vague populaire de répudiation des

militaires et le soutien pour la vérité et la justice44 », le nouveau président Alfonsin

décida de passer outre cette loi et fit emprisonner plusieurs officiers de haut rang.

Cependant, il dut vite céder face aux menaces de coup d’État venant de l’armée, et

toutes les personnes emprisonnées furent finalement amnistiées. Rolston écrit à propos

de l’Argentine : « certains affirment que cet échec était inévitable, à partir du moment

où la recherche de la vérité et la recherche de poursuites judiciaires étaient couplées45

». La Truth and Reconciliation Commission en Afrique du Sud a, pour sa part, préféré

sacrifier la possibilité de poursuites judiciaires :

Au vu de la nature des accords négociés il était impossible d’entreprendre despoursuites judiciaires à grande échelle. Dans ce contexte, l’amnistie ne peut qu’êtrevue comme une pré condition nécessaire et inévitable aux accords de paix46.

32 L’enquête Saville a adopté une position que l’on pourrait qualifier d’intermédiaire : si

aucun témoin ne s’est vu octroyer une immunité contre les poursuites, le tribunal a

cependant décidé que les informations données par les témoins dans le cadre de

l’enquête ne pourraient pas être utilisées contre eux par la suite lors d’éventuelles

poursuites judiciaires47. Le communiqué de presse du 25 février 1999 explique les

raisons de cette décision :

Lord Saville a demandé cette garantie car les témoins […] auraient normalement ledroit de refuser de répondre à des questions s’il y avait un risque d’auto-incrimination. […] Une telle assurance était nécessaire pour assister le tribunal danssa tâche de recherche de la vérité concernant les événements de Bloody Sunday48.

33 Le Procureur général a déclaré avoir pris cette décision « dans l’intérêt général », après

avoir estimé que « l’efficacité de l’enquête […] serait probablement augmentée plutôt

que diminuée » par cet arrangement49. On peut donc penser qu’il s’agit d’un choix de

privilégier la vérité par rapport à la justice, ce qui est cohérent au vu des termes dans

lesquels l’enquête a défini sa propre mission, mais ne sera pas suffisant pour satisfaire

toutes les demandes de la BSJC puisque les témoignages recueillis ne pourront être

utilisés par eux pour atteindre leur objectif de justice-rétribution.


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34 On peut donc se demander dans quelle mesure un exercice comme l’enquête Saville est

susceptible de remplir sa fonction d’apaisement : si elle a effectivement servi de tribune

pour les personnes n’ayant pas pu s’exprimer pendant l’enquête Widgery, avec un

nombre considérable de témoins entendus et des transcriptions consultables par tous

sur Internet, et si la publication du rapport a fourni aux télévisions des images de liesse

populaire et de familles soulagées d’obtenir enfin une déclaration d’innocence pour

leurs proches, il est encore beaucoup trop tôt pour parler de succès.

35 Passée l’euphorie du 15 juin 2010, il apparaît que tous les activistes de la campagne

pour la justice n’ont pas été convaincus par la publication du rapport Saville. Jim

Collins, artiste basé à Derry et ayant participé à l’organisation des commémorations de

Bloody Sunday depuis 1989, considère qu’on « ne peut pas parler de victoire ». Selon lui,

la publication du rapport a été avant tout un exercice de communication habilement

« chorégraphié » par le gouvernement britannique : les médias étaient venus en masse

le jour de la publication pour immortaliser le moment où les familles sortiraient du

Guildhall, et les expressions de joie dues à la fin de l’attente et à la satisfaction d’avoir

obtenu une déclaration d’innocence pour leurs proches. Jim Collins évoque le caractère

trompeur de l’image de la foule devant le Guildhall applaudissant le discours de David

Cameron : selon lui, elle montre les habitants de Derry, une ville majoritairement

nationaliste, comme de « bons sujets britanniques applaudissant leur Premier

Ministre », alors qu’ils applaudissaient en réalité les excuses du gouvernement, et non

l’institution. Il ajoute que, les familles n’ayant eu que quelques heures le 15 juin pour

parcourir les conclusions principales d’un rapport d’environ 5 000 pages, il est fort

possible qu’elles découvrent « après réflexion » que certains aspects du rapport ne sont

pas satisfaisants, mais il sera alors trop tard car l’affaire sera considérée comme classée

par les médias50.

36 En effet, très vite après la publication du rapport, la famille de Gerry Donaghey a

exprimé son mécontentement à propos de l’interprétation donnée par Saville d’un des

incidents les plus controversés de Bloody Sunday : le problème des bombes à clous

retrouvées sur le corps de Donaghey par la police. Selon la famille de ce dernier, et la

majorité des témoins, Donaghey n’avait pas de bombes sur lui, et elles auraient été

délibérément placées sur son corps après sa mort par des soldats, dans le but de

l’incriminer. Le rapport Saville refuse de trancher sur ce cas, mais affirme malgré tout

que Donaghey était « probablement en possession des bombes au moment où il a reçu

la balle51 ». Bien qu’il prenne soin de préciser que Donaghey s’enfuyait lorsqu’on lui a

tiré dessus, et que l’action du soldat était donc injustifiée, ce refus de l’exonérer

totalement sur la question des bombes à clous a quelque peu terni la déclaration

d’innocence le concernant : pour sa sœur Mary Donaghey, « [Saville] a donné avec une

main et repris avec l’autre52 ».

37 Enfin, au rang des griefs qui subsistent du côté de certains membres des familles, se

trouve la très faible probabilité de pouvoir engager des poursuites judiciaires contre les

soldats. Dans une émission de la chaîne irlandaise TV3, le 24 septembre 2010, Gerry

Duddy, membre de la BSJC, a réaffirmé son désir d’obtenir des poursuites judiciaires

contre les soldats53. Cependant, cet objectif semble fort compromis, d’une part en

raison de l’arrangement évoqué précédemment entre l’enquête et les témoins, et

d’autre part parce qu’après le grand événement de la publication du rapport, il existe

un sentiment souvent exprimé par la presse que des poursuites ne feraient que


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compromettre l’apaisement apporté par Saville, repousser encore la résolution du

problème, et raviver les tensions intercommunautaires54.

38 Dans un contexte politique toujours très polarisé, la réhabilitation des victimes de

Bloody Sunday reste souvent perçue comme une cause catholique ou nationaliste, et la

réception du rapport Saville du côté protestant a été mitigée. On a pu assister à des

gestes de sympathie intercommunautaire, dont le plus symbolique est probablement la

venue de plusieurs dignitaires des Églises protestantes dans le Bogside pour rencontrer

les familles des victimes de Bloody Sunday, le lendemain de la publication du rapport

Saville. Cette décision a été saluée par les journaux de tous bords comme un geste

porteur d’espoir et un symbole de réconciliation55.

39 Toutefois, la publication du rapport a également provoqué des réactions moins

positives : Graham Dawson expliquait en 2007 que pour beaucoup d’unionistes,

l’enquête Saville n’était qu’un « pot-de-vin » accordé à la communauté nationaliste

pour acheter leur soutien aux accords de paix56. Dès 2004, on pouvait lire sur une

fresque unioniste du quartier de Shankill à Belfast, photographiée par Jonathan

McCormick : « Où sont nos enquêtes ? Où est notre vérité ? Où est notre justice57 ? »,

allusion à peine voilée à l’enquête Saville. La publication très médiatisée du rapport a

donc relancé le débat sur l’existence d’une « hiérarchie des victimes » : dans le contexte

d’un conflit qui a fait plus de trois mille morts, certains considèrent que dépenser près

de 200 millions de livres pour une enquête sur la mort de « seulement » treize

personnes constitue une injustice profonde vis-à-vis des autres victimes. Alors que

beaucoup de proches de victimes du terrorisme ont dû se faire une raison et renoncer à

obtenir la justice, voire même la vérité, soit parce qu’une enquête était impossible, soit

en raison de la libération des prisonniers politiques dans le cadre de l’Accord du

Vendredi Saint, les victimes de l’Etat apparaissent parfois comme une

catégorie privilégiée. Après le 15 juin 2010, de nombreux articles ont été publiés qui

contenaient des déclarations provenant de la communauté unioniste, principalement

d’hommes politiques ou de représentants d’associations de victimes, dénonçant cette

situation comme une injustice ou appelant à faire des enquêtes sur les tragédies de

« leur » communauté afin de maintenir une certaine égalité de traitement58. Willie

Fraser, de l’association de victimes FAIR (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives), a

notamment déploré l’existence d’un « déséquilibre » dans le traitement des victimes,

ajoutant que l’argent dépensé pour l’enquête Saville montrait que « certains morts des

Troubles [étaient] plus égaux que d’autres [sic]59 ».

40 Si la publication du rapport Saville a été perçue comme un moment historique, et

généralement positif en raison des images de liesse populaire et des discours

triomphants des familles des victimes, il est difficile de dire si elle a apporté une réelle

résolution au trauma. Saville, en insistant pour examiner chaque détail malgré les

critiques sur la longueur et le coût de l’enquête, a réussi à convaincre les familles de

son sérieux, et la « vérité » qu’il a livrée dans son rapport a été globalement bien reçue,

malgré quelques désaccords notamment sur le cas de Gerry Donaghey. Cependant, une

fois le problème de la vérité écarté, reste le problème plus épineux de la justice : la

question des poursuites judiciaires, qui a toujours divisé même à l’intérieur de la BSJC,

se retrouve désormais au premier plan. Les questions restent finalement entières :

l’enquête Saville a-t-elle apporté une « résolution », ou a-t-elle ouvert la porte à la

rétribution ? Constitue-t-elle la fin du chapitre de Bloody Sunday, ou le début d’une

série de campagnes pour l’ouverture de nouvelles enquêtes ? Contribuera-t-elle à


80

l’apaisement, ou simplement à nourrir les rancœurs sur le thème de la « hiérarchie des

victimes » ? Les membres de la BSJC, qui ont reçu de l’organisation non-

gouvernementale irlandaise Rehab le titre de « People of the Year » le 11 septembre 2010,

affirment qu’en ce qui les concerne « le temps des campagnes est révolu60 », mais des

groupes réclamant des enquêtes sur d’autres événements tragiques des Troubles ont

déjà saisi l’occasion de donner plus de visibilité à leur cause, parfois avec l’aide de

membres de la BSJC : c’est le cas, par exemple, des familles des onze victimes du

« massacre de Ballymurphy » de 197161. Cependant, les mots de David Cameron dans

son discours au parlement, lorsqu’il a affirmé qu’il n’y aurait « plus d’enquête

coûteuses et à durée indéterminée portant sur le passé62 », laissent entendre que

l’enquête Saville risque fort de rester une exception.

NOTES

1. Eamonn McCann (dir.), The Bloody Sunday Inquiry : The Families Speak Out , Dublin,

Pluto Press, 2006, p. 6. Toutes les traductions sont de l’auteur.

2. Graham Dawson, « Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory : Bloody Sunday, Derry,

1972-2004 », History Workshop Journal, n° 59, 2005, p. 161.

3. Dermot Walsh, Bloody Sunday and the Rule of Law in Northern Ireland, Basingstoke,

Macmillan, 2000, p. 12.

4. Graham Dawson, Making Peace With the Past : Memories, Trauma and the Irish Troubles,

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 148.

5. Dawson, 2007, p. 148-149.

6. Trisha Ziff (dir.), Hidden Truths : Bloody Sunday 1972, Santa Monica, Smart Art, 1998,

p. 41.

7. The Rt. Hon. Lord Widgery, Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the events on

Sunday, 30th January 1972, which led to the loss of life in connection with the procession in

Londonderry on that day, London, Her Majesty’s Stationary Service, 1972, p. 98.

8. Widgery, p. 97.

9. Dawson, 2007, p. 120.

10. Ziff, p. 23, p. 125.

11. Joelle Gartner, « Anger at the Heel : The Legacy of Bloody Sunday », in Ziff, p. 125.

12. Seamus McKinney, « Bloody Sunday family dismisses Jackson admission », Irish

News, 30 mai 2007, [www.nuzhound.com/articles/irish_news/arts2007/

may30_family_dismisses_Jackson_admission. php].

13. Don Mullan, « Blood, White and Blue », in Ziff, p. 42-43.

14. Hansard 1803-2005. UK Parliament, volume 217, c. 485, 21 janvier 1993 ; volume 288, c.

781W, 24 janvier 1997 ; volume 289, c. 495, 30 janvier 1997 ; volume 289, c. 505-506,

30 janvier 1997 [http://hansard.millbanksystems.com].

15. Hansard, volume 289, c. 506, 30 janvier 1997.


81

16. David A. Croker, « Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, and Civil Society » in

Robert I. Rotberg, Dennis Thompson, Truth v. Justice : The Morality of Truth Commissions,

Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 102.

17. Bill Rolston, Turning the Page Without Closing the Book, Dublin, Irish Reporter

Publications, 1996, p. 13.

18. Widgery, p. 45.

19. Ibid., p. 58, p. 99.

20. Peter Pringle, « Exorcising Widgery », in Ziff, p. 58.

21. Ziff, p. 23.

22. Maureen E. Mulvihill, « The Camera Does Not Lie: Revisiting Bloody Sunday », New

Hibernia Review, volume 6, n° 4, 2002, p. 154.

23. Widgery, p. 7-8.

24. Kathy Marks, « Blair Issues Apology For Irish Potato Famine », The Independent,

2 juillet 1997, [www.independent.co.uk/news/blair-issues-apology-for-irish-potato-

famine-1253790.html].

25. Jonathan Powell, Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, Londres,

Bodley Head, 2008, p. 45.

26. Joanne O’Brien, A Matter of Minutes : The Enduring Legacy of Bloody Sunday, Dublin,

Wolfhound Press, 2002, p. 88.

27. Gartner in Ziff, p. 127.

28. Michael Cunningham, « Saying Sorry : The Politics of Apology », The Political

Quarterly, volume 70, n° 3, 1999, p. 287.

29. The Rt. Hon. Lord Saville of Newdigate, the Hon. William Hoyt, the Hon. John

Toohey, “Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry”, I.4.1, I.4.33, I.3.79, Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Website, 17 juin 2010, [http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org].

30. Discours de David Cameron, « House of Commons Hansard Debates », vol. 511, c.

730-742, 15 juin 2010, United Kingdom Parliament, [www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/

cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100615/debtext/100615-0004.htm].

31. Rolston, 1996, p. 12-14.

32. Martin Imbleau, « Initial Truth Establishment By Transitional Bodies and the Fight

Against Denial », in William A. Schabas, Shane Darcy (dir.), Truth Commissions and

Courts : The Tension Between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth, Dordrecht, Kluwer

Academic Publishers, 2004, p. 162.

33. « Closure » en anglais.

34. Max Hastings, « Give us inquiries into the banking crisis and Iraq, not Bloody

Sunday », The Guardian, 10 novembre 2008, [www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/

10/northern-ireland-banks].

35. Alban Maguinness, discours à l’occasion de la marche commémorative annuelle de

Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1er février 2009.

36. Susan McKay, « The need for inquiries is all part of the peace process », Irish News,

12 juin 2007, [http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/irish_news/arts2007/

jun12_need_for_inquiries__SMcKay. php].


82

37. Sarah Brett, « Outrage At Bloody Sunday ‘Insult’ », The Belfast Telegraph, 5 juin 2007,

[www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/outrage-at-bloody-sunday-

insult-13447528.html].

38. Brandon Hamber (dir.), Past Imperfect : Dealing With the Past in Northern Ireland and

Societies in Transition, Derry/Londonderry, INCORE, 1998, p. 20.

39. Ibid., p. 11.

40. Bill Rolston, 2000.

41. William James Booth, Communities of Memory : On Witness, Identity and Justice, London,

Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 135.

42. Ibid., p. 115.

43. Bill Rolston, Unfinished Business : State Killings and the Quest For Truth, Belfast, Beyond

The Pale, 2000, p. 325.

44. Rolston, 1996, p. 15.

45. Rolston, 1996, p. 16.

46. Hamber, p. 60.

47. « Attorney General Press Notice », Press Notices, Bloody Sunday Inquiry Web Site,

25 février 1999, [www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/press/Archive/25feb99.htm].

48. « Attorney General Press Notice », Press Notices, Bloody Sunday Inquiry Web Site,

25 février 1999, [www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/press/Archive/25feb99.htm].

49. Ibid.

50. Entretien avec Jim Collins, 22 juillet 2010, Derry/Londonderry.

51. The Rt. Hon. Lord Saville of Newdigate, the Hon. William Hoyt, the Hon. John

Toohey, « Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry », VII.145.25, Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Website, 17 juin 2010, [http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org].

52. Alan Healy, « Victim’s Family Angry At Nail Bombs Claim », Derry News, p. 5, 17 juin

2010.

53. Interview de Gerry Duddy, Ireland AM, TV3, 24 septembre 2010, [ www.tv3.ie/

videos.php?

video=27359&locID=1.65.74&date=2010-09-24&date_mode=&page=1&show_cal=2&newspanel=&showspanel=&web_only=&full_episodes=].

54. « Justice and Truth Have Finally Been Served », The Independent, 16 juin 2010,

[www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/justice-and-truth-have-finally-been-

served-2001515.html] ; « Bloody Sunday : Prosecutions Would Be In No One’s Interest »,

The Telegraph, 15 juin 2010, [www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/7831212/Bloody-

Sunday-Prosecutions-would-be-in-no-ones-interest.html] ; Max Hastings, « This Grossly

Misguided Excavation of the Past », The Daily Mail, 17 juin 2010, [www.dailymail.co.uk/

news/article-1286953/MAX-HASTINGS-This-grossly-misguided-excavation-past.html].

55. « Protestant Church Leaders Extend ‘Hand of Friendship’ To Bloody Sunday

Families », Derry Journal, 16 juin 2010, [www.derryjournal.com/journal/Protestant-church-

leaders-extend-.6364802.jp] ; Brian Hutton, « Protestant Leaders Visit the Bogside », The

Newsletter, 17 juin 2010, p. 4 ; « Protestant Church Leaders To Visit Bloody Sunday Site »,

The Belfast Telegraph, 16 juin 2010, [www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/bloody-

sunday/protestant-church-leaders-to-visit-bloody-sunday-site-14843810.html#ixzz0r9NxiMl2] ;John Cooney and George Jackson, « Historic ‘Hands Across Divide’ As Church Leaders


83

and Families Unite », The Independent, 17 juin 2010, [www.independent.ie/national-news/

historic-hands-across-divide-as-church-leaders-and-families-unite-2223358.html].

56. Dawson, 2007, p. 202.

57. Jonathan McCormick, « 30 Years of Indiscriminate Slaughter by So-Called Non-

Sectarian Irish Freedom Fighters » in « A Directory of Murals », Cain Web Service, album

59, photo 2062, mars 2004, [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/mccormick/album59.htm].

58. Sam Lister, “Tearful McCrea Names ‘Forgotten Victims’ of Provos”, The Belfast

Telegraph, 7 juillet 2010, [www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tearful-mccrea-names-

lsquoforgotten-victimsrsquo-of-provos-14867409.html##ixzz0tHjb4gjh] ; “Campbell Demands

Answers On Deaths”, The Londonderry Sentinel, 24 juin 2010,

[www.londonderrysentinel.co.uk/news/Campbell-demands-answers-on-deaths.6381635.jp] ; Sir

Reg Empey, “Inquiries Are No Way To Build a Shared Future”, The Guardian, 15 juin

2010, [www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/15/ulster-unionist-sir-reg-empey].

59. Henry McDonald, « Bloody Sunday : £191m and 434 Days – Will Saville Draw a Line

Under Past? », The Guardian, 11 juin 2010, [www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/11/bloody-

sunday-saville-draw-line].

60. Interview de Gerry Duddy, Ireland AM, TV3, 24 septembre 2010, [www.tv3.ie/

videos.php?

video=27359&locID=1.65.74&date=2010-09-24&date_mode=&page=1&show_cal=2&newspanel=&showspanel=&web_only=&full_episodes=].

61. « Ballymurphy massacre probe call backed », The Belfast Telegraph, 21 septembre

2010, [www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/ballymurphy-

massacre-probe-call-backed-14954315.html#ixzz10LkVwIgK].

62. Discours de David Cameron, « House of Commons Hansard Debates », vol. 511, c.741,

15 juin 2010, United Kingdom Parliament, [www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/

cmhansrd/cm100615/debtext/100615-0004.htm].

RÉSUMÉS

Bloody Sunday reste l’un des événements des Troubles en Irlande du Nord qui a le plus marqué la

mémoire collective. Son potentiel traumatique s’explique d’une part par l’implication des forces

de l’État, et d’autre part, par l’impact doublement traumatisant du rapport Widgery : la première

enquête publique de 1972 fut perçue comme une tentative de blanchir l’armée. Après des années

de campagne, les familles obtinrent en 1998 une seconde enquête. Dans un contexte de

réconciliation, un des objectifs de l’enquête Saville était de « guérir » les blessures laissées par

Bloody Sunday et par le rapport Widgery. Cependant, comme tous les organismes de transition

dont le rôle est d’apaiser les tensions liées à un passé contentieux afin de permettre aux

communautés concernées de construire un futur commun, l’enquête a également suscité doutes

et critiques.

Bloody Sunday is among the events of the Northern Irish Troubles which have left a deep imprint

on popular memory. Its traumatic potential can be explained on the one hand by the

involvement of the state forces, and on the other hand, by the additional traumatic impact of the


84

Widgery report: the 1972 public inquiry was perceived as a “whitewash”. In 1998, after years of

campaigning by the families, the Saville Inquiry was set up. In a context of reconciliation, one of

its objectives was to “heal” the wounds left by Bloody Sunday and by the Widgery Inquiry.

However, like all transitional bodies, the role of which is to ease the tensions linked to a

contentious past in order to allow the communities in question to build a common future, the

Saville Inquiry has also raised criticism and doubt.

INDEX

Keywords : Northern Ireland - Bloody Sunday, justice, reconciliation, Northern Ireland - conflict,

Northern Ireland - post-conflict, Northern Ireland - peace process, trauma

Mots-clés : justice, Irlande du Nord - Bloody Sunday, Irlande du Nord - conflit, réconciliation,

Irlande du Nord - processus de paix, Irlande du Nord - post-conflit, trauma

AUTEUR

CHARLOTTE BARCAT

Université de Brest-UBO


85

Violence et guerre dans la littératureirlandaiseApproaches to Violence and Warfare in Irish Literature


86

“Snared by Words”: Trauma and theShoah in the Poetry of MedbhMcGuckianShane Alcobia-Murphy

1 Medbh McGuckian’s writing is characteristically appropriative: each poetic text is

woven together using phrases and images plucked from myriad sources. A close study

of her word-hoard, the papers and manuscripts kept in the Special Collections

Department at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, demonstrates that

her notebooks constitute a diary of her reading. She creates word-lists compiled whilst

consulting biographies, critical works, history books and other (often arcane and

diverse) genres, and then subsequently constructs poems from these quotations. As she

states: “I like to find a word living in a context and then pull it out of its context. It’s

like they are growing in a garden and I pull them out of the garden and put them into

my garden, and yet I hope they take with them some of their original soil, wherever I

got them1”. In this article I want to tend to one recently planted corner of this garden

where she has created poems from studies related to the Shoah and explore the means

by which trauma is inscribed therein.

2 “To write about the Holocaust, and to write criticism on a text, any text, that

acknowledges the Holocaust”, argues Robin Silbergleid, “is necessarily to engage in a

conversation about literature and ethics2”. One objection raised against writing about

the Shoah is that the very idea of genocide is unthinkable and therefore

unrepresentable. As another writer has put it, “[n]o symbolic universe grounded in

humanistic beliefs could confront the Holocaust without the risk of being shaken to its

foundations3” Indeed, survivors often face the dilemma of being at once impelled to

bear testimony whilst simultaneously finding the ordeal either intolerable or

unfeasible. The problem is not due to the limits of memory but, as Laurence Kirmayer

argues, it lies in “the inadequacy of ordinary words to express all they have witnessed”;

the event presented “an incomprehensible catastrophe that undermines the very

possibility of coherent narrative4”. The traumatised survivor carries “an impossible

history within them5”, a personal history which they strive to communicate and over


87

which they wish to gain mastery; yet it is also one which defies narrativisation. While

“stories are a mode of symbolic structure that constructs identity”, trauma by nature is

“that which evades structure and shatters identity6”. The mind rebels against the

recollection of traumatic memories and actively distorts and fragments the ensuing

narrative. Thus, as Gabriele Schwab in her recent study of life-writing, trauma and

trans-generational suffering has argued, “[w]riting from within the core of trauma is a

constant struggle between the colonizing power of words and the revolt of what is

being rejected, silenced. […] Trauma as a mode of being halts the flow of time, fractures

the self, and punctures memory and language7”.

3 If, for the traumatised survivor, narrativisation of genocide is psychically problematic,

for the creative writer who wishes to make art out of such atrocity the dilemma is of an

ethical order. Many commentators regard art as an unconscionable obtrusion on the

Shoah: while Berel Lang has condemned the fictive dimension of artistic production

(“literary representation imposes artifice, a figurative mediation of language, and the

contrivance of a persona – that is, a mask – on the part of the writer8”), Theodor

Adorno famously castigated the distortive “aesthetic principles of stylization” with

which art transfigures and strips genocide of its horror, thus doing injustice to its

victims9. Art, then, is said to render genocide knowable, its formal strategies containing

and aestheticising the suffering; narrative may offer closure, yet such atrocity resists

being closed off. Equally, art may constitute a second form of subjection for the victim

since, as is implied in Adorno’s critique, the writer may fall into the double trap of

sensationalism and voyeurism. As the Oxford academic Christopher Ricks notes,

“atrocity may get flattened down into the casually ‘atrocious’, or it may get fattened up

into that debased form of imagination which is prurience10”. In such a situation, writers

must be vigilant against simply treating the Shoah as a fashionable or convenient topic.

“The burden which the writer’s conscience must bear”, writes the poet Geoffrey Hill,

“is that the horror might become that hideously outrageous thing, a cliché. This is the

nightmare, the really blasphemous thing: that those camps could become a mere

‘subject’11”. However valid such reservations may be, an artist within his or her text can

remain vigilant against voiding atrocity of its true horror. Indeed, as Ezrahi contends,

“[i]t may be precisely in its resistance to conceptual abstraction, to psychological

reductionism, that art as a version of historical memory can provide form without

fixing of meaning, insight without explanation, for the recovered events12”. The subtle

ambiguities of art, with its allusive and often elusive strategies, can open up the event

for the contemporary reader thereby resisting closure. Yet if the artist is not a survivor

and has little connection to the Shoah, does he or she have a right to treat it as an

object of scrutiny and as a subject for art?

Is it morally acceptable to speak at all about an atrocity one did not really know? Isit permissible to use our distance from the events of the Shoah as an enablingconduit of their imaginative reconstruction? And how can writers reconstruct thoseevents without giving them an aesthetic order or finish that makes themassimilable and thus frighteningly admissible (or repeatable)13 ?

4 Susan Gubar argues that even the most ethically-minded poets (and scholars) feel a

modicum of shame when depicting the suffering of others and that they “mistrust their

right to speak, even as they attest to the means by which they speak14”. Medbh

McGuckian is one such poet and in “Goddess of the Candlelight during Childbirth15” she

engages with and quotes from Gubar’s study, along with two other equally

unacknowledged sources16, to create a poem which self-reflexively signals the


88

impossibility of fully comprehending the Shoah. Instead of narrative precision and

closure, the poem is marked by fragmentation and associational logic; rather than

presenting a narrative of trauma, it circles around and gestures towards it. As Jenny

Edkins argues with regard to the inexpressibility of trauma, “We cannot try to address

the trauma directly without risking its gentrification. We cannot remember it as

something that took place in time, because this would neutralise it. All we can do is “to

encircle again and again the site” of the trauma, “to mark it in its very impossibility17”.

The text mimics the cryptonymic narrative whereby trauma is revealed in the

distortions, gaps and fragmentations of language. Within such a text, what Schwab calls

“the buried ghosts of the past” emerge “to haunt language from within, always

threatening to destroy its communicative and expressive function18”.

the weekday gods (RG 230); blocked the

windows with thorns (RG 231); fires of male

olive (RG 114); yellow roses (SG 216)

The weekday gods have blocked the windows with

thorns.

We breathe nothing but working class blue, fires of

male

Olive, the heavy grace of deeper yellow roses.

star risings and settings (RG 230); The

tangible

hand at the centre of things (TC 138); large

red

J (SG 31); rounded up to eat grass in the

town

square (SG 31)

Star risings and settings are such dangerous angels.

The tangible hand at the centre of things

Is a large red J

Rounded up to eat grass in the town square.

5 The opening stanzas (cited above right; sources quoted on the left) present a series of

juxtaposed images which disorientate the reader. Who are the “weekday gods” and why

have they blocked the windows with thorns? To whom does “we” refer? What is the

connection between the “male olive” and the “yellow roses?” How can a hand be “a

large red J”? How can that letter “eat grass” and in which “town square” does this

activity take place? As readers, we bear witness to a speaker for whom language is in

pieces due to an unspecified traumatic event, one which cannot be contained within a

fully comprehensible narrative because, in Blanchot’s terms, “the disaster de-scribes19”.

The poet, of course, has undergone no such trauma and the lines imitatively advance a

cryptonym narrative. Uncovering the sources and reading them alongside each other

enables us to discern the rationale behind such imitation.

6 The first line presents a tension between, on the one hand, faith in a coherent belief

system which may ultimately grant the individual protection from harm and, on the


89

other, the individual’s lack of agency and a sense of being at the mercy of inscrutable

forces. While the source text indicates that the placing of thorns in the window at the

time of a birth constituted an apotropaic ritual in ancient Rome (RG 231), “blocked”

and “thorns” mark the domestic space in McGuckian’s text as unsafe. This is a pattern

which is continued in the following lines. Although the stanza’s birth imagery is

connected with catarchic astrology (“star risings and setting”) to show how infants are

placed under the care of a supervisory divinity (Candelifera, who is “connected with

the candle-light during childbirth”), the purificatory and protective images of fire

associated with both the birth of the individual and of the nation20 are rendered wholly

ironic when conjoined with “the heavy grace of deeper yellow roses”. “Grace” refers to

the bestowing of the free favour of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners, yet

what is granted in this instance does not constitute a blessing; rather, the image is

taken from a passage in which Gubar cites from Gertrude Stein’s “Adler” to describe the

hue of the corpses of dead Jews at Treblinka, “those with gold in their mouths, and

those with skin / the colour of yellow roses” (SG 216). The “fires”, then, have less to do

with the purificatory rites on the eve of Parilia (the birth-date of Rome) than with the

concentration camps’ crematoria. Such is the destination for those who had been

subject to a systemic process of othering enshrined within German laws and

regulations. The poem quotes from Gubar’s text to indicate how the Jews became

dehumanised: categorised by and reduced to an alphabetical sign – “passports stamped

with a large, red J” (SG 31) – they are further forced to conform to the Nazi’s conception

of them as animals, “rounded up […] to eat grass in the town square” (SG 31).

Throughout the opening stanzas, then, language has become an unstable system with

each image having a double, and self-cancelling, signification: birth-death; protection-

imprisonment; purification-destruction.

7 However, what is one to make of “The tangible hand at the centre of things”? As a trope

the hand may indicate authorship and, as it is “at the centre”, it may signify control;

however, the word “things” subverts the idea of mastery as it implies both

objectification and imprecision. In fact, the stanza conveys an inexorable process of

dehumanisation, from human subject (“hand”), to object (“thing”) and finally, to a sign

(“J”). Yet the hand also belongs to a female figure which the poem goes on to describe:

lines of darkness put around the heel of her

hand (TC 134); cursive grey (TC 135); barely

does its work of holding the cashmere

shawl (TC 138)

Lines of darkness put around the heel of her hand

On its cursive grey surroundings

Shiver into strong silver-it barely does its work

Of holding the cashmere shawl.


90

the stab of her thumb back towards her

body (TC 221); silence issues from her as from

a drowned or empty ship (TC 138);

The stab of her thumb back towards her body

Is doll-like. Silence issues from her

As from a drowned or empty ship,

Or the damp of a single low word.

not that I dream of describing her (TC 140)

in one of her states (TC 133); a presence simple

as absence (TC 138); disturbing perfume

(TC 140); the faded bead of her nipple (TC 134)

Not that I dream of describing her near shoulder,

In one of her states, her presence simple

As absence, her face’s disturbing perfume,

How she is a scent, the faded bead of her nipple.

8 On the surface, these stanzas overtly mark the trauma which they cannot narrate: the

apparent solidity of the body dissipates and the text is marked by “silence”, “absence”,

that which is “faded” and empty. Indeed, since the speaker declares that she would

“not dream of describing her near shoulder” – instead, she de-scribes the subject’s body

– one could argue that McGuckian conforms to Gubar’s conception of the hyper-

sensitive poet who must insistently dwell on her authority to speak for or about the

victim: “[her] scrupulous scrutiny of [her] own warrant for composing and [her]

wariness about retrospection manifest how creative analyses of the Shoah resist

exploitative rhetoric” (SG 30). Yet the poem’s deployment of corporeal imagery is more

complicated than this : not only does it mark the site of trauma and imitatively depict

the ways in which such trauma fragments narrative, it reveals (via the source text from

which the images are quoted) the fear which lay behind the Nazi’s autocratic control,

namely contagion (the blurring of distinctions between the Aryan and the Jew).

9 The text establishes a parallel between a stricken Jewish figure in the first two stanzas

and an objectified female figure in the remaining stanzas. The “hand at the centre of

things” belongs to the subject of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), a painting which,

according to T. J. Clark, was shocking when displayed at the Paris Salon in 1865 because

the nude body was unfixed and refused categorisation. In nineteenth-century Paris, the

prostitute was a social ‘other’ and was by necessity categorised and objectified “in the

files of the police, a number, apart from all social beings” (TC 103). By contrast, the

category of courtisane was more acceptable and “was what could be represented of

prostitution” (TC 109). Manet, however, renders unclear the distinction between the

two; as Clark argues, “Olympia is depicted as nude and courtisane, but also as naked and

insoumise ; the one identity is the form of the other, but the two are put together in

such a way as to make each contingent and unfinished” (TC 131). Each quotation from

Clark that McGuckian cites is an example of this deliberate blurring: Olympia’s face is

described as the “disturbing perfume of a fleur du mal”; “the faded bead of her nipple”

(TC 134) makes the body indefinite; the placement of the hand disobeys “the rules of

the nude” (TC 136) as it fails “to enact the lack of the phallus” (TC 135). What was so


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unacceptable about Olympia for contemporary reviewers was that her physical body

could not be categorised, hence it lacked a determinate place in the social body; thus,

the image challenged and subverted not only conventional codes of representation, but

signalled the ways in which the strict boundaries upon which an entire class system

had been founded were, by the mid-nineteenth century, being eroded. Olympia’s

erasure of clear distinctions reflects the degree of social mixing and free circulation

amongst the different classes and this reflected wider “fears of insurrection” (TC 105).

10 Thus, while McGuckian’s splicing together of quotations in “Goddess of the Candlelight

during Childbirth” serves to encircle the site of trauma and indicate how the

catastrophic event annuls “the possibility of recounting the totality” by presenting

“speech in pieces, splinters and fragments of speech21”, the specific content of her

quotations reveals the cause of that trauma. She parallels two instances of social

control which, stemming from a fear of contagion, objectify and dehumanise the

individual. Yet while her poem graphically depicts the victim and appears to lay the

female body open to our scopic gaze, she resists objectifying her. Indeed, just as

Manet’s Olympia blurs distinctions and resists categorisation, so too does McGuckian’s

text. Language here becomes an unstable system due to the deployment of ambiguous

imagery and the withholding of information about the sources (thereby refusing to

provide the reader with a key to read the poem). Her work, then, resists exploitative

rhetoric and refuses to categorise the victim as “other”.

11 A more controversial strategy adopted by McGuckian in her attempt to commemorate

those who survived the Shoah is the unacknowledged co-option or appropriation of

existing testimony within a first-person narrative since such a manoeuvre risks

claiming the suffering of others as her own. For example, “So Warsaw’s Coming to Wait

on Us Now22” is, to all appearances, a lyric poem in the sense that it seems to give direct

expression to a state of mind or a process of perception and feeling (the opening

stanzas are on the right; the source text is on the left) :

The war kept going on and on (G 426)

And we were rotting away (G 426); Who would

Have thought it would go on like this so

long? (G 415)

The war kept brewing. On and on.

We were rotting away. Who would

Have thought it would so long?

I want to escape to the Old Town (G 411)

I felt as if I were in some strange German city,

where I should feel afraid of the stones under my feet (G 317)

I wanted to escape to the Old Town.

I felt as if I were in some strange

German city crippled by the stones

Under my feet.


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I just kept going in circles doing nothing (G 428)

“I have so much to say to you I prefer to keep

silent” (G 432); snared by words (G 253)

I kept going in circles doing nothing.

I had so much to say, I preferred

Not to be snared by words.

12 For the reader who is unaware of McGuckian’s practice of composing poetic centos and

who does not realise that the poem is based on Michal Grynberg’s Words to Outlive Us23 –

a collection of prose narratives centred around twenty-nine eyewitness testimonies

from Jews who were either confined to the Warsaw Ghetto or hiding in other parts of

the city – there is a risk of viewing the poem as, in M.H. Abrams’s definition of the lyric

poem, a “fragment of reshaped autobiography24”. Therefore, there are two issues at

stake here: firstly, the appropriation of eyewitness testimony – six of the quotations

come from Dawid Fogelman’s narrative, with a single quotation taken from testimonies

by Stefan Ernest and Franciszka Grünberg – for aesthetic purposes; secondly, the

apparent ventriloquising by the poet of another’s suffering through the lyrical “I”.

However, recent critical and theoretical arguments have persuasively reminded the

reader not to confuse the poet with the speaker when analysing a lyric poem25, and, in

any case, it is perhaps best to regard this text as a dramatic monologue, one which

plays out a psycho-drama not experienced by the poet herself. Still, how is one to

answer the charge of impropriety regarding the use of the words of others? The answer

lies in discerning the poem’s thematic focus and purpose.

13 The text presents a retrospective narrative which holds in tension times past and

present. The speaker reveals that her identity had unravelled due to enforced

segregation within the Ghetto; what the speaker describes in the second stanza is a

form of self-alienation (figured in the text as a misrecognition of place). The impulse to

escape leads only to inaction and a circling back upon herself (spatially and mentally).

For her, words were to be mistrusted and what resulted was silence: she “preferred not

to be snared by words”. This scenario is presented in contrast with her present state

since she now relates her history. In the opening tercet the speaker’s mind circles back

to the past in order to describe a traumatic condition; however, the use of the past

continuous tense for verbs which signify a cycle of generation and degeneration

(“brewing” ; “rotting”) hints that the trauma has not been kept at bay. Indeed, “on and

on” signals continuing distress: the phrase not only repeats the semantic content of the

opening sentence, thus disrupting the flow of the narrative and allowing it to circle

back on itself, the narrative becomes fragmented since the sentence lacks grammatical

structure. Language in the poem ceases to function properly. The question asked in the

sentence that follows – “Who would have thought it would so long? ” – fails to provide

resolution and it cannot be answered since it lacks the implied verb (“last”). Thus, the

speaker is seen to void her own discourse (consciously or unconsciously) of any sense of

ending. What we have here is trauma in the sense of “a disease of time [which] permits

the past to relive itself in the present, in the form of intrusive images and thoughts26”.

Because trauma is a «breach in the mind’s experience of time27” the standard

experience of time as a linear, chronological progression from past to present to future

is disrupted. Traumatic events are timeless: for the victim, trauma appears to have “no

beginning, no ending, no before, no during, and no after28”. Therefore, McGuckian’s


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selection and juxtaposition of quotations does not seek to appropriate the eye

witnesses’ suffering; rather, she fragments the oral testimony to convey a sense of

ongoing suffering often missing from Words to Outlive Us. While the oral testimonies

collected in Grynberg’s work are undoubtedly authoritative, moving and of real

historical value, the majority of the narratives present a retrospective coherence.

Trauma, however, affects the ability to place memories of events into a coherent and

linear narrative: when trauma occurs “time cannot be made to tell a […] story, cannot

be restored to narrative coherence, because violence shatters time29”. Thus,

McGuckian’s poem dislocates the narratives to recreate the traumatic condition.

14 She deploys many of the same strategies in “Skirt of a Thousand Triangles30”, a poem

based on Michelangelo in Ravensbrück, Karol Lanckoronska’s account of her wartime

experiences, particularly her time in Ravensbrück concentration camp31. We again have

a retrospective narrative, one which appropriates first-hand testimony by a camp

survivor. The opening two-line stanza presents a tension between the defensive urge to

deny one’s experience and the contrary impulse to bear witness (the text is on the

right, the source is on the left):

‘I am at present reading a fascinating book called

Dante n’a rien vu’ (MR 46);

I am at present reading a fascinating book

Called ‘Dante n’a rien Vu’ – a tortoise-shell

reading.

it was […] minus twenty-seven (MR 106); Kraków

was drowning in flags (MR 45); closed their windows

[…]

in order not to hear those bells (MR 45); All around

the

Market Square enormous white poles had been

planted,

every one and a half metres, from which fluttered

blood-

red banners, many metres long, with an

embroidered white

circle […] That same night, in Kraków, more than

sixty

persons were registered as having committed

suicide (MR45)

It was minus 27. The city was drowning in

flags.

We closed our still normal windows in order

Not to hear the bells. All around the Market

Place,

Enormous white poles had been planted

every

One and a half meters long, embroidered

With a white circle. That same night

More than sixty persons were registered

As having committed suicide.


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I had quickly sat down with my back to the

window (MR 79); I could only count the shots (MR

132)

the unravelled sweaters and scarves (MR 135); while

I

was winding bandages (MR 42); common-or garden

nerves (MR 120); told me precisely how to knock on

the

door (MR 42); a house […] was ‘liberated’ (MR 64);

The

first two days we spent sitting on our suitcases (MR

40)

Having quickly sat down with my back

To the window, I could only count the shots.

Not the unravelled scarves. While I was

binding

Bandages, with my common-or-garden

nerves,

She told me how precisely to knock upon the

door

When a house was ‘liberated’.

The first two days we spent

Sitting on our suitcases.

15 Foregrounding the time of writing, the speaker declares that she is reading a book

entitled Dante n’a rien vu, a title which seemingly corresponds to the reading process

which is characterised the by self-protective “tortoise-shell” : Dante saw nothing. Yet

that text, properly entitled Dante n’avait rien vu, is a testimony by Albert Londres

published in 1924, one which offers a critique of French military prisons in the colonies

and which bears witness to the atrocities committed by the authorities. The distance

between Londres’s disposition and that of the speaker mirrors that between the poetic

text and its source. Lanckoronska’s narrative is intended as testimony. In the prologue

she states: “My memoir is meant to be a report – and only a report – of what I

witnessed during the Second World War” (MR xxv). In contrast, the poetic speaker’s

actions in the past are characterised by a wilful blindness to what is happening: the

closing of the windows is enacted to affirm normality, yet it is clear that the opposite is

the case (the ringing of the bells celebrate the capitulation of France and in the market

square the blood-red banners herald the appearance of Nazi swastikas). The strangely

passive construction – “More than sixty persons were registered / As having

committed suicide” – indicates a failure to comprehend the horror of what is occurring:

the human beings have become textualised. The speaker has turned her back on the

outside world and can only “count the shots” : there is a deliberate effort not to witness

the execution of her fellow citizens. The action of sitting on her suitcase indicates the

desire to flee, yet her inaction conveys her lack of agency. In effect, she herself is

caught within “the white circle” of the embroidered flag. By reversing the intention

and effect of the source text, McGuckian focuses our attention on the understandable,

though utterly self-defeating refusal to bear witness to atrocity.

16 The image of the embroidered flag is picked up on and transformed later in the poem

when the speaker, having undergone imprisonment and on point of release, declares,

“You have to back out / Of the cell as you leave, and tread on a rag/On the splintering


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floor”. The source text states that this is a ritual undertaken by anyone leaving the

prison cell : “As I was on my way to the door, one of the Ukrainian girls flung herself on

me and turned me round to face the cell: ‘You have to back out of the cell as you leave.

That way you draw us all out after you, and you’ve got to tread on a rag as you go’”

(MR 143). Within the poetic text, the ritual’s meaning is clear: it forces the released

prisoner to look at and bear witness to her former companions, and to remember them.

Incorporated within the poem, it marks a moment when the speaker is no longer self-

absorbed, as she was when within the white circle. The fact that the rag is dragged

along “the splintering floor” is a significant departure from the source text. The

unravelling of this fabric perhaps indicates that a further meaning is to be gleaned

from the image as it is one which has its counterparts in the other poems. In “Goddess

of the Candlelight during Childbirth” when we are told that Olympia’s hand “barely

does its work / Of holding the cashmere shawl”, it is a disruptive moment (a refusal to

conceal that which must be hidden). By contrast, in “So Warsaw’s Coming to Wait on Us

Now”, when the speaker’s companion “seals herself with her shawl”, the speaker

herself has a blouse cut for her and she sews it up quickly, an action which is self-

protective and serves to resist the hardship she is undergoing. When McGuckian

borrows tropes of woven or sewn garments from her sources she not only highlights

their status as texts woven together from earlier texts (textus: tissue of a literary work,

literally that which is woven), she is also adverting to a key function behind her

reprising of exemplary texts.

17 In their introduction to Rewriting/Reprising in Literature the editors state that trauma is

“a sudden intrusion of the shapeless and the nameless which tears the fabric open,

whether it be in the narrative of our lives or in the stories which try to give shape to

such disruptive events32”. When attempting to counteract a trauma which not only

evades narrative structure but also actively de-scribes it, when “snared by words” in

the face of the indescribable, or indeed when faced with describing that for which one

has no authority to speak, a writer may delve into the pre-existing word-hoard and, to

paraphrase Eliot, use the fragments to shore against the ruins33. To do so is to highlight

an alternative meaning of reprise, namely the darning of a fabric/text: “rewriting/

reprising may be understood as an endless attempt to heal […] breaches loaded with

silent affects34”. Yet in McGuckian’s work her emphasis is not on healing or on the

construction of coherent narratives. The tearing, unravelling or divestment of a

garment in her work signals her intention to remain truthful to the nature of trauma.

Paradoxically, then, her stitching together of fragments from source texts is not

intended to grant wholeness, unity or coherence to the original; rather, she uses them

to disorientate the reader and make us bear witness to experiences which we cannot

fathom.


96

NOTES

1. Medbh McGuckian, interview by Helen Blakeman, Irish Studies Review, 11:1, 2003, p.

67.

2. Robin Silbergleid, “‘Treblinka, a Rather Musical Word’ : Carole Maso’s Post-holocaust

Narrative”, MFS : Modern Fiction Studies, 53:1, Spring 2007, p. 2.

3. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature, Chicago, The

University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 1.

4. Laurence J. Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation”,

Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek,

New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 174-5.

5. Cathy Caruth (ed.), Introduction, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 5.

6. Amos Goldberg, “Trauma, Narrative and Two Forms of Death”, Literature and

Medicine, 25.1, Spring, 2006, p. 122.

7. Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, New

York, Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 41.

8. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press,

1990, p. xi.

9. Theodor Adorno cited in Irving Howe, “Writing and the Holocaust”, Writing and the

Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang, New York, Holmes and Meier, 1988, p. 179.

10. Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 285.

11. Hill, “Under Judgment”, interview with Blake Morrison, New Statesman, 8 February

1980, p. 213.

12. S. D. Ezrahi, op. cit., p. 4.

13. Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, Bloomington,

Indiana University Press, 2003, p. 29.

14. Gubar, op. cit., p. 29.

15. Medbh McGuckian, “Goddess of the Candlelight during Childbirth”, unpublished

poem sent to the author, 14 January 2009.

16. Susan Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz (cited in text as SG); Jorg Rupke, Religion of the

Romans, trans. Richard Gordon, Cambridge, Polity, 2007, cited in text as JP; T. J. Clark,

The Painting of Modern Life, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999, cited in text as

TC.

17. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge, CUP, 2003, p. 15.

18. Schwab, op. cit., p. 49.

19. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock, Nebraska, University

of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 7.

20. Jorg Rupke’s Religion of the Romans outlines how, on the birth-date of Rome, “[o]ne

or more fires of male olive-, pine-, juniper- and laurel-branches were lit, and offerings

made to Pales, requesting protection from dangers” (p. 114).


97

21. Marc Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning”, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. David

L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003, p. 112.

22. Medbh McGuckian, “So Warsaw’s Coming to Wait on Us Now”, An Sionnach, 3.1,

Spring, 2007, p. 80-2.

23. Michal Grynberg (ed.), Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto,

trans. Philip Boehm, London, Granta, 2003. Cited in text as G.

24. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature,

New York, Norton, 1973, p. 123.

25. See Scott Brewster, Lyric, London, Routledge, 2009, p. 2.

26. Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, p. 7.

27. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, London, The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 4.

28. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or, the Vicissitudes of Listening”, Testimony: Crises of

Witnessing in Literature, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, New York, Routledge,

1992, p. 69.

29. Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, London, Cornell

University Press, 2001, p. 92.

30. Medbh McGuckian, “Skirt of a Thousand Triangles”, An Sionnach, 3.1, Spring, 2007,

p. 79-80.

31. Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, Michelangelo in Ravensbrück : One Woman’s War

against the Nazis, trans. Noel Clark, London, Pimlico Press, 2007. Cited in text as MR.

32. Claude Maisonnat, Josiane Pacaud-Huguet and Annie Ramel, “Introduction”,

Rewriting/Reprising in Literature: The Paradoxes of Intertextuality, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, p. XII.

33. T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”, The Waste Land and Other Poems, repr. 1990, London,

Faber, 1921, p. 41.

34. Claude Maisonnat, Josiane Pacaud-Huguet and Annie Ramel, p. XIII.

ABSTRACTS

Medbh McGuckian’s writing is characteristically appropriative: each poetic text is woven

together using phrases and images plucked from myriad sources. This article examines how she

uses unacknowledged quotations to mark and encircle narratives of trauma. Looking specifically

at three poems which take the Shoah as their thematic focus, I explore how she avoids

exploitative rhetoric and how she is aware of her lack of authority to speak about or on behalf of

the victims.

L’écriture de Medbh McGuckian s’approprie les choses : chacun des textes poétiques est élaboré

en reliant, comme en un tissage, des expressions et des images issues de sources multiples. Cet

article se penche sur la manière dont elle utilise des citations (dont les auteurs ne sont pas


98

référencés) pour marquer et cerner un discours sur le traumatisme. On prendra pour exemple

trois poèmes qui ont pour thème la Shoah, et l’on montrera comment McGuckian se détourne

d’une rhétorique qui exploiterait le sujet pour au contraire souligner la difficulté intrinsèque à

laquelle elle est confrontée pour parler des victimes, ou en leur nom.

INDEX

Keywords: McGuckian Medbh, poetry, trauma

Mots-clés: McGuckian Medbh, poésie, trauma

AUTHOR

SHANE ALCOBIA-MURPHY

University of Aberdeen


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Le long cheminement de la mémoirecollective irlandaise : A Long LongWay de Sebastian Barry (2005)Sylvie Mikowski

1 L’Irlande, pour des raisons qui ont été démontrées maintes fois, offre un exemple

frappant d’une part d’une concurrence entre mémoire et histoire, d’autre part d’une

mémoire sélective et forcée, mise au service d’une idéologie visant à construire ou pour

le moins renforcer une identité nationale, pour reprendre les termes utilisés par le

philosophe Paul Ricœur dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli1. Dans cette perspective, les

commémorations, jouent un grand rôle, celles qui ont lieu autant que celles qui n’ont

pas lieu. Ce n’est ainsi pas un hasard si ce furent les cérémonies de commémoration du

50e anniversaire du Soulèvement de Pâques de 1916 qui marquèrent l’émergence d’un

mouvement protestataire parmi les intellectuels, les historiens et les écrivains,

identifié depuis comme « le courant révisionniste », qui provoqua lui-même

l’apparition d’un courant « contre-révisionniste ». Aux yeux de certains

commentateurs, les grandioses cérémonies de 1966, avec parade militaire et défilé de

chars blindés, orchestrées par le parti Fianna Faíl, auraient joué un rôle non négligeable

dans le déclenchement des troubles en Irlande du Nord, par leur exaltation de la

violence armée et du sacrifice de quelques-uns pour une cause dite commune.

2 Pâques 1916 appartient certainement à la catégorie des événements historiques

irlandais ayant reçu le plus grand nombre d’interprétations variées et totalement

contradictoires. Tandis que le gouvernement irlandais a voulu en faire le symbole de la

naissance de la nation, un des moments forts de la commémoration étant la lecture du

texte de la proclamation de la république irlandaise lue par Padraig Pearse le 24 avril

1916, des historiens, au premier rang desquels Roy F. Foster, y voient pour leur part

une série d’erreurs et de bévues, la principale étant le fait même que la rébellion ait eu

lieu2. La Raven Arts Press de Dermot Bolger publia pour sa part en 1986 un pamphlet

intitulé : 16 on 16 : Irish Writers on the Easter Rising, dans lequel le journaliste du Irish

Times Fintan O’Toole décrit les commémorations du soulèvement comme une tentative

de transformer un échec en une action glorieuse et mémorable3. La controverse a


100

également inspiré à Roddy Doyle, appartenant à la même mouvance esthétique et

idéologique que Dermot Bolger, un roman intitulé A Star Called Henry4, dans lequel il

remet en question l’orthodoxie nationaliste concernant les buts et les enjeux du

Soulèvement. En tout cas, bien que contestée, la commémoration de Pâques 1916 n’en

constitue pas moins un exemple de ce que Paul Ricœur nomme une mémoire forcée,

« armée », comme il la décrit, « par une histoire elle-même “autorisée”, l’histoire

officielle, l’histoire apprise et célébrée publiquement 5 ».

3 Mais surtout, la mémoire imposée de Pâques 1916 va de pair avec ce que Ricœur appelle

un oubli forcé : celui des milliers d’Irlandais qui au moment du Soulèvement se

battaient contre les Allemands dans les tranchées en Belgique et en France, sous

l’uniforme de l’armée britannique. La participation de 200 000 Irlandais à la Première

Guerre mondiale, qui causa la mort de 35 000 d’entre eux, ne donna lieu qu’à des

commémorations furtives jusqu’en juillet 2006, date de la première commémoration

officielle en République d’Irlande de la Bataille de la Somme. En revanche, 200 vétérans

de cette guerre furent assassinés entre 1919 et 1922, accusés de collusion avec

« l’ennemi », c’est-à-dire les Anglais. En 1927, une proposition faite aux députés du Dáil

d’ériger un monument aux morts à Merrion Square fut vigoureusement repoussée. Les

cérémonies du 11-Novembre, ou Remembrance Day, furent longtemps associées en

République d’Irlande à des manifestations de soutien aux unionistes, d’autant plus

qu’on y jouait le God Save the Queen et qu’on y arborait le drapeau de l’Union Jack. Le

jardin de Islandbridge, seul mémorial de la Première Guerre mondiale autorisé à

Dublin, tomba pendant des années en déshérence.

4 Le roman de Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way6, illustre de manière remarquable d’une

part le lien entre récit de fiction et récit historique, d’autre part entre mémoire et

histoire, et pose la question du rôle de la littérature dans la transmission d’une

mémoire collective. Il se trouve que le roman enchevêtre trois formes de mémoire, ou

plutôt cherche à réparer trois formes d’oubli : celui, collectif, du rôle des Irlandais

engagés dans l’armée britannique pour se battre dans les Ardennes, la Flandre et la

Somme ; celui ensuite qui concerne l’histoire personnelle de la famille de Sebastian

Barry. En effet, un de ses grands-pères combattit dans l’armée britannique pendant la

Seconde Guerre mondiale, et surtout un de ses arrière-grands-pères était le Chief

Superintendent de la Dublin Metropolitan Police, chargé de réprimer la Grande Grève de

1913. Il fut l’homme qui mena la charge au cours de laquelle quatre manifestants furent

tués. Barry ressuscite cet embarrassant aïeul dans son œuvre sous les traits de Thomas

Dunne, qui apparaît d’abord vieux et malade dans The Steward of Christendom7 puis est

remémoré longtemps après sa mort par sa fille Annie dans Annie Dunne8, pour enfin être

représenté dans la force de l’âge, veuf élevant seul ses quatre enfants, dans A Long Long

Way. C’est là la troisième forme de réparation de l’oubli opérée par Barry au fur et à

mesure que son œuvre se construit : il sort de l’ombre des personnages qui jusque-là

n’avaient fait que hanter ses récits antérieurs, Willie apparaissant effectivement

comme un fantôme sur la scène dans The Steward. De même, Barry recrée aux côtés de

Willie le personnage de Jessie Kirwan, fils de Fanny et de Patrick Kirwan, protagonistes

de sa pièce Prayers of Sherkin9.

5 En choisissant ainsi un membre différent de la même famille comme centre de

conscience pour chaque œuvre Thomas, Annie ou Willie Dunne, Fanny ou Jessie Kirwan

Barry suggère la variabilité des souvenirs et interroge le lien entre mémoire

individuelle et mémoire collective : sont-elles discordantes ou nécessaires l’une à


101

l’autre ? N’existe-t-il de souvenirs que partagés ? La vérité de Thomas se trouve-t-elle

dans le souvenir que garde de lui sa fille Annie ou dans les souvenirs que sa mémoire à

lui conserve des événements passés ? Et quelle part de mémoire, personnelle ou

collective, peut ou doit contribuer à l’élaboration de l’histoire nationale ? On retrouve

là une autre problématique propre à Paul Ricœur, celle d’être pour soi-même ou/et

pour les autres. Barry l’illustre à sa façon à travers la saga des Dunne, citoyens

condamnables aux yeux des autres membres de la communauté nationale, car placés à

contre-courant de l’idéologie du moment, soient parce qu’ils étaient catholiques du

« Château », c’est-à-dire loyalistes, juste au moment où l’union était sur le point de se

dissoudre, ou parce qu’ils étaient soldats engagés dans l’armée britannique, appelés à

tirer sur les rebelles de 1916, ou encore femmes célibataires sans enfant dans un pays

qui sacralise le mariage et la maternité, comme Annie. En imaginant et en représentant

verbalement la conscience, les souvenirs et le point de vue de ces personnages, en

révélant leur « soi-même », Barry confronte leur vérité intérieure à celle qui est

construite par les autres.

6 Par ailleurs, l’œuvre de Barry met à contribution la mémoire du lecteur ou du

spectateur, qui, en retrouvant des personnages rencontrés précédemment, mais aussi

des faits passés avérés, est amené à se remémorer simultanément des récits fictifs et

des récits historiques, expérience qui souligne l’identité de nature, purement verbale,

entre histoire et fiction. A Long Long Way est ainsi accompagné d’une bibliographie des

ouvrages historiques les plus récents publiés sur le rôle de l’Irlande dans la Grande

Guerre, et s’appuie largement sur des faits authentiques. Willie Dunne est le

représentant fictif des 80 000 Irlandais qui s’engagèrent au cours des douze premiers

mois de la guerre, formant trois brigades, dont l’une était composée uniquement de

soldats venant d’Ulster, la célèbre 36e Division. Willie appartient pour sa part au

régiment des Royal Dublin Fusiliers, une composante de la 16e division. Il participe à la

bataille de Saint-Julien, près d’Ypres, au cours de laquelle le 2e bataillon des Fusiliers de

Dublin fut presque entièrement exterminé, empoisonné par le fameux gaz moutarde

déversé par les Allemands que personne ne connaissait encore, épisode reconstitué

dans le chapitre 4 du roman. Il est tout à fait exact que, comme Willie de retour à

Dublin en permission, un nombre important de soldats du régiment des Fusiliers de

Dublin prirent part à la répression du Soulèvement du 24 avril 1916 alors qu’ils étaient

en permission. De retour au front, Willie participe avec son régiment à la prise de

Guillemont et de Guinchy, au cours de laquelle les bataillons de l’Ulster et ceux du Sud

combattirent côte à côte, et où 4 314 Irlandais perdirent la vie. Puis Willie prend part à

la bataille de Messines, qui dura plus d’une semaine, victoire à laquelle la 16e division

d’Ulster et la 36e du Sud contribuèrent ensemble, et au cours de laquelle Willie

Redmond, le frère de John, le leader du Irish Parliamentary Party, fut tué, comme le

rapporte Barry dans le chapitre 18. Willie lui-même est tué lors des derniers combats de

1918, le 2e régiment des Fusiliers de Dublin ayant effectivement été engagé en

octobre 1918 dans la bataille du Cateau dans laquelle 44 % de ses effectifs furent tués.

7 Le personnage de Father Buckley, qui dans le roman de Barry prie avec les soldats avant

la bataille et donne l’extrême-onction aux mourants, est sans doute inspiré du

Révérend Willie Doyle, figure légendaire connue pour son courage, qui donnait les

derniers sacrements aux soldats blessés à mort dans les circonstances les plus

dangereuses. Fervent admirateur de Redmond, il exhortait les soldats à combattre non

seulement pour défendre la Belgique catholique mais aussi la cause de l’Irlande, à

travers celle d’une autre nation, comme il le disait. Il fut tué à Ypres en 1916, comme


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l’est Father Buckley dans le roman. Le sort de Jesse Kirwan, exécuté pour rébellion,

rappelle quant à lui celui des 239 soldats irlandais condamnés à mort et exécutés

pendant la guerre par les autorités britanniques pour désertion ou désobéissance. Un

rapport récent, publié seulement en 2004, a établi la preuve des préjugés racistes à

l’encontre des Irlandais qui motivèrent ces jugements le plus souvent iniques et sans

commune mesure avec la faute commise.

8 En ce qui concerne les motivations attribuées par Barry à ses personnages pour décider

de s’engager dans l’armée, alors que le service militaire n’était pas obligatoire en

Grande-Bretagne en 1914, elles sont tout à fait conformes à ce que les historiens nous

en disent aujourd’hui. Ils expliquent ainsi qu’il existait une longue tradition de

l’engagement militaire chez les Irlandais ; que certains d’entre eux s’étaient laissé

convaincre au début de la guerre par John Redmond de la nécessité de se battre pour

l’Irlande au sein de l’Empire, puisque le Home Rule était pratiquement acquis ; que les

Irlandais étaient sensibles au parallèle établi entre la situation de la Belgique, petite

nation catholique, avec celle de l’Irlande. D’autres s’étaient engagés pour des raisons

économiques, fuyant le chômage, d’autres encore recherchaient simplement l’aventure

et l’expérience du combat et des armes. Quant à Willie Dunne, fils du Chief

Superintendent de la Dublin Metropolitan Police, sa décision de s’engager s’impose à lui

comme une évidence. Cependant, il est fait allusion au cours du récit à la chute

spectaculaire du nombre de soldats irlandais enrôlés volontaires après le soulèvement

de Pâques et suite à ce qu’on a nommé la « crise de la conscription ».

9 Ainsi, le roman de Barry est solidement adossé aux faits historiques attestés par les

archives, statistiques, documents et témoignages de l’époque. Cependant, A Long Long

Way n’est pas un livre d’histoire, même s’il peut s’apparenter par endroits à une

reconstitution historique, mais avant tout un travail de mémoire, qui cherche à sortir

de l’amnésie collective une page entière du passé, dont le souvenir a été effacé par un

exemple particulièrement frappant d’oubli forcé. Ce sont donc les ressources de la

mémoire que Barry utilise pour faire ressurgir des images enfouies et provoquer ainsi

l’anamnèse. Dans ce but il a recours à l’imagination, dans la mesure où imagination et

souvenir ont comme point commun de rendre présent ce qui est absent, une des

fonctions de l’imagination, que Ricœur désigne comme sa « fonction ostensive10 » étant

de « mettre sous les yeux », de donner à voir, de faire voir. Il souligne également que le

récit, qu’il soit historique ou fictif, donne à la fois à comprendre et à voir, qu’il existe un

rapport de quasi identité entre lisibilité et visibilité.

10 Il n’est donc pas étonnant que parmi toutes les techniques propres à la fiction

narrative, Barry ait privilégié dans A Long Long Way celle qui concerne la manipulation

du point de vue. Le récit est en effet entièrement narré du point de vue de Willie, soldat

ordinaire, que sa jeunesse, son ignorance, sa confiance dans son père, ainsi que son

caractère simple et obéissant identifient au personnage type du naïf ou de l’innocent

qui va servir de conscience – témoin au lecteur pour découvrir à travers lui une

situation incompréhensible, révoltante ou insupportable, procédé bien connu depuis

Voltaire, Swift, Aldous Huxley ou encore Imre Kertezs dans Etre sans Destin. Ainsi,

comme le souligne Christina Hunt Mahony dans un article intitulé « Barry’s Naïfs and

the Poetry of Humanism11 », Willie, comme tout soldat dans n’importe quelle armée, ne

comprend pas toujours ce qu’on lui demande de faire. Le sentiment permanent de

désorientation, d’incompréhension et d’ignorance qui l’accompagne tout au long des

différentes batailles auxquelles il participe l’entraîne à ne se fier qu’à ses perceptions :


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« He had hardly a true idea who he was in that second, what he was thinking, where he was,

what nation, he belonged to, what language he spoke » (35).

11 Le choix de raconter ainsi l’histoire à travers les perceptions de Willie se révèle

particulièrement efficace dans deux épisodes : celui de la première attaque au gaz

moutarde subie par le bataillon de Willie, et celui du Soulèvement de Pâques à Dublin.

Dans ce dernier, l’incompréhension totale de Willie des scènes qui se présentent à ses

yeux « it was the most astonishing thing Willie Dunne ever thought he would see in his native

place » (87) souligne la confusion qui caractérisa l’événement. Ainsi Willie et ses

camarades pensent un moment que des Allemands ont envahi Dublin, et que c’est

contre eux qu’on les envoie se battre ; Sackville Street, si familière à Willie, est soudain

transformée à ses yeux en champ de bataille ; un officier interdit à Willie de parler à

« l’ennemi », alors qu’il ne fait que poser une question à un citoyen dublinois

d’apparence tout à fait ordinaire à ses yeux. Quelques instants plus tard, il reçoit dans

ses bras un jeune rebelle agonisant qui, trompé par la couleur de son uniforme, le

prend pour un Écossais. La plus grande confusion concerne peut-être le document

distribué à Willie et qui fait référence à « our gallant allies in Europe » (90). L’expression

est extraite du texte authentique de la Proclamation de la République irlandaise lue le

24 avril 1916 par Pearse et fait référence au soutien apporté à la rébellion par les

Allemands : elle paraît incompréhensible à Willie, qui se bat avec ses camarades contre

ces mêmes Allemands en Flandre, au prix de souffrances extrêmes. Ainsi, la

représentation d’une scène connue du point de vue d’un personnage qui en ignore tout

produit un effet de défamiliarisation qui pousse le lecteur à abandonner ses souvenirs

construits de l’événement pour le configurer autrement.

12 Dans l’épisode de l’attaque au gaz moutarde, les soldats, ignorant à nouveau tout de la

nature de l’étrange nuage jaune qui se dirige vers leur tranchée, se basent uniquement

sur leurs perceptions pour essayer de comprendre ce qui se passe. Odeurs et bruits se

transforment bientôt en sensations horribles de douleurs et de suffocation : « Anyone

that lingered tasted the smoke, felt the sharp tines in his throat raking and gashing, and he was

undone » (47). Ce passage, qui mêle description des sensations éprouvées par les

personnages, d’ordre surtout visuelles puisque la couleur jaune y joue un rôle essentiel,

et évocations de l’apocalypse : « he thought horribly of the Revelation of St John and

wondered if by chance and lack he had reached the unknown date of the end of the living world

», (49), est à rapprocher d’un autre roman de guerre, The Red Badge of Courage de

Stephen Crane. Ce récit de la Guerre de Sécession est très souvent loué pour son

réalisme photographique, sa faculté de faire voir la réalité des batailles grâce au choix

de la restriction du point de vue à travers la conscience du personnage principal, le

soldat Henry Fleming. Le style de Barry, riche en images et en comparaisons qui

frappent l’imagination, est également à rapprocher de celui de Crane, par exemple dans

l’évocation de l’horreur éprouvée dans les deux récits par chacun des deux

protagonistes à la vue des cadavres jonchant le champ de bataille. Seule l’ampleur de la

dévastation et du massacre, infiniment plus grande entre 1914 et 1918 que pendant la

Guerre civile américaine, semble séparer les deux guerres, comme l’atteste le parallèle

suivant entre Crane et Barry :

He came to a fence and clambered over it. On the far side, the ground was litteredwith clothes and guns. A newspaper, folded up, lay in the dirt. A dead soldier wasstretched with his face hidden in his arm. Farther off there was a group of four orfive corpses keeping mournful company12.


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[…] the sightless sockets peered at the living soldiers, the lipless teeth all seemed tohave just cracked some mighty jokes. They were seriously grinning. Hundreds morewere face down, and turned on their sides, as if not interested in such awful mirth,showing the gashes where missing arms and legs had been, their breasts turnedaway, and hundreds of floating hands, and legs, and big heavy puddles of guts andoffal, all mixed through the loam and sharded vegetation. (Barry, 178)

13 Dans les deux passages, des sentiments sont attribués aux cadavres décrits : mournful

dans un cas, grinning dans l’autre, suggérant une inversion de l’animé et de l’inanimé

qui provoque un effet grotesque. Les deux passages mentionnent également la position

des cadavres allongés dans la saleté (the dirt) ou au milieu d’une végétation décomposée

(loam and sharded vegetation) tels des détritus jonchant le sol, accentuant ainsi l’effet de

déshumanisation recherché. Il est d’autant plus intéressant de rapprocher l’œuvre de

Barry de celle de Crane dans la mesure où on a parlé du « révisionnisme » de ce dernier

concernant l’histoire de la Guerre de sécession, et qu’il fut d’ailleurs taxé

d’antipatriotisme quand le livre fut publié.

14 Mais surtout Crane comme Barry soulèvent la question de la nature du courage et de

l’héroïsme, question également placée au cœur de l’historiographie de la période

s’étendant entre 1916 et 1918 en Irlande. L’assomption sur laquelle repose la

commémoration du Soulèvement de Pâques par l’État nationaliste irlandais est en effet

celle de l’héroïsme des participants, censés avoir sacrifié leurs vies pour l’amour de la

patrie. Même le célèbre poème de Yeats, « Easter 1916 », malgré ses ambiguïtés,

souligne comment l’événement éleva les hommes de 1916 à une hauteur dépassant le

commun des mortels. Cette assomption en revanche fut niée par la force de l’oubli aux

soldats irlandais morts pendant la Première Guerre. Or, de même que les historiens

révisionnistes ont contesté l’héroïsme des rebelles de Pâques, préférant souligner leur

manque de préparation et leur volonté de forcer le destin au nom d’un peuple qui ne

leur demandait rien, de nombreux écrivains contemporains de la période qui suivit

l’indépendance se sont également insurgés contre le culte de l’héroïsme entretenu par

Yeats et le mouvement de la Renaissance celtique. L’esthétique de la Renaissance fut

celle de l’épopée, du mythe, de la tragédie héroïque.

15 En retour, reprochant à leurs aînés d’avoir construit de toutes pièces la mémoire d’un

passé glorieux ponctué d’exploits accomplis par des personnages exceptionnels ainsi

que d’un âge d’or de la culture et de la vie nationale irlandaise, les auteurs de l’après-

indépendance se tournèrent soit vers la satire, comme Flann O’Brien ou Sean O’Casey,

soit vers le naturalisme, comme Patrick Kavanagh. À leur suite toute une génération de

romanciers ou dramaturges, comme John McGahern ou Tom Murphy, s’est caractérisée

par une peinture réaliste de l’anti-héroïsme et des vies étriquées et sans gloire de leurs

personnages fictifs. L’œuvre de Barry semble s’inscrire directement dans ce

mouvement de remise en cause d’une certaine forme d’écriture de l’histoire et de la

littérature irlandaises. Ainsi dans A Long Long Way il privilégie l’homme ordinaire par

rapport aux grands hommes, Willie se caractérisant d’ailleurs par sa petite taille, qui

l’empêche de devenir policier comme son père mais pas de s’enrôler dans l’armée. Tout

au long du récit, raconté donc du point de vue du soldat mais non par sa voix, le

narrateur insiste sur le sentiment éprouvé par Willie de n’être qu’un élément infime et

insignifiant d’un ensemble qui le dépasse : « It was then that he felt slight enough in the

world, a creature of low stature » (49). Cette insistance sur la petitesse du protagoniste de

Barry s’oppose au culte des héros qui parsème l’histoire d’Irlande, Daniel O’Connell

étant surnommé « The Liberator », Parnell « Ireland’s Uncrowned King », Eamon de Valera


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« The Long Fellow » et Michael Collins « The Big Fellow ». D’ailleurs la statue érigée à

l’intérieur de la GPO à Dublin pour commémorer l’Insurrection de Pâques représente le

géant Cúchulainn. Cependant la petite taille de Willie ne souligne pas seulement son

aspect ordinaire et banal, mais aussi sa jeunesse, au point que son jeune âge ainsi que

son ignorance et son innocence l’assimilent ni plus ni moins qu’à un enfant.

16 Ainsi nous apparaît un autre aspect du récit, mise en lumière par les très nombreuses

références religieuses qui imprègnent le récit. Il n’en est pour s’en convaincre que de

citer la phrase : « Soon the places were filled with new men from home. Flocks and flocks and

flocks of them, thought Willie. King George’s lambs » (54). Ou encore : « The officer in charge, a

florid-faced captain with a patch on one eye, lined them up, ready to embark. Willie remembered

he used to be down here as a little fella with his father, to watch the Irish lambs being loaded on,

for the English trade… » (85) Qu’ils soient agneaux destinés à l’immolation, ou enfants

promis à un nouveau « Massacre des Innocents », les soldats de Barry correspondent en

tout point à la définition de la victime sacrificielle, désignée au hasard pour purger la

communauté de ses pulsions de violence. C’est d’ailleurs son père qui envoie Willie au

front, comme Abraham envoie son fils Isaac au sacrifice sur l’ordre de Dieu. Thomas en

portera la culpabilité jusqu’à la fin de ses jours. Un des moments les plus émouvants du

roman se produit lorsque Willie chante l’Ave Maria de Schubert devant ses camarades

rassemblés, promesse d’une éternité après la mort qui selon les mots de Barry « could

not be rendered meaningless even by slaughter » (134).

17 Ironiquement, Barry a donc recours dans ce roman à la même rhétorique du sacrifice

que la littérature de la renaissance celtique. De même, le lyrisme de certains passages

s’apparente au style de l’épopée, avec ses récits de batailles, d’exploits et de morts. Mais

là où les nationalistes honorent le sacrifice des Insurgés de 1916, et lui donnent un sens

en en faisant l’événement fondateur de la république, Barry laisse en suspens la

question du sens du martyr des soldats irlandais de la Première Guerre, d’autant plus

que son souvenir a été oblitéré. Par endroits, son roman semble répondre au poème de

Yeats, et partager ses interrogations sur la nature et l’utilité du courage : « Was it

needless death after all? » : en effet, un sacrifice non reconnu et qui n’est pas commémoré

par la communauté est-il encore efficace, c’est-à-dire, comme le dit René Girard13,

permet-il encore l’éradication de la violence et le maintien de la paix sociale ? Au

regard de la guerre civile qui déchira la société irlandaise après l’armistice de 1918 et le

retour des soldats irlandais chez eux, ou encore des événements d’Irlande du Nord,

conséquence directe du Soulèvement de Pâques, on peut en douter. Le vers dans lequel

Yeats insiste sur la reconnaissance des intentions des rebelles de 1916 : « We know their

dream; enough/To know they dreamed and are dead » – prend une résonance ironique au

regard des morts de Ypres, Messines et St-Julien, dont personne n’a souhaité pendant

longtemps reconnaître pour quel idéal ils voulaient se battre et mourir. De même, le

vers « Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart » prend un sens tragiquement

ironique si on l’applique au destin de Willie, qui traverse trois années de guerre avant

de mourir, quelques semaines avant l’armistice, et dont Barry imagine l’épitaphe, qui

constitue les derniers mots du roman, son existence se pétrifiant effectivement dans

l’éternité de la mort et de cette inscription. Comme en réponse aussi au célèbre refrain

de Yeats, « all changed, changed utterly », Barry attribue la pensée suivante à Willie, de

retour sur le front après sa permission à Dublin pendant laquelle il a tiré sur les

insurgés de la GPO : « nothing had changed just where he found himself-utter change was just

across the plains. Nothing had changed. But something had changed in Willie Dunne » (101),


106

suggérant que le devenir du peuple irlandais se joua autant sur les champs de bataille

de la Somme que dans Sackville Street.

18 Peu à peu, la manière dont les Irlandais se souviennent de 1916 a également changé : les

événements de Pâques et ceux de Ypres, Messines ou Gallipoli ont été « racontés

autrement, en supprimant, en déplaçant les accents d’importance, en refigurant

différemment les protagonistes de l’action en même temps que les contours de

l’action », pour reprendre la formule de Paul Ricœur dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli14.

Le roman de Barry, de même que la pièce de Frank McGuiness, See the Sons of Ulster

Marching Down the Somme15 ont largement contribué à ce changement, utilisant toutes

les ressources de l’imagination et du verbe pour modifier notre vision et nous faire

mieux revoir et comprendre les hommes et les faits du passé.

NOTES

1. Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, coll. « Essais », 2000.

2. Voir par exemple Roy Foster, Modern Ireland : 1600-1972, London, Allen Lane, 1988.

3. « 1916 was an attempt to make failure glorious and memorable », Fintan O’Toole, « The

Failure of Failure », in Dermot Bolger (dir.), 16 on 16. 16 Irish Writers on the Easter Rising,

Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1988, p. 42.

4. Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry, London and New York, Penguin, 1999.

5. Paul Ricœur, op. cit., p. 104.

6. Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way, London and New York, Viking, 2005. Tous les

numéros de pages entre parenthèses renvoient à cette édition.

7. Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom, London, Royal Court Theatre & Methuen,

1995.

8. Sebastian Barry, Annie Dunne, London, Faber and Faber, 2002.

9. Sebastian Barry, Prayers of Sherkin, in Plays : 1, London, Methuen Drama, 1997.


11. Christina Hunt Mahony, « Barry’s Naïfs and the Poetry of Humanism », in Christina

Hunt Mahony (dir.), Out of History. Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry, Washington,

DC, The Catholic University of America Press, 2006.

12. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), New York, Pocket Books, 1976, p. 61.

13. René Girard, La violence et le sacré, Paris, Grasset, 1972.


15. Frank McGuiness, See the Sons of Ulster Marching Down the Somme, London, Faber,

1986.


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RÉSUMÉS

Dans A Long Long Way, publié en 2005, Sebastian Barry poursuit son œuvre de recouvrement de la

mémoire nationale, entreprise dans ses pièces de théâtre, comme The Steward of Christendom, mais

aussi dans ses romans comme Annie Dunne. En mettant successivement en scène les différents

membres de la même famille, les Dunne, caractérisée par son appartenance à une classe sociale

aujourd’hui rejetée dans les marges de l’histoire, celle des catholiques loyalistes, et ayant de

nombreux points communs avec la propre famille de l’écrivain, Barry cherche à mettre en

lumière les événements passés de l’Irlande volontairement laissées dans l’ombre par

l’historiographie nationaliste. Le protagoniste de A Long, Long Way, Willie Dunne, permet ainsi à

Barry de restituer l’expérience des milliers de soldats irlandais engagés sous l’uniforme

britannique pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale, et auxquels le nouvel Etat irlandais refusa

pendant longtemps de rendre hommage par des commémorations officielles, alors même que la

rébellion de 1916 donna lieu à des cérémonies grandioses. En s’appuyant sur les notions d’oubli

forcé ou de mémoire forcée, définies par Paul Ricœur dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, cet article

s’applique à analyser les procédés utilisés par Barry et à confronter la fiction aux faits

historiques.

In A Long Long Way published in 2005, Sebastian Barry continues to explore the hidden recesses of

Irish national history, as he did previously in his plays (The Steward of Christendom) or his novels

(Annie Dunne). Here he stages yet another member of the Dunne family, who, being Catholics loyal

to the Crown, like Barry’s own forefathers, are representative of a whole class generally excluded

from nationalist historiography for reasons of non-conformity. Willie Dunne is one of the

thousands of young Irishmen who enrolled in the British Army in WWI to fight in the Somme and

in Flanders, and whose sacrifice was denied official recognition and tribute by the independent

Irish State, until very recently, whereas the 1916 Rebellion was celebrated on a grand scale.

Through the character of Willie, Barry questions the notion of sacrifice and its significance when

it is not acknowledged by the community for whose sake it is performed. This article relies on

Paul Ricœur’s definitions of « forced oblivion » and « forced remembrance » to analyse the

devices used by Barry and to compare fiction to historical facts.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Barry Sebastian, histoire et fiction, histoire et mémoire, bataille de la Somme (1916),

Première Guerre mondiale, trauma

Keywords : history and fiction, battle of the Somme (1916), history and memory, trauma, Barry

Sebastian, First World War

AUTEUR

SYLVIE MIKOWSKI

Université de Reims-Champagne-Ardenne


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Exorcising Trauma: UncannyModernity and the Anglo-Irish Warin Elizabeth Bowen’s The LastSeptember (1929)Edwina Keown

1 In this essay I shall examine The Last September as a hybrid novel syncretising an Anglo-

Irish gothic tradition with modernism. As we shall see, by using innovative and

aesthetically shocking narrative techniques Bowen textually embodies the conflict

between the Anglo-Irish and Catholic Ireland, with their bloody history, when

confronting the social pressure of World War I, nationalism, new technologies and

sexual politics. It re-examines the novel’s infamous finale, the burning of the big house

Danielstown, in the context of modernism and the uncanny to explore Bowen’s

ambiguous exorcism of the trauma of Irish colonial history and memory. By locating

The Last September within gothic and modernist studies, this essay develops the on-

going critical debate that “[w]ith a personal caste history of loss, Bowen’s roles as an

Irish Ascendancy novelist and as an ideologically conservative modernist attuned to a

wider European cultural dispossession converge in her fiction1.”

2 The Last September is celebrated as the Anglo-Irish “big house” novel that anatomises

the War of Independence (1919-1921). It is a benchmark modernist and gothic text for

the twentieth century because of Bowen’s experimental treatment of two themes –

revolutionary class politics and female sexuality – that have been central to gothic

since its full emergence in the eighteenth century as a “writing of excess” that

“shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the

uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence2”. Bowen continues the

innovative and political Gothic of the Anglo-Irish writers Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”

(1874) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In The Last September she experiments with

gothic and modernist techniques: using gothic to create the narrative disruptions; the

alienation; the clash between different versions of history; and the focus on gender and

alternative sexuality that are all associated with modernism. With its isolated and


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decaying ancestral home; its ruined mill and ghosts; its lower-class Catholic “natives”

versus landed, hybrid Anglo-Irish “settlers/colonialists”; its entrapped female and male

characters; its ambiguous “visitors” – dispossessed Anglo-Irish and the Irish Republican

Army (IRA) gunmen; and its exploration of terrifying modernity in the guise of the

motorcar and the “New Woman”, The Last September ensures that in the “twentieth

century, in diverse and ambiguous ways, Gothic figures have continued to shadow the

progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of

enlightenment and humanist values3.”

Doublings: Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish gothic-modernist legacy

3 In many respects, it could be said that Irish history gave birth to the gothic literary

tradition in the English language. Critics agree that gothic emerged as a response to the

Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas

of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and his writing on the terror of the French Revolution

with its destruction of property and reversal of enlightenment values4. Jarlath Killeen

originates gothic earlier, in the terror arising from the 1641 Irish rising and massacre

of Protestant English colonialists, and the subsequent bloody Cromwellian settlement

of Ireland in the 1640s and 50s with the colonial confrontation between the Protestant

English “settlers” who took land from the defeated “native” Catholic Irish5. Tit for tat,

both sides besieged fortified castles and towns and butchered the inhabitants, but

Protestant English and Anglo-Irish writers remembered the terror as irrational acts of

Catholic violence against Protestant order and reason – resulting in an Irish “proto-

Gothic6”. The settlers’ guilt of usurpation and their fear of retaliation by dispossessed

Irish Catholics formed the psychic landscape of Ireland and the Irish literary

imagination. This guilt and fear was built into the foundations of Anglo-Irish big houses

and formed the underside of the ruling social order in the eighteenth century, “the

Anglo-Irish Ascendancy” that moulded itself on Enlightenment values. This gothic fear

of the natives shaped Irish history and literature into the twentieth century.

4 Since the English novelist Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), gothic

conventions of: ancestral homes; entrapped females; threatening landscapes and

climate; class-based political unrest; sexually ambiguous and threatening men and

women signify clashes between different social orders and generations. In the English

tradition gothic represented the concerns of the emerging English middle class and

gentry in opposition to feudal aristocrats and a growing urban working class. In

Ireland, gothic was more overtly political, and it typically represented the concerns of

the Anglo-Irish who governed Ireland until the 1801 Act of Union between Ireland and

England destroyed their power7.

5 The Anglo-Irish Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1801) is a hybrid realist-gothic black

comedy charting the demise of the Protestant landlords, the Rackrents, and the rise of

the Catholic Irish middle-class who ultimately triumph. Charles Maturin’s classic

Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is set in a decaying Anglo-Irish big house that is over-run

by malevolent Catholic servants and haunted by the restless ghost of an earlier owner,

Melmoth, who has made a Faustian pact with the devil. Both novels feature degeneracy,

bad blood and incarcerated females. Increasingly, as the nineteenth century

progressed, Anglo-Irish writers couched their political decline in feminised language


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and tropes of incarcerated women and gender-bending villainous ancestors, as fears of

class revolution were equated with and confused with female sexuality and

emancipation.

6 Sheridan’s “Carmilla” and Stoker’s Dracula represent terror, specifically in relation to

the late nineteenth-century Land War in Ireland, and generally in relation to social and

scientific developments in Ireland, Britain and Europe which were raising questions

surrounding class and the constructions of the feminine and masculine, and thereby

undermining the conservative bourgeois rational order. Le Fanu portrays the

relationship between Carmilla and her victim as a mutual and intense female crush,

transgressing Victorian sexual and social taboos. Dracula lusts after men as much as

women. Both texts introduce travel and transport as a new gothic realm. Speedier

means of travel and communication – carriages, letters, steamships, trains, telegrams –

enable Carmilla and Dracula to infiltrate English homes and transform men and

women. As Sinead Mooney writes, Bowen herself in her memoir Bowen’s Court (1942)

“traces the migration of Gothic horror from a threatening world to the interior of the

mind, from the castles of Maturin and Radcliffe to psychoanalytic theories of the self8”.

7 With the Irish Literary Revival and James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), realism, celticism and

Irish mythology overtook Anglo-Irish gothic as Irish writers and society focused on the

rise of Irish Nationalism, equated with Catholicism, and the struggle for independence

from the British: a struggle in which the Anglo-Irish and their big houses would become

the main causalities. Following independence in 1921 the Irish novel in general

oscillated between realism and modernism, except for the supernatural, big house

black comedies of Bowen and her fellow Anglo-Irish writer Molly Keane – who wrote

big house gothic and uncanny novels into the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s Ian

Cochrane, E. L. Kennedy, John Banville, Patrick McCabe and Jennifer Johnston began

using big houses and gothic devices in their fiction, showing that Bowen is an

important link between Anglo-Irish gothic, modernism and Irish writers today. New

Bowen scholarship from Ireland, Britain and America position Bowen as an Ascendancy

modernist with gothic undertones “who was more attuned than most to the unspoken

and, for some, unspeakable sexual desires that challenge what Adrienne Rich has

termed ‘compulsory heterosexuality’9”. Margot Backus argues in The Gothic Family

Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (1999) that

Bowen’s metaphors, characters and descriptions conjoin revolutionary forces that seek

to tear away the façade of Anglo-Irish society with illicit sexual desires that threaten

marriage10. Heather Ingman argues that The Last September with its archetypal big

house, its insular family (seemingly cut-off from the real world around them), and

complex portrayal of women, politics and desire is central to critical re-examinations

of the Irish national tale post-independence11. She reads Bowen in the context of Julia

Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves and Nations without Nationalism, in particular Kristeva’s

“psychoanalytic insight to politics, drawing on Freud’s notion of the Uncanny, that is,

the uncanny sensations we experience in relation to certain objects or people

stemming from the unconscious projection of our desires and anxieties onto the world

around us12.” Ingman is interested in why Bowen links the themes of a nation

attempting to establish itself with a young girl, the Anglo-Irish Lois, trying to find her

place in the world. I would add that Bowen is re-working gothic conventions within the

cultural context of the Anglo-Irish war. Lois’s sense of uncanny strangeness or doubling

helps her to connect, across her caste and gender divide, with the nationalists. In

Ingman’s words Lois’s “awareness of her alterity within, that she is other to herself,


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prepares her to relate, as Kristeva has argued awareness of alterity always does, to the

other as other13”. Two recent critical essay collections give full credence to Bowen’s big

house modernism, her ghosts stories and sense of the supernatural, and her avant-

garde experimental style and treatment of class, triangular relationships and same-sex

desire14.

8 Heather Laird’s essay “Bowen in Contemporary Irish Literary and Cultural Criticism”,

argues that Bowen’s status as an Anglo-Irish woman in a settler colony, and “the

divided loyalties that this engendered” dampened her radical potential15. Despite

Bowen’s literary flirtation with transgressive sexuality and revolutionary IRA

characters and in-between states, which attest to extreme physical and psychological

restrictions, same sex desire is often rejected in favour of marriage. Laird acknowledges

the splitting and doublings of Bowen in literary and cultural criticism the “Anglo-Irish

Bowen”, the “modernist Bowen”, the “postmodernist Bowen”, the “bisexual Bowen”

and the “Irish Protestant Gothic”. However she sees this fragmented state of Bowen

criticism as a positive. It confirms Bowen’s own interest in the themes of fragmentation

and alterity in response to twentieth-century social change. In Bowen’s own words the

“dissonance, the doublings and twistings of mankind16”. Laird closes her own appraisal

with a reference to The Last September and its burning finale. But she reads this

exorcism not as artistic liberation but rather a fondness for “surfaces themselves and

those who sought to maintain them17.” As we shall see Bowen’s treatment of historical

trauma and twentieth-century sexuality is ambiguous and open. She cuts to the heart

of modern concerns about identity, repression and the role of art in exorcising

personal and cultural trauma. To give Bowen the last word in this section tracking her

literary and critical legacy to date, “[t]he novelist’s subject is not society, not the

individual as a social unit, but the individual as he is, behind the social mask. As such,

his peculiarities are infinite18.”

The trauma of Irish history and The Last September

9 Elizabeth Bowen’s own peculiarities were infinite. She was a descendant of a

Cromwellian settler. The first Bowen in Ireland fought for Oliver Cromwell; and in

payment Cromwell awarded the Bowens land in Cork that had belonged to a defeated

Catholic-Irish gentleman19. In the 1770s, a third generation Bowen built a big house,

“Bowen’s Court”, to establish the Bowen’s landlordship over the local Catholic Irish.

Despite the fact that three hundred years had passed, Bowen acutely felt that the

memories of the 1640s were still alive in Ireland and were being fought out in the War

of Independence (1919-1921). Bowen believed that Bowen’s Court was built on a

fundamental injustice – an unlawful act of dispossession against the Catholic-Irish –

and that the day of reckoning for the Anglo-Irish community had now arrived in 191920.

Because of her father’s illness, which was partially triggered by the rise of Irish

nationalism, Bowen was educated in England from the age of seven. Due to the War of

Independence, the twenty-year-old Bowen was sent away to Italy and then went on to a

literary life in London and Oxford. It was there, ten years after the War of

Independence that Bowen wrote The Last September.

10 The novel is riven with a nostalgic sense of a lost time that still haunted Bowen in 1929.

The Last September is set in Cork between September 1920 and February 1921, during the

most ferocious stage of the War of Independence and the burning of the big houses.


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“Danielstown” is home to the Anglo-Irish Sir Richard and Lady Myra Naylor and a

series of displaced family members and friends: the orphaned nineteen-year-old Lois

Farquar who is Sir Richard Naylor’s niece; the Oxford undergraduate Laurence who is

Lady Naylor’s nephew; the eternal house-visitors Hugo and Francie Montmorency who

have sold their big house and own only a motorcar; and the twenty-nine-year old

Marda Norton who is engaged to an Englishman. The action happens in one week, but

the use of gothic and modernist narrative devices disrupt the linear realist present and

impose instead a cyclical-historical-mythological time that is associated with Irish

Catholicism and the rebel tradition. Echoing traditional Anglo-Irish gothic, Bowen uses

the trope of the Anglo-Irish big house to represent Irish politics and settler/native class

relations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and register the end of the

Anglo-Irish community and culture in Ireland. Danielstown is threatened by the Irish

countryside, which remembers Irish history and camouflages the republican gunmen.

The gunmen close in on the house, turn it into a battleground and finally burn the big

house – marking it as a contested space for revolution and the birthing of post-imperial

independent Ireland.

11 However, Bowen explores more than Irish revolutionary politics in her novel. Sheridan

Le Fanu was an important literary influence, but so too was Virginia Woolf. Bowen was

equally concerned with Irish history and the position of women in modern life. She

explores the cultural fall out from the post-world-war-I revolutionary sexual politics –

thereby making The Last September a novel which resonates beyond Ireland to explore

broader literary and social revolution of modernism and modernity sweeping Ireland,

Britain, Europe and America. Bowen represents Danielstown and the Irish landscape as

two female presences confronting each other: from this trope of the big house as a

beleaguered female Bowen develops her second gothic theme. She interrogates

bourgeois anxieties surrounding female sexuality and mobility. While some critics

argue that Danielstown is the central character in the novel, others argue that Lois is

the central character and that the novel explores career opportunities for young

women, against the backdrop of the War21. I would suggest that the novel does not have

a central character. Instead the plot hinges on Bowen’s gothic treatment of a series of

relationships or pairings/doublings – the already mentioned relationship between

Danielstown and the surrounding native territory (representing the colonial aspect of

Irish history); the special relationship between Lois and Danielstown; and the

homoerotic relationship between Lois and Marda.

12 The novel opens with the arrival of the Montmorencys in their motorcar and the first

paragraph synthesises gothic themes from the eighteenth century with revolutionary

politics and twentieth-century modernity. The motorcar contains a new breed of

landless Anglo-Irish aristocrats who have lost their ancestral home and thereby their

place in the world:

About six o’clock the sound of a motor, collected out of the wide country andnarrowed under the trees of the avenue, brought the household out in excitementon to the steps. Up among the beeches, a thin iron gate twanged; the car slid outfrom a net of shadow, down the slope to the house. Behind the flashing windscreenMr and Mrs Montmorency produced – arms waving and a wild escape to the wind ofher mauve motor-veil – an agitation of greeting. They were long-promised visitors.They exclaimed, Sir Richard and Lady Naylor exclaimed and signalled: no one spokeyet. It was a moment of happiness, of perfection22.


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13 From this moment of brief happiness The Last September pursues a steady decline to the

furnace on the last page. The gothic undertones: “wide country” and narrow, shadowy

avenues closing in on the house, the “thin iron gate” which seems vulnerable to

trespassers, the agitation of greeting, the references to the motorcar and Bowen’s

preference for the past-tense warn the sensitive reader that this fragile picture of

perfection is about to be destroyed by political change. Bowen is one of the first writers

to give modern vehicles a gothic and sinister cast and connect them with the irrational

terror of colonial and class based clashes. In doing this she introduces contemporary

anxieties about technological developments arising in the aftermath of World War I.

Throughout the novel the motorcar brings a sequence of unwelcome “guests” to

Danielstown, culminating in the arrival of IRA guerillas who burn the big house. In

Bowen’s stories such as “Summer’s Night”, “Joining Charles”, “The Disinherited” as

well as in several of her novels, journeys, be they by bus, train, or car, mark the point at

which the boundaries between the sanity and madness, the everyday and the uncanny

begin to collapse.

14 Sir Richard and Lady Naylor and Danielstown unwillingly find themselves caught up in

the “unofficial” stage of the War of Independence, when battle-lines between the flying

columns of the Irish Republican Army and the British mercenaries, the Black and Tans,

were reaching a violent pitch of reprisals and counter reprisals. The IRA encroached

upon and wrested back land and estates belonging to the Anglo-Irish, using them to

store arms and for short cuts when ambushing the Black and Tans or the British Army.

Sir Richard’s niece Lois asks Hugo Montmorency at dinner “If you are interested, would

you care to come and dig for guns in the plantation?” (LS 25) Immediately, Sir Richard

silences Lois, denies the guns exist and refers to the IRA euphemistically as tourists.

“You’ll have the place full of soldiers, trampling the young trees. There’s been enough

damage in that plantation with the people coming to sightsee: all Michael’s friends.”

(LS 25) Caught between the IRA and the British Army, the Anglo-Irish cannot afford to

take sides. Both the IRA and the Black and Tans burnt the homes of anyone seen to help

the enemy23. Throughout the novel, the family and their guests hear the “furtive”

sound of lorries and motorcars patrolling the estate boundaries and the surrounding

countryside. These modern technologies are not only an unnatural affront to the

“natural” social order in Ireland of Anglo-Irish gentry and Catholic farmers and

peasants, but they are modern harbingers of Irish revolutionary politics which have

been around since the 1640s and flared up in the 1798 failed United Irishmen Rising.

Ingman links nationalist memories of 1798 and 1916 with Lois’s memory of her dead

mother Laura chaffing against the social restraints that now suffocate Lois24.

15 Bowen gives her big house a female persona and establishes a special psychic

connection between the house and a female guest, the mother-less Lois, that verges on

a mother-daughter pairing. While Bowen gives Danielstown a benign background

presence reaching out to the orphaned Lois, the house had a darker, more smothering

presence for Laura (Sir Richard’s sister) who died when Lois was ten years old. Neil

Corcoran argues that Laura signifies the darker side of political and social decline,

specifically female entrapment in the big house and family duty: “Sister of the master

of the big house, and southern wife of a failed northern marriage, she is the Anglo-Irish

ghost par excellence” and she represents the “entrapment and failure of the class” but

also the burden of trying to hold onto the Anglo-Irish dream25. Laura haunts

Danielstown and the characters – her promise and her frustration and sense of futility.


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Laura, like Lois, is presented as trying to escape yet ironically she now only exists as a

ghostly memory in the house with her name scratched angrily on the bedroom wall and

her trunks mouldering in the attic. Lois equates the house with her mother and she

yearns for yet wants to escape both of them.

16 It is the desire to escape Anglo-Irish domesticity and denial of reality that spurs Lois to

walk in the grounds of Danielstown late in the evening, following the dinner scene. As

Lois steps outside the house she steps into the darkness of Irish colonial history,

represented by the trees and shrubs of Danielstown. “[D]ank” leaves “like the tongues

of dead animals” assault her bare skin, pressing in upon her (LS 33). Like the heroines

in eighteenth-century gothic-romances Lois is terrified and breathes in death and

decay. The narrative identifies Lois’s terror as a specific Anglo-Irish one, a “fear before

birth”, which is transmitted from parents to children. The terror outside, originally

associated in gothic with Catholicism, is now identified as the horror within the Anglo-

Irish themselves. The narrative alludes to colonial history and the Anglo-Irish

usurpation of Catholic homes: the nightmare side of their big house enlightenment

dream (LS 33). In the same passage an injured bird that “shrieked and stumbled down

through dark, tearing the leaves”, mirrors Lois’s terrified stumble through Danielstown

and adds to Bowen’s construction of the uncanny.

17 The scene recalls Hamlet: the world is out of joint and nature bears witness to unlawful

acts of murder “Silence healed, but kept a scar of horror.” (LS 33) “Murder will out”

because history is never past in Ireland, but gothic-style haunts and disturbs the

present. Into this scene of mounting terror Bowen introduces the IRA gunman for the

first time. Horror-struck Lois watches the bushes move “the displaced darkness” and

believes she is “indeed clairvoyant” and is “going to see a ghost” (LS 33). The ghost

turns out to be the IRA gunman, a “trench-coat” with “a resolute profile”, who is

making a short cut through Danielstown. Bowen’s irony defuses the terror and is aimed

at the Anglo-Irish who refused the reality that they were in the middle of a

battleground and viewed as the enemy. IRA gunmen were referred to as “trench-coats”

because of their guerrilla attire, but Bowen’s abstract description also turns the

gunman into an emblem of Irish nationalism and a fanatical terrorist. In a narrative

reversal Lois feels that the gunman turns her into a ghost as he walks past “in

contemptuous unawareness. His intentions burnt on the dark an almost invisible trail;

he might have been a murderer he seemed so inspired.” (LS 33)

18 Indeed, the IRA kill a number of British soldiers including Lois’s fiancé Gerald Lesworth,

before burning Danielstown. Bowen represents the duality in Irish nationalism: the

gunman may be a fanatic but he is also the end result of Irish colonial history and the

Enlightenment – the rights of the individual, Republicanism and Socialism; he is the

hero or executioner who will redress Ireland’s wrongs. Echoing the Irish Literary

Revival’s imagery of Irish mythological heroes such as Cúchulainn returning from the

past to liberate Ireland, Bowen creates the sense that the disputed land has given birth

to and possesses the IRA gunman. “The crowd of trees, straining up from passive

disputed earth, each sucking up and exhaling the country’s essence – swallowed him

finally.” (LS 34) Bowen gives the land a vampiric cast and her imagery recalls the trope

of “Cathleen ni Houlihan” – the hag-like mythological Irish queen whose beauty and

youth is restored by the self-sacrifice of her young men.


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Uncannily transgressive sexuality

19 In keeping with gothic convention, Bowen portrays Danielstown as the light of

civilisation in opposition to the irrational darkness of Irish history and nationalism.

However, Lois’s brush with reality has given her a new adult perspective on her family.

She perceives their vulnerability: stones and mortar have been feminised into “flowers

in a paperweight”, depicted as a useless object in a lady’s boudoir rather than the

masculine seat of colonial landlords. A number of uncanny paradoxes “lovely unlovely”

and “unwilling bosom” signify Ireland is an unnatural mother willing to evict the

Anglo-Irish and Lois, adding to Lois’s contradictory anxiety that on the one-hand she is

motherless and placeless but on the other hand she needs to break away from the

ancestral home and memories of her mother to become her own woman (LS 66). The

narrative translates Lois’s anxieties about her family and herself into a sexual

attraction for the twenty-nine-year-old Marda Norton. The attraction is played as a

gothic subtext and Bowen suggests that lesbian desire is as much a threat to the

traditional Anglo-Irish way of life as the IRA.

20 The minute Marda enters Danielstown her androgynous figure, her fashionable clothes

and detachment disrupts and reorders the domestic space. Having arrived late she has

the household in chaos, attempting to track down a suitcase that she has carelessly left

on a train and is not too worried about. Marda has a vague idea that the local

telephone, run by the lady in the grocery-shop-cum-post-office will be as efficient as

the London telephone exchange. She exudes modernity and here seems to have

successfully rid herself of Anglo-Irish baggage and history “She escaped the feminine

pear-shape […– They remained sitting behind her with a vague sensation of having

been abandoned.” (LS 79) She seems to Lois a woman without a past and with a bright

future, with a London fiancé who is a stockbroker. Marda is set in contrast to the wet

climate in Cork and the shabby interior of Danielstown. Bowen covertly frames their

relationship with gothic tropes that present Marda as Lois’s seducer and rescuer. First

Lois is intrigued then aroused by Marda’s belongings: reading Tatler then trying on

Marda’s fur coat “finding a coat she could not live without” (LS 76). Using erotic

language Bowen simulates a sexual climax as Lois “fading, dying into the rich

heaviness” repeats the thought “escape” as a wistful desire and then an italicised

satisfied achievement (LS 76). There is a vampiric inflection to Lois trying on Marda’s

coat, with echoes of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, as Lois almost tastes Marda through her

belongings, and there are echoes of Stoker’s Jonathan Harker who lets the three

vampire women seduce him in Dracula’s castle.

21 The attraction between Lois and Marda is coded. Up until this point in the novel Lois

has not found a role model or a fitting object of desire, an “other”, to help her create

her own identity. Her mother, Danielstown and the men in her life are all inadequate.

Simply trying on the fur coat transforms Lois from an adolescent into a sexualised

woman, as if the coat has deflowered her or more tantalisingly its owner, Marda, has.

“And she paced around the hall with new movements: a dark, rare, rather wistful

woman, elusive with jasmine. ‘No?’ she said on an upward note: the voice startled her,

experience was behind it.” (LS 76-77) Possessed by Marda’s coat Lois paces the hall like

an exotic animal caged within Danielstown but with a new awareness of who she is and

can be, that brings a realisation that she can escape the house “and the blurred panes,

the steaming trees, the lonely cave of the hall no longer had her consciousness in a


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clamp. How she could live she felt. She would not need anyone.” (LS 70) Here we have a

Freudian and Kristevan irruption of the uncanny and desire as Marda is introduced as a

familiar and unfamiliar invading presence both for Lois and for the house (Marda has

visited Danielstown many times since she was a child and each time something bad or

strange has happened to her)26.

22 In the course of the novel Marda becomes for Lois in a Kristevan sense “the familiar

potentially tainted with strangeness and referred (beyond its imaginative origin to an

improper past)” – Marda and her portable luggage, English fiancé and cosmopolitan

glamour represents an alternative life-style to the big house. Derek Hand argues that

Lois tries on Marda’s coat in order to “lose herself in someone else’s life” because “her

existence, and that of the Anglo-Irish society she is representative of, is a ghostly one27

”. I would add to this that Lois’s sense of lack could be read positively as an openness to

crossing boundaries and trying out different identities and relationships in order to

discover her own. Bowen’s ambiguous syntax raises questions about identity and

sexuality and nationality through encounters with strangers that help us understand

our own inner strangeness.

23 If, as Kristeva argues, “uncanny strangeness” is a mechanism for releasing repressed

sexuality and anxieties of castration within individuals, then Marda makes Lois face up

to her personal and cultural sense of castration and isolation trapped within the Anglo-

Irish community. Lois’s personal fear is textually mirrored in Danielstown’s horrified

and unsettled reaction to Marda, symbolising the settler community’s own cultural

castration anxieties in relation to their colonial relationship with Ireland. As noted,

Ingman uses Kristeva’s theory of the “other” as “my (‘own and proper’) unconscious” to

read Lois as “a secret rebel against the constraints placed on her by life in the Big

House where, like the nationalist rebels, she lacks power’ and reveals in Bowen’s work

questions of “gender and nationality are never simple28”. Marda invades Lois and alters

her perspective on her family traditions and her future. Bowen transforms Danielstown

and Ireland into a backward cave in contrast to modern London life and ideas about

women, but she also uses gothic to encode “anti-social” lesbian desire.

24 Later in the novel Lois is aroused by watching Marda paint her nails in a heaven of

female toiletries and dresses associated with foreign travel and sophistication – “And

the pink smell of nail-varnish, dresses trickling over a chair, flash of swinging shoe-

buckle, cloud of powder over the glass, the very room with its level stare on the tree-

tops, took on awareness, smiled with secrecy, had the polish and depth of experience.

The very birds on the frieze flew round in cognizant agitation.” (LS 79) Lois strokes

Marda’s dresses from Vienna – a coded substitute for Marda. The guest room has been

turned into an exotic boudoir as Marda and her belongings have taken possession of

the house transforming it, affecting the walls and looking glass whose “secrecy” makes

them complicit in the homoerotic energy that Marda exudes. Only the birds on the

frieze uncannily come to life and voice a danger to the patriarchal foundations of the

house. Lois despairs “I do not interest her” and hopes “the carpet would burn with the

house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon Marda’s memory” as Bowen

conflates imagery of outlawed sexual relations with revolutionary politics (LS 98). As

Marda tells Lois there “seems a kind of fatality” in her relationship with the house (LS

77).


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Exorcising Trauma: The spectral mill and burningDanielstown

25 Marda’s fatal relationship with Danielstown and Bowen’s conflation of sexual relations,

revolutionary politics and irruption of the uncanny comes to a climacteric in the mill

scene. It is here that the triangular desire between Hugo, Marda and Lois is fully played

out when Marda is accidentally shot in the hand by the IRA gunman. In what can only

be called an ironic play with signification and clash between Anglo-Irish and modernist

cultural politics, Bowen saturates her narrative with gothic techniques and Freudian

symbolism. The mill is described as “staring, light-eyed, ghoulishly […] Those dead

mills – the country was full of them, never quite stripped and whitened to skeletons’

decency: like corpses at their most horrible […] high façade of decay […] Incredible in

its loneliness, roofless, beams criss-crossing dank interior daylight […] took on all of

the past to which it had given nothing” (LS 122-23). Both Neil Corcoran and Julian

Moynihan argue the mill scene is political and moral gothic that reveals a “romantic

ruin” is produced by “unimpressive economic reality”, a repressed spectral “other” and

dark double to Danielstown29. But it is also a prophetic mirror for Danielstown’s ruined

state by the novel’s end. This gothic and Freudian exuberance destabilises the text,

showing the return of the historical repressed in the gunman who warns Lois and

Marda “you had better keep in the house while y’have it” (LS 125) As Botting and

Kiberd argue, gothic “excess” and “horror” is the site of sexual transgression and the

mill becomes the locus of sexual ambivalence between Marda, Lois and Hugo. Sulking,

Hugo remains outside the mill trying to cope with Marda’s uncanny impact “on his

most intimate sense of himself” and sees her ghost in his wife Francie (LS 126). Hearing

the gunshot Hugo rushes inside and overreacts, revealing his emotional chaos and

desire for Marda. “He was set on transgressing the decencies. ‘Don’t you realize you

might have been –’ Marda laughed, coming out through the door of the mill beside him.

He looked at her lips – no higher – angrily – burningly. Lois looked quickly away.” (LS

127) The agitated Hugo uncannily thinks he sees “blood round the lips” (LS 126). Again

Marda becomes the locus of vampiric and illicit desire that threatens the social fabric

based on marriages and homes30. The couple have met too late. For Hugo is married to

the older Francie who cannot have children now, and Marda is engaged to the

Englishman Leslie Lawe. She and any children they have will become English, as Leslie’s

name spells it out. The correlation between disruptive sexuality and Danielstown’s

doom is relayed to the reader through Bowen’s broken syntax, rising narrative tension

and allusion to burning. The overlooked Lois takes up Hugo’s forgotten box of matches,

reminding the reader of earlier textual allusions linking Lois with Danielstown burning,

in particular Lois’s desire to set the house alight in a bid to grab Marda’s attention.

26 From this moment on the fate of the house is inevitable as the narrative speeds up and

violence and death erupt and close in on the house. The British soldiers become like the

Anglo-Irish besieged, redundant and then obsolete. Gerard kisses Lois, but only

increases her sense of lack, before he is collected in an armoured car. The British

barrack’s ball ends in a drunken jazz frenzy with the gramophone crashing and the

record smashing as Bowen’s jagged syntax and imagery of burning and water signals

the end: “his hands a cup of fire. There were two bright specks in his eyes. – Then the

match whirled off and died on the dark […] his face blinking in and out of the dark,

faintly red with the pulse of his cigarette […] the roar of merriment, solid and swerving


118

evenly as a waterfall past the door, splintered off in crash. Silence came, with a hard

impact.” (LS 154-55) The dance resembles Armageddon or hell – there are references to

the Trenches. The English soldier Daventry is described as an ironic Satan, a few days

later he tells Lois that Gerald has been killed by the IRA, and the D.I.’s Anglo-Irish niece

is a sexualised “hell-cat” (LS 156). Balloons are popped and electricity pulses, as another

Anglo-Irish woman asks if the noise is like a bombardment. Outdoors there is a

contrasting “sinister energy” as the “country bore in it strong menace” and a British

sentry “inhumanly paced like a pendulum” (LS 155). Bowen’s twisted syntax, condensed

symbolism, dehumanized abstraction into time, and references to World War I affirm

her modernist preoccupation with narrating a new world order. Here, the sentry marks

the time of the end of British rule and the Anglo-Irish and the hour of the coming of the

IRA.

27 The ending of the house when it comes is quick and militarily efficient, covering just

one final paragraph. As Ellmann notes, “it replays the first paragraph but in reverse as

if a film had been rewound” as Bowen’s gothic-modernist ending adapts cinematic

techniques producing an effect of aesthetic shock and a photographic “living image of a

dead thing” through replicating the double movement of technological/spectral

media31. Like an uncanny double negative of the opening, IRA motorcars drive away

from the burning Danielstown in the middle of the night, “the executioners bland from

accomplished duty.” (LS 206) Bowen’s prophetic, apocalyptic imagery comes to a head

with a “fearful scarlet” throwing the light back from the three burning big houses so

that “the country itself was burning”. Her description here is similar to her imaginative

recreation in Bowen’s Court of the Irish landscape following the Cromwellian wars32. As

mentioned we have the final eruption of cyclical-historical-mythological time

associated with the Irish Catholicism and the rebel tradition, and Anglo-Irish gothic

based on the Protestant settlers’ fear of the return of the repressed Catholics – a

psychological fear that is displaced onto the landscape: “roads in unnatural dusk ran

dark with movement, secretive or terrified; not a tree, brushed pale by wind from the

flames, not a cabin pressed in despair to the bosom of night, not a gate too starkly

visible but had its place in the design of order and panic.” (LS 206) Bowen’s uncanny

oxymoron “abortive birth” recalls Yeats’s poem about the War of Independence “The

Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed […]And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born33?

28 Yeats reads Ireland and the Troubles as a metaphor for post-war twentieth-century

modernity and revolutions. Ten years later, when writing The Last September, Bowen

sets her finale as judgement day for the Anglo-Irish. The final trauma of “colonial

power” is demolished in “the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back,

confident, to the steps”. The final two lines become an epitaph to the Ascendancy with

Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, standing outside silently staring at their burning home as

if it was a funeral pyre. As critics comment, despite the dramatic finale, the novel is

open ended and the future tenuous and rootless. We do not know the fate of the

Naylors, or the Montmorencys and Marda who are last scene driving off in motorcars.

Lois is reported in art school in London or Paris.


119

NOTES

1. Vera Kreilcamp, “Bowen: Ascendancy Modernist” in Eibhear Walshe (ed.), Elizabeth

Bowen, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2009, p. 15.

2. Fred Botting, Gothic, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 1.

3. Ibid, p. 3.

4. Siobhain Kilfeather, “The Gothic Novel” in John Wilson Foster (ed.), The Cambridge

Companion to the Irish Novel, Cambridge, CUP, 2006, p. 78.

5. Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Anglo-Irish Imagination in the Long

Eighteenth Century, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2005, p. 30.

6. Ibid.

7. John Wilson Foster, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, p. 9.

8. Sinead Mooney, “Bowen and the Modern Ghost”, in Walshe, op.cit., p. 84.

9. Heather Laird, “Bowen in Contemporary Irish Literary and Cultural Criticism”, in

Walshe, op. cit., p. 204.

10. Heather Laird, op.cit, p. 203.

11. Heather Ingman, Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender, Ashgate,

Aldershot, 2007, p. 30.

12. Ibid., p. 30.

13. Ibid.

14. Eibhear Walshe (ed.), Elizabeth Bowen (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2009) is a

collection of new critical essays by leading Irish and British academics. Susan Osborne

(ed.), Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives (Cork, CUP, 2009) encompasses American,

Australian and European scholarship, but there is some cross-over with the Irish

Academic Press publication.

15. Heather Laird, op.cit., p. 204.

16. Elizabeth Bowen, “Disloyalties” (1950) in The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth

Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (1986), London, Vintage, 1999, p. 60.

17. Heather Laird, op.cit., p. 204.

18. Elizabeth Bowen, “Disloyalties”, p. 60.

19. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters (1942 & 1943), London, Vintage,

1999, p. 57.

20. Ibid., p. 451.

21. Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation, Vision Press, Barnes & Noble, 1981, p.

20.

22. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (1929) London, Vintage, 1999, p. 7. Further

references to this edition are abbreviated as LS.

23. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972, London, Penguin, 1989, p. 449.

24. Heather Ingman, op.cit., p. 34.

25. Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, Oxford, OUP, 2004, p. 50.


120

26. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919) in Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan (eds.), Literary

Theory: An Anthology, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., p. 154-168; and Julia Kristeva,

Strangers to Ourselves, New York, Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 182-88.

27. Derek Hand, “Bowen and the Unfinished Business of Living” in Walshe, op.cit., p. 71.

28. H. Ingman, op.cit., p. 37.

29. N. Corcoran, op. cit., p. 54.

30. For further critical readings on the relationship between vampires, sexuality and

the Anglo-Irish see Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page,

Edinburgh, EUP, 2003, p. 65; and Julian Moynihan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in

a Hyphenated Culture, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 84.

31. Fred Botting, Limits of Horror, Manchester, MUP, 2008, p. 87.

32. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters, op. cit., p. 74-75.

33. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” in Daniel Albright (ed.), The Poems (1990),

London, Everyman, 1998, p. 235.

ABSTRACTS

This paper gives a sustained examination for the first time of The Last September as a hybrid novel

synthesising an Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition with modernism. It is a benchmark gothic text for

the twentieth century because of Bowen’s experimental treatment of two themes – revolutionary

class politics and female sexuality – that have been central to gothic since its full emergence in

the eighteenth century as a “writing of excess” that “shadows the despairing ecstasies of

Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and

decadence”, as Fred Botting writes. By locating The Last September within gothic and modernist

studies, this essay enhances and redresses gaps in new critical perspectives on Bowen.

Cet article examine d’un point de vue inédit The Last September, roman hybride synthétisant la

tradition gothique anglo-irlandaise et le modernisme. Ce roman est central dans la littérature

gothique au vingtième siècle, dans la mesure où Bowen s’y livre à une exploration de deux

domaines – la politique révolutionnaire concernant les classes sociales et la sexualité féminine.

Ces problématiques sont en effet au cœur du gothique depuis la naissance du genre au dix-

huitième siècle en tant qu’« écriture de l’excès » qui, selon Fred Botting, « reflète les extases

désespérées de l’idéalisme romantique et de l’individualisme, et les étranges ambivalences du

réalisme de l’ère victorienne et de la décadence ». En situant The Last September au cœur des

études gothiques et modernistes, cet article identifie et vient combler les lacunes des

perspectives critiques récentes.


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INDEX

Mots-clés: Bowen Elizabeth, littérature gothique, sexualité, femmes et féminité, femmes -

représentations littéraires, littérature – modernisme, trauma

Keywords: Bowen Elizabeth, sexuality, gothic literature, women and femininity, women -

literary representations, trauma, literature – modernism

AUTHOR

EDWINA KEOWN

Trinity College Dublin


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Trauma et hantise de soi dans TheMai et By the Bog of Cats de MarinaCarrHélène Lecossois

1 The Mai et By the Bog of Cats1 explorent le côté sombre de la maternité qu’elles lient pour

l’une au matricide, à l’infanticide et au suicide, pour l’autre au suicide uniquement. La

mort occupe ainsi une place essentielle, aussi bien sur le plan thématique que

structurel ou formel. La fable s’articule autour de la perte qu’ont subie les deux

protagonistes et de la mort que Mai et Hester se donnent. Contrairement à By the Bog of

Cats, qui confronte le spectateur directement à la mort violente de l’héroïne (et au

meurtre de sa fille), The Mai lui épargne la vue du suicide, qui a lieu hors scène. Le corps

mort de Mai n’en est cependant pas moins exhibé à la fin du premier des deux actes que

compte la pièce. La place médiane qu’occupe la monstration du cadavre dans

l’économie générale de l’œuvre signale la centralité de la mort2, tout en remettant en

question le caractère définitif et irrévocable de celle-ci – le second acte revenant sur un

moment précédant le suicide. La prosopopée inscrit le passé dans le présent et nie toute

solution de continuité entre la vie et la mort. À une structure temporelle linéaire et

orientée, Marina Carr préfère une construction analeptique, un entrelacs de présent et

de passé et une cyclicité. La temporalité qu’elle instaure est celle du retour et de la

répétition, dont on sait depuis Freud qu’ils sont symptomatiques du trauma. La nature

inassimilable de celui-ci force, en effet, le sujet, en proie à des forces autres que sa

volonté (Freud parle de « destin »), à revivre l’expérience traumatisante. Ecartelés

entre un passé qui ne passe pas et ne cesse de faire retour et un avenir qui n’offre

aucune perspective de changement, les personnages de Carr semblent condamnés à

éternellement revivre ou rejouer la même histoire et à (re)faire continuellement

l’expérience de la perte et de la dissolution. L’une des principales caractéristiques des

protagonistes de The Mai et By the Bog of Cats est leur spectralité : Mai et Hester sont

marquées du sceau d’une mort prochaine ou déjà advenue. Fantomatiques, elles sont

elles-mêmes hantées par d’autres fantômes qui les rongent de l’intérieur. Cependant,

s’ils les vident effectivement de leur substance, ces fantômes « encryptés », pour le dire


123

avec Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok3, leur confèrent également une certaine densité

en faisant d’elles le lieu où viennent s’accumuler, tels des sédiments, les histoires

d’autres femmes. Les personnages apparaissent comme un mélange paradoxal

d’insubstance et d’excès de présence(s). The Mai et By the Bog of Cats s’efforcent de

représenter, c’est du moins ce que cet article se propose de démontrer, le trauma de

sujets dont l’avènement n’a jamais vraiment eu lieu, de sujets condamnés à vivre dans

la hantise de l’individuation.

2 The Mai et By the Bog of Cats nous donnent à voir un feuilleté temporel dont les strates

sont peuplées d’êtres fantomatiques. L’immatérialité spectrale des personnages déjà

morts de The Mai est redoublée par l’aspect fantomatique qu’ils avaient déjà de leur

vivant : lorsque Mai se prépare pour accompagner Robert au bal du Lion’s Club, elle

suscite les commentaires suivants : « Beck : Mai, you’re a picture. / Millie : You are, Mom. /

Grandma Fraochlán : An apparition if ever I saw one » (166). La superbe robe de soirée dont

Mai s’est parée ne réussit pas à masquer son absence de substance, qui est, au contraire,

mise en valeur. Le sens littéral de l’expression laudative vient se superposer au sens

métaphorique. Privée de toute épaisseur, Mai est ainsi comparée à un tableau ou à une

image. Le regard aiguisé de Grandma Fraochlán, opiomane invétérée, experte dans l’art

de la fantasmagorie, ne s’y trompe pas, et le mot « apparition » insiste sur l’aspect

spectral de Mai. La première scène de By the Bog of Cats nous confronte à une ombre

protatique, le Ghost Fancier, dont les propos nous annoncent que la scène sera et est

déjà peuplée de fantômes : « […] Where there’s ghosts there’s ghost fanciers » (265). Même si

Hester lui signifie son erreur, en lui disant que ce ne peut être elle qu’il est venu

chercher puisqu’elle est encore en vie (« I certainly am [alive] and aim to stay that way »

(266)), elle est déjà marquée du sceau d’une mort prochaine. Au fil des scènes, sa nature

spectrale est d’ailleurs de plus en plus perceptible ; elle-même déclare à l’acte III : « […]

For a long time now I been thinking I’m already a ghost » (321). Dans son étude sur les

fantômes épiques et tragiques, Patricia Vasseur-Legangneux nous explique que, chez

Homère, l’eidôlon est « un corps vidé de sa substance et de sa force. Le terme d’ombre

est alors employé (skia) pour qualifier ce corps qui a perdu son principe vital, le thumos,

est capable de s’envoler […] et est comparé à une fumée ou à un oiseau dont il peut

avoir le cri aigu4 ». Le cygne noir, présenté comme l’ombre d’Hester dans la première

scène, (« What’re you doin’ draggin’ the corpse of a swan behind ya like it was your shadow? »

(265)5, lui demande le Ghost Fancier) fait retour, lors de la scène finale, qui nous donne

à voir son cœur, métamorphosé en cygne : « She’s cut her heart out – it’s lyin’ there on top

of her chest like some dark feathered bird » (341). L’image du cygne rattache

incontestablement Hester à la mythologie celtique, elle fait également écho aux

fantômes épiques, d’autant qu’Hester pousse un long cri animal peu avant de mourir.

3 À tous ces spectres qui peuplent la scène de ce théâtre d’ombres, s’ajoute une sorte de

méta-fantôme, celui du personnage de théâtre. Les masques que nous donne en effet à

voir la mimésis théâtrale font du personnage une présence-absence dont la nature ne

diffère pas fondamentalement de celle du fantôme. Cela est d’autant plus vrai chez

Marina Carr que les personnages auxquels elle donne naissance portent plusieurs

masques et qu’ils conjoignent donc plusieurs présences-absences : Hester Swane est un

avatar de Médée, Mai une réincarnation de Coillte, personnage de légende dont Millie

rapporte l’histoire à la fin de l’acte I. L’irlandicité de ce nom, comme le localisme que

Marina Carr fait entrer dans la langue, en reproduisant au plus près l’accent plat et

guttural des Midlands – cette région dont le nom même et l’emplacement géographique


124

signalent l’entre-deux et reflètent le caractère liminal des personnages qui l’habitent,

fait surgir un dernier fantôme, celui de la langue. Le gaélique hante la scène de The Mai :

la phrase qui ensorcelle Grandma Fraochlán et la fait succomber aux charmes du

« pêcheur aux neuf doigts » a été prononcée en gaélique6 et des termes tels que « a stóir

» ou « a chroi » ponctuent le discours des personnages. Cette langue qui affleure

régulièrement à la surface du texte, qui fait retour et hante l’autre langue, est liée à

l’affect et au regret. Elle peut être entendue comme l’expression d’un deuil qui ne se

fait pas. Elle signifie aussi que la « vraie » langue est ailleurs ; exilé dans la langue, le

sujet n’a de cesse que de se heurter à l’indicible. La « fantômachie », pour reprendre le

terme de Derrida, que Marina Carr nous donne à voir nous invite à réfléchir sur la

nature de la présence-absence qui constamment fait retour sur scène. Nous

interprétons la spectralité des personnages et de la langue comme autant de

manifestations symptomatiques d’un trauma. Le spectre, entité indécise qui allie des

réalités contradictoires telles que présence et absence, évanescence et rémanence,

donne corps, pour ainsi dire, au trauma en ce qu’il signale la présence insistante de

l’invisible, de ce qui reste hors de portée de la conscience du sujet – de ce qui, en

d’autres termes, lui crève les yeux, au sens propre et au sens figuré.

4 La dramaturgie de la revenance que Marina Carr met en place évoque par bien des

aspects un travail de deuil qui n’aboutit pas. Sa poétique du deuil impossible s’appuie

sur une dichotomie de l’excès et du manque. L’exemple le plus frappant est sans doute

celui de la rame de Curragh dans The Mai. Relique du défunt mari de Grandma

Fraochlán dont celle-ci ne se déleste jamais, les proportions exubérantes de cette rame

contraignent les personnages à redessiner les contours de l’espace qu’ils habitent («

Connie : We had to saw through the banister to get it into our house », 113) et signalent le

caractère envahissant de la mort qui ne laisse que peu d’espace aux vivants. Le

gigantisme de la rame fait écho à celui de la fenêtre de la maison de Mai dont Connie dit

qu’elle n’en a jamais vue de plus grande. La taille de la rame et celle de la fenêtre sont à

la mesure de la perte qu’ont subie Grandma Fraochlán et Mai. La matérialité

envahissante de l’une et la béance qu’encadre l’autre figurent toutes deux le vide ou le

deuil impossible et dessinent les contours de l’espace du trauma. Les morts ou leurs

fantômes occupent le centre de l’espace scénique et envahissent l’espace psychique des

protagonistes, les laissant dans l’incapacité de choisir quelque nouvel objet d’amour.

5 Le deuil impossible dans lequel les personnages sont figés rejaillit sur les paysages

qu’ils habitent et leur donnent des accents mélancoliques certains. Le spectateur est

ainsi confronté à une surabondance de signes connotant la mort, l’absence, le vide et

est frappé par la dimension létale de l’univers qui se dévoile. Dans By the Bog of Cats le

rideau se lève sur un paysage lugubre et enneigé qu’un cadavre de cygne noir vient

maculer de sang et sur la mention d’une tombe qu’Hester s’apprête à creuser. The Mai

s’ouvre sur le retour, après de longues années d’absence, de l’être aimé, mais n’en

demeure pas moins une pièce de la perte, ce que dit clairement le caractère élégiaque

de la narration de Millie. La nature mortifère des signes exposés au tout début de la

pièce ne sera cependant perçue qu’a posteriori : le rêve prémonitoire que raconte Robert

dans la première moitié de l’acte I transforme les cygnes, l’étui de violoncelle et le lac

sur lequel s’ouvre la fenêtre en autant de signes annonciateurs de mort.

Robert — I dreamt that you were dead and my cello case was your

coffin and a carriage drawn by two black swans takes you away from

me over a dark expanse of water and I ran after this strange hearse


125

shouting, “Mai, Mai” […]

The Mai — So you’ve come back to bury me, that what you’re sayin’?

(The Mai, 125)

6 La maison près d’Owl Lake est, du dire même de Mai, de celles que l’on construit quand

on n’a plus nulle part où aller. « Millie : The Mai set about looking for that magic thread

that would stitch us together again and she found it at Owl Lake, the most coveted site

in the country » (111). La métaphore du fil, la ressemblance entre Mai, femme fidèle

attendant patiemment le retour de son mari parti dans une contrée lointaine, et la

Pénélope de la mythologie grecque nous invitent à voir la maison comme un avatar du

linceul de Laerte que Mai tisse/bâtit pour gagner du temps. Dans l’espace scénique et

dramatique de The Mai et By the Bog of Cats, les signes mortifères se conjuguent à ceux

qui figurent la vacuité. L’une des images autour desquelles se structurent les deux

pièces est celle de la béance. La mort s’inscrit littéralement en creux sur la surface de la

tourbière. C’est dans un trou que Catwoman voit, malgré ses yeux aveugles, la tragédie

à venir (« Catwoman : Lave this place now or you never will./Hester : I’m stoppin’

here./Catwoman : Sure I know that too. Seen it writ in a bog hole », 276-277). C’est dans

un trou également qu’Hester Swane retrouve le corps gelé du cygne noir, son double

métaphorique. La tourbière toute entière apparaît ainsi comme une tombe ouverte, à

l’image de celle que creuse Hester pour Black Wing. Dans The Mai, c’est la fenêtre de la

maison-linceul qui figure la béance et rend manifeste l’invisible – que celui-ci prenne la

forme de la légende tragique que Mai revit malgré elle ou de l’espace qui ne sera jamais

offert à la vue des spectateurs, le hors scène, que la mention des différents rêves nous

invite à appréhender comme lieu de l’inconscient. Donnant sur Owl Lake, dont la

légende dit qu’il s’est formé des pleurs de Coillte et dans lequel celle-ci meurt noyée, la

fenêtre est moins ouverture sur un extérieur ou un ailleurs que miroir confrontant Mai

à ses doubles spéculaires. La scène s’apparente à bien des égards à une caisse de

résonnance dans laquelle les histoires des différentes générations de femmes que The

Mai met en scène se font écho, comme autant de variations sur le même thème. La

matrice, que les histoires de Millie, Mai, Ellen ou Grandma Fraochlán ne font que

dupliquer, est la légende de Coillte et Bláth qui elle-même, peut se lire comme une

version irlandaise du mythe de Déméter et Perséphone ou de celui d’Eurydice et

d’Orphée.

7 Le paysage de désolation, de tristesse infinie et de mort sur lequel donne la fenêtre

duplique l’intérieur de la maison, lui-même espace de chagrin inconsolable. Intérieur et

extérieur en viennent à se confondre. L’espace scénique et dramatique se fait espace

psychique et relève d’une géographie de l’intime et du subjectif. Marina Carr construit

une véritable poétique de la mélancolie en mettant en scène des héroïnes qui font

littéralement corps avec un espace mortifère. « Millie : […] Heartbroken Coillte lay down

outside the dark witch’s lair and cried a lake of tears that stretched for miles around. One night,

seizing a long-awaited opportunity, the dark witch pushed Coillte into her lake of tears » (147).

Le lac s’origine dans le corps de Coillte ; il est aussi le lieu de sa dissolution. Hester

Swane, comme Coillte-Mai, s’inscrit dans un rapport de consubstantialité avec le

paysage. Elle ne se sent chez elle que lorsqu’elle arpente la tourbière avec laquelle elle

fusionnera après sa mort :

Hester — Ya won’t forget me now, Carthage, and when all of this is

over or half remembered and you think you’ve almost forgotten me


126

again, take a walk along the Bog of Cats and wait for a purlin’ wind

through your hair or a soft breath be your ear or a rustle behind you.

That’ll be me and Josie ghostin’ ya. (340)

8 La représentation du trauma passe chez Marina Carr par la mise en texte de répétitions

compulsives. Dans By the Bog of Cats, la tourbière est le lieu où se rejoue inlassablement

le départ de la mère, qui, par deux fois, interdit à sa fille de la suivre et la condamne à la

regarder s’éloigner, impuissante :

Hester — […] And she says, “I’m goin’ walkin’ the bog, you’re to stay

here, Hetty.” And I says, “No”, I’d go along with her, and made to

folly her. And she says, “No, Hetty, you wait here, I’ll be back in a

while.” And again I made to folly her and again she stopped me. And I

watched her walk away from me across the Bog of Cats. And across

the Bog of Cats I’ll watch her return. (297)

9 Ce qui préside par la suite aux actions d’Hester, c’est la répétition infinie de cette scène

traumatisante. Son errance compulsive reproduit celle de sa mère et le meurtre de sa

fille peut être perçu comme l’actualisation de ce que sa mère lui a fait subir

symboliquement. Hester assimile, en effet, l’abandon de sa mère, et le regard qu’elle lui

jeta en s’éloignant, à un meurtre, comme le signale le verbe « do away » :

Hester — Eden – I left Eden, Monica, at the age of seven. It was on

account of a look be this caravan at dusk.

Monica — And who was it gave ya this look, your mother, was it? Josie

Swane?

Hester — Oh aye, Monica […] – Who’d believe an auld look could do

away with ya? (323)

10 Le regard de Josie Swane, aussi terrible que celui de Méduse, laisse sa fille à jamais

sidérée. L’événement traumatique est soustrait à la temporalité et ne trouve pas

d’ancrage, de lieu psychique, dans le temps subjectif d’Hester qui, à presque quarante

ans, croit encore aux contes de fées et continue à espérer le retour de sa mère7. Lorsque

Millie évoque le moment où sa mère travaillait à Londres et était devenue la coiffeuse

attitrée d’une petite princesse arabe, elle établit une analogie entre Mai et cette petite

princesse :

Millie — […] The Mai and the princess were two of a kind, moving

towards one another across deserts and fairytales and years till they

finally meet in a salon under Marble Arch and waltz around

enthralled with one another and their childish impossible world. Two

little princesses on the cusp of a dream, one five, the other forty.

(153)

11 Cette histoire rappelle celle de Grandma Fraochlán qui se fantasme en personnage de

légende et s’imagine être la fille du Sultan d’Espagne. Les héroïnes de Marina Carr

ressemblent à des matriochkas : doubles de figures mythologiques, elles donnent

naissance à d’autres doubles et sont rongées de l’intérieur par un vide qu’elles sont

impuissantes à combler. Les histoires de princesses, de sultan ou de mère qui reviendra

un jour près de la « tourbière des chats », ne font que redire ce vide insondable. Dans la


127

réponse qu’elle fait à Grandma Fraochlán, Julie sous-entend l’incapacité de l’excès à

masquer le manque :

Grandma Fraochlán — I told ya, ya eejit, my great grandfather was

Tunisian! I’m only quarter Tunisian, half Maroccan and half Spanish!

Julie — That makes five quarters! How many quarters in a whole?

(142)

12 La prolifération des fantasmes vide la réalité de toute substance. Celle des spectres

annihile le présent. Présence du passé qui ressurgit dans le présent, le spectre brouille

les repères temporels. Les personnages hantés de The Mai et de By The Bog of Cats

portent en eux le signe que la mort habite le vivant, que la catastrophe a déjà eu lieu et

qu’elle aura lieu à nouveau. Cette catastrophe à la fois passée et future vide le présent

de sa substance. Le présent de l’indicatif signale alors une temporalité à jamais figée,

celle de l’éternel retour. Dans By the Bog of Cats le temps de la hantise est signalé par

l’erreur du Ghost Fancier qui confond l’aube et le crépuscule. Cette aube crépusculaire

est le moment où le cours du temps s’inverse, le passé devenant futur et le futur passé.

Le futur antérieur apparaît donc aussi comme le temps de la hantise chez Marina Carr.

Dans « Théorie de la hantise », Jean-Jacques Lecercle pose que « la hantise brouille

l’espace (en ce qu’elle n’admet ni incarnation ni objectivation) », la hantise est, en effet,

une expérience subjective, l’intuition de ce qui va advenir au sujet mais qui n’a pas de

réalité pour lui, à savoir sa propre mort. Elle brouille aussi « le temps (en ce qu’elle

illustre le paradoxe d’un avenir qui laisse des traces rétrospectives dans le présent : la

hantise est [donc] une forme d’anachronie) ». Jean-Jacques Lecercle explique que :

Le spectre existe dans l’espace, autant que dans le temps, ce qui est normal si c’estun objet. Et la hantise, ce qui est normal pour un procès, n’existe que dans le temps.Mais ce temps n’est pas le même. Le temps du spectre est le passé, celui de lahantise l’avenir. Si on vit dans la hantise de sa propre mort, c’est dans l’avenir quela hantise situe l’objet qu’elle vise, et c’est dans l’avenir qu’elle transporte le sujetqui l’éprouve8.

13 L’aube crépusculaire sur laquelle s’ouvre By the Bog of Cats est intéressante en ce qu’elle

conjugue le crépuscule, moment où se réveillent traditionnellement les morts qui

viennent hanter les vivants, et l’aube qui porte les traces rétrospectives de la mort à

venir. Dans The Mai, la présence-absence de la mort à la fois analeptique et proleptique,

fait du présent de l’histoire un entrelacs d’éternel retour et de hantise. La fenêtre

s’ouvre sur le présent a-temporel de la mort du personnage légendaire de Coillte et sur

le futur antérieur de la mort de Mai : la prosopopée transformant la mort passée en une

mort à venir. Lorsque Robert, qui dit avoir rêvé de façon récurrente de la mort de Mai,

lui demande si elle n’a jamais rêvé de sa mort à lui, voici ce qu’elle lui répond :

I dreamt it was the end of the world and before my eyes an old

woman puts a knife through your heart and you die on the grey

pavement, and for some reason I find this hilarious. Then the scene

changes and I’m a child walking up a golden river […] At the bend in

the river I see you coming towards me whistling through two leaves

of grass – you’re a child too – and as you come nearer I smile and

wave, so happy to see you, and you pass me saying, “Not yet, not yet,

not for thousands and thousands of years.” And I turn to look after

you and you’re gone and the river is gone and away in the distance I


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see a black cavern and I know it leads to nowhere and I start walking

that way because I know I’ll find you there. (126)

14 Les marqueurs temporels, qui nous font passer d’un présent inaccessible – « not yet, not

yet » – à une forme d’éternité – « thousands and thousands of years », établissent une

temporalité atemporelle typique des rêves, qui n’est pas sans affinité avec celle dans

laquelle vivent les personnages traumatisés que Carr met en scène. Dans le rêve, le

prince charmant que Mai souhaite voir en Robert la fuit et la caverne vers laquelle elle

se dirige rappelle celle dans laquelle Coillte découvre Bláth dans les bras de la sorcière

de la nuit. Jamais Coillte n’affronte les ténèbres de la caverne, préférant rester dehors à

pleurer toutes les larmes de son corps. Cette caverne peut se lire comme une

métaphore de l’inconscient et de la dépossession. Abri de la sorcière de la nuit après

qu’elle a ensorcelé Bláth, la caverne est bien le lieu où se joue une histoire de

spoliation. Mai s’aveugle en identifiant Robert comme l’objet de sa quête. C’est moins

un « you » qu’un « I » qu’elle recherche et le rêve qu’elle raconte met en scène un sujet

dépossédé de lui-même.

15 Marina Carr met en scène des personnages dont l’individuation n’est pas advenue. La

perte de la mère ne résulte ni pour Hester, ni pour les quatre générations de mères et

de filles de The Mai dans l’autonomie du sujet. Les femmes que Carr nous présente sont

aliénées dans le psychisme d’une autre. Héritières de l’histoire de leur mère, elles sont

hantées et agies par cette histoire qu’elles ne cessent de répéter et s’apparentent à des

revenants condamnés à vivre une histoire qui a toujours déjà eu lieu, pour le dire avec

Derrida. « […] We can’t help repeating, Robert, we repeat and we repeat, the orchestration may

be different but the tune is always the same » (123).

16 Le passage de l’unité fusionnelle à la dualité ne se fait pas. Dans les deux pièces qui nous

intéressent, il est ouvertement question d’infanticide. Julie accuse Grandma Fraochlán

d’avoir tué métaphoriquement sa fille :

[…] She filled the girl’s head with all sorts of impossible hope, always

talkin’ about the time she was in college, and how brilliant she was,

and maybe in a few years she’d go back and study. And it only filled

Ellen with more longing […]. And do you know the worst, the worst of

it all, Ellen adored her and looked up to her and believed everything

she said, and that’s what killed her, not childbirth, no, her spirit was

broken. (146)

17 Hester, fidèle à l’histoire du personnage mythologique dont elle est le double n’hésite

pas à tuer son enfant. Son geste met au jour et porte à son paroxysme le versant de

haine dont on dit, traditionnellement, qu’il hante l’amour maternel. Dans cette pièce où

le cours du temps peut s’inverser et où les mères et les filles se fondent en une figure

indifférenciée, l’infanticide fait surgir le spectre du matricide. Hester fantasme,

d’ailleurs, le meurtre de sa mère – « If she showed up now I’d spit in her face, I’d box the jaws

off of her, I’d go after her with a knife » (318). Le meurtre symbolique n’est pas pour autant

accompli. On pourrait penser qu’il l’est, à la toute fin de la pièce, et qu’Hester actualise

son fantasme lorsqu’elle retourne le couteau contre elle-même. A ce moment-là, Josie

apparaît comme le double d’Hester enfant – elle a l’âge qu’avait Hester au moment du

départ de sa mère et porte, comme Hester à l’époque sa robe de communion – et Hester

comme le double de Josie Swane, sa mère. Hester et Josie meurent en prononçant les


129

mêmes mots : « Mam, Mam » et laissent sur la tourbière enneigée une trace

ensanglantée qui n’est pas sans rappeler celle qu’avait laissée le cygne noir au début de

la pièce. La répétition et le palindrome accentuent l’impression de circularité. Celle-ci

signale que la déliaison d’avec la mère, le matricide symbolique, qui ouvrirait sur

l’individuation et l’altérité n’a pas eu lieu.

18 Si le rapport entre By the Bog of Cats et son hypotexte, Médée, est évident, celui qui unit

The Mai à Electre, l’un des intertextes cités par la critique, l’est moins. Marina Carr met

bien en scène des femmes endeuillées dont le père est absent. Il n’est cependant jamais

question de vengeance. C’est davantage à la psychologie du personnage d’Electre qu’à

l’intrigue de la tragédie de Sophocle, d’Euripide ou d’Eschyle que The Mai fait écho.

Electre reproche à sa mère de faire passer son bon plaisir avant le sien et lui tient grief

d’être davantage amante que mère. C’est précisément ce qui est reproché à celle qui fait

figure de mère archétypale dans The Mai : Grandma Fraochlán. Les femmes de la pièce

ne sont pas en manque de mari ou de père, elles sont en manque d’amour maternel.

Celui-ci a toujours fait défaut, comme en témoigne, par exemple, le fait que la mère de

Grandma Fraochlán la forçait à l’appeler « The Duchess », la mettant ainsi d’emblée à

distance et lui interdisant l’expression de toute marque d’affection. Oreste, que Michèle

Gastambide voit comme interchangeable avec Electre en raison du fait que la question

du matricide concerne « le sujet dans tout son être, féminin et masculin,

indépendamment du pôle sexuel où il a dû se placer9 », hésite avant d’affronter l’ultime

tabou que représente le meurtre d’une mère. Voici ce que Michèle Gastambide écrit du

temps que se ménage Oreste avant le meurtre dans Le meurtre de la Mère. Traversée du

tabou matricide :

Anticipation terrifiante et fascinante de l’orage émotionnel et narcissique qui vaembraser son être à l’instant où son bras, d’un seul et même mouvement, empreintd’une toute-puissance vertigineuse, va réaliser la relation la plus proche qui soitavec une mère, la plus mortifère, la plus interdite et du même mouvement, lacoupure la plus radicale, la plus libératoire d’avec elle10.

19 Euripide et Sophocle présentent un Oreste qui n’a pas encore triomphé de son apathie.

Seul Eschyle, toujours selon les mots de Michèle Gastambide, « ne recule pas devant

l’ultime moment de vérité : la rencontre du fils avec la mère où vont se découvrir leurs

désirs11 ».

20 Dans By the Bog of Cats et The Mai, Marina Carr nous met en présence de femmes

incapables d’accomplir le geste libératoire qui célèbrerait la déliaison d’avec la mère.

Englués dans des questions d’héritage et de filiations, les personnages sont des êtres

dépouillés de toute identité singulière. Leurs désirs ne peuvent se découvrir, étant

toujours voilés par celui de la mère. La hantise d’eux-mêmes dans laquelle les

personnages féminins vivent, nous la lisons comme la principale manifestation du

trauma que ces personnages ont subi. La nature, par essence, inassimilable du trauma

empêche toute représentation directe ou frontale. Pourtant, dans les pièces de Carr

(cela est vrai d’autres pièces, telles Portia Coughlan ou Womanand Scarecrow, par

exemple) la réalité factuelle du trauma est exprimée sans détour. Les personnages

semblent parfaitement conscients des maux qui les affectent. Catwoman souligne ainsi

qu’Hester est douée d’une clairvoyance et d’un discernement particulièrement aigus : «

the way ya go on as if God gave ya a little frog of a brain instead of the gift of seein’ things as

they are, not as they should be, but exactly as they are » (273-274). Dans son introduction à

The Dazzling Dark. New Irish Plays, Frank McGuinness écrit : « Tragedy is so often the

consequence of a fatal lack of self-knowledge. Marina Carr rewrites that rule. Her characters die


130

from a fatal excess of self-knowledge12 ». Si les faits sont exposés, la langue échoue

cependant continuellement à dire l’émotion du trauma et la parole n’a aucun effet

libératoire.

21 Carr met en scène des personnages incapables d’inscrire leur histoire dans l’ordre

symbolique. L’histoire de Coillte, qui informe celle de toutes les générations de femmes

de The Mai, est celle du silence. Coillte ne dit pas son chagrin, c’est son corps qui prend

la parole par le biais des larmes. Incorporée, la peine n’est jamais mise à distance parce

que jamais mise en mots. Le personnage de Mai, à l’image de celui de Coillte, est associé

au somatique. Au tout début de la pièce, elle place des livres sur une étagère, comme si

par ce geste elle se dissociait de l’ordre du symbolique et écartait la possibilité de dire

sa propre histoire. Elle n’est alors qu’un corps-instrument : « He taps her shoulder, hip

bone, ankle », « Now he plays the cello bow across her breasts » (107-108). C’est à Millie que

revient le soin de dire son histoire. En tentant de rassembler les morceaux épars de

l’histoire de sa mère, Millie se conforme a posteriori au rôle que celle-ci lui assigna le

jour du départ du père. Ce jour-là, alors qu’elle tentait de noyer son chagrin dans

l’alcool, Mai envoya Millie chez le boucher pour y chercher une aiguille et du fil.

L’alcool que Mai avale, comme les larmes que verse Coillte et qui finissent par l’avaler,

signalent un besoin de remplir une bouche vide… de mots. Dans la requête impossible à

satisfaire que formule Mai se combinent deux images : celle du morcellement, liée à la

boucherie, qui fait ressortir l’intensité de l’arrachement que vient de subir Mai et celle

du remembrement que signalent l’aiguille et le fil.

No shroud for the Mai. It was her wish. In one of those throwaway

conversations which only become significant with time, The Mai had

said she wanted to be buried in blue. So here we were in a daze

fingering sky blues, indigo blues, navy blues, lilac blues, night blues,

finally settling on a watery blue silk affair. Business done, we moved

down the aisle towards the door. A little boy, escaping his mother,

ran from the side, banged off Robert and sent him backwards into a

display stand. About him on the floor, packets of needles and spools

of thread all the colours of the rainbow. (129)

22 La profusion de fils et d’aiguilles signalent que la quête de Millie est arrivée à son

terme, ou tout au moins qu’elle va se teinter d’autres couleurs et prendre une autre

forme. Munie d’une aiguille et d’un fil métaphoriques, Millie se fait la narratrice de

l’histoire de sa mère. D’une main alerte, elle s’efforce d’exorciser la souffrance que

celle-ci a endurée et de contenir sa détresse. Millie tente d’offrir aux sujets en défaut

d’eux-mêmes que sont son arrière grand-mère, mais surtout sa mère, un cadre pour

contenir leur affliction refoulée. Ce cadre est celui de son récit, symbolisé par celui de

la fenêtre, près de laquelle elle est constamment postée.

23 Incapables de dire le trauma, les protagonistes de The Mai et By the Bog of Cats, rejouent

à l’infini la scène traumatisante jusqu’à se donner la mort. Cette mort qu’elles se

donnent peut, cependant, paradoxalement, se lire comme le signe de leur libération.

Dans la lecture qu’il fait de Patočka dans Donner la mort, Derrida écrit ceci :

[…] Faire l’expérience de la responsabilité, […] c’est faire l’expérience de sasingularité absolue et appréhender sa propre mort, c’est la même expérience : lamort est bien ce que personne ne peut ni endurer ni affronter à ma place. Monirremplaçabilité est bien conférée, livrée, on pourrait dire donnée par la mort13.


131

24 The Mai et By the Bog of Cats nous confrontent au paradoxe d’une mort à la fois

potentiellement libératrice et aliénante en ce qu’elle ne fait que dupliquer la mort

d’une autre. L’aporie devant laquelle la mort des protagonistes nous place est l’une des

formes que prend la mise en scène du trauma chez Carr. Cependant, la nature somme

toute très conservatrice et très logocentrée du théâtre de Carr contribue à tenir à

distance la réalité affective et émotionnelle du trauma – par opposition aux théâtres du

traumatisme dits « postdramatiques », celui de Sarah Kane, par exemple, dont tous les

composants tendent à représenter l’irreprésentable du trauma. Un hiatus se fait jour

entre les thèmes que Carr met au centre de ses pièces et la forme dramatique qu’elle

choisit pour celles-ci.

NOTES

1. L’édition à laquelle les numéros de pages donnés entre parenthèses renvoient est la

suivante : Marina Carr, Plays 1, London, Faber and Faber, 1999.

2. Les titres déjà indiquent, même si le spectateur ne le comprend que

rétrospectivement, la centralité de la mort : celle du personnage éponyme, Mai, est déjà

advenue et c’est près de la « tourbière des chats » que la mort se donne.

3. Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, L’écorce et le noyau, Paris, Flammarion, 1987.

4. Patricia Vasseur-Legangneux, « Des fantômes épiques aux fantômes tragiques :

héritage, transformations, inventions dans l’antiquité grecque », Dramaturgies de

l’ombre, Françoise Lavocat et François Lecercle (dir.), Rennes, Presses Universitaires de

Rennes, collection « Interférences », 2005, p. 16.

5. Les propos du Ghost Fancier font écho aux croyances religieuses concernant les

morts dans la Grèce antique : « au terme des rites funéraires, le corps humain revêt la

forme d’une réalité à deux faces dont chacune renvoie à l’autre et implique sa

contrepartie : une face visible et localisée et une face invisible, insaisissable et fugitive »

(J.-P. Vernant cité dans Patricia Vasseur-Legangneux, p. 15). Le mot « corpse » renvoie à

la face visible que mentionne J.-P. Vernant, le mot « shadow » à la face invisible.

6. « Grandma Fraochlán : I remember the first time I met the nine-fingered fisherman. ‘Is mise

Tomás, scipéir, mac scipéara’, he said. I knew where he was comin’ from, one sentence, one

glance of his blue eyes and me heart was in his fist », The Mai (119).

7. « Monica : You up on forty, Hester, and still dreamin’ of storybook endin’s, still whingin’ for

your Mam. » (324).

8. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, « Théorie de la Hantise », Tropismes, n° 14, Université de Paris

X, 2007, p. 7.

9. Michèle Gastambide, Le meurtre de la Mère. Traversée du tabou matricide, Paris, La

Méridienne, 2002, p. 64.

10. Ibid., p. 88.

11. Ibid., p. 89.


132

12. Franck McGuinness (dir.), The Dazzling Dark. New Irish Plays, London, Faber and

Faber, 1996, p. ix.

13. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort, Paris, Galilée, 1999, p. 64.

RÉSUMÉS

Le trauma que The Mai et By the Bog of Cats s’efforcent de représenter est celui de sujets dont

l’avènement n’a jamais eu lieu, de sujets condamnés à vivre dans la hantise de l’individuation. La

dramaturgie du traumatisme que Marina Carr met en place dans ces deux pièces s’apparente à

bien des égards à une dramaturgie de la revenance. Le spectre, entité indécise qui allie des

réalités contradictoires telles que présence et absence, évanescence et rémanence, donne pour

ainsi dire corps au trauma en ce qu’il fait retour et signale la présence insistante de l’invisible, de

ce qui reste hors de portée de la conscience du sujet. La nature par essence inassimilable du

trauma empêche toute représentation directe ou frontale. Si, paradoxalement, les pièces de Carr

disent la réalité factuelle du trauma sans détour, elles semblent cependant échouer à en exprimer

la réalité affective et émotionnelle.

This article aims at defining the nature of the traumatic experience that lies at the heart of

Marina Carr’s The Mai and By the Bog of Cats. Here, Carr constructs characters that never emerge

as subjects. The “subject” staged in the two plays is one whose individuation has never really

occurred. The female protagonists, Hester Swane and The Mai, are forever ghosted by their own

(m)other. The figure of the spectre, as an indefinite entity which allies contradictory

characteristics such as presence and absence, evanescence and persistence, (dis)embodies

trauma in that it forever returns, thus signalling the insisting presence of the invisible, of that

which forever eludes the subject’s consciousness. The essentially inassimilable nature of trauma

renders any direct, frontal representation impossible. Whereas Carr’s plays allow us to see and to

hear the factual reality of trauma, I argue that they also fail to fully express trauma’s affective

and emotional reality.

INDEX

Mots-clés : Carr Marina, théâtre, trauma

Keywords : Carr Marina, drama, trauma

AUTEUR

HÉLÈNE LECOSSOIS

Université du Maine, Le Mans


133

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134

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Paris, Arléa, Collection Essais, 2001.

33 Fassin, Didier and Richard Rechtman, L’empire du traumatisme : enquête sur la condition de

victime, Paris, Flammarion, 2007.


136

34 Kardiner, Abram, The Traumatic Neuroses of War, Washington, DC, National Research

Council, 1941.

35 Maqueda, Francis. Traumatismes de guerre : actualités cliniques et humanitaires, Revigny sur

Ornain, Hommes et Perspectives, 1991.

36 Nacht, Marc, A l’aise dans la barbarie, Paris, Grasset, 1994.

37 Martin, Jean-Clément, Violence et révolution : essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national,

Paris, Seuil, Collection L’univers historique, 2006.

38 Mattingly, Cheryl, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1998.

39 Michaud, Yves, La violence, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, coll. « Que sais-je ? »,

1988.

40 Mitzal, Barbara, Theories of Social Remembering, Maidenhead, Open University Press,

2003.

41 Montbrial (de) Thierry, Jansen Sabine, Violence : de la psychologie à la politique, Bruxelles,

Bruylant, 2006.

42 Muchembled, Robert, Une histoire de la violence : de la fin du Moyen-Age à nos jours, Paris,

Seuil, Collection L’Univers historique, 2008.

43 Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi, Oxford

UP, 1983, Oxford, Oxford UP, 1988.

44 Prakash Gyan, Kevin M. Kruse, The Spaces of the Modern City, Imaginaries, Politics, and

Everyday life, Princeton, N.J., Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2008.

45 Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, Oxford

Paperbacks, 1988.

46 Žižek, Slavoj, Violence, London, Profile Books, 2008, rep. 2009.

47 —, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London, Verso, 1989.

48 Wilson, John P., Catherine C. and So Kum Tang (eds.), Cross-Cultural Assessment of

Psychological Trauma and PTSD, New York, Springer, 2007.

Social and Political Violence: Ireland and NorthernIreland

Commissions, Reports and Indexes of Deaths: Northern Ireland

49 Bloomfield, Kenneth, “We Will Remember Them”: Report of the Northern Ireland Victims

Commissioner, Belfast, The Stationery Office Northern Ireland, April 1998.

50 McDougall, Bertha, Support for Victims and Survivors: Addressing the human legacy, Report of

the Interim Commissioner for Victims Survivors, Belfast, Interim Commissioner for Victims

and Survivors, 2007.

51 —, “Executive Summary” of Support for Victims and Survivors : Addressing the human legacy,

Report of the Interim Commissioner for Victims Survivors, Belfast, 2007.

52 McKeown, Michael, Database of Deaths Associated with Violence in Northern Ireland,

1969-2001, CAIN Web Page : [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/mckeown/].

53 The Commission for Victims and Survivors (CVS), Initial Work Programme, June 2008-

March 2009 (Draft), 10 June 2008, Belfast, CVS, 2008, [http://www.cvsni.org/]


137

54 The Commission of Victims and Survivors (CVS), Final Report, Initial Literature Review of

The Needs of Victims and Survivors, prepared by the Social Research Centre Limited,

Belfast, CVS, 2009

55 Saville of Newdigate, The Rt Hon Lord (Chairman), The Hon Mr William L. Hoyt, The

Hon Mr John L. Toohey, The Bloody Sunday Inquiry, [http://www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/

index.html], 15 June 2010.

56 Sutton, Malcolm, Sutton Index of Deaths, 1969-2001, CAIN: [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/

index.html].

Institutional Child Abuse

57 Cafardi, Nicholas P., “Fraternal Correction, Lessons from the Irish Sex-Abuse Crisis”,

Commonweal, New York, vol.137, Number 5, p. 9-11

58 Commission of Investigation, Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, July 2009

(The Murphy Report), 2009.

59 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Report (The Ryan Report), Dublin, The

Stationery Office, 2009, [http://www.childabusecommission.ie/index.html].

60 Gilligan, Robbie, “The ‘Public Child’ and the Reluctant State?” Éire-Ireland, 2009, vol. 44,

nos. 1 & 2, p. 265-290.

61 Kaveny, Cathleen, “Truth or Consequences: in Ireland, straying far from the mental

reservation”, Commonweal, New York, vol. 137, Number 5.

62 Littleton, John and Eamon Maher (eds.), The Dublin/Murphy Report: A Watershed for Irish

Catholicism?, Dublin, Columba Press, 2010.

63 Riordan, Susannah, “Challenging Bad Nuns: Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries”, The Irish

Review, Volume 42, Number 42, September 2010, p. 120-127.

Other Critical Works

64 Dawson, Graham, “Trauma, Memory, Politics: The Irish Troubles”, in Trauma: Life Stories

of Survivors, ed. Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson, NJ and

London, Piscataway, 2004.

65 —, T.G. Ashplant and Michael Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and

Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics”, in Ashplant, Dawson and Roper

(eds.) Commemorating War: the Politics of Memory, NJ and London, Piscataway, 2004.

66 —, “Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972-2004”,

History Workshop Journal, Issue 59, 2005, p. 151-178.

67 —, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles, Manchester,

Manchester UP, 2008.

68 Dixon Paul, Northern Ireland: The Politics of War and Peace, Basingstoke, New York,

Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

69 Edwards, David, Pádraig Lenihan and Tait Clodagh (eds.) Age of Atrocity: Violence and

Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, Dublin, Ireland, Portland, Four Courts Press,

2007.


138

70 Farquharson, Danine and Sean Farrell (eds.), Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture

in Modern Ireland, Cork, Cork University Press, 2008.

71 Feldman, Allen, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice,

Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities”, Radical History Review, Issue 85, Winter

2003, p. 58-73.

72 —, Formations of Violence. The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland,

London, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

73 Gregory, Adrian, Paseta Senia (eds.), Ireland and the Great War: “A War to Unite Us Al’’?,

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002.

74 Herron, Tom, Lynch John, After Bloody Sunday: Ethics, Representation, Justice, Cork, Cork

University Press, 2007.

75 Lloyd, David, “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?”, Interventions : International

Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 2, Number 2, 2000, p. 212-28.

76 McCann, Eamonn, War and an Irish Town, London, Pluto Press, 1973, 3rd revised edition.

77 McKittrick, David, Lost Lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result

of the Northern Ireland troubles, Edinburgh, London, Mainstream, 2001.

78 O Dochartaigh, Niall, From Civil Rights to armalites: Derry and the birth of Irish Troubles, New

York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

79 O’Duffy, Brendan, British-Irish Relations and Northern Ireland: from Violent Politics to Conflict

Regulation, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007.

80 Parkinson, Alan F., Belfast’s Unholy War: the Troubles of the 1920s, Dublin, Portland, Four

Courts Press, 2004.

81 Pine, Emily, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish

Culture, New York, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

82 Hayes, Patrick and Jim Campbell, Bloody Sunday: Trauma, Pain and Politics, London,

Dublin, Ann Arbor, Pluto Press, 2005.

83 Resta Esther, Guerre de religion et terrorisme en Irlande du Nord : mensonges et manipulation,

Paris, L’Harmattan, 2001.

84 Rolston Bill, “Dealing with the Past, Pro State paramilitaries, Truth and Transition in

Northern Ireland”, Human Rights Quarterly 28, 2006, p. 652-675.

85 Shirlow Peter and Kieran McEvoy, Beyond the Wire: Former Prisoners and Conflict

Transformation in Northern Ireland, London, Ann Arbor, MI, Pluto Press, 2008.

86 Shirlow Peter, Tonge, Jonathan, James McAuley and Catherine McGlyn, Abandoning

Historical Conflict ? Former Paramilitary Prisoners and Political Reconciliation in Northern

Ireland, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010.

87 Smyth Breen, Marie, Truth Recovery and Justice after Conflict, Oxford, Routledge, 2007.

88 Tonge, Jonathan, Northern Ireland, Cambridge, Malden, Mass., Polity, 2006.

89 Townshend, Charles, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848,

Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983.


139

Narrating Trauma

General Reference

90 Aucouturier, Michel, Jörn Cambreleng, Françoise Cartano et al., Traduire la violence,

Vingt-deuxièmes assises de la traduction littéraire, Arles 2005, Atlas, Actes Sud, 2006.

91 Benjamin, Walter, Œuvres. Essais traduits de l’allemand par Maurice de Gandillac, 1-

Mythe et violence, Paris, Denoël, coll. « Dossiers des lettres nouvelles », 1971.

92 Chiantaretto, Jean-François, Ecriture de soi et trauma, Paris, Anthropos, 1998.

93 Craps, Stef and Gert Buelens, “Introduction : Postcolonial Trauma Novels”, Studies in the

Novel, Vol. 40, nos 1&2, Spring & Summer 2008, p. 1-12.

94 Goldberg, Amos, “Trauma, Narrative and Two Forms of Death”; Literature and Medicine,

Vol. 26, Number 1, Spring 2006, p. 122-141.

95 Hartman, Geoffrey H., “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary

History, Vol. 26, Number 3, 1995, p. 537-563.

96 Ramadanovic, Petar, Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma and Identity, Lanham,

Lexington Books, 2001.

97 Robinett, Jane, “The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience”, Literature and Medicine,

Vol. 26, Number 2, Fall 2007, p. 290-311.

98 Schwab, Gabrielle, “Writing Against Memory and Forgetting”, Literature and Medicine,

Vol. 26, Number 1, Spring 2006, p. 95-121.

99 Tal, Kali, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, Cambridge, Cambridge UP,

1996.

100 Tellier, Arnaud, Expériences traumatiques et écriture, Paris, Anthropos, 1998.

101 Vickroy, Laurie, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, Charlottesville, U. of

Virginia Press, 2002.

Narrating Trauma: Irish Literature and the Arts

102 Angel-Perez, Élisabeth, Voyages au bout du possible : les théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel

Beckett à Sarah Kane, Paris, Klincksieck, 2006.

103 Borderlines: Personal Stories and Experiences from the Border Counties of the Island of Ireland,

The Borderlines Project, Gallery of Photography, 2006.

104 Cardin, Bertrand and Claude Fierobe (eds.), Irlande, écritures et réécritures de la Famine,

Caen, Presses universitaires de Caen, 2007.

105 Lloyd, David, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity, Field Day Files 4, Keough-Naughton

Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, Field Day, Dublin, 2008.

106 McKenna, Bernard, Rupture, Representation and the Refashioning of Identity in Drama from

the North of Ireland, 1969-1994, Wesport, Connecticut, London, Praeger, 2003.

107 Murphy, Shane Alcobia, Governing the Tongue in Northern Ireland: The Place of Art, the Art of

Place, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005.

108 Van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine, “The Trauma of Irishness; or, Literature as Material

Cultural Memory in Joyce”, Configurations, Vol. 7, Number 2, Spring 1999, p. 247-266.


140

109 Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism,

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

110 Whelan, Kevin, “The Memories of ‘The Dead’”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 15,

Number 1, 2002, p. 59-97.


141

Comptes rendus de lectureBook reviews


142

Here Comes The NightMarion Naugrette-Fournier

RÉFÉRENCE

Alan Gillis, Here Comes The Night, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-85235-494-7

1 « Open a new window./Go on and Google yourself ». Le ton est donné. Avec Alan Gillis, dès le

premier vers, un mélange d’insolence et de franchise brutale vous agresse verbalement,

voire visuellement. On aime ou on n’aime pas. Mais si on aime, et si on accepte d’entrer

dans le jeu des possibilités du langage auquel nous invite Gillis, alors le plaisir de

lecture devient pure jubilation. On ouvre certes un nouveau recueil (Here Comes The

Night est le troisième recueil de poésie d’Alan Gillis, publié par Gallery Press en

septembre 2010) ; on ouvre aussi une nouvelle fenêtre, celle d’une écriture poétique

résolument moderne, en prise sur et aux prises avec la langue anglaise actuelle, dans ce

qu’elle a de plus inventif et de plus familier. « Go on and Google yourself » : ce vers est

presque une devise, et résume à lui seul le credo poétique du recueil, qui consiste à

porter un regard critique acerbe et acéré sur notre société, notamment sur la société

nord-irlandaise, et ce en prenant au piège la langue anglaise elle-même, en se jouant de

ses néologismes, de certaines modes langagières. Gillis utilise et incorpore avec brio les

nouveaux outils qui structurent le quotidien de l’homme du XXIe siècle – Google,

Facebook et MySpace, parmi d’autres. Mais la grande force de Gillis consiste à dégager

et à exploiter le potentiel poétique de ces instruments : Google, Facebook et MySpace

sont pour lui les nouveaux outils poétiques de demain. A travers la manipulation

ironique de ces outils qu’est la sienne, il ouvre tout un champ de réflexion et de

méditation encore relativement récent en poésie : le nouveau rapport à soi que des

outils tels que Facebook induisent, par exemple en permettant de retrouver un nom qui

ressurgit du passé :

And the name’s slow-dawned gravity

widens the window, weirds and sends

you plunging into the déjà vu

of a phlegm-skied twilight


143

with unreal soldiers on the walls

lit by fire-red and air-blue streetlights; […].

2 Et c’est alors que la fenêtre s’élargit, et que derrière la satire de ce “brave new world”

apparaît un univers beaucoup plus familier à Gillis, que l’on retrouve dans ses recueils

précédents comme Somebody, Somewhere et surtout Hawks and Doves : la nouvelle Belfast,

tout aussi sombre et tourmentée que l’ancienne. Le titre du recueil prend tout son

sens : « Here Comes The Night », au lieu du « Here Comes The Sun » si radieux des

Beatles. Et lorsqu’on regarde la structure du recueil, une géographie poétique

crépusculaire se dessine, avec des titres de poèmes comme « In The Shadow of the

Mournes », « In A Glass Darkly », « At Dusk », « On A Cold Evening in Edinburgh », ou

l’éponyme « Here Comes The Night ». La nuit nord-irlandaise ou écossaise de Gillis se

pare parfois de couleurs flamboyantes, mais ce sont les couleurs de la violence ou de la

honte d’une société qui vit au bord du gouffre. Chez Gillis la nuit est noire de dettes, et

le ciel en rougit : « debt/threats looming in the guilt-blushed sky »…


144

A Fool’s ErrandMarion Naugrette-Fournier

RÉFÉRENCE

Dermot Healy, A Fool’s Errand, Oldcastle, Gallery Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-85235-499-2

1 La mer, la musique. La mort, les oiseaux. Ces quatre motifs, tels des motifs de musique,

rythment le quatrième et nouveau recueil de poésie de Dermot Healy, A Fool’s Errand,

publié chez Gallery Press en septembre 2010. Ce recueil sort de l’ordinaire pour

plusieurs raisons, et sa structure très particulière y est pour beaucoup : découpé en

neuf sections (« The Leavings », « The Sound of Time Flying », « The Beaten Sound »,

« The Thrashing Shadows », « The Voyage », « The Wild Goose Chase », « The Late

November List », « The Arrowhead » et « The Ebbing Sound »), cet ouvrage est

essentiellement structuré autour du phénomène des migrations annuelles de certains

oiseaux. Il s’agit ici des oies bernaches (« barnacle geese »), qui chaque année

entreprennent le long et périlleux voyage entre le Groënland où elles se reproduisent et

une île sur la côte ouest de l’Irlande où elles s’installent pour l’hiver, près de l’endroit

où habite le poète dans le comté de Sligo. L’arrivée et le départ des oies bernaches

ponctuent le recueil à intervalles réguliers, et sont le repère, le témoin du rythme des

saisons, du passage inexorable du temps, et aussi de la disparition des proches ou des

amis – l’autre élément qui structure le livre est la mort d’un des amis du poète, ami

musicien. On assiste à une métamorphose poétique opérée par le travail de deuil, où les

instruments de musique se transforment en oiseaux :

Since I began to

look up

at your psalm

all of the instruments

have turned into birds. […]

2 Les oiseaux migrateurs, d’instruments éparpillés deviennent « the orchestra of memory »,

prêts à repartir et à s’élever dans les airs dès le premier coup de baguette, ou d’aile, de


145

leur chef d’orchestre, une fois le printemps venu. Les oies bernaches symbolisent la

transmission d’un savoir (« the same journey is made, again and again, by a wild goose, tamed

by centuries/of wind »), même si ce savoir reste incertain – « the unsure knowledge ». Une

comparaison est ainsi esquissée entre ce savoir instinctif et la tradition orale musicale,

selon laquelle les musiciens se transmettent des airs par la parole et l’écoute, au fil des

générations; Healy fait d’ailleurs allusion à une chanson au titre significatif, « The Geese

in the Bog ». Le bruit des oiseaux lui évoque un air oublié, sans doute lié à l’ami musicien

disparu; mais cette cacophonie ornithologique brouille aussi la mémoire du son, le

disperse, abandonnant le poète à une quête impossible, « a fool’s errand », ou « a wild

goose chase », à la recherche du temps perdu, migrant, tel les oiseaux migrateurs qu’il

observe, entre les limbes du passé. « Time is flying » : cette métaphore qu’Healy emploie

est la clef du recueil, image qu’il prend au pied de la lettre. Mais le vol des oies est un

trompe-l’oeil : elles vont de l’avant, pour faire un voyage qu’elles ont déjà fait et refait.

Leur futur est un passé qu’elles perpétuent, et notre passé attend notre futur au

tournant : « Open the front door/the back slams shut ».


146

Un Poète dans la tourmenteJacqueline Genet

RÉFÉRENCE

Pierre Joannon, Un Poète dans la tourmente, W. B. Yeats et la Révolution irlandaise, Dinan,

Terre de Brume, 2010, 135 p. ISBN 978-2-84362-440-7

1 Empressons-nous d’appuyer la remarque qui ouvre le livre : « assigner un contenu

politique à l’oeuvre et à la vie d’un poète aussi profondément artiste » que W. B. Yeats «

n’a rien d’une démarche incongrue ». Cet ouvrage le prouve brillamment.

2 Reprenant Oliver Gogarty pour qui, sans W.B. Yeats, il n’y aurait pas d’Etat libre

d’Irlande, P. Joannon présente les événements historiques et biographiques qui

appuient ce jugement, parmi les plus marquants, l’influence d’O’Leary, l’entrée de

Maud Gonne, la « fringante égérie du nationalisme irlandais » qui happe le jeune poète

amoureux dans « l’engrenage de la politique » ; son adhésion à l’Irish Republican

Brotherhood, sa sympathie pour les Boers, sa lettre « cinglante » dans le Freeman’s

Journal lors de la visite de la Reine Victoria en Irlande ; sa nomination comme sénateur,

son obtention du prix Nobel où la politique n’est pas étrangère, l’Académie suédoise

saluant l’arrivée de l’Irlande dans le concert des nations.

3 P. Joannon s’emploie à cerner l’attitude politique de Yeats qui malgré ses origines,

s’estime le « représentant exemplaire de la vieille Ascendancy anglo-irlandaise »

tiraillée entre des allégeances contradictoires. Lorsque le nationalisme devenant

poésie, on se prend à goûter le passé, à prôner l’étude du gaélique et la traduction en

anglais des grands cycles de la littérature celtique, on assiste à l’éclosion de la

Renaissance littéraire dont Yeats sera le représentant le plus remarquable. L’évocation

du passé héroïque d’ O’Grady, son History of Ireland, s’adresse à l’Ascendancy coloniale.

Conservateur unioniste, il estime que les « landlords » s’inspirant des vertus de

Cuchulain rétabliront leur puissance chancelante ; le nationalisme de Yeats « d’essence

aristocratique » et son refus du matérialisme anglais se situent dans ce droit fil.

D’emblée apparaît l’ambiguïté de son attitude : Anglais en Irlande, Irlandais en

Angleterre, il ne reconnaît totalement pour sienne ni l’histoire anglaise ni celle de


147

l’Irlande ; en quête d’unité, il aspire à unir l’Irlande anglicisée à celle des Gaëls. Le fossé

entre nationalistes catholiques animés d’une ferveur gaélique et démocratique et ceux,

comme lui, dont les goûts aristocratiques et esthétiques s’expriment dans la langue des

« oppresseurs » accentue cette ambivalence.

4 L’Art, pense-t-il, peut favoriser son rêve d’unité ; sa poésie se nourrit de mythes

celtiques et du folklore paysan, reprenant possession d’une culture étouffée par les

conquérants. En marge du nationalisme populaire pénétré de catholicisme qu’il rejette,

loin des petits bourgeois « vulgaires et mesquins », il remplace la religion protestante

de son enfance par « une Eglise infaillible de tradition poétique avec un amas

d’histoires, de personnages et d’émotions [...] transmis de génération en génération » et

développe une esthétique élististe dont l’une des expressions sera ses pièces nô, «

théâtre impopulaire » pour un public « en forme de société secrète ».

5 Ses poèmes reflètent la même ambiguïté. Ainsi « Pâques 1916 » est-il jalonné

« d’inflexions contradictoires ». L’Irlande romantique n’est pas morte – « rising » est

« soulèvement » et résurrection » –, mais ce combat n’est-il pas l’effet « d’un

aveuglement stérile » ? Attirance et répulsion se côtoient. Il jette un regard passionné

sur les événements mais s’enferme dans sa tour ; pourtant en 1921, dans un climat de

terreur, il prononce une violente diatribe, contre les Black and Tans. S’il songe à fuir

l’Irlande et l’Angleterre, la guerre civile le surprend encore à Thoor Ballylee ; s’il

éprouve «un « obscur désir d’action », il sait que sa tâche est autre. On comprend que P.

Joannon le regarde comme « l’authentique poète national de l’Irlande, nonobstant ses

origines anglo-irlandaises sacralisées jusqu’à la provocation et son mépris de la foule

inculte et fanatique affiché avec non moins d’arrogance ».

6 L’ouvrage rend compte des accusations de fascisme portées contre lui, expliquant que

s’il voit peut-être O’Higgins « sous les traits d’un nouveau Burke », Gentile en disciple

de Berkeley, il éprouve sans conteste une sympathie pour les Chemises Bleues du

Général O’Duffy et sa « Garde nationale » inspirée du fascisme. Si en 1933 celle-ci

fusionne avec le Parti irlandais du Centre et la Ligue des Gaëls de Cosgrave, celui-ci,

excédé par le « leadership hystérique et destructeur » d’O’Duffy, lui signifie rapidement

son congé. L’illusion fasciste de Yeats aura été brève, même si on ne peut le dédouaner

car il s’est réjoui de cette aventure; sa position, estime P. Joannon, est plus proche du

nationalisme aristocratique de Pessoa que du fascisme, plus près aussi de celle de

Valéry avec lequel il est comparé très pertinemment.

7 Saluons le regard encyclopédique et scientifique de P. Joannon qui, à partir de discours,

pamphlets, poèmes, nous offre cette étude magistrale, l’une des plus exhaustives.


148

Territoires de l’étrange dans lalittérature irlandaise au xxe siècleMark Fitzpatrick

REFERENCES

Gaïd Girard (dir.), Territoires de l’étrange dans la littérature irlandaise au XXe siècle, Rennes,

Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009, 275 p., ISBN 978-2-7535-0842-2, 18 €

1 Gaïd Girard’s collection of essays, the proceedings of a symposium on 20th century Irish

literature’s strange lands, could not have been more appropriate reading material

while visiting Ireland in December 2010, after the almost-unprecedented general

snowfall. The white shroud undifferentiating, defamiliarising the landscape, provoked

the unquieting anxiety of the blank page, erasing the signs of the present, to leave us in

what Chris Morash’s essay, closing the volume, calls “the continuous past”.

2 Indeed, this persistence – or, as in Maryvonne Boisseau’s illuminating contribution, this

rémanance – this afterglow of an essential strangeness in Irish literature, often most

associated with the 19th century gothic, throughout the 20 th century’s various forms

and transformations, is at the heart of the territory that this volume attempts to map.

If, as Girard’s introduction points out, we are to agree with Terry Eagleton’s assessment

of Ireland as the “monstrous unconscious of the metropolitan society”, and position

ourselves “critically” (with Paul Muldoon’s “critically positioned figure”, interestingly

translated by Girard as a “figure en déséquilibre”, thus spatialising an idea, as so many of

these texts proceed to do), then we must take account of many subtle boundaries,

intersecting “territoires”, and many-layered anachronologies in the long history of a

young nation.

3 Questions of genre, and the spectral, indeterminate limits between them, inform many

contributions, with Todorov’s Introduction à la literature fantastique a key text, deployed

perhaps to greatest effect by Morash, who articulates Todorov’s approach with that of

Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment, and Victor Sage, whose contribution on

“McGahern’s Inverted Uncanny”, where he also brings into play the Burkean Sublime


149

as the Uncanny’s mysterious double, is a stern test of the solidity of the lead of one’s

underlining pencil.

4 Claude Fierobe’s magisterial opening essay surveys the territory to be explored, with a

plotting of Irish 20th century fiction’s “Territoires d’inquiétude”, and we are then

treated to an unsettling trip through haunted history, the Big House in Trevor and

Banville, ironic disenchantment and poetic re-enchantment in Wilde’s, Bowen’s, Ciaran

Carson’s ghosts, the power of words, and of silence, in AE, Flann O’Brien, and Beckett,

to return to the worrying strangeness in the real, and the disquiet of a stranger politics

in the volume’s final section.

5 The idea of the Uncanny receives the expected attention, with some treatments of it

more subtle than others; Magali Falco’s exploration of its presence in Banville’s

Birchwood suffers from the playful, arch series of self-conscious variations that the

novel itself plays on notions of the Gothic, the carnival, the (Un)Heimlich.


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Out of the EarthSylvie Mikowski

RÉFÉRENCE

Christine Cusik (ed.), Out of the Earth : Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts, Cork, Cork

University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-185918-154-7, 269 p.

1 La vague de l’éco-critique, venue des Etats-Unis, a récemment déferlé sur le petit

monde des études irlandaises, comme le firent autrefois la critique postcoloniale ou la

critique féministe. Cheryll Glotfelty, co-auteur de The Ecocriticism Reader : Landmarks in

Literary Ecology (Athens GA : Georgia University Press, 2003), définit ainsi l’écocritique

comme « l’étude de la relation entre littérature et l’environnement physique. […] Elle

examine les rapports entre nature et culture, et spécifiquement les artefacts culturels

que sont le langage et la littérature ». Reprenant à son compte le concept d’altérité

central aux études postcoloniales, l’écocritique étend sa définition à tout ce qui est

« non-humain ». Etre un auteur « écocritique », c’est donc avoir pris conscience de la

façon dont les hommes rejettent le non-humain comme essentiellement « autre » et

s’efforcer à travers ses écrits de subvertir cette binarité en brouillant la frontière entre

humain et non-humain. Selon les auteurs des onze chapitres de cet ouvrage collectif, la

littérature irlandaise se prête particulièrement bien à une approche écocritique, l’un

d’entre eux notant par exemple que « l’écologie est depuis des siècles un aspect central

de la poésie irlandaise, bien qu’il n’y soit pas fait référence en tant que telle ».

Cependant, tous les genres littéraires sont abordés dans cet ouvrage très complet, qui

couvre également une période s’étendant du début du XIXe siècle à nos jours, et déborde

du domaine strictement littéraire grâce à un article consacré aux représentations du

paysage irlandais dans le discours touristique depuis le XIXe siècle.

2 Même si pouvait avoir l’impression qu’une grande attention avait déjà été accordée au

fameux « sense of place » irlandais, à l’opposition entre ville et campagne, ou encore aux

visions romantiques d’une Irlande pastorale où l’homme vivrait encore en harmonie

avec la nature, cette nouvelle grille de lecture se révèle fertile et vraiment novatrice.

Par exemple, Jefferson Holdridge souligne la particularité du romantisme en Irlande


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dans un chapitre consacré à Lady Morgan et William Carlton d’où il ressort que

l’histoire nationale, et les conséquences tragiques de catastrophes naturelles telles que

la Grande Famine conduisirent les écrivains irlandais à adopter un mode anti-pastoral,

mettant souvent en jeu la notion de « wildness ». De même, pour Joy Kennedy-O’Neill,

l’attitude de Synge face à la nature, telle qu’elle s’exprime dans Riders to the Sea, ne peut

être assimilée à un mode purement pastoral ou romantique, mais découle plutôt d’une

vision complexe de l’environnement naturel propre à l’Irlande, et qui mélange

paganisme, christianisme et darwinisme. Pour sa part Greg Winston relit The Untilled

Land de George Moore avant tout comme un témoignage des transformations profondes

ayant affecté le paysage et l’économie rurale de l’Irlande après la Famine et

l’émigration de masse qui s’ensuivit.

3 En ce qui concerne l’époque contemporaine, le chapitre que Kathryn Kirkpatrick

consacre à Paula Meehan est un exemple de critique « écofeministe », qui découle de

l’observation selon laquelle les femmes sont souvent rejetées dans la même forme

d’altérité que le « non-humain », et souvent assimilées au monde naturel, comme le

démontre encore l’étude de la place des animaux dans les romans de Edna O’Brien, écrit

par Maureen O’Connor. L’écocritique ne s’arrête cependant pas à l’analyse de textes où

la nature joue un rôle central. Ainsi, une lecture critique de Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha de

Roddy Doyle permet de dépasser notre vision de ce romancier comme celui de la

modernité urbaine et de souligner le rôle dans ce roman d’un environnement naturel

dégradé qui participe à la dégradation générale de l’existence du protagoniste.

L’importance égale accordée aux changements dans l’environnement naturel et à ceux

survenant dans la famille de Paddy est ainsi donnée comme exemple de traitement

littéraire non-anthropocentrique. La pièce de Martin McDonagh The Cripple of Insihmaan

s’inscrit plus logiquement dans le corpus de l’écocritique dans la mesure où elle

interroge et subvertit la représentation traditionnelle des îles d’Aran, site par

excellence de la sentimentalité pastorale caractéristique de la Renaissance celtique,

également exploitée par le cinéaste américain Robert Flaherty dans Man of Aran.

L’ouvrage se termine par un entretien avec Tim Robinson, écrivain, artiste et

cartographe, combinaison presque aussi nouvelle et étonnante que l’est l’écocritique

elle-même.


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The Politics of Irish WritingAnne Goarzin

RÉFÉRENCE

Kateřina Jenčová, Michaela Marková, Radvan Markus, Hana Pavelková (eds.), The Politics

of Irish Writing, Prague, Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University, 2010, ISBN

978-80-254-6151-8

1 Ce volume réunit les contributions des participants à la conférence sur « The Politics of

Irish Writing », qui s’est tenue à Prague en septembre 2009, sous l’égide du Centre

d’études irlandaises de Charles University. Le parti-pris est ici délibérément

interdisciplinaire : l’ouvrage donne à lire des contributions de jeunes chercheurs venus

majoritairement d’Irlande et du Royaume-Uni, mais aussi d’Europe continentale,

témoignant ainsi du dynamisme de la recherche dans ce domaine et de la place centrale

du centre de recherche de Prague dans le paysage des études irlandaises. Les rubriques,

au nombre de neuf, abordent comme on peut s’y attendre le canon littéraire irlandais

mais elles se penchent aussi sur la littérature féminine, la littérature d’avant, les

Troubles ou en réaction aux Troubles, ou encore la poésie, la fiction et le théâtre

contemporains. On appréhende toujours, à la lecture de pareil ouvrage, le morcèlement

dû à l’effet de juxtaposition des articles. Mais ici la richesse des contributions, souvent

écrites dans une langue élégante (qui témoigne d’un remarquable travail

d’harmonisation) compense largement cette potentielle faiblesse. Les textes sont

abordés de manière innovante, associant habilement une lecture précise du texte et

une approche théorique qui est mise au service du texte et de ce fait toujours digeste.

C’est le cas de l’article qui analyse les mécanismes rhétoriques des pièces de Pearse, «

Liturgy and Revolution : Two Plays by Patrick Pearse and Translatio sacrii » (Maciej Ruczaj),

ou dans celui consacré à In the Congested Districts de J. M. Synge (Giulia Bruna), qui

s’intéresse à la question de la rhétorique colonialiste et au concept de « cultural

remembrance ». Sans citer les 23 articles, il faut remarquer que l’ambition commune à

ces travaux est la réévaluation critique de textes souvent négligés par la critique, tels

les « schoolboy novels » irlandais, ou encore l’œuvre de Katharine Tynan ou de Brian


153

Moore. Il y a là des perspectives novatrices et stimulantes qui éclairent notre

compréhension de textes clé ou de questions centrales – comme celle de l’esthétique de

la révolution dans « Easter 1916 », de l’élégie politique comme genre dans la poésie nord-

irlandaise, ou de l’humour noir dans les le théâtre irlandais contemporain.


154

Keeping Faith with the Past in GaelicProse 1940-1951Clíona Ní Ríordáin

REFERENCES

Philip O’Leary, Keeping Faith with the Past in Gaelic Prose 1940-1951, Dublin, UCD Press,

2010, ISBN 978-1-906359-27-0

1 Philip O’Leary’s previous volumes, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival 1881-1921

(1994) and Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State 1922-1939 (2004), shed light on prose writing

in Irish during the revival and its immediate aftermath. His new volume focuses on the

following decade in a nine-chapter book which addresses the increasing disillusion of

Irish language writers. Each chapter is organized thematically, addressing such issues

as authenticity, ruralism, and earlier Irish literature, amongst others. Of particular

interest are the chapters devoted to the writing about the past in Irish. Chapter five

evokes the period from prehistory to 1700. This period was vital ideologically, as it

represented the “pristine Gaelic nature and its putative glory” (179). O’Leary highlights

the errors of writers who based their work on texts like Lebor Gabhála Érenn, confusing

history and mythology and failing to recognise the pseudo-historical nature of their

sources. Nonetheless, he recognises the invaluable contribution of people like Liam S

Gógan and Gustav Lechmacher, who, in a number of articles, addressed the vacuum of

history writing in the ancient history of Ireland.

2 O’Leary also looks at the way this period was represented in creative work during the

period, examining drama and novel forms alike. Chapter Six, which covers writing

about the past from 1700 to 1923, illustrates how much this period captured the

attention of historians and creative writers alike. O’Leary examines the writing devoted

to the period surrounding the 1798 rebellion and point outs that, despite attempts to

provide objective accounts, the stories and histories frequently portrayed a sectarian

version of events. Chapter seven studies local and international history written in Irish

and offers a fascinating insight into a largely ignored facet of Irish writing. The writing


155

on the work of the revivalists themselves (their activities as timirí, the early Irish

language colleges) is as O’Leary says a “treasure-trove” for anyone interested in the

socio-cultural history of Ireland in the early twentieth century.

3 However it is in the final chapter of the book, which deals with the work of Máirtín Ó

Cadhain and Brian Ó Nualláin, that O’Leary’s work is at its most stimulating and vivid,

setting the work of those two masters against some of their more pedestrian

contemporaries.

4 The volume contains an extensive critical apparatus, with nearly 100 pages of notes in

double columns, and an impressive list of primary sources. It is beautifully produced

and includes a bookmark to allow ease of movement between notes and text. It is

clearly a work designed for the scholar rather than for the general reader.


156

Lectures d’un texte étoiléSylvie Mikowski

RÉFÉRENCE

Bertrand Cardin, Lectures d’un texte étoilé : Corée de John McGahern, Paris, L’Harmattan,

coll. « Classiques pour demain », 2009, 190 p., ISBN 978-2-296-09181-8, 18 €

1 Bertrand Cardin, spécialiste de l’œuvre de John McGahern et de la nouvelle irlandaise,

consacre un ouvrage entier à l’étude d’une des plus célèbres nouvelles de l’auteur :

Korea, publiée en 1970 dans le recueil Nightlines. Il en propose aussi une nouvelle

traduction, basée sur la dernière version du texte qui fut republiée dans Creatures of the

Earth, New and Selected Stories, en 2006. L’ouvrage de B. Cardin repose sur une hypothèse

énoncée dans l’introduction, selon laquelle le texte ne doit pas être « enfermé [dans

une interprétation unique], ramassé, mais étoilé ». L’auteur propose donc pas moins de

six lectures différentes du texte, chacune fondée sur une approche critique différente :

lecture contextuelle, génétique, thématique, structuraliste, psychanalytique,

intertextuelle. C’est dire la volonté pédagogique qui soutient cet ouvrage, dont chaque

chapitre inclut une courte justification de l’itinéraire critique emprunté. Le chapitre le

plus novateur et le plus intéressant pour ceux qui sont déjà familiers des thèmes et

personnages de McGahern est celui consacré à l’analyse du manuscrit de Korea, puisque

celui-ci est à présent consultable, avec d’autres archives personnelles de l’auteur, à la

bibliothèque de l’université de Galway, à qui il les a légués. Cardin conclut de son

examen des documents que McGahern se livrait à une « ré-écriture infinie » de ses

textes, celle-ci concernant souvent des éléments infimes mais déterminants- ainsi le

remplacement de « to prepare myself to murder » dans la dernière phrase du texte par

« for murder » – et tendant vers toujours plus de briéveté et d’ellipse, comme il sied à

l’art de la nouvelle. Les autres chapitres développent l’importance, souvent soulignée

par les critiques, de l’image dans l’écriture de McGahern. Dans Korea abondent les

images d’obscurité, d’eau, de violence et de mort. La lecture « formaliste » du texte met

pour sa part en lumière les jeux de répétition également repérés comme une

caractéristique fondamentale du style de McGahern, et tente de manière convaincante


157

de percer le mystère d’une écriture en apparence très dépouillée mais extrêmement

envoûtante, en décomposant l’architecture de la phrase, voire des segments de phrases.

Une limite possible de la méthode choisie par Bertrand Cardin est que les

interprétations d’un texte ne se laissent pas toujours enfermer dans des catégories bien

séparables et bien étiquetées. Ainsi par exemple le rapprochement proposé avec le

mythe du sacrifice d’Abraham peut-il concerner aussi bien la mise à jour des références

intertextuelles que la relation père-fils analysée dans le chapitre « psychanalyse », qui

est également commentée dans le chapitre intitulé « Le texte et ses motifs ». Il est vrai

que la réussite du texte de McGahern résulte de l’habile entremêlement d’une syntaxe

particulière, d’un rythme de la phrase, d’images, de symboles, ainsi que d’allusions à un

certain contexte historique, à des souvenirs intimes, à des lectures, et que le défi posé à

tout critique est de décider par quel bout défaire cet écheveau. C’est finalement le

mérite de Bertrand Cardin de suggérer par cet ouvrage que McGahern, comme tout

grand écrivain, à la fois confirme les hypothèses théoriques les plus courantes, et les

transcende inévitablement.


158

The Methuen Drama Anthology of IrishPlaysVirginie Privas

REFERENCES

Patrick Lonergan (dir.), The Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish Plays, London, Methuen

Drama, 2008, 448 p., ISBN 978-1-408-10678-5

1 This new anthology, published by Methuen, brings together five Irish plays: The Hostage

(1958) by Brendan Behan, Bailegangaire (1985) by Tom Murphy, The Belle of the Belfast City

(1989) by Christina Reid, The Steward of Christendom (1995) by Sebastian Barry and The

Cripple of Inishmaan (1996) by Martin McDonagh. Patrick Lonergan, who lectures in

contemporary drama at NUIG, explains his choice in a nine page introduction.

Lonergan reminds us of Ireland’s spectacular development: from the famine to the

Celtic Tiger, from civil war to peace. For Lonergan, this rapid change has raised

fundamental questions about the identity of the new Irish, all the more so as

immigration has brought new problems to Ireland. Therefore, he wonders how the

Irish can now reconcile their past with the present. To him then, the main purpose of

the five plays collected here is to try and respond to these new problems from the

middle of the 20th century. Lonergan further explains that these five Irish plays

challenge and transgress the boundaries that define national identity: they ask what it

means to feel Irish now and they explore how these identities and feelings can be

represented on stage.

2 Lonergan chooses to start with the The Hostage, because it stages a group of characters

imprisoned in a cycle of repetition – Anglo-Irish violence – which is put forward by the

captivity of a British soldier in an Irish lodge-house. The author’s text is studded with

references to Irish and British history; the past effectively mars the characters’ present

and increases this feeling of imprisonment. On the contrary, Tom Murphy’s

Bailegangaire is an attempt to go beyond that cycle of repetition. For Lonergan,

Murphy’s aim is to get the spectator to raise his consciousness in relation to the


159

difference between fiction and reality. This play helps him to take into account the

tragic elements of his life: he needs to move on once tragedy has occurred. It is for that

reason that Lonergan considers Murphy to be one of the greatest playwrights of the

20th century, and Bailegangaire his most beautiful play. With The Belle of the Belfast City,

the editor shares Reid’s viewpoint: many of the problems that the Northern Irish have

are also rooted in the past of the Province. Their lives are forged by their environment

no matter how far they go from it; their past is their inescapable present. For Lonergan

and for Reid, the victims’ version of history is worth listening to.

3 This is also the case in Barry’s The Steward of Christendom, which sheds light on the life

of Thomas Dunne, a man whose future was stolen because of an unconventional past.

What is more interesting from Lonergan’s viewpoint is that Barry’s play announces a

move from the traditional representation of the Irish past on stage. While Irish

playwrights had traditionally given a poetic version of the Republic’s past, Barry

celebrates daily life and its meaning and finds beauty in what is not said.

4 The last play in this anthology, The Cripple of Inishmaan, clearly stands out from the

others. It stages a crippled Irish boy who leaves the isles of Aran – as a real and

authentic Irish place – for Hollywood to become a movie-star in Robert Flaherty’s

documentary film, Man of Aran (1934). The spectator is offered the opportunity to watch

characters that in turn watch and judge the performance of Irishness in the movie. For

Lonergan, McDonagh’s light comic style and his play-within-the play technique are

misleading since he calls for the spectator to meditate about himself and about Ireland

seen as an object of global consumption. He invites the spectator to condemn the movie

directors and playwrights who aim at imagining an authentic Ireland for commercial

purposes.

5 In this anthology, we are shown the evolution of the dramatic representation of Ireland

over fifty years echoing the rapid evolution of Ireland’s situation. The whole island of

Ireland, north and south, has been given an international dimension and the past is

imprisoning no more. Such an anthology is thus interesting for academics since it calls

for a reflection on the evolution of the dramatic representation of Ireland. The

spectator is asked to reflect on Ireland’s situation – locally and globally, and how it can

be best represented on stage. The audience, like the characters, are no longer hostages

of time, or of place; they are asked to act, react and ultimately take a stand with regard

to their own condition. The climax is reached with The Cripple in which the following

paradox emerges: the audience’s desire to experience an authentic Ireland in theatre

although the theatre is a place of imagination and fantasy.


160

Cinema on the PeripheryEstelle Epinoux

RÉFÉRENCE

Conn Holohan, Cinema on the Periphery : Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film, Dublin,

Portland, Irish Academic Press, 2010, 198 p., ISBN 978-0-7165-3022-0

1 Le Professeur espagnol Rosa González, spécialiste du cinéma irlandais, présente

l’ouvrage de Conn Holohan comme « a ground-breaking initiative » (p. IX). L’auteur

propose en effet une approche comparative des cinémas irlandais et espagnol, ce qui

est novateur, tant dans la méthode que dans l’approche du cinéma irlandais. Il analyse

la rencontre de ces deux cinémas avec la modernité et la manière dont elle s’exprime à

travers les films de ces pays. Une telle approche permet à l’auteur de donner au cinéma

irlandais un ancrage européen fort, contrairement à la grande majorité des études sur

ce cinéma, qui se limitent aux frontières de l’île.

2 L’ouvrage se divise en cinq chapitres qui abordent le développement des cinémas

irlandais et espagnol à travers une approche comparative (chapitre un), la question de

la représentation du pouvoir patriarcal (chapitre deux), l’image de la féminité dans les

films récents (chapitre trois), celle de l’espace urbain (chapitre quatre) et celle du passé

national (chapitre cinq).

3 Conn Holohan présente les caractéristiques historiques qui rapprochent les deux pays :

affinités religieuses ou encore statut de pays relégué à la périphérie de l’Europe tout au

long du vingtième siècle. L’auteur prend également soin de mentionner les divergences

qui éloignent les deux pays, en évoquant par exemple le fait que l’Espagne a été l’un des

premiers pouvoirs coloniaux alors que l’Irlande a été un pays colonisé.

4 Après avoir mis en évidence les points majeurs de l’histoire des deux pays, l’auteur

évalue également les éléments partagés par les films irlandais et espagnols, en

repositionnant chacun des cinémas nationaux dans son propre processus national de

modernisation. L’objectif de l’étude est double : montrer comment les changements et

les évolutions des deux pays ont transformé leur imaginaire culturel respectif, et


161

évaluer l’impact que la modernité et les interactions globales croissantes entre le

national et l’international ont eu sur les films. Le marquage « national » de chaque

cinéma est étudié dans les limites de ses frontières, ainsi que dans le cadre plus large de

la globalisation.

5 Au fil de sa recherche, l’auteur étudie son corpus de films suivant une analyse textuelle,

une étude du genre, tout en les interprétant dans leurs contextes social, culturel et

politique. Ce sont les structures profondes, à la fois iconographiques et narratives, des

films qui sont analysées. Les différentes stratégies de représentation sont détaillées à

travers une soixantaine de films, qui ont été réalisés entre 1992 et 2006, et dans lesquels

figurent des thèmes récurrents, que l’on retrouve dans les filmographies espagnole et

irlandaise, ce qui renforce la pertinence d’une étude comparative entre ces deux

cinémas.


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After the FloodAnnick Cizel

RÉFÉRENCE

James Silas Rogers, Matthew J. O’Brien (eds.), After the Flood : Irish America 1945-1960,

Dublin/Portland, Or. Irish Academic Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7165-2988-0 (prix non

indiqué)

1 Ce riche portrait de la vague d’immigration qui suivit la Seconde Guerre mondiale

jusqu’aux années soixante s’élabore au fil de treize études de cas qui tour à tour

déclinent les multiples facettes de la « mosaïque » (p. 6) des nouvelles identités

irlandaises au vingtième siècle. En contraste avec le déclin des flux migratoires durant

la Grande Dépression et la lente résurgence des immigrations européennes après 1945,

c’est la contribution de cette nation d’émigrants au Rêve américain dans le renouveau

socio-économique et culturel de l’Amérique des années cinquante qui est dessinée ici.

Surtout, en s’attachant à la recomposition d’histoires particulières, ces textes et leurs

sources mémorielles nombreuses dépassent l’histoire devenue mythe de la quête de

l’Amérique et d’une première présidence irlando-américaine iconique pour écrire un

pan de l’histoire nationale irlandaise au prisme de cette « tapisserie éclectique » (p. 21)

d’expatriés qui s’employèrent à (re)construire l’identité de l’Irlande libre sur des terres

étrangères.

2 Alors que son omission du Plan Marshall fait de la République le parent pauvre de

l’Europe occidentale en reconstruction, le Rêve irlandais contribue ainsi au socle

identitaire transatlantique : liberté religieuse, prospérité économique, esprit

d’entreprise, libération des femmes, massification de la culture populaire, société de

consommation deviennent autant de valeurs partagées, au fondement d’une relation

elle aussi « spéciale ». Le catholicisme demeure pourtant le marqueur premier de

réseaux sociaux communautaires territorialisés, signifiant le ralliement ethnique mais

aussi, à l’inverse, la ségrégation par une Amérique dominante non moins

« caucasienne ». L’élaboration d’un « vernis » (p. 77) identitaire homogène, cependant,

contribue à la popularité d’une ethnicité « ahistorique » (p. 110) – et donc américaine –,


163

véhicule d’exportation culturelle d’une assimilation « raffinée et contrôlée » (p. 78), à la

réciprocité particulière. Récits historiques, contes et légendes abondent ainsi une

mythologie irlandaise entre intégration et rébellion, gratifiée d’un « intérêt public »

(p. 76) grandissant, inspirant peu à peu une culture populaire américaine. Le renouveau

de la tradition irlandaise se démocratise ainsi dans les médias de masse, et régénère les

études irlandaises au prisme d’une Irlande « naturelle », havre pour touristes, antidote

singulière aux excès de la guerre froide et du consumérisme (p. 143), précurseur de

l’écologie politique.

3 À l’instar des manifestations sportives pourtant (p. 24-37), les marqueurs identitaires

d’unification de la diaspora se multiplient contre l’ « insularité » républicaine ou la

« relation spéciale » anglo-américaine qui, à Washington, motive l’émergence d’un

leadership irlando-américain nourri de modernisation et de christianisme universel, à

l’image de la croisade anticommuniste des « Hibernians » (p. 57-70). L’anticommunisme

occidental interdit désormais l’isolationnisme qu’avait privilégié une communauté

irlando-américaine largement hostile à un ordre mondial sous leadership anglo-

américain dans l’entre-deux-guerres, et force une forme de neutralité pro-britannique

malaisée, tandis que les rivalités politiques inhérentes à la partition irlandaise

nourrissent une diplomatie contradictoire auprès de l’ami américain. Tandis que les

valeurs de l’américanisation confortent le pacte antitotalitaire commun à l’histoire des

deux nations irlandaise et américaine, le nationalisme irlandais se transforme peu à

peu en patriotisme américain, vecteur indirect d’ascension politique internationale

pour la jeune République, et d’abandon d’une « attitude défensive » plus traditionnelle

(p. 69).

4 Bien que les frontières de l’irlandité ne soient que rarement franchies pour étudier la

porosité de cette résurgence identitaire vers la mère patrie en amont, et la terre

d’accueil en aval, celles-ci tissent les liens spéciaux d’une histoire nationale expatriée,

régénérée dans la multiplicité des supports culturels qui l’illustrent : mémoires et

autobiographies, magazines et quotidiens, littérature, cinéma et musique sont ainsi

abondamment convoqués. Au final, ces treize études réfutent de nombreux clichés en

mettant à jour des stratégies diverses, individuelles et communautaires, d’ascension

politique et sociale à la faveur d’une Amérique en mutation, plus que jamais terre

d’opportunités.


164

Architects of the ResurrectionJulien Guillaumond

RÉFÉRENCE

R. M. Douglas, Architects of the Resurrection. Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and the Fascist ‘New Order’

in Ireland, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009, 322 p., ISBN :

978-0-7190-7998-6

1 D’une façon générale, quiconque recherchant des informations sur Ailtirí na hAiséirghe

devait, jusqu’à présent, se contenter de quelques lignes, au plus quelques paragraphes,

expliquant qu’il s’agissait d’une organisation nationaliste d’extrême droite active en

Irlande dans les années 40. À partir de l’examen de nombreuses sources primaires (en

premier lieu les archives personnelles du fondateur du mouvement disparu en 1991

mais aussi les archives militaires, celles des services secrets irlandais et britanniques

ainsi que des entretiens avec des anciens du mouvement) et d’un vaste travail de

réflexion sur l’extrême droite dans le monde au XXe siècle, l’historien R. M. Douglas s’est

attelé avec brio dans cet ouvrage à combler ce vide apparent laissé par l’historiographie

irlandaise sur la période d’entre deux guerres. Si l’ouvrage replace la naissance et le

développement de Ailtirí na hAiséirghe dans le contexte historique des années 1930-40

et, point intéressant, ne se limite pas au cas irlandais, le mérite de l’ouvrage vient

surtout de sa remise en question de certaines des idées reçues sur l’histoire irlandaise

pendant ces décennies. Deux questions principales servent de fil conducteur à

l’ouvrage : 1) les Irlandais, dans leur ensemble, acceptaient-ils le régime politique dans

lequel ils vivaient ? 2) la neutralité du pays, plutôt de nature bienveillante à l’égard des

Alliés, émanait-elle de la volonté populaire ou relevait-elle en grande partie d’une

position du gouvernement Fianna Fáil de l’époque ? Autrement dit, la population dans

son ensemble était-elle pro-britannique ?

2 Composé de 7 chapitres, l’ouvrage peut se diviser de façon arbitraire en deux grands

ensembles, le premier remet en perspective les années 30-40 en Irlande en s’intéressant

à ce que l’auteur nomme les « influences anti-démocratiques », autrement dit les forces

qui cherchaient, à l’époque, à saper les fondements du système politique (chapitres 1 et


165

2). Si certaines sont plus connues, celle résultant par exemple de la division du

mouvement républicain ou alors l’existence du mouvement fasciste des « Chemises

Bleues » (Blueshirts) au début des années 30, l’auteur revient sur ce terreau idéologique

en montrant aussi que la société irlandaise de l’époque était traversée par des

mouvements anti-communistes poussés par la frange catholique, des mouvements

exaltant par exemple les vertus du franquisme et recherchant un modèle de société

dans le Portugal de Salazar, mais aussi par des positions antisémites marquées. Cette

analyse ouvre une seconde partie entièrement consacrée à Ailtirí na hAiséirghe dans

laquelle l’auteur étudie, tour à tour, la naissance du mouvement en 1942, la formation

idéologique et le rôle de son fondateur né à Belfast et « leader » (à prendre ici au sens

totalitaire du terme) Gearóid Ó Cuinnegáin, ainsi que l’idéologie propre qui animait le

mouvement, un mouvement moins préoccupé par l’expansion territoriale comme les

partis fascistes européens (quoique le nord de l’île devait être récupéré), que par la

volonté d’établir un État Aiséirghe en Irlande, un état totalitaire régi par un parti unique

dont l’objectif final était de rechristianiser le monde et sauver la civilisation. L’ouvrage

retrace pour finir le parcours de ce mouvement en politique et tente d’expliquer les

raisons de son déclin au tournant des années 1940-50.

3 En conclusion, si l’on peut regretter le flou, sans aucun doute involontaire, entretenu

par l’auteur sur le terme approprié pour qualifier Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (mouvement,

parti, organisation politique, les trois réunis ?) au fil de l’ouvrage, il s’agit d’une infime

chose au regard des réflexions que suscite la lecture de cette passionnante étude sur

l’Irlande de l’entre deux guerres et des enseignements que l’on peut en tirer au regard

de l’époque contemporaine.


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Bertram WindleClíona Ní Ríordáin

REFERENCES

Ann Keogh, Dermot Keogh, Bertram Windle : The Honan Bequest and The Modernisation of

University College Cork 1904-1919, Cork, Cork University Press, 2010, 368 p., ISBN

978-185918-473-8

1 This collaborative work by Emeritus Professor of History at UCC, Dermot Keogh, and his

wife Ann, developed from an MA thesis written by the latter on the subject of

philanthropy and the construction of the Honan Chapel. Although the chapel bears the

name of its benefactor, Isabella Honan, there is no doubt but that Bertram Windle,

President of Queen’s College, later University College Cork from 1905-1919, had a

fascinating part to play in the construction of the iconic building. The focus of this

work is Windle himself and the role he played in the development of the university at

the beginning of the twentieth century; he was responsible, as David Gwynn suggests in

his centenary tribute (University Review, Autumn/Winter 1960), for its transformation

from “the old moribund Queen’s College, into the vigorous University College”.

2 A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Bertram Coghill Alan Windle was a Renaissance

man : Professor of Medicine, archaeologist extraordinaire, and one of the founding

fathers of Birmingham University in its modern incarnation. Through his father he was

connected to the Cadbury family and to the manufacturing clans of Wolverhampton;

through his mother, he was linked to notable Anglo-Irish families such as the Bushes,

the Greenes, the Cramers and the Somervilles. He was also a high profile convert to

Catholicism and, as the Keoghs point out, this fact had no small bearing on his ability to

bring the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland onside and convince them that Catholics should

be allowed to attend the college. In nine chapters, the Keoghs briefly examine his early

life, before concentrating on the battles he fought in Cork. They highlight Catholic

opposition to the “godless” Queen’s Colleges and outline the negotiation Windle

undertook to obtain an independent University of Munster. Impeccably researched,

drawing on archival sources in Ireland, Rome, Canada, the United States and Britain,


167

Windle’s diaries, as well as the earlier work of Sr Monica, first biographer and friend of

Bertram Windle, the book charts the increasing disillusion of UCC’s President and his

departure for Canada, where he spent nine very happy years before his death in 1929.

3 Windle’s path intersects at various stages with those of prominent Irish and British

citizens (Chief Secretary Wyndham, Patrick Pearse, the “strumpet” Markiewicz, Neville

Chamberlain, Erskine Childers, Douglas Hyde). We also encounter a certain Edward de

Valera, who is an unsuccessful candidate for the professorship of Mathematical Physics

in Cork, and a post office clerk who voiced fierce opposition to Windle’s removal to the

University of Ogham Stones from Farran, Co. Cork. The postal clerk was none other

than Michael Collins.

4 The Honan bequest and the subsequent construction of the Honan Chapel, allowing a

Catholic place of worship for the students of the university, show how Windle was an

able politician negotiating between various interest groups; mindful of the non-

denominational nature of the National University, the railings around the chapel

separated it from the non-denominational institution.

5 Ultimately, Windle failed in his mission to obtain an independent university for

Munster. He was hugely critical of the National University structure, which he saw as

weighted in favour of UCD, and he resented the time wasted in travelling to Dublin for

frustrating meetings. A convinced Home-Ruler and supporter of Redmond, he was also

horrified at the 1916 Rising (his diary is very blunt with regard to the executions of the

signatories of the proclamation). The increasing encroachment of nationalism on his

everyday life led him to retire from the presidency and leave the Ireland to which he

had so gladly returned in 1905.

6 This book makes a vital contribution both to the history of education in Ireland and to

the historiography of UCC, continuing the work undertaken in John A. Murphy’s

history of the college and in the volume devoted to the Honan Chapel itself. With its

contemporary resonance, the volume also serves as a cautionary tale for all those who

are interested in the notion of a university, and the politics of university development.


168

Irish Women and Street PoliticsNathalie Sebbane

RÉFÉRENCE

Tara Keenan-Thomson, Irish Women and Street Politics, Dublin, Irish Academic Press,

2010, 286 p., Cloth, ISBN 978-0-7165-3026-8, £50.00

1 Ouvrage fascinant et très novateur, à la fois dans le domaine de l’histoire des femmes et

dans celui de l’engagement politique militant, le livre de Tara Keenan-Thomson prend

le parti de se concentrer sur une période circonscrite (1956-1973) et de s’intéresser à la

question de l’engagement militant des femmes, à la fois au Nord et au Sud, afin

d’analyser l’influence des mouvements dits de rue, street politics, sur l’émergence de la

seconde vague du féminisme en Irlande.

2 L’une des spécificités de ce travail est qu’il couvre une période assez peu documentée

de l’histoire du pays, à l’exception des Troubles en Irlande du Nord. 1956 voit l’IRA

engager et manquer sa border campaign et 1973 consacre l’entrée de l’Irlande dans la

CEE. Pourtant, entre ces deux dates, tant sur la scène internationale que nationale, de

chaque côté de la frontière, des femmes, issues de milieux différents, répondant à des

motivations différentes et utilisant des méthodes différentes, sont sorties de la sphère

privée pour s’engager dans la sphère publique. Elles ont lutté pour obtenir des

logements décents, pour le respect des droits civiques, pour le droit à la contraception,

en descendant dans la rue, laissant un instant de côté leurs responsabilités

domestiques, et ignorant les diktats de la société patriarcale dans laquelle elle vivaient.

De Dungannon à Dublin, en passant par Derry ou Cork, ces femmes ont bouleversé les

schémas de la société et remis en cause un status quo qui semblait voué à la pérennité.

3 L’analyse de Keenan-Thomson repose sur une multiplicité de sources, des entretiens

avec des militantes, des archives de presse, et montre que les événements

internationaux et nationaux des années 60 ont favorisé l’émergence de revendications

politiques. La place des femmes à la tête de mouvements comme la NICRA, la DHAC ou

encore au sein du Sinn Féin, si elle n’a pas immédiatement conduite à une prise de


169

conscience féministe globale, a néanmoins permis que s’opère une prise de parole

politique et une remise en cause du « régime de genre ».

4 La question des liens paradoxaux entre féminisme et républicanisme est très prégnante

dans cet ouvrage et l’on constate à quel point l’engagement républicain a freiné le

développement de la seconde vague de féminisme, au Nord comme au Sud. Les

exemples de Betty Sinclair (NICRA), Bernadette Devlin et Mairin de Burca (Sinn Fein,

Irish Women’s Liberation Movement) en témoignent : « To Sinclair, feminism was a middle

class point of view that distracted from the more important goal of achieving a classless society.

»

5 L’engagement militant de rue convenait davantage aux femmes, absentes des instances

politiques conventionnelles, dans la mesure où il demandait moins de disponibilité et

leur permettait de ne pas abandonner leurs taches domestiques de manière

permanente. En outre, surtout au Nord, les femmes ont joué avec le mythe de

l’innocence pour abuser les autorités, ce qui a eu pour effet de les éloigner davantage

d’un engagement féministe.

6 Le militantisme des Irlandaises au sein de mouvements radicaux a eu un impact très

profond sur les rapports de pouvoir dans la société irlandaise. La notion de genre, par

conséquent, est à prendre en compte dans toute analyse des changements sociaux sur

la période étudiée. Cet ouvrage rend compte de la transformation des rapports de genre

au sein du mouvement républicain, des mouvements pour les droits civiques, et plus

généralement, des mutations de la société irlandaise par le prisme de l’émergence du

mouvement féministe.


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Flown The NestNathalie Sebbane

RÉFÉRENCE

Hanna Greally, Flown The Nest, Cork, 2009, Attic Press, 96 p, ISBN 978-1-8559-4212-7

1 Lorsque le quotidien régional, The Champion, commence à publier Flown The Nest en 1972

sous forme d’épisodes, Bird’s Nest Soup est déjà en vente, et la troisième partie de

l’autobiographie d’Hanna, Housekeeper At Large, est sous presse. L’édition de 2009

contient Flown The Nest et Housekeeper at Large.

2 Dans Bird’s Nest Soup, Hanna Greally racontait les dix-huit années de sa vie passées au

sein d’un hôpital psychiatrique. Les raisons pour lesquelles elle y avait été enfermée, à

la demande de sa mère, restent entourées d’un mystère. Dans la préface à l’édition de

1972, rédigée par Greally elle-même, elle tente de justifier les omissions qui intriguent,

les blancs qui dérangent. Elle résume en une phrase très simple et pourtant très

poignante, les dix huit années d’internement : « I went into the Big House an impulsive,

uninhibited girl, and I left a cautious, subdued, almost servile woman. I am now a sadder but a

wiser woman, and one who can say with certainty that knowlegde and freedom are happiness. »

3 Hanna quitte St Loman en 1962, au moment où le régime de l’internement

psychiatrique est en pleine mutation, et la terminologie même reflète cette évolution.

Elle était entrée dans un asile (asylum) et sort d’un hôpital. Sur les recommandations du

directeur, elle va être l’une des premières à séjourner dans une institution d’état, dite

de « réhabilitation » ou réinsertion pour utiliser un terme plus contemporain.

Coolamber Manor, dans le comté de Longford, accueille des jeunes femmes – pour la

plupart frappées de handicaps physiques – et leur dispense une formation afin qu’elles

puissent trouver des places d’employées de maison, couturières ou cuisinières.

4 Hanna n’y passera qu’une année, qu’elle décrit comme agréable, dans un

environnement apaisant, bienveillant, marquant un contraste fort avec les années

sombres passées au sein de l’institution psychiatrique.


171

5 À l’issue de cette année de formation, elle est enfin prête à affronter le monde : « I

would be free again […] now I wanted it prodigiously and for ever. » C’est une femme en quête

de liberté, d’identité, de citoyenneté. Elle va occuper plusieurs emplois en Irlande, puis

en Angleterre. Elle ne reste jamais bien longtemps dans le même endroit, même si

employeurs sont satisfaits. Elle a besoin d’autre chose, sans pourtant bien savoir quoi.

Elle restera plusieurs années au service d’un médecin à la retraite, pour qui elle nourrit

des sentiments forts sans jamais oser les dévoiler. Son récit se termine avec le décès du

médecin, lorsqu’elle décide de retourner définitivement en Irlande.

6 Il est peu aisé de situer cet ouvrage dans un genre spécifique. Il s’agit à la fois d’une

autobiographie et d’une oeuvre littéraire mais également d’un témoignage, d’une trace.

Hanna Greally, en nous ouvrant des fenêtres sur différents moments de sa vie, nous

permet de découvrir la condition d’une femme irlandaise, née à une époque où il n’y

avait guère de salut hors du mariage et des ordres religieux, et où les insitutions,

qu’elles fussent psychiatriques ou de réinsertion, se substitutaient à la liberté d’une

femme célibataire et sans famille. À son retour en Irlande, elle s’achète une petite

maison dans laquelle elle finit ses jours, assez péniblement, entre la maladie et les

difficultés financières. Mais elle meurt en femme libre, en citoyenne irlandaise à part

entière.

7 L’écriture a joué un rôle cathartique dans le cheminement d’Hanna vers la liberté. Elle

avait envisagé d’écrire sur son retour en Irlande, ce retour aux sources qu’elle redoutait

sans doute autant qu’elle le désirait. Elle n’en a pas eu le temps. Si ce qu’elle dit est tout

aussi important que ce qu’elle a choisi de taire, c’est dans l’interprétation et la lecture

de son œuvre, à des périodes différentes, que réside la richesse de ce témoignage.


172

IrelandPhilippe Cauvet

RÉFÉRENCE

Christophe Gillissen (ed.), Ireland : Looking East, Peter Lang, 2010, 169 p., ISBN

978-90-5201-652-8 (pb), ISBN 978-3-0352-6036-6 (eBook)

1 Ce recueil rassemble une dizaine de contributions, qui abordent chacune un aspect de

cette vaste question – les relations entre l’Irlande et l’Est – mais l’impression première

qui ressort à leur lecture est la très grande hétérogénéité des articles. Certes, l’essentiel

des contributions, fort intéressantes, est consacré à des questions d’histoire et de

civilisation, et elles sont organisées chronologiquement, mais l’on passe, par exemple,

d’une comparaison des politiques linguistiques turques et irlandaises, à une étude de la

réaction indienne face à la Grande Famine, ou à une analyse des relations entre les

Nord-Irlandais et leurs voisins polonais et lithuaniens. De plus, même si les

contributions sont principalement consacrées à des recherches d’ordre historique et

civilisationnel, la littérature n’est pas totalement ignorée (Grace Neville signe un article

fort intéressant sur Derry O’Sullivan et plus particulièrement sur une partie de son

œuvre consacrée aux Juifs parisiens pendant la seconde guerre mondiale).

2 Etait-il possible d’éviter cette hétérogénéité ? Mais plus encore, était-il nécessaire de le

faire ? Comme le signale Christophe Gillissen, directeur de cette collection d’articles,

dans son introduction (il signe aussi un article sur l’Irlande et le Moyen Orient à l’ONU),

les relations entre l’Irlande et le monde occidental ont été maintes fois étudiées. En

revanche, les relations entre l’Irlande et l’Est l’ont beaucoup moins été. Il était donc

urgent que la recherche s’intéresse à cette question si vaste. Or devant un tel champ

d’investigation, comment choisir une aire géographique, une approche scientifique ou

un thème précis ? Existe-t-il un point d’entrée plus légitime qu’un autre ?

3 Le choix de Christophe Gillissen – celui précisément de ne pas choisir – est le bon.

Plutôt que de nous présenter ce nouveau domaine de recherche par un prisme

réducteur, il a choisi de nous en montrer toute la diversité et toute la richesse et cette

collection d’articles permet donc au lecteur de s’y confronter. Ainsi, cet ouvrage nous


173

fait comprendre que nous nous trouvons là devant un nouvel espace de recherche,

immense et vierge, et que toutes les approches et disciplines scientifiques sont

nécessaires afin de le défricher et de le cultiver.

4 D’ailleurs, les événements qui se déroulent depuis quelques mois dans le monde

oriental arabo-musulman valident ce choix. Ils nous apportent la preuve que, comme le

disait Edward Said, l’Orient n’intéressait pas l’Occident qui s’est enfermé dans une

vision autocentrée du monde. Les études irlandaises, à leur manière, s’étaient elles

aussi enfermées dans cette conception occidentale de l’Irlande et du monde. On espère

que ce livre ne sera donc qu’une première étape dans le désenclavement nécessaire de

notre discipline et que, directement ou indirectement, il contribuera à nourrir chez

nous, à l’Ouest, une réflexion sur notre relation à l’Orient au sens large, sous toutes ses

formes, sous toutes ses latitudes et dans toute sa complexité.


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Ship of FoolsVanessa Boullet

RÉFÉRENCE

Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools : How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, Londres,

Faber and Faber, 2010, 245 p. ISBN 978-0-571-26075-1

1 Ship of Fools est un essai polémique sur les différents éléments qui, selon Fintan O’Toole,

ont contribué à la chute du Tigre Celtique : hommes politiques incompétents, souvent

corrompus et pourtant réélus par les Irlandais, banquiers et promoteurs cupides, et

enfin régulations inexistantes dans la gestion des affaires du pays.

2 La thèse principale que développe O’Toole, journaliste et intellectuel de gauche, est que

l’Irlande a d’une certaine manière importé sa modernité économique (passant

rapidement d’une économie pré-moderne à une économie post-moderne) alors que son

système politique demeure archaïque. Cela a conduit à la corruption et à la collusion

des élites qui se sont enrichies au détriment de tout un pays.

3 O’Toole commence par expliquer que le Tigre Celtique n’a pas été planifié et construit,

mais résulte d’un simple rattrapage économique, aidé par la conjoncture mondiale et –

certes – par son faible taux d’imposition. Il déplore que dans les années 2000 la classe

dirigeante a privilégié une vision à court terme, enrichir les Irlandais, plutôt que

d’investir dans les infrastructures et donc l’avenir de l’Irlande.

4 L’auteur explique ensuite que la classe dirigeante, notamment au sein du Fianna Fáil,

est corrompue. Il déplore les relations étroites entre affaires et politique et l’absence de

poursuites judiciaires. Il pense qu’un grand nombre des problèmes actuels de l’Irlande

provient de la persistance d’habitudes clientélistes de l’époque coloniale alors que

l’affaiblissement de l’Eglise catholique laissait l’éthique s’éteindre. Par exemple, la

banque centrale irlandaise préfère le terme de « tax avoidance » à « tax evasion » afin de

laisser une apparence de légalité et de ne pas à avoir intervenir.

5 Le livre est bien écrit et il semble difficile de ne pas adhérer à la thèse d’O’Toole :

hommes politiques, banquiers, promoteurs et autorités de contrôle portent tous une


175

grande part de responsabilité, active ou passive, dans la chute du Tigre celtique. Il

égratigne aussi l’électorat irlandais qui a constamment ré-élu des personnages qu’il

savait – selon O’Toole – corrompus. Le journaliste conclut que si le pays veut évoluer, il

doit changer de mentalité et passer à une Seconde République.

6 Ship of Fools n’apprendra que peu de choses à l’observateur attentif de l’Irlande des deux

dernières décennies, mais il offre une synthèse fort agréable. Il ne faut cependant pas

perdre de vue que ce livre est un pamphlet contre les promoteurs immobiliers et contre

le Fianna Fáil. Fintan O’Toole l’assume et précise au début du livre qu’il ne prétend pas

avoir écrit un ouvrage universitaire, mais sa crédibilité serait renforcée s’il citait les

sources des faits et chiffres avancés.

7 Ceci étant dit, Ship of Fools est un des meilleurs ouvrages du moment sur la crise

irlandaise. O’Toole constitue ouvertement un dossier à charge – et donc critiquable –

mais le lecteur qui n’ignore pas les évidents progrès apportés par le Tigre Celtique

pourra grâce à lui se forger une conviction sur les raisons de l’agonie.


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Documents

Études irlandaises, 36-1 - OpenEdition Journals