“TO SWEETEN IRELAND’S WRONG”: THE PRESENCE OF POSTCOLONIAL TRAUMA
IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH FICTION
Laura Camille Brownell
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2007
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
(Literature)
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING
2010
© 2010
Laura Camille Brownell
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
“TO SWEETEN IRELAND’S WRONG”: THE PRESENCE OF POSTCOLONIAL TRAUMA
IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH FICTION
A Thesis
by
Laura Camille Brownell
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Dr. Dave Madden
__________________________________, Second Reader
Dr. Stephanie Tucker
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Laura Camille Brownell
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Dr. David Toise
Department of English
iv
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
“TO SWEETEN IRELAND’S WRONG”: THE PRESENCE OF POSTCOLONIAL TRAUMA
IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH FICTION
by
Laura Camille Brownell
In this study, I examine the lasting effects of colonization in contemporary Irish fiction.
In particular, this thesis traces postcolonial themes through three recent Irish novels-The Gathering by Anne Enright, Night by Edna O’Brien, and The Sea by John Banville.
These novels all display themes common in the works of writers from nations that
suffered from colonization in their histories, including the loss of identity; the
construction of the self through narration; the problematic relationship to Ireland as a
motherland; the need to re-write familial and personal history from an Irish perspective;
and the challenges of using English, an imposed language, to construct identity. It is
valuable for critics to recognize the postcolonial traits present in Irish works in order to
better understand Irish literature itself, as well as the struggles that the country’s citizens
continue to face today.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Dr. Dave Madden
_______________________
Date
v
DEDICATION
To my husband, Noel, my sister, Julie, and my parents, Jim and Carol. I could not have
done this without their love and support. They have encouraged me throughout this
process and put up with me in my times of insanity. They have read drafts and listened to
endless hours of discussion about Irish literature. Thank you for your love, faith, and
patience.
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my thesis advisor, Dr. Dave Madden for not only giving me
his time and dedication throughout this process, but also inspiring my interest in Irish
literature. It is through Dr. Madden that I discovered the beauty and power of these
works, and I will forever appreciate that. His willingness to read, and re-read, drafts has
helped me create something I am truly proud of. I would also like to thank Dr. Stephanie
Tucker for her support and inspiration. Throughout my college career, Dr. Tucker’s
enthusiasm and true connection with the literature she teaches has been inspirational. I
sincerely thank her for seeing me through this process with kindness and encouragement.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ................................................................................................................................ vi
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................. vii
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1
2. ANNE ENRIGHT’S THE GATHERING.......................................................................... 23
3. EDNA O’BRIEN’S NIGHT ............................................................................................... 43
4. JOHN BANVILLE’S THE SEA ....................................................................................... 64
5. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 89
Work Cited .............................................................................................................................. 93
viii
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Throughout the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first, Ireland has contributed a
wealth of literature to the world. Over the past thirty years, twenty-three Irish authors
have either won or been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and one was
awarded the Nobel Prize.1 They have produced literature that called for independence
from England and literature that dealt with the after-effects once the Irish free-state was
created. The country2 has become economically independent and prosperous since its
freedom from English rule, yet the vestiges of colonialism still remain in the country’s
culture. The Irish Literary Revival of the early 1900s, spawned by authors and activists
like W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Douglas Hyde, and the recent economic success of the
country solidified Ireland’s presence in the world as one of the major nations of
influence. However, the effects of years of colonialism remain in the cultural
consciousness of the country and are addressed extensively in contemporary Irish fiction.
While the authors of early twentieth-century Ireland were concerned with establishing a
national identity, for contemporary Irish writers, the country’s independence and
nationhood are accepted, and the postcolonial eye has turned to the individual. In
contemporary Irish fiction, postcolonial discovery has become a personal quest for
1
Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
Throughout this thesis, when I refer to Ireland, I am referring to the Republic of Ireland. Although
Northern Ireland has been equally as productive literarily as the Republic of Ireland, its status as a
continuing colony of England complicates matters in such a way that I feel it should be dealt with
separately from its southern counterpart. Given the historical and cultural differences between the two
nations in the past century, it seems inappropriate to lump the two together.
2
2
subjectivity and authority, a journey to develop an independent and satisfying personal
identity as an individual and an Irish citizen.
Regardless of the struggles Ireland has endured because of its troubled
relationship with England, the assertion that Ireland is a postcolonial country is not
widely accepted. Lois Tyson cites that there is a “general consensus that the United
States and Ireland are not postcolonial nations . . . the second because it has long been an
integral part of British culture” (424). Indeed, the general consensus among many critics
seems to be that postcolonial criticism deals with literature from colonized, third world
countries. Theorists such as Homi Bhabha, M.H. Abrams, and Charles Bressler refer to
postcolonial studies in terms of third world countries that have been dominated by first
world powers, and all fail to mention Ireland in their consideration of postcolonial
literatures. In A Glossary of Literary Terms, Abrams claims that postcolonial criticism
focuses “on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean islands, and South
America. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such analyses also to the
discourse and cultural productions of countries such as Australia, Canada, and New
Zealand” (245). Notably, he leaves out Ireland in his discussion. Likewise, in Bressler’s
Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, postcolonial literature is
described as “writings from colonized or formerly colonized cultures in Australia, New
Zealand, Africa, South America, and other places that were once dominated by, but
remained outside of, the white, male, European cultural, political, and philosophical
tradition” (235-36). By this standard, Ireland would be put in a precarious position on the
outskirts of the postcolonial tradition, for Ireland’s inhabitants are indeed much closer to
3
the “white, male, European cultural, political, and philosophical tradition” than those
writing in more distant countries.
As Tyson points out, perhaps the absence of Ireland in much of the discussion of
postcolonial literature is caused by its seeming similarity to the colonizer. In The Empire
Writes Back, which offers an in-depth discussion of the effects of colonization, Bill
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin assert that “the literatures of African
countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta,
New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all
post-colonial literatures,” but fail to add Ireland to this long list (2). Although Ireland is
mentioned later in the book, “literature of Ireland might also be investigated in terms of
our contemporary knowledge of post-colonialism, thus shedding new light on the British
literary tradition,” it is hardly included in the mainstream focus of postcolonial studies,
and the value of looking at Ireland through this lens is to gain understanding of the
British literary tradition, not specifically the Irish (23). Declan Kiberd takes offense at
Ireland’s treatment in The Empire Writes Back, claiming in Inventing Ireland that “a
recent study of theory and practice in postcolonial literature, The Empire Writes Back,
passes over the Irish case very swiftly, perhaps because the authors find these white
Europeans too strange an instance to justify their sustained attention” (5). Kiberd asserts,
as does Tyson, that the reason Ireland is frequently left out of the discussion is because it
is commonly considered too similar in location and culture to England to be viewed as
postcolonial.
4
Since the focus of many critics in defining postcolonial studies is on the economic
stability of the country, as the relationship is often defined in terms of first world versus
third world, critics frequently fail to notice the cultural and psychological damage left
from colonization that continues despite the economic status of a country. However, if
the focus of postcolonial studies is the economic standing of once colonized countries,
then it is no surprise that Ireland fails to make the list. For, as Christina Hunt Mahony
points out in Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition, Ireland is
“enjoying a level of unprecedented economic prosperity, moving as it has to take its place
among European nations” (1). Despite Ireland’s economic growth and its resounding
literary status in the world, the country is still dealing with the effects of England’s
domination. The historical English presence in Ireland has expressly worked throughout
the centuries to destroy and debase the Irish identity and culture in such a way that
despite its singular relationship with England and its economic stability, Ireland can be
described as in every way a postcolonial country with a profusion of literary works
created in reaction to their historical and cultural oppression.
Many major critics in the fields of both Irish and postcolonial studies include
Ireland in their discussion of the effects of colonization on nations. Prem Poddar and
David Johnson, in A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Thought in English, claim
“Ireland is regarded by many commentators as England’s oldest colony. The history of
major political relations between the two islands began with the commissioning in 1155”
(242). They also assert that because of the history between Ireland and England, “a
strong argument can be made for looking at all Irish anglophone cultural production
5
through a colonial or postcolonial lens” (246). Further, in Ireland and Empire: Colonial
Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Stephen Howe stresses that “Ireland was for
centuries the victim of English, or British, imperialist oppression. Ireland, north and
south, is still the victim of imperialism. The Irish Republic in a neocolonial state. . . .
Ireland must recover its cultural identity from centuries of colonialist impositions” (1).
Likewise, in Stephen Bonnycastle’s In Search of Authority: An Introductory Guide to
Literary Theory, he reminds readers in his discussion of postcolonial literature that
Ireland “has a long history of suffering from English colonization, although this fact is
often forgotten. From the twelfth to the twentieth century Ireland was brutally treated by
England, her land appropriated, and her citizens disenfranchised” (236). These critics
who readily classify Ireland as postcolonial focus not on its economic status, but rather
on the history of the country and on its current struggle to deal with the psychological and
cultural effects of centuries of oppression.
Irish literary critics Seamus Deane and Declan Kiberd persuasively argue that
Ireland is a postcolonial nation struggling in its literature to create an identity for itself
outside of England. In his “Introduction” to Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature,
Deane asserts:
Ireland is the only Western European country that has had both an early
and a late colonial experience. Out of that, Ireland produced, in the first
three decades of this century, a remarkable literature in which the attempt
to overcome and replace the colonial experience by something other,
6
something that would be ‘native’ and yet not provincial, was a dynamic and
central energy. (3)
Similarly, in Inventing Ireland, Kiberd notes that English colonization of Ireland
consisted of
political rule from London through the medium of Dublin Castle; economic
expropriation by planters who came in various waves of settlement; and an
accompanying psychology of self-doubt and dependency among the Irish,
linked to the loss of economic and political power but also the decline of
the native language and culture. (6)
Kiberd further states that Ireland offers a particularly valuable site for studying the affects
of colonization because “Ireland, unlike most other colonies, was positioned so close to
the occupying power, and because the relationship between the two countries was one of
prolonged if forced intimacy” (6). Both Deane and Kiberd, as leading theorists in the
field of Irish studies, deal extensively with Ireland as a postcolonial country and examine
the ways in which Ireland still struggles to shed the scars of its colonial past.
Furthermore, Tyson parenthetically admits that “some Irish people, especially in
Northern Ireland, would surely disagree with this assessment [that Ireland is not a
postcolonial nation], and many postcolonial critics cite the work of Irish poet W.B. Yeats
as emblematic of anticolonialist nationalism” (424). This brings up an important point in
classifying Ireland as a postcolonial nation, for Northern Ireland can still be regarded as a
colony, though it is technically part of the United Kingdom. Stephen Howe reminds
readers that “Northern Ireland is a British colony” (1). Despite the independence of the
7
Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland has yet to gain freedom from British rule.
Bonnycastle also notes that the “struggle over Northern Ireland has continued to this day.
It seems ironic now that the works of Yeats and Joyce, both of whom were strongly
affected by the liberation movement, are seen as two of the outstanding authors of
twentieth-century English literature” (236). Further, Kiberd asserts that the process of
decolonization in the freed portion of Ireland is “made even more difficult by the
persistence of British rule over six counties of Northern Ireland” (6). The separation
between the British-ruled North and the freed South acts as a constant reminder of the
history of colonization in Ireland and of its not yet entirely successful battle with England
for freedom. Indeed, as Kiberd notes, “it was less easy to decolonize the mind than the
territory” (6). Writers in the Republic of Ireland must still struggle psychologically
through their bloody history with England despite their independence, a process that is
ever-present in their literature.
In all but its current economic situation, Ireland shows the traits of a postcolonial
nation in its literature. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin deal extensively with postcolonial
traits in The Empire Writes Back, noting, “A major feature of post-colonial literatures is
the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the post-colonial crisis of identity
comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective
identifying relationship between self and place” (8). Nations that have been colonized
have, in one sense or another, been dispossessed of the rights to their lands. During
colonization, the oppressed people are told that their homeland, which connects them, is
no longer theirs. They thereby lose the sense of unification that a motherland provides.
8
This deeply ruptures national and personal identity, for to be stripped of a home disrupts
the sense of belonging or unity the people of a country possess. Frantz Fanon, in The
Wretched of the Earth, asserts that “For a colonized people the most essential value,
because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them
bread and, above all, dignity” (36). Land is essential to a nation’s sense of worth and acts
as a tangible symbol of its independence; hence, postcolonial literature deals heavily with
the relationship between land and people. Edward Said also addresses the effects of
colonization on a people’s relationship to their land in Culture and Imperialism, claiming,
“The slow and often bitterly disputed recovery of geographical territory . . . is at the heart
of decolonization” (209). For Ireland in particular, this has been a truly slow battle, for it
is still six counties short of a unified nation. This prolonged and unfinished task of
decolonizing the physical island of Ireland creates an even heavier importance placed on
Ireland as a place, which, in turn, makes the task of cultural decolonization even more
difficult. Said asserts that “One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance was to
reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land. . . . The search for authenticity, for a more
congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history . . . these too are made
possible by a sense of the land reappropriated by its people” (226). As Said emphasizes,
once a country is politically decolonized, the act of mentally decolonizing requires a
people to first re-appropriate and repopulate the land. A strong sense of cultural
authenticity, of identity, must be preceded by a new and powerful claim to the land, both
physically and emotionally.
9
The destruction of land and culture that occurs with colonization leaves people
with the need to recreate a sense of authentic self. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin state, “In the early period of post-colonial writing many writers were
forced into the search for an alternative authenticity which seemed to be escaping them,
since the concept of authenticity itself was endorsed by a centre to which they did not
belong” (40). A colonized people is told by the colonizers that their culture and way of
life is abnormal and defective. They are rejected as “other” and told that if they want to
be considered civilized, they must conform to the standards of the colonizers. This
process degrades the sense of identity they possessed before the process of colonization,
but does not provide a satisfactory identity to replace it. A people in the process of
decolonization, therefore, must attempt to reestablish a strong sense of authentic identity,
both as a nation and as individuals. This process continues long after a country is freed.
As Tyson notes,
although the colonizers retreated and left the lands they had invaded in the
hands of those they had colonized, decolonization often has been confined
largely to the removal of British military forces and government officials.
What has been left behind is a deeply embedded cultural colonization . . .
Thus, ex-colonials often were left with a psychological ‘inheritance’ of a
negative self-image and alienation from their own indigenous cultures,
which had been forbidden or devalued for so long that much precolonial
culture has been lost. (419)
10
The process of decolonization involves a state of “in-betweeness,” where people are
unable to embrace who they once were, but have not yet determined who they will be in
the wake of colonization. Tyson describes this feeling as “unhomeliness,” a term used by
Homi Bhabha among others and refers to the “feeling of being caught between cultures,
of belonging to neither rather than to both. . . . To be unhomed is to feel not at home even
in your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis
had made you a psychological refugee, so to speak” (Tyson 421). When the old identity
of a pre-colonized country no longer seems viable because it has been degraded, and the
imposed identity of the colonizer is inauthentic because the colonizer has been rejected, a
new authentic identity must be created. This can lead to what Tyson refers to as a
“hybrid” identity and Peter Barry, in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and
Cultural Theory, calls “the double, or divided, or fluid identity” (Tyson 422, Barry 196).
This liminal space provides a unique, yet frequently unsatisfying, view of the world that
allows a people to see things from multiple perspectives but provides no unifying sense
of authentic identity.
In the wake of this destruction of identity, many postcolonial societies look to
history in order to reestablish authentic identity. The reexamination and recreation of
history pervades postcolonial writing, for a culture’s past is regarded as an important
determiner of its future. As Said maintains in Culture and Imperialism, postcolonial
writers
bear their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation
for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending
11
toward a post-colonial future, as urgently reinterpretable and redeployable
experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory
reclaimed as part of a general movement of resistance, from the colonist.
(212)
For a postcolonial writer, looking to the past is viewed as establishing a foundation from
which the future will grow. During colonization the past was a phenomenon dictated and
written by the colonizer, so in order to move forward, post-colonial writers feel
compelled to rewrite their history in an attempt to claim authority over it. Likewise, in
The Location of Culture, Bhabha asserts that recreating culture requires art that “does not
merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring
it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the
present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia of living” (7).
There is therefore a constant shifting between past, present, and future, for all three are
intricately related in that the past must be reclaimed and rewritten before the present and
future can be claimed as well.
The literature of postcolonial nations also deals extensively with the role of
language in constructing identity and culture, for, during the process of colonization,
most colonized peoples confronted the imposition of a foreign language onto their culture
and politics. In Ireland, English rule was enforced in part by the destruction of the Irish
language and by forcing English upon the people. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin note, “One of the main features of imperial oppression is the control
over language. . . . Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure
12
of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’,
and ‘reality’ become established” (7). Colonizers impose their language as the sole
medium of truth and honor, and degrade the oppressed language as barbaric. The
colonized people’s whole way of communicating is thereby dismissed as inadequate and
they are forced through educational, economic, and political necessity to communicate in
a language that was not their own. This imposition creates a sense of alienation from
meaning and creation, for the act of linguistic creation is separated from the natives’ life
experiences. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin further assert that the alienation felt by
people who are stripped of their language is also
shared by those whose possession of English is indisputably ‘native’ (in the
sense of being possessed from birth) yet who begin to feel alienated within
its practice once its vocabulary, categories, and codes are felt to be
inadequate or inappropriate to describe the fauna, the physical and
geographical conditions, or the cultural practices they have developed.
(10)
Thus, for people in former colonies that have adopted English as the standard language,
like Ireland, there can still be a sense of alienation, for even though they may have grown
up speaking English, they are still conscious that the language was an imposed one and
that their native language may have been more apt in describing the realities of the
country.
Authors frequently struggle with the decision of whether to write in the more
frequently used English or the less common native tongue, for the consequences of either
13
are problematic. If a poet chooses to use the native tongue, in many cases the audience
for the work is automatically limited. However, if the poet writes in English, she or he
may feel that the message of the work is compromised and changed in the translation.
However, as The Empire Writes Back points out, “This is not to say that the English
language is inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonial experience, but that it
needs to develop an ‘appropriate’ usage in order to do so (by becoming a distinct and
unique form of english)” (10-11). English as it was imposed is not the English of the
native peoples, but it can become authentic. The language can be reclaimed and made
authentic through the infusion of native narrative customs and linguistic traits into the
oppressor’s English, thus creating an English that can adequately represent the identity of
a postcolonial people. The Empire Writes Back asserts that a postcolonial society is able
to adopt English as its own language and thereby feel that its expression in that language
is authentic through the “appropriation and reconstitution of the language of the centre,
the process of capturing and remoulding the language to new usages, [which] marks a
separation from the site of colonial privilege” (37). Through recreating the language and
infusing it with the linguistic conventions of the native tongue, postcolonial authors are
able to separate their means of expression from the imposed form given to them by the
colonizer. They are thereby able to use the language of the colonizer, but in such a way
that it further frees them from their colonization, rather than inscribing them deeper
within it. The literature, therefore, examines the relationship to language and looks for
ways to infuse authenticity and tradition into a language that was, or still is, other. The
14
act of writing thereby becomes more than simply an act of transcribing, but instead an act
of recreating language and the world by revisioning it in a new type of language.
Despite its long-standing freedom from English rule, Ireland still displays many
of the characteristics of a postcolonial nation in its literature. The fiction produced by
Irish novelists in recent years has a distinctly Irish character that is an outgrowth of their
colonial past. Irish politics, poetics, and self-conceptualization are overtly present in
these fictions, regardless of their subject matter. As Bhabha, Said, and Fanon all note of
postcolonial literatures, Irish literature tends to focus on the role of history and the past in
reconstructing the present and thereby the future. In The Irish World: The History and
Cultural Achievements of the Irish People, Brian de Breffny asserts that “Irishmen have
always been acutely, some would say morbidly, aware of their past. Today the country
still carries the burdens of history” (6). Reconsidering history is not a morbid and
unhealthy obsession with the past, but rather a necessary part of moving forward for a
country recovering from the psychological effects of years of colonization. As Deane
points out in his discussion of Irish literature in the “Introduction” to Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature, “A society needs a system of legitimation and, in seeking for
it, always looks to a point of origin from which it can derive itself and its practices” (17).
The backtracking eye of Irish fiction is a way of legitimizing the present by claiming the
past back from the colonizer. Since the English were in power, they were the ones who
claimed the rights to write the histories during domination, and now that Ireland is free,
its writers frequently write back to tell the stories that the colonizers suppressed or
ignored.
15
Irish literature also focuses heavily on the role of Ireland as a physical entity in an
effort to reclaim the land and thereby reconstruct identity. Norman Jeffares discusses the
Irish relationship to Ireland extensively in “Place, Space and Personality and the Irish
Writer.” He asserts that “the physical entity of Ireland is an integral part of the
atmosphere of much Anglo-Irish writing” (11). Jeffares attributes this interest in the
space of Ireland to the ability of space to take characters “out of time, out of the past – a
thing particularly to be hoped for – into a blessed sense of timelessness, the Traherne-like
vision, the present that perhaps only children really know. And even they need space for
it, for if one has space enough, then one has time enough” (37). The physical entity of
Ireland can be embraced as a site of power where writers can recreate their relationship to
Ireland and its history. Because the land remains regardless of who is in power, it is a
constant in a history of instability. Further, because the Irish have suffered a history of
abrogated land rights and forced exile, reclaiming the land emotionally is an integral part
of rebuilding identity for Irish authors in and outside of Ireland. The physical island of
Ireland is the most tangible representation of freedom and peace available to Irish writers,
so it inhabits an important role in the journey of self-discovery many Irish writers take.
One of the main themes in Irish postcolonial literature writing is the search for a
satisfying identity. Writers must cope with the fragmented self-images left for them by
the English and must discover how to re-imagine the contradictory identities they have
been offered. In Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980, Deane
highlights the struggle of Irish authors to reinvent themselves in light of their hybrid
culture, claiming that Irish literature “derives from a culture which is neither wholly
16
national nor colonial but a hybrid of both” (11). With such a dynamic culture, the act of
reconstructing identity is a complicated one. Kiberd expands on the complex act of
identity creation in Inventing Ireland, stating that the Irish “seem to take pleasure in the
fact that identity is seldom straightforward and given, more often a matter of negotiation
and exchange” (1). This negotiation seems a natural outgrowth of the hybrid cultural
environment that arises from years of colonization. Kiberd further explains, “The Irish
self . . . was a project: and its characteristic text was a process, unfinished, fragmenting.
It invited the reader to become a co-creator with the author and it refused to exact a
merely passive admiration for the completed work of art” (120). The literature created by
Irish poets enacts a personal quest for identity and asks the reader to construct identity as
she reads, just as the author’s identity shifts and grows as she re-imagines the past and the
future.
The challenge of recreating identity is also an outgrowth of the roles the English
language and the poet have played in Irish history. The concept of the poet has held a
particularly important role for Ireland, as Douglas Hyde, the first president of Ireland,
demonstrates in A Literary History of Ireland, “the greatest English bard of the
Elizabethan age was allowed by his countrymen to perish of poverty in the streets of
London, while the pettiest chief of the meanest clan would have been proud to lay his
hearth and home and a share of his wealth at the disposal of any Irish ‘ollamn’” (xxxiv).
The Irish bard has historically been celebrated throughout Ireland as a speaker of truth
who, equalizes king and beggar and makes all accountable for their actions. In Inventing
Ireland, Kiberd notes that the “artist was the fittest interpreter for the state of [the]
17
relationship” between the monarch and the land (18). The poet was expected to interpret
the signs given by the earth in order to determine whether the king was doing a
satisfactory job, a task which was highly revered by the people. The responsibility of this
job, however, was not lightly given, for the training of an Irish poet when the Bardic
tradition was flourishing consisted of up to twelve years of study in order to master “a
complex system of quatrains under the guidance of an ollamh (professor). The poet’s
self-image was accordingly high and all were jealous in guarding their rights” (Kiberd,
Irish Classics 4). Although the poetic system faced challenges and underwent many
changes during English rule, the legacy of the Irish bard is still present in contemporary
fiction, as authors and their characters search for a new understanding of the author in
Ireland. Many Irish narratives are constructed by characters through journal or book
writing, direct address, or stream of consciousness. The stories thereby depict the act of
narration as a way of creating personal identity. In light of the degradation and outright
destruction of Irish literary history by the English during colonization, Irish authors have
sought to redefine what the role of the poet will be in contemporary Irish society.
The attempt to reconstruct the role of the poet is complicated by the Irish
relationship to the English language, a language that was forced on them by the English
during colonization. Kiberd emphasizes the impact of the loss of Irish in Inventing
Ireland, claiming, “The twin frustrations of twentieth-century Irish life, reflected in the
two unachieved aims of the largest political party on the island, are the failure to
reintegrate the national territory and to revive Irish as the community language” (649).
The loss of the language becomes no less destructive than the loss of the northern six
18
counties. Despite efforts to revive the language, Deane notes that “The bulk of the Irish
people are ignorant of and alien to the Irish language and its ancient literature”
(“Introduction” 18). Thus, the fiction produced in Ireland displays a distinct relationship
to the English language because of a hyper-awareness that English is not the country’s
native language. Irish authors therefore take a step back from the linguistic constructions
because they are aware that the language they use is an approximation. They know it
cannot linguistically represent their ideas because it is not the native language of their
land and their history.
Brian Friel’s play Translations expresses the complexities of this linguistic bind.
By dramatizing the erasure of the Irish language and the re-naming of Ireland into the
“correct” Anglicized names, Friel sets the stage for the relationship to linguistics invoked
in later Irish works. One character, for instance, cautions that the Irish intellect and spirit
are not suited for the commerce-oriented English language, asserting that English
“couldn’t really express us” and “our own culture and the classical tongues made a
happier conjugation” (23). As Deane points out in Celtic Revivals, “Irish literature tends
to dwell on the medium in which it is written because it is difficult not to be selfconscious about a language which has become simultaneously native and foreign” (13).
In the narrators of Irish fiction, this friction between English as an imposed language yet
the language of the majority, creates an ironic tension with what they are narrating. They
realize during their construction that the story is only a story and language is not
sufficient, and they ask the reader to share this realization. These fictions highlight for
19
the reader that no constructed history or story is ever really consistent with reality
because it is created with an insufficient language.
The combination of the historical devaluation of the poet and the inability to trust
the English language as a reliable medium undermine the poet’s role as seer and bard.
The changes the English made to the Irish social structure led to the Irish poet’s loss of an
audience and culture that valorized them. They could thereby no longer narrate the
identity and history of Ireland and its citizens with authority, and, in the face of this
legacy, characters in contemporary fiction attempt to reestablish the Irish poet’s right to
construct a narrative and identity for the Irish subject. Authors in these works give their
characters the chance to establish authorship over their Irish identities, thus reminding
audiences of the poet’s traditional function. In the literature, this need to regain authority
to narrate produces a recurrent theme of the quest for self. Narrators journey through
their memories, histories, and localities to understand who they are. They attempt to renarrate the past to claim authority over their present and future, becoming, in effect,
writers of their own lives.
In the following chapters, the contemporary Irish works through which I will trace
these postcolonial themes are Edna O’Brian’s Night, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, and
John Banville’s The Sea. Each of these authors expresses the struggle to establish a
personal identity in Ireland, and their works deal expressly with the plight of Ireland as a
postcolonial country. Each has contributed immensely to the Irish canon and offers
contemporary works that reflect many of the themes present in much Irish fiction today.
Edna O’Brien has been celebrated by critics since the 1960s and has received Irish,
20
English, and American awards for her works. In the chapter on O’Brien in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists Since 1960, Martine van Elk asserts
that “O’Brien is a major contemporary writer who deserves to be included in any critical
survey of modern Irish fiction” (177). James Cahalan, in Double Visions: Women and
Men in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction, likewise calls O’Brien “the pioneer of
the current generation of women writing about Irish women’s struggles,” and counts
Night as “one of O’Brien’s best novels” (114, 84). Kiberd equally esteems O’Brien,
suggesting that she was “arguably the writer who made many of the subsequent advances
in Irish women’s writing possible: and she continued to craft a prose of surpassing
beauty and exactitude” (Inventing Ireland 566). O’Brien remains an influential voice in
Irish studies and has not failed to create a multitude of works that capture the Irish spirit.
Anne Enright, although a slightly newer voice in Irish fiction than O’Brien, is a
profoundly gifted and acclaimed author in Ireland today. She has won multiple awards,
including the Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering. Caitriona Moloney, in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography, calls Enright “one of the most promising fiction
writers to appear in Ireland in the 1990s” and notes that she “has received considerable
critical attention and literary accolades for her short stories and novels” (88). Moloney
also declares that Enright’s work “challenges traditional belief systems and
epistemologies; she conflates the genres of journalism, history, and fiction to make
problematic the official records and shared memories of the past” (88). The new, but
brilliant, voice Enright brings to the field offers critics new ways of understanding the
21
experiences of Irish life and the struggles authors face in recreating who they are in
modern Ireland.
Like Enright, John Banville was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for
The Sea, along with numerous other prestigious awards throughout his literary career,
such as the Allied Irish Banks Fiction Prize, the American-Irish Foundation Award, and
the Guardian Fiction Prize, to name only a few. Christina Hunt Mahony, in
Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition, asserts that “Banville’s fiction is
the most highly allusive and self-consciously literary that is being written in Ireland
today. It is also simultaneously the most poetic and the most spare” (232). The Sea
beautifully captures a man’s struggle to reclaim the right to narrate his own life and
redefine his identity. In Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt: An Analysis of the
Epistemological Crisis in Modern Fiction, Neil Murphy asserts that Banville’s work as a
whole “is a symbolic reflection of man’s search for meaning, for order” (235). This
pervasive search for meaning demonstrates a quest that is integral to much postcolonial
writing.
These authors each deal with claiming the authority for Irish subjects to narrate
their own lives, despite their differing subject matters, and viewing their texts through a
postcolonial lens adds depth to the novels themselves and to the understanding of the
Irish history in general. These novels show how Irish fiction has matured with the
development of the Free State of Ireland, for the literature demonstrates how the country
continues to cope with the lasting effects of its colonial history. The characters in these
novels enact a search that has occurred for centuries in Ireland—culturally, literarily, and
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individually—and will continue for years to come. Colonization leaves a lasting imprint
on a culture long after the colonizer has withdrawn, even if the country has recovered
economically and established a strong sense of Nationhood, for colonialism affects a
nation on a personal level, and generations of authors must deal with the impact.
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Chapter 2
ANNE ENRIGHT’S THE GATHERING
Anne Enright’s The Gathering deals with the vestiges of colonialism present in modernday Ireland by portraying the physical and psychological search of the main character,
Veronica. Despite Ireland’s independence and strong sense of nationhood, Veronica
demonstrates the lasting need to cope with the trauma of colonization that remains on a
personal level for the inhabitants of Ireland. Through her search, the novel exemplifies
the need for Irish authors to reclaim the authority to narrate their own lives and recreate
themselves by integrating the fragmented pieces of identity that remain in the wake of
British colonization. Veronica, or Vee as she is frequently called, travels around Ireland
and searches her history in an attempt to understand who she is and where her life is
heading. Vee comes to face the fractured identity she has been living under, and is, in a
sense, “unhomed” by her experiences. Her confidence in the roles she plays in her family
is shattered, and she must discover who she is outside of the social roles she has been
inhabiting. Vee is able to recreate her identity by examining her past, establishing a
physical presence in Ireland, and narrating the truth of her and her family’s existence.
Through this journey, she is able to return home to Ireland and her family with a more
secure and authentic identity.
The central trauma of Vee’s story is her family’s relationship to Lamb Nugent, the
man who was her grandmother’s landlord and who molested her brother Liam as a child.
This trauma, however, has far-reaching consequences. In Veronica’s eyes, the
relationship between Lamb and her family was one of exploitation from the beginning.
24
As Vee goes through her grandmother’s rent books, which she finds in her mother’s
house years after her grandmother has passed away, she wonders,
Why should anyone keep these things, except out of fear – of the long arm
of the law, or of the Revenue Commissioners; investigating the tax
situation on a house you never owned, and that your mother did not own
before you? I have . . . a sickening sense of what these books meant to the
possessor, the rights they might afford. (217)
For Vee, these rent books indicate that Ada never felt ownership over her home or felt
that she could prove her right to live there. The only reason Vee can imagine Ada and
her mother keeping these records for fifty years is fear that they would still be taken
advantage of. According to Vee, as Lamb was the landlord, he had rights to the house and
to the occupants. In reading the correspondence between Lamb and Ada over the years,
Vee decides that the relationship was one of “sudden pique and petty cruelty” (235). She
further asserts:
. . . there is a sense of thrall to it, too; of Nugent working in the garage,
that he owned, at the back of the house and then walking round to the
door, that he owned, at the front, and knocking. It makes the ritual of the
tea and biscuits a savage enough little one, on his part, and Ada at her
most charming – her most, you might say, sexy – because that is what
women on their back foot are like. Thirty-eight years of so many shillings
per week; her whole life dribbled away into his hand. Thirty-eight years of
25
bamboozling him with her female charms, while he sat there and took it,
and liked it, because he thought it was his due. (235)
The position of landlord gives Lamb power to intrude into the family because he owns
their home, which leads to his molestation of Liam, for he only has access to the children
because he had ownership of the house. Vee’s description of his visits as savage rituals
where Lamb gets what he thinks he is owed and Ada uses her sexuality to try to protect
her rights speaks to the daily trauma of oppression the occupants in the home suffered.
As Vee points out, the monthly payment to Lamb is more than money; Ada’s “whole life
dribbled away.” Ada and the children were taken advantage of and abused and could do
nothing to free themselves from a life of oppression because they had no other home to
retreat to and no means of gaining the rights to their home and lives from Lamb.
The trauma that results from Lamb’s presence in the Hegartys’ lives resonates not
only on a personal level for Veronica, but is present as a metaphor for a national crisis. In
reflecting on Lamb’s molestation of her brother, Vee calls attention to widespread reports
of molestation in Ireland near the end of the twentieth century.3 In fact, she only
remembers what happened to her brother because of the reports she hears about other
cases, stating, “Over the next twenty years, the world around us changed and I
remembered Mr Nugent. But I never would have made that shift on my own--if I hadn’t
been listening to the radio, and reading the paper, and hearing about what went on in
schools and churches and in people’s homes” (172-73). In this way, Liam’s experience is
3
In 2009, Ireland was still dealing with the issue of child sexual abuse. Shawn Pogatchnik, from the
Boston Globe, reports “investigators documented decades of chronic molestation and brutality in Chatholicrun facilities for children” and that “investigators determined in a 2,600-page report published in May that
orders of Catholic brothers and nuns abused tens of thousands of children in their care--and secular
authorities did nothing effective to stop it” (A5).
26
viewed as more than a personal assault, but a national crisis. She further ties their family
experience to a national situation by relating the shame and guilt she and Liam always
carry with them in response to their histories and their present lives to the experience of
Ireland as a whole, “This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a
family--a whole fucking country--drowning in shame” (168). Vee asserts that Liam’s
and her situation is not simply a personal one, but a single representation of what Ireland
as a whole feels.
In fact, the relationship between Nugent and Vee’s family can be read further as a
figurative representation of the larger cultural situation in Ireland. The character of
Lamb, of the landlord who takes advantage of his tenants in their own home, can be read
as a symbolic depiction of the role England played in Ireland’s history. Ada, Liam, and
Vee would thereby symbolize the Irish people who suffered degradation and exploitation
during colonization. Lamb’s nickname, “Nolly May,” even speaks to his allegorical
status, for as Vee reminds the reader, Easter, the first day that Ada and Lamb spend time
together is the day “Christ says, ‘Noli me tangere,’ to the woman in the garden. Do not
touch me. It is too soon. It is too soon to be touched. Oh Nolly May” (106). Lamb’s very
name indicates that his purpose is to represent an abusive and intrusive force that must be
held off. Vee even imagines that “Charlie owned the house once, but lost it to Nugent on
a horse,” and although she dismisses this possibility, it speaks to the feeling of
manipulation and forced domination Lamb has over her grandparents (232). His hold
over the Hegartys as the landlord mimics the hold England had over Ireland during
colonization, for Ireland was a land that was stolen, and ruled by the English. While the
27
Irish lived on it and tried to keep it as a home, the English constantly asserted their rights
to the land. In the novel, Enright sets up this same scenario with Lamb, Ada and Charlie.
Lamb constantly asserts his ownership rights through rent, the use of the garage, and
through the weekly visits on Friday where Ada has to do her best to use her charms to
keep what should have been hers. This dynamic is a miniature portrayal of the effects a
violent colonizer has on a country.
As Nugent can be read as a symbol of the colonizer, Liam is the clearest
representation for what the Irish people suffered during their oppression. In the novel,
Liam is a metonym for the Irish people, in that even his friends refer to him as a general
concept of the Irish rather than an individual person. Liam also suffers the most directly
from Lamb’s presence in the Hegartys’ lives, for as a boy he is molested by Lamb in his
grandmother’s home. The violence and destruction of innocence implicit in this act
conveys the affect of colonization on a society. As Lamb uses Liam for his own pleasure
and in doing so destroys Liam’s chance of a happy future, England’s intrusion into
Ireland for profit and the expansion of the empire left a culture of uprooted people. Vee
states that she “knew that Liam would never come home now, either to this bed, or the
bed in Griffith Way, or any other bed he made for himself” (122). The affects of this
molestation represent the cultural destruction left in the wake of colonization, for just as
Liam, the Irish must reconstruct a home for themselves after decolonization since their
homes had been destroyed.
The story can thereby be read as an allegory for the lasting situation left by
colonization in Ireland, for even though Ada, Charlie, and Nugent are all dead, their
28
children and grandchildren must continue to deal with the lasting effects of their
relationships. Veronica states that Nugent could be “the explanation for all of our lives,
and I know something more frightening still--that we did not have to be damaged by him
in order to be damaged. It was the air he breathed that did for us. It was the way we were
obliged to breathe his second-hand air” (224). If we read Nugent as the symbol for
England as a colonizer, this speaks to the remaining effects of colonization long after
England has rescinded its control of the Republic of Ireland, for even though England is
not still actively oppressing the Irish as Lamb did Liam and Ada, contemporary Ireland
still suffers as the remaining Hegartys do. Vee’s journey through the story to recover an
authentic identity after the shock of her brother’s death can represent the contemporary
struggle of the Irish who still deal with the trauma of their cultural history.
Veronica demonstrates the fractured, or hybrid, identity that many postcolonial
subjects experience after decolonization. As Lois Tyson describes it, a “postcolonial
identity is necessarily a dynamic, constantly evolving hybrid of native and colonial
cultures” (422). In an idealized situation the colonized subject would arrive an identity
that could take elements from both cultures to create a fluid, fulfilling sense of self.
However, this is not always how colonized subjects respond to their situation. Stephen
Bonnycastle, in In Search of Authority: An Introductory Guide to Literary Theory, poses
two options for the oppressed: a) “you can abandon your own culture and adopt that of
the other” or b) “you can develop a response that mixes elements of yourself with
elements of the other” (234). The process of intertwining cultures can create what Tyson
calls “double consciousness,” for both cultures are present within the self even when they
29
conflict (421). Tyson explains that this double consciousness often creates “an unstable
sense of self” and a “feeling of being caught between cultures, of belonging to neither
rather than to both, of finding oneself arrested in a psychological limbo that results not
merely from some individual psychological disorder but from the trauma of the cultural
displacement within which one lives” (421). Enright’s novel opens with Vee attempting
to find a way out of this psychological limbo, a struggle that displays the cultural struggle
of Ireland to try to find its way out of its history of colonization. With the death of her
closest brother, Liam, she comes to realize that her identity is not a fulfilling combination
of cultural values, but rather that it has been lost among the various identities ascribed to
her.
Her brother’s death shocks Vee into questioning the validity of her life and the
authenticity of the roles she inhabits. After Liam’s death, Vee feels,
I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go
‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other
people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to
mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until
my brother died. (181)
She has only been inhabiting the roles she adopted as mother and wife, but she does not
feel connected to them. They do not represent who she really is; rather, they deprive her
of the opportunity to determine who she is underneath. Vee further expresses her
concern over her lack of identity in her relationship to her mother, who, Vee asserts, does
not know who she is. Vee admits, “she knows who I am, it is just my name that escapes
30
her. . . . ‘Veronica!’ I feel like shouting it at her. ‘You called me Veronica!’” (4-5). In
addition to her mother not knowing her, Vee also frequently conflates herself with her
family, listing the siblings as “the remnants too of Midge-Bea-Ernest-Stevie-Ita-MossieLiam-Veronica-Kitty-Alice-and-the-twins-Ivor-and-Jem” (44). In both of these
instances, Vee does not stand out among the mass of children her mother produced. She
is only one of the list, with no distinct existence outside of her family. She sees no real
distinction between the siblings, just as her mother is unable to recognize which daughter
she is. As Vee is the sole narrator of her story, her mother’s inability to know her own
daughter is more importantly a reflection of Vee’s inability to know herself. She does not
see who she is, and therefore asserts that no one else can see her either. She cannot
separate herself from her family, a fusion that is made even more complicated by her
close relationship with her brother Liam.
Throughout the story, Vee’s narration seems to conflate her and her brother; in
fact, he can be read as a kind of alter-ego. As Vee describes it, “There were eleven
months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other’s tails; one after the
other. . . . Sometimes I think we overlapped in there, he just left early, to wait outside”
(11). From the beginning, the two were linked, with no separation between them, “There
is the hint of my brother’s smile in my own, a tone of voice I sometimes hit” (66). She
also begins the novel by confusing their ages, stating that she wants to narrate the events
that happened when she was “eight or nine,” but then later clearly explains that she “was
eight and Liam was barely nine” (1, 142). In this way she begins her story by confusing
her identity with her brother’s, he representing her fractured identity. He takes on the
31
parts of her that she rejects, representing the disbelief she has in her own life, for she
asserts that he “blamed me for my nice house, with the nice white paint on the walls, and
the nice daughters in their bedrooms of nice lilac and nicer pink. He blamed me for my
golf-loving husband. . . . He treated me like I was selling out on something, though on
what I do not know” (168). Just as Vee transfers her own inability to see herself to her
mother, she transfers the disbelief she feels in her life to her brother. While he is alive,
he is able to carry this half of her so she does not have to realize that her identity is
fractured, that she is only living in the roles she plays. But once he dies, this disbelief is
shifted back to her, and she must establish what about her life she does believe in, what is
real and what is in inverted commas. On a symbolic level, Vee’s struggles with her and
Liam’s enmeshment can be read as the need for contemporary Irish citizens to recreate
their identities after the death of colonized Ireland. Liam represents an abused and
wounded Ireland, as he is the one who suffers most directly from Nugent’s oppression.
Vee, as the contemporary Irish subject in search of a stable cultural identity, must
struggle to see who she is after she has separated herself from such a painful past. This
past will always be with her, but she must discover who she is as a free individual in
post-colonial Ireland.
The key role Veronica comes to question is motherhood, for this role has
dominated her adult life. Vee’s own mother, who remains nameless throughout the
novel, exemplifies the fears Vee has for herself if she fully accepts her role as a mother.
Given the history of women’s rights in Ireland, it is no wonder Vee is resistant of the role
32
of motherhood. James Cahalan, in Double Visions: Women and Men in Modern and
Contemporary Irish Fiction, asserts:
Sexism was inscribed directly into the Irish constitution of 1937, which
recognized the “special status” of the Catholic Church in the Republic of
Ireland, banned divorce, and asserted that a woman’s place was in the
home. Although censorship and many other conservative aspects of the
Free State greatly relaxed beginning in the late 1950s, change regarding
issues key to gender relationships—such as divorce and birth control—
have been much longer in coming and in some cases have not yet occurred.
(20)
Women have had to struggle to gain the right to an authentic identity, rather than
conforming to the pressures of a society that oppresses them. Vee, as a representation of
one version in an oppressed Ireland in the novel, shows the struggle to reestablish and revision social roles after Irish decolonization. As family history and tradition have been
devalued in Ireland because of colonial rule, the family and the roles of women in
particular within the family have to be reestablished for a newly-freed Ireland.
Vee’s mother, only referred to as Mammy, vividly represents the complicated
understanding of motherhood in Ireland. Her body and mind have been ravaged by
numerous births, and in her becoming the ideal Catholic mother (by reproducing nearly
annually), she has become no mother at all, unable even to remember which child is
which, “My mother had twelve children and--as she told me one hard day--seven
miscarriages. The holes in her head are not her fault” (7). Vee asserts that Mammy’s
33
submission to mothering has turned her into a “creature,” a “piece of benign human meat,
sitting in a room” (46, 47). Motherhood has not only stripped her of humanity, but erased
her, “my mother is such a vague person, it is possible she can’t even see herself” (4). Her
mother “has been rendered transparent by sweetness and suffering” (228). Mammy’s
invisibility reflects the historical oppression of women that deprives them of power and
selfhood, that forces them to conform to the expectations of their husbands and families,
that strips them of authenticity. The treatment of Mammy invokes a hierarchy of
oppression, for the father oppresses the mother as the British oppressed Ireland. The
woman here is used like the English used Ireland: her sole purpose according to the man
is dependent upon the goods she can produce, and her humanity is devalued in the
process.
Vee’s own fear that she is invisible, that her mother does not truly see her, reflects
the fear that as a mother she will become Mammy and be invisible to herself and to
others. Vee worries that if she sees herself as a mother, then she is defined only by her
children, “I like to talk to them. If I don’t talk to them I think I will die of something-call it irrelevance--I think I will just fade away” (37-38). If she is only a mother, once her
children have no interest in her she will cease to exist, becoming a vague creature like her
mother. With her brother’s death, she begins to see that motherhood is not enough to
define her. She admits that when someone dies, “everything shuts down, and all the ways
you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the
kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. . . . most
of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid” (27). Suddenly being a “Mammy” is
34
not enough to determine who she is and leaves her without a role, “I used to be a
journalist. I used to write about shopping (well someone has to). Now I look after the
kids--what’s that called?” (39). Just as her vague mother has no name, motherhood in
general is no longer a name for Veronica. Vee is so traumatized by her mounting
disbelief in her role as mother that she must flee her two small daughters, her husband,
and her home to discover how she can simultaneously be herself and part of her family.
After her brother’s death, every night Vee travels aimlessly around Ireland in a
search of self-definition. This nightly search represents an obsession with reestablishing
a connection between herself and Ireland as a physical entity, for Vee has been what
Homi Bhabha refers to as “unhomed.” This “unhomeliness,” a “feeling of being caught
between cultures,” of feeling “not at home even in your own home because you are not at
home in yourself,” is acted out in Vee’s disconnection from her physical family home
(Tyson 421). She now disbelieves in the sincerity and family that her home represents,
“This is how I live my life since Liam died. . . . I walk the house. Nothing settles here.
Not even dust” (36). With Liam’s death, her house loses its authenticity. She does not
see her own history or identity represented in her house and cannot “settle” there. She
later describes it as “Oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate. There is no blood here. There is no
blood in this house” (130). The living nature of a home that truly feels like home has
been stripped from her house and her self. She cannot reconcile herself to the life she has
created and doubts whether or not she and her family are truly present in her life or if it is
simply as bland and empty as the various colors of her gray walls.
35
Her nightly search further exemplifies the important role of the land in Irish
fiction. Vee’s ability to establish a connection to the land, which has historically been
denied her people, encourages her ability to reconcile herself to an authentic identity, for
the land is the ultimate representation of Ireland and of freedom. With this search,
Enright displays the “concern with place and displacement” that Ashcroft, Griffiths, and
Tiffin address in The Empire Writes Back (8). Vee has to recover an “effective
identifying relationship between self and place” since this relationship has been disturbed
by her dissociation from her home (Ashcroft 8). Her journey is an attempt to “reclaim,
rename, and reinhabit the land,” to reappropriate it so that it feels like she belongs
somewhere (Said 226). By driving around Ireland at night and going to the places of her
past, she attempts to reclaim each place as an adult so that it is not overwhelmingly
inhabited by the terrors of her past. Most notably, one night Veronica is able to
“overcome the car’s natural reluctance and drive it all the way to Broadstone,” where she
lived with her grandmother and Liam was molested (150). With her sister Kitty, Vee
drives to St. Ita’s, a psychiatric hospital where her Uncle Brendan was a patient, and
feels, “It is as though we are driving through a sudden brief mist, on the other side of
which is the past” (159). These journeys to places that hold the pain of the past help Vee
see Ireland as not only a place of oppression and fear, but as her present that can become
a real home for her future. Indeed, this need to be reattached to Ireland is exemplified in
the locations of her siblings, for, out of the twelve, only three remain in Ireland. All the
others have exiled themselves, to London, South America, the United States, and “God
36
knows where” (187). In her family’s diaspora readers see how Irish citizens must
continue to establish a right to the land despite their history of forced exile and relocation.
In order to establish this connection and assess whether her home and her life
truly have ‘blood’ in them or not, Vee must depict a journey into herself. On this
physical journey, she admits, “There is nothing illegal about driving, but it all feels
forbidden to me, the housewife in her Saab, abandoning her children while they sleep,
leaving them unprotected from their dreams” (150). The forbidden nature of her odyssey
reflects the difficulty of reappropriating a land once stolen. Vee’s fear is essentially of
the liminal space that a decolonized subject inhabits during the process of shedding a
fragmented identity and creating a new one. Veronica explores the places of her past and
her future, “always tending towards the sea,” a place that represents the unknown future
and her murky memories of the past. Her physical exploration of Ireland is therefore a
dual journey, one that allows her to reestablish her right to Ireland as a country and one
that prompts her to see the connection between the past and present.
During her journey around her country and London to claim her brother’s body,
Vee travels mentally through her history to rewrite her understanding of herself and her
role in the world. In postcolonial writing, history and memory play integral parts in the
formation of the present. Most notably, Vee focuses on the scars left by the past on her
family. Her interest in the past coincides with Edward Said’s assertion in Culture and
Imperialism that postcolonial writers “bear their past within them—as scars of
humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of
the past tending toward a post-colonial future” (212). Vee’s reexamination of the past is
37
therefore an attempt to understand the scars her cultural history has left so that she can
revision a new future for herself. This examination of scars arises most often in regards
to Liam, whose wounds were so severe he drowned himself in the ocean. Vee
understands her brother’s death in terms of the events that drove him to this action,
claiming, “What is written for the future is written in the body, the rest in only spoor. I
don’t know when Liam’s fate was written in his bones” (163). This reference to bones is
a recurring motif throughout the book, first appearing on the opening page, where Vee
describes the molestation of her brother as a young boy as “a crime of the flesh, but the
flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones” (1). As a
postcolonial people bear with them the scars of their past, Liam’s bones are engraved
with the wounds afflicted on him in his childhood. The scars left on Liam from his past
seem physical to Vee, as the physical country of Ireland was scarred and burned through
the process of ejecting and subduing the people. The raping of a country is here made an
intimately personal attack, for each person is left with this hurt written in her or his
bones. In order to understand how these scars shaped Liam’s later life, Vee must
examine why these scars appeared in the first place, claiming, “The seeds of my brother’s
death were sown many years ago. The person who planted them is long dead . . . So if I
want to tell Liam’s story, then I have to start long before he was born” (13). Liam’s
history does not merely begin with his birth, but rather with the lives of those in his past
that have shaped who he is by their actions. Vee’s hope is that by better understanding
his and her pasts and by reinterpreting events, she can not only understand the present,
but reshape her future and the lives of those around her. She recognizes that her familial
38
and cultural histories shape her present experiences with the world, so if she is able to
reconcile herself to them, then her future might be better than her brothers.
In Veronica’s own life, history is just as important a determiner of identity as it is
for her brother. She frequently asserts that who she is does not simply depend on her
current actions, but rather integrates her and her family’s past into her identity. In
recalling her grandfather’s funeral when she was a small girl, Vee wonders if his “blood,
so heavy and sticky and wrong--I wonder if it was still inside him, because it is the same,
or a quarter the same, as my own blood. If I cut myself, right now, I would see it running
free” (63). Family history is therefore not something that can be escaped, and every cut
she endures bleeds that history and reminds her of those who have contributed to who she
is. Hence, to understand herself, Vee has to understand that blood by understanding her
family’s past. Thus, the majority of the memories she explores do not dwell exclusively
on her own personal history, but also on her grandmother, Ada, a figure she sees as key in
determining the identity of her entire family. In an attempt to understand Ada—and
thereby her family—Vee creates various scenarios for Ada’s life that explain her
influence. In one scenario, Vee “decided that Ada had been a prostitute,” while her
boyfriend at the time “pointed out, it was just as possible that she had been a nun,” but
that she could not help “looking at the mysterious fact of her life and deciding on the one
story that would explain us all” (84). Vee cannot create a new future for herself until she
recreates a past that satisfyingly explains the present. For, just as the past is constantly
running through Veronica’s veins, a part of her is also always living in the past. In
remembering a trip she took with her grandmother as a child, Vee asserts, “Another part
39
of me is still, these years later, walking along the road where the stranger set us down,”
displaying that no one is ever truly in the present, for part of a person always remains
living in the past (113). Homi Bhabha explains this concurrent existence in past and
present in The Location of Culture, “The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not
the nostalgia of living” in postcolonial literature (7).
Vee’s need to reexamine the past culminates in her narration, an act that allows
her to recreate her understanding of history and personal identity simultaneously. By
narrating her story, Veronica claims the authority to construct her own identity, a right
deprived colonial subjects. She rewrites a past that she can accept and therefore creates a
future that is hopeful. For Vee, the purpose of the novel, in fact, is to write down what
happened to her brother as a child and thereby understand her past and move forward into
a more hopeful future. The story opens with the line, “I would like to write down what
happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if
it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside
me--this thing that may not have taken place” (1). This event, readers later discover, is
the molestation of her brother, an event that she views as an axis in the construction of
her life. At night while her family sleeps, Vee rebuilds who she is by staying “downstairs
while the family breathes above me and I write it down, I lay them out in nice sentences,
all my clean, white bones” (2). By spending her nights translating memories onto a page,
she takes control and becomes the writer of her own life. For Vee, the ability to narrate
experience lies at the heart of the ability to establish identity. She can only deal with the
trauma of her oppressive past by writing down what happened to her brother, by making
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sense of it and explaining it to the rest of her family. For, at the resolution of the novel,
when Vee is able to finally return home knowing who she is, she determines that it is
through sharing her understanding of the past that she will reconcile herself to her life, “I
know what I have to do-- even though it is too late for the truth, I will tell the truth. I will
get hold of Ernest and tell him what happened to Liam in Broadstone, and I will ask him
to break this very old news to the rest of the family” (259). It is only through reclaiming
her authority over the past and allowing her family to do the same that Vee can accept
what really happened in her childhood.
This narration of the past, however, does not hinge on facts, but rather on
creation. She does not need to know the truth of the past to understand it; instead, she
needs to invent a version of the past that makes sense of the present. The bulk of her
narrative creates scenes that she could not possibly know are true, scenes of family
member before she was alive. The main event she narrates is the meeting, long before
she was born, of her grandmother and the man who later molests her brother, “mostly, I
write about Ada and Nugent in the Belvedere, endlessly, over and again” (38). In her
narration, Vee frequently reminds her reader that what she presents is not fact, with notes
such as, “She was wearing blue, or so I imagine it” and “It is possible that Nugent is
imagining it all – or that I am” (14, 17). She thereby asserts that it is not the factual past
that matters, but her ability to construct a meaningful past that is important. In
remembering Nugent molesting Liam, Vee asserts that “even though I know it is true that
this happened, I do not know if I have the true picture in my mind’s eye” (144). This
demonstrates the friction between truth, fact, and memory. Veronica is able to know the
41
truth of something without necessarily knowing its facts or having a clear memory of it,
for her, the truth of the past is determined largely by the imprints it leaves. That is, what
is most true of the past is what can most clearly explain how the present came to be.
Hence, Vee establishes that the role of the poet in contemporary Ireland is not that of
historian, but rather the one who creates history and reclaims authority over the present in
doing so. As Franz Fanon asserts in The Wretched of the Earth, “The settler makes
history and is conscious of making it. . . . the history which he writes is not the history of
the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she
skims off, all that she violates and starves” (41). Vee’s disregard for the strict “fact” of
the past underscores the notion that in a postcolonial society, the recorded facts of history
rarely match the experience of the colonized. In writing back, therefore, a colonized
people must recreate a past that explains their experience, a past that is no more fictional
or factual than the colonizer’s, but a past that explains rather than recounts. Vee gladly
adopts this role in her family and uses her narration to fashion a past that fits their
experiences and allows them to reclaim their family as their own. As the representative
of the modern Irish citizen struggling with a postcolonial cultural identity, Vee
demonstrates the need for contemporary writers to reexamine the past in order to reclaim
Ireland as a home.
Through exploring Ireland and examining her family history, Vee is able to
reconnect to herself and determine who she is underneath the roles she has been given.
Through this examination, she is able to remove the “inverted commas” in which she has
been living. By portraying Veronica’s journey of self-discovery, Enright exemplifies the
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struggles postcolonial authors still face. The Gathering displays the lasting trauma of
colonization and the effects this creates on a personal level for Irish citizens. In this way,
Enright reflects the enduring need of postcolonial subjects to continue to examine their
past to move into a satisfying future. By viewing this novel from a postcolonial
perspective, one can see that Ireland has yet to entirely recover from the scars that have
been carved into its bones. These scars, however, do not have to lead to a life of pain and
suffering as Enright’s Liam has. Instead, these scars can be used to create fiction that
displays bravery and creativity in the face of adversity. Enright shows how writing can
be a way to transform a traumatizing past into something that colors the present and the
future in a fulfilling way. The Gathering displays that although the wounds that cut to
the bone in Ireland may never entirely heal, the future can still be beautiful and hopeful.
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Chapter 3
EDNA O’BRIEN’S NIGHT
Like Enright’s novel, Edna O’Brien’s Night opens with a highly personalized
experience of an Irish woman in crisis. The residue of Ireland’s traumatic past, however,
is visible in O’Brien’s depiction of Mary Hooligan’s night of sleeplessness and
rumination. Mary spends her night reminiscing about her past in order to understand her
relationship with herself and Ireland. In a single night, Mary wanders the rooms of
another’s house, in a country that is not her own, as she mentally journeys through her
past in search of a sense of identity and futurity and for an understanding of her origins
and her future. As she narrates her journey, she recreates her identity as an Irish citizen.
Although Edna O’Brien lives abroad, as does her main character, her novel places
importance on Mary’s hometown of Coose in western Ireland, and her relationship with
homeland as a physical place emphasizes the importance of Ireland as a motherland and a
symbol for national and personal identity. Mary’s struggle to find satisfaction in her
lonely life is fueled by undercurrents of mistrust, pain, and self-doubt left by the recent
wounds of the Irish fight for independence.
Although Night focuses intently on a single woman’s emotional well-being, the
novel is very much indicative of a national struggle. Mary’s story can be viewed as
representative of the Irish relationship to a complex colonial past. In fact, the novel
opens with an epigraph using two quotations that call attention to Ireland’s history. The
first of the two quotations reads, “She is far from the land / Where her young hero
sleeps,” which is the opening of the Thomas Moore song, “She is Far From the Land.”
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The subject of the tune is Sarah Curran, the fiancé of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet
(Gwynn 15), the leading organizer of the ineffective yet memorable revolt of 1803, who
refused to flee the country because he did not want to leave Curran, and was captured and
executed as a result (Hahn 217). Starting the novel with such an epigraph asks the reader
to view the story from a specifically Irish historical point of view, and the reader can
identify the central character of the novel, Mary, with either Robert Emmet, a
revolutionary continuing to struggle with Ireland’s nationhood, or with Sarah Curran, the
“She” in the song. If Mary is viewed as a modern embodiment of Curran, she is a woman
who has lost her companion and her future to the fight for a free Ireland. Mary’s
profound loneliness speaks to this reading.
The second epigraph encourages the reader to view Mary allegorically, “The
original Hooligans were a spirited Irish family whose proceedings enlivened the drab
monotony of life in Southward towards the end of the nineteenth century.” When Mary
does introduce herself as a hooligan, she does so with detachment, stating, “I’m called
Mary. At least they did that with a certain propriety. Plain Mary Hooligan” (47). She
does not say, “I am Mary,” as many would, but rather, “I’m called Mary,” which places
her in a passive position (my emphasis). From the beginning, Mary is connected to Irish
history, for her very namesake calls attention to her family history and her place within it.
Since she is a submissive receptor for the name of her family, she is also placed as
passively subject to the effects of her history, rather than in control of her own
individuality.
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Mary is additionally portrayed as representative of exiles from Ireland by the
reoccurring references to geese and her seeming kinship with the birds. O’Brien’s
references to geese allude to the seventeenth century Flight of the Wild Geese in Ireland,
when in 1691, after the Treaty of Limerick, Patrick Sarsfield and an estimated 12,000
Irish soldiers were expatriated throughout Europe. These Wild Geese fled the country in
hopes of eventually invading England or Ireland and regaining power (Moody 506). The
Penal Laws that followed the treaty laid such heavy restrictions on Catholics that the
exodus continued throughout the century, leaving the country devoid of a viable
resistance for years (Inglis 62).
In her musings, Mary regularly links herself to geese, revealing not only her
desire to return to Ireland, but also her kinship with birds, stating, “I have even made a
written request to be buried on an island in the vicinage of Coose, a woeful place
surrounded by choppy waters and presided over by a pair of unpropogating swans. Or is
it geese?” (6). A small island ruled by geese can represent a freed Ireland where those
who were once powerful and forced to flee have returned and evicted the intruders.
Mary, as an Irishwoman living abroad, like these geese, displays a feeling of banishment
from Ireland. Through this comparison, Mary can be seen as a representative for Irish
exiles in general who feel a longing to return to their home country, but are unable to do
so. O’Brien further establishes her central character as embodying exiles with the story
about her time in New York, “I picked up that slang in New York, where I once went to
promote Coose. That was in my prime. Very laughable. My task was to lure the
unfortunate exiles back to the Old Bog Road, the trout streams, and the potlatch
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ceremonies” (98). Mary, who becomes an exile by the time she tells her story, highlights
the need to bring people back to Ireland, while also displaying the difficulty of
repatriation, for, all she picked up in New York was some slang.
Mary’s living arrangement and the sense of homelessness and frustration she feels
because of it is, in a sense, a mini-drama reenacting the relationship between Ireland and
its British colonizers. O’Brien establishes early on that Mary is in England and that she
is not comfortable there, “I have the curtains drawn, the old clausilium shut tight, so it
ought to be safe enough, it ought. I take a tablet, break it down its central line, and
swallow one half, with some of the waters of the Malvern hills” (4). Although Mary is in
England’s Malvern Hills, she attempts to cut herself off from its influence, for she shuts
the curtains as if she is a snail receding within her shell for protection. England is
therefore established as a site of danger and a place in which Mary is not happy because,
despite her curtains, she knows she only “ought” to be safe, not that she is. Further, she
takes a “tablet,” indicating that she is ill in someway. Perhaps, because of her
sleeplessness readers can infer it is a sleeping pill, but if so, the pill fails to work, for
Mary’s insomnia does not subside throughout the night.
Mary’s insecurity in the house is later reinforced by her admission that it is not
her own domicile, “I am here in the capacity of a caretaker. They needed someone to
take in the mail and douche the plants and so forth. Also to turn on lights in the evening,
to give the semblance of a full house. They are irrational about being robbed” (42). In
this house, Mary is just a visitor performing the image of a full house for the intrusive
outside world. She develops no sense of belonging and comfort nor establishes a life
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there; she only performs the act of living for someone else’s benefit. She is thereby
devalued by her hosts, Tig and Jonathan, just as the English have historically devalued
the Irish. In “Hysterical Hooliganism: O’Brien, Freud, Joyce,” Helen Thompson notes
that Jonathan and Tig are “names borrowed from John Middleton Murray and Katherine
Mansfield, Tig being Mansfield’s nickname,” which suggests a reading of the “underside
of Victorian literary culture,” as well “as a commentary on ownership and mastery of
geographic space” (38). Mary is, indeed, overtly aware of her physical presence in the
house and the fact that the effects of her presence may be judged by the real owners,
“Often when I am out for a walk I get the distinct impression that they are back, have let
themselves in and are disgusted at my habits, the little altar that I’ve made, the candle
grease in thick splodges on the embossed cloth, various statues and icons, the shawl
spread out over the prayer chair” (45). Her living situation highlights the mistrust and
judgment in which the British and Irish have been mired for centuries, for not only is
Mary at the will of the English, but she is also aware that they will not approve of her
culture.
Mary further asserts, “I don’t mind what happens so long as I can stay. I like to
venture and make a bit of an expedition, but only with the certainty that I can get back in.
. . . I am not too sure of what I want to befall them, just so long as they remain away
indefinitely, forever. . . . I know it’s futile, but I still ask for it” (45-46). Her sense of
homelessness is compounded by the fact that she could be evicted at any moment. She
has struggled to make this her home despite the expectation that she only perform life
rather than live it, but she is utterly at the will of her landlords who can come home and
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expel her. Mary’s experience here coincides with what Homi Bhabha describes in The
Location of Culture as being “unhomed.” Bhabha explains that being unhomed arises
through the physical and cultural displacement that takes place in colonization. The
dispossessed come to feel that they have no home, even when they are home because the
public force of colonization has intruded upon their private lives. Bhabha states, “to be
unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that
familiar division of social life into private and public spheres” (9). In Night, Mary has
been given a home, or a place to live, but she is not allowed to shed her feeling of
homelessness because she is constantly reminded that she has no ownership and that her
“home” can be taken from her at any moment. This mimics the experience of a colonized
people, for their ownership of property has been negated by the intruding force, and even
if the intruder leaves, ownership cannot necessarily be reestablished, for the colonized
people’s confidence in their right to own has been taken away as well.
The distinct insecurity of home Mary feels is given a historical context by her
frequent assertion that the past cannot be escaped, but is a force ever-present in daily life,
“I had the most terrible feeling, the most shocking realization: you cannot kill the dead”
(43). There is no way for her to fight against what has already happened. The scars of
the past are even present at birth for Mary as she nurtures her son, “When at first he was
tonsured and I used to be putting a bonnet on him, the crown of his head spoke to me of
former massacres, his little bones used to suggest holocausts” (8). In the child she sees
Ireland’s history of oppression just below the benign surface of childhood innocence. Of
her own birth, she says she already had “some cursed inkling, some predilection toward
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shame and calamity and stupor, already liturgicalized before entering that dark, damp,
deep seasous place” (11). She does not enter the world fresh and free of sin but with
shame and disaster and in need of a cleansing. Her assertion that she is predisposed
toward shame coincides with Enright’s comment in The Gathering that the whole of
Ireland is “drowning in shame” (168). There is no innocent state for an Irish person in
either of these novels. Shame has become something innate in the Irish identity rather
than something developed as a result of behavior. Irish ethnicity alone brings with it the
judgment and violence of the past.
The underlying current of past trauma creates a disjointed relationship between
Mary and her abandoned motherland, which is represented by her tumultuous connection
to her deceased mother. This relationship is a painful and uncomfortable one, where her
mother is dead but inescapable, and where Mary wants both to be her mother and to
detach from her. Mary seems to have little emotional connection to her mother, “I feel as
much for the woman in the train who had the flushes as for the woman, Lil, who bore
me” (3). Not only is her mother relegated to the position of a stranger, but further she is
even denied a term of endearment. Instead of calling her “mom” or the like, Mary most
commonly refers to her as Lil, creating a distinct separation between them that limits
intimacy. However, despite this evident detachment, Mary also expresses a clear desire
to be more like her mother. In describing Lil, Mary admits,
I resemble her, except in one particular. She had a little green floating spot
on the white of an eye, a purty little spot it was, and if I am to develop any
new characteristics I shall plump for one, one that moves slightly
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according to the curvature and gaze of the eye. Not a bright green, more or
less misted. (12)
Furthermore, when her mother dies and Mary goes home to her father, he asserts,
“’You’ll stay,’” in response to which she puts on her mother’s “brown astrakhan coat”
and sets out for a walk around her childhood home (20). In this instance, Mary tries on
her mother’s identity to see if it fits her. As she imagines her life as her maternal proxy,
she decides it is not an identity she can don, returns the coat, and leaves her father alone.
Helen Thompson sees this rejection of the coat and her father as a refusal to “lock herself
into a caretaking role,” a role that she inevitably assumes when she accepts the job Tig
and Jonathan offer her (45). Mary feels a constant paradox in needing to separate herself
from her mother completely to create her own identity, but also in feeling a desire to
become her mother.
Mary’s most disturbing encounter with Lil comes after her death while Mary is
caretaker in England. She recalls one night when she was trying to sleep in the guest
bedroom her hosts had arranged for her, “Lil had the audacity to appear there one night,
swaddled in linen no less, and with a rosary swinging from her waist” (42). The
appearance of her deceased mother begins as a sort of religious experience, with Lil
preaching to Mary about the “joys of heaven and the writhing woes of hell,” swaddled as
Christ at birth and displaying a rosary (42). While at first Mary admits “love welled up in
me and I wanted to put my hand out and touch the earlobe, the cool, the white earlobe,”
her fond vision of her mother soon degrades into a disturbed fight against Lil’s attempt to
overwhelm her identity and intrude on her personhood (42). Mary imagines that her
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mother, “got into the bed, the single bed. It squeaked. I edged away. . . . She arched and
tilted and bowed her body so that she fitted exactly into mine, my tumescence and my
curves, her tumescence and her curves, and it felt as if we were being welded together, or
at least molded together” (43). This sexual intrusion by her mother and her attempt to
merge with Mary physically represents the unsuccessful separation of self from family
and country that results in Mary’s dysfunctional relationship to Lil. A presence that
could be positive and comforting, as this encounter first seems to be, turns out to be so
overbearing it is damaging. The mother figure here almost commits rape or molestation,
and the episode is fraught with sexual innuendo, for Mary was “afraid [Lil] might nake
herself” and Lil “kept adhering to me. Such suctorial sounds, such busying” (43). These
descriptions could be read as a maternal symbol of breast-feeding, but they are much
darker than that. It speaks much more of a maternal relationship that is disturbed,
inappropriate, and damaging, and one that must be escaped. Unfortunately, this intrusive
mother force presents itself as inescapable, for the ghostly appearance communicates that
it “would be resident here for all time, keeping a total watch” (43). The mother figure,
like the past, is intrusive, unwanted, and ever-present.
In Night, this mother figure can represent the unhealthy relationship to Ireland as
a motherland some Irish expatriates suffer. For O’Brien, Ireland is the mother of its
people, even if it is not always the healthiest one. In her memoir, Mother Ireland, which
was published only four years after Night, O’Brien’s opens by stating, “Countries are
either mothers or fathers” and quickly establishes that “Ireland has always been a woman,
a womb” (1). This analogy holds strong in Night, for, like Lil, Ireland is a force that
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incites tenderness and longing, but also occasions pain and abuse. The history of Ireland
can no more be escaped by an Irish citizen than the memory of an intrusive and
controlling mother can by a daughter. In a later chapter, O’Brien explains that she
victoriously “got away” from Ireland in her flight to England and sees Ireland as a place
that “had warped me, and those around me, and their parents before them, all stopped by
a variety of fears” (127). This same torn relationship to Ireland is present in Mary’s
struggle. She describes her homeland as “that old alma mater,” a nourishing mother,
which is also a “glorified bog” (30). She both loves and wants to be like her mother and
her motherland, but also finds each force overwhelming.
Like O’Brien, Mary flees her mother figure twice, both as mother and as
motherland, in order to establish a separate identity: once as a young girl, then again
metaphorically in Tig and Jonathan’s house after her confrontation with the ghostly
mother figure. As caretaker, her hosts, “ascribed to me . . . a single room with red
wallpaper, of the oxblood variety,” the site of the vision of her dead mother (42). In
response to this, she “gathered up [her] effects” and “appropriated the master bedroom”
(43, 42). It is in the small, red room suggestive of blood that her mother appears, and that
the inescapable history of Ireland haunts her. Like Mary’s relationship to the house as a
whole, the flight and relocation act as a metaphor for the attempt to escape the painful
history of Ireland through rejecting the Irish identity and appropriating that of the
oppressor. She rejects a room that symbolizes the Irish history of being relegated to a
degraded and violent existence where culture and heritage are not only disrespected, but
viciously destroyed, and adopts a room that represents the power and control of the
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people who decide the fate of the other. This is more than a simple shift of location for
Mary; this is a political shift that offers her power.
In his book In Search of Authority: An Introductory Guide to Literary Theory,
Stephen Bonnycastle asserts that in reaction to a colonizing force, dominated people have
three possible avenues: they can “stick with [their] own experience, and be relatively
uninfluenced,” they “can abandon [their] own culture and adopt that of the other,” or they
“can develop a response that mixes elements of [themselves] with elements of the other”
(232-234). Bonnycastle explains that some people “assimilate themselves to” the
dominant group “partly because this gives them some access to power, but also because it
allows them to constitute themselves as selves” (230). Of the three options, the first,
sticking steadfastly to one’s own culture, is difficult for two reasons: cultures in contact
with each other will almost inevitably influence each other simply by interacting in
everyday experience, and if a dominated group fights the culture of the oppressor, it will
only be more oppressed. The dominant group most commonly sees the other as “a
species of subhuman animal,” so if the oppressed group clings to its own culture, it only
becomes more animal-like in the eyes of those with power (Bonnycaslte 229). The
second and third options both pose avenues that are more likely to offer power and
respect to the oppressed, for both routes align them more closely with those who have
authority. In attempting to adopt the identity of the oppressor, a group can hope to gain
the power of that group and be seen as human again.
Throughout Night Mary attempts to appropriate the identity of the dominant
English culture just as she appropriates Tig and Jonathan’s bedroom. She slowly takes
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over more and more of the house and tries to claim it as her own. There is one room in
the house in particular that she feels ownership over, “I am possessive about that room. I
would like it to be mine. For instance, I objected to the snapshots, the ones of Jonathan
and Tig, as being too happy, too blasé. I removed them” (46). Here she tries to establish
ownership by ridding the room of the appearance of the previous owners, replacing their
presence with hers as the new master. She demonstrates her newfound power through
her dominion over the physical objects in the room, “There are balls on the points of
wires, and I play with them and tease them, and conk them together, and I make them
fight with one another and make up with one another and spin around” (47). Like
English rule historically did with the Irish, Mary acts as the puppet-master and tries her
hand at manipulation and oppression, which result in violence and turmoil among the
subjects.
Mary further associates herself with the identity of the oppressor rather than the
oppressed by assuming Tig’s clothing. When she brings a man home, she narrates, “In
removing my coat he said ‘Mmm.’ It was a ponyskin, one of Tig’s. I have managed to
pick the lock of the wardrobe and am on the lookout for a crowbar to invade the cellars”
(63). Helen Thompson asserts that “by borrowing Tig’s clothing, Mary attempts to adopt
Tig’s identity, either because she feels that she cannot attract another successful man with
her own personality or because she needs the protection of an assumed guise” (45).
However, an equally pressing option is that she adopts Tig’s dress in order to identify
with the group in power. She also speaks of the English royal family and says, “I like to
study their hairstyles and try out their deportment, I am very impressed with their
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deportment and their low-starch diets, which I read about in the magazines” (35). In
addition to trying on the oppressor’s costume, she tries to mimic their behaviors and
mannerisms.
In The Location of Culture, Bhabha discusses the use of mimicry in colonial
discourse as a tool of simultaneous self-elevation and other-devaluation. He states,
“mimicry emerges as the representation of a double articulation; a complex strategy of
reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power”
(86). In this sense, Mary’s appropriation of the other’s costume is an attempt to gain the
power of the other through similarity. However, Bhabha also notes that mimicry detracts
from that power by being “the sign of the inappropriate . . . and poses an immanent threat
to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (86). Through inappropriately
mimicking Tig, Mary detracts from the oppressor’s power by making it seem absurd and
showing her ability to impersonate it. In “Hysterical Hooliganism: O’Brien, Freud,
Joyce,” Thompson notes the inappropriateness of Mary’s clothes, her borrowed ones in
particular, “Mary wears clothes inappropriate to the occasions in which she finds herself:
lamé in the morning to walk home after a night of sex with Nick and his wife . . . and a
satin dress for a walk in the park” (45). These costumes which seemingly empower her
by aligning her identity with the dominant power at the same time degrade that power
through inappropriate use.
Most surprisingly, Mary adopts the linguistic habits of the oppressing culture.
When she meets a young Irishman at a New Year’s party, she returns his greeting of “Tap
o’ the morning’ to you” with “To hell or to Connaught,” which she notes is the “war cry
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of Oliver Cromwell” (26). Here, Mary aligns herself not simply with the English, but
with a particularly violent and oppressive image of the English. Cromwell, who subdued
Irish rebellion in the mid-1600s, used such violence in his attacks that, as historian Brian
Inglis puts it, “Cromwell’s name branded itself onto the national consciousness; to this
day, it comes first to mind wherever Ireland’s wrongs are recited” (58). The line “To hell
or to Connaught” refers to Cromwell’s order that all Catholics at the time relocate to
“holdings beyond the Shannon, in Connaught” so their land could be distributed to
Cromwell’s followers (Inglis 58). According to surveyors at the time, “over half the total
acreage of Ireland was replanted” (Inglis 58). Here, Mary not only recalls the violent
history of Ireland’s oppression, but aligns herself with the oppressors and claims her right
to unhome people and degrade their land and culture. Through her attempts to associate
herself with the dominant culture, she seeks an identity that might allow her to escape her
traumatic postcolonial past. However, such a shift cannot give satisfaction, for Mary can
never finally abandon her Irish history. The wrongs committed toward her people linger
within her regardless of the costume she wears.
Despite her living in England and her seeming desire to associate herself with
Englishness, Mary has a clear animosity toward the country and its people. She describes
herself as living “Among the foe. The Brits, the painted people” (49). Here, the British
are a clear enemy, and an enemy that is hidden and false. Mary acts out her hostility
toward the English in her relationship to the house. Although she is deeply attached to
the place and does not ever want to leave, during her stay, she commits small
indiscretions toward it, admitting, “Little does my mistress know. I have wrought
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innumerable stains and I am champion at spilling. Also, I scratched the hinges of the
escritoire with my thumbnail. I did it absentmindedly one afternoon or one evening when
I was idler or gamier than usual” (49). Unconsciously, Mary retaliates against the
oppression of the English in small ways when she can, despite her attempts to become a
part of that group. She enacts her revenge on the house as a way to undermine the
authority of the owners, just as an oppressed group desires to negate the authority of the
oppressor through hostile means.
The convoluted relationship of the Irish to Ireland evidenced by Mary’s struggle
to define herself against Irish identity is further exemplified by her son, Tutsie. Mary
notes Tutsie’s disconnection from Ireland, “There was always a bit of jam lodged
somewhere on his lips, so that the kisses had a fruitiness and brought to mind the
orchards of Coose, where he hailed from but scarcely knew” (71). Although Mary has
distanced herself from Ireland, she still has an intimate relationship with it. Her son,
however, is so distant he does not know the land, yet he “had the pall, a bit of the Coose
moroseness” (70). This pall, perhaps, places him in a more harmful position than Mary,
for he still carries with him the wounds of his people but is unable to understand why he
has these scars. As a reaction to his missing relationship with his homeland, Tutsie
travels the world because “he wanted to reach places that others hadn’t percolated to,”
and “he is determined to get back to nature cures” (7, 74). Because of this separation, he
feels an urge to reconnect to the land and get back to his roots. There is a sense of
homelessness about Tutsie, as he undertakes a perpetual search for his own beginning
that he will never understand.
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Mary, although temporarily rooted in the house in England, finds herself on a
similar search, one that has taken her through her past and that of her people and now
propels her into the future. Just before Mary finds the telegram from Tig expelling her
from the house, she seems to have come to a close in her night of mental wandering. She
explains that she is up and “limbering” now, “in command of an unusual feeling, a liking
for everything” (115). She compares this feeling to “that nice feeling that one has after a
convalescence, the joints are weak and the head inclines to reel, but the worst is over, the
lurid fever has passed” (115). For Mary, this night of meandering through her past has
been a way to recover from illness. If Mary is representative of the Irish postcolonial
consciousness, then the illness from which she recovers is most certainly colonization.
Like Veronica in The Gathering, by narrating her experience, Mary has found a way to
deal with this past. At this point she is able to consider a reattachment to Ireland, “Oh,
Connemara; oh, sweet mauve, forgotten hills, stay with me, bide” (115), a remark
reminiscent of that in the opening of the novel, “Oh Connemara, oh, sweet mauve ills,
where will I go, where will I not go now? Fucking nowhere” (4). In the second passage,
Mary addresses Ireland directly, but it is hopeless; there is nowhere for her to go. By the
end of the novel, however, the hills of her country may be forgotten, but she implores
them to stay with her and wait, leaving open hope for a reconnection.
Mary further establishes that the process of creating her narrative has helped her
cope with her past and allowed her a possible future in her closing reference to Thomas
Moore. As she opens with a quote from a Moore song, so does she close with one. In
her acceptance of her expulsion from Jonathan and Tig’s house, she says, “Gladly, too
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gladly I go. I refuse to touch my favorite surfaces, or to say anything in the way of a
bardic farewell. The harp that once through Tara’s halls is silenced, mute” (117). This is
a reference to Moore’s song “The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls,” which reads:
The harp that once through Tara’s halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls,
As if that soul were fled.-So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory’s thrill is o’er,
And hearts, that once beat high for praise,
Now feel that pulse no more.
No more to chiefs and ladies bright
The harp of Tara swells;
The chord alone, that breaks at night,
Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,
The only throb she gives,
Is when some heart indignant breaks,
To show that still she lives. (Moore 208)
Thus, Mary aligns herself with the harp that represents Ireland. As ancient Ireland’s harp
was silenced through violence and oppression, Mary’s singing has been silenced, but in a
very different way. She has, in effect, been silenced through Jonathan and Tig’s return
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home, for the hope and happiness she expresses before she receives the telegram
dwindles in these final sentiments, but there is a positive outcome in this as well.
Moore’s poem ends with a necessary heartbreak: freedom wakes “when some heart
indignant breaks, / To show that still she lives,” and so does Mary’s narration. Her
expulsion from the house breaks her heart but reveals life underneath. She has sung her
song and can now move forward. In these final lines she expresses both the frustration of
homelessness and the freedom of it. She closes by addressing “star of the morning,” a
sign that she is looking to the future rather than the past. She also ends with the intention
of movement, “let’s kip down on some other shore, let’s live a little before the awful allembracing dark enfolds . . . ” (117). Here, she suggests she will leave England, perhaps
to explore the world as her son is or perhaps to return to the Ireland that she just asked to
“stay with [her]” before the telegram. Ultimately, however, this is a hopeful image, for
she is partially freed from her past through her night of authorship, and she rejects her
attempts at appropriating the English identity and plans on living. She has served her
time as the harp that sings of Ireland’s past and now is moved to action.
When Mary receives the telegram evicting her from her home, she knows there
are two possible responses: she can remain passive or she can take control, and her first
response is “Of course I could squat or throw myself at their mercy, I could say I have
nowhere to go, I could implore, but the thought of that prostration galls me. Making this
my umbilicus, begging for crumbs, suckling on dry dugs” (116). Although she has
rejected Ireland as a mother in the past, here she is unwilling to allow England to become
her new mother. She does not want to become attached to this new country, which offers
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a no more healthy environment than her old, for this mother is dry and would offer no
nourishment or satisfaction.
Mary ultimately decides to abandon the house and by extension England,
“Begone, begone. Or maybe it’s me that’s saying it. Already I have such a dislike for
the place, such a loathing, an aversion, vengeance for the roof under which all the
auspices were meager” (117). Her stay in England has not only been unfulfilling, but it
has offered no promise of a hopeful future, for the auspices, or the omens, she has
received while there have been deficient. In response to this realization, Mary sheds both
her present and her past, saying, “Au revoir, Tig, au revoir, Jonathan, au revoir, Boss and
Lil and all soulmates, go fuck yourselves. I have been saddled long enough. It is time for
memory to expire” (117). Here, she declares farewell to her representatives of a
repressive English colonizing force and to Boss and Lil, who represent her traumatic past
as an Irish citizen. She further detaches herself from her “soulmates,” something she has
been unable to find in her love affairs. In all these relationships, she has been burdened
and her identity has been overshadowed by the force she aligned herself with. When she
says goodbye to all, she stands on her own, separate from her oppressive past and her
unsuccessful present. Most notably, she says, “It is time for memory to expire,”
indicating that she intends to live in the present from now on. Throughout the novel, she
has only been concerned with her past while her present existence in the house stood as a
holding pattern where she passively waited for her hosts to come home and reject her.
Now that they have come, she is forced into action.
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Instead of remaining the passive receptacle she has been, Mary decides to reject
the house just as it rejects her. She feels the house willing her to leave and determines
that she is the one who is truly in control. In her rejection of the building, she rejects the
oppressive force it represents. In this rejection, however, she does not find herself alone.
She asks the “guardian angel of vagrants” to “givvus eyes” and “lend us a hand,” thereby
establishing herself as a member of a larger group (117 my emphasis). This larger group
can be read as the recovering Irish people. The Irish, this closing line seems to establish,
cannot find sustenance through accepting English authority or succumbing to the English
identity, but rather must continue the search. There is no clear solution given here, for
Mary gives no direction as to where she is headed, but it does exemplify the process in
which Irish citizens are still mired. There is no clear and simple solution for them.
O’Brien does not have Mary tell the Irish what to do; instead, she simply mirrors the
problem in which they find themselves. There is no sustenance for the Irish in simply
singing of Ireland’s past, and there is no satisfaction in denying that their past impacts
them. Instead, they must keep pushing forward and looking for a solution that will
satisfy them, just as Mary is doing. Part of this solution may be rewriting Ireland’s
history on a national and a personal level like Mary, but part of it is also in action and in
moving forward. Looking back will not suffice.
Ultimately, Mary’s journey in Night exemplifies the struggles faced by Irish
decedents regardless of where they live. Despite her attempts to detach herself from the
painful parts of her Irish history, it is still a part of her, shaping her life. Through Mary’s
journey, O’Brien shows readers not only the pain people still face because of the brutality
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committed against their ancestors, but also the strength it takes to fight back. O’Brien
shows that despite the freedoms gained in Ireland, the fight is not done, for it must
continue on a deeply personal level. Mary, as a symbol of someone who has lost family,
country, and future, just as the “She” did in the opening epigraph by Moore, demonstrates
that denying the past or abandoning Ireland will not treat the wounds of the past. Instead,
she shows that the Irish must accept their history and the pain that comes with it, but then
move forward and continue discovering who they are and where they belong in the
world.
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Chapter 4
JOHN BANVILLE’S THE SEA
John Banville’s position in the Irish literary tradition is a site of contestation for
critics and for Banville himself, whose view of Irish literature is complex and shifting.
He has asserted his own separateness from the category of Irish literature; in fact, in his
early career, Banville claimed he did not believe “specifically ‘national’ literatures are of
terribly great significance” (Sheehan 76). He goes on to say that it is “foolish to say that
Joyce is an Irish writer or that that Beckett is an Irish writer. The fact that they were born
in Ireland or even wrote about Ireland is not really terribly important” (76). Later in his
career he admits that he “never felt part of any movement or tradition, any culture even”
(Schwall 17). He also asserts, “I am in this country but I’m not going to be an Irish
writer. I’m not going to do the Irish thing” (19). At the same time he distinguishes the
way Irish writers use language from others, “For the Irish, language is not primarily a
tool for expressing what we mean. . . . We have profound misgivings about words. We
love them--all too passionately, some of us--but we do not trust them. Therefore we play
with them” (“A Talk” 14). Derek Hand, however, in John Banville: Exploring Fictions,
points to Banville’s own admission, “every contemporary Irish writer has to take one of
two aesthetic directions: to follow either the path of James Joyce or of Samuel Beckett”
(Schwall 11). This indicates that Banville sees the impact of Irish literary history on the
Irish writer, for if each writer must choose from one or the other tradition, it certainly
suggests that the Irish literary tradition is alive and well in all Irish work.
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Critics are likewise split on what influence Banville’s country has on his writing.
In Contemporary Irish Literature: Transforming Tradition, Christina Hunt Mahony
describes Banville as “a unique voice in fiction in Ireland today” and distinguishes him
from other Irish authors, “. . . although his work is sometimes set in Ireland, it is not
really about Ireland. Questions of national identity do not engage this author” (237).
Rüdiger Imhof concurs with Mahony, noting that Banville has “turned to incontestably
non-Irish subject matter” and that Banville’s “true context,” rather than among the ranks
of Irish writers, “is the international level of what has, rightly or wrongly, been termed
postmodern fiction” (Imhof 7, 12). Imhof, like Mahony, thereby separates the discussion
of Banville’s literature from the discussion of the Irish literary tradition.
On the other side of the discussion, Kersti Tarien Powell, in “’Not a Son But a
Survivor’: Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Banville,” highlights that “Irish critics have dissented,”
citing Seamus Deane’s article “’Be Assured I am Inventing’: The Fiction of John
Banville” (200). Deane notes, “What we meet in his work is another version of that
brand of self-consciousness which has been such a distinctive feature of one tradition
(and that is the major one) of Irish fiction” (334). Deane further describes Banville’s first
three novels as having a “psychiatric accuracy” which is “part of the Irish historical
experience” regardless of how historically accurate the books are (337). Powell also
points to Joseph McMinn’s The Supreme Fictions of John Banville, an analysis of
Banville that “perceptively noted the central part that Irish historical landscape plays in
Banville’s fiction” (200). Although McMinn views Banville’s novels from a postmodern
perspective, he asserts that Ireland and Irish history play a central role in almost all of his
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works, “Aside from Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, every fiction by Banville, including
the plays, draws on an Irish historical landscape” (6). Derek Hand reads Banville’s work
in a distinctly Irish light, admitting that Banville’s key areas of exploration share many
elements of both modernism and postmodernism, but “concerns with the nature of
language, the imagination, art and the reality they connect with and supposedly map . . .
also possess a particular and peculiar resonance in a specifically Irish context” (4). He
then goes on to assert that by understanding the connection between Ireland and Banville,
one can hope to better distinguish the motivating factors in his work as well as come to
see the recreation of a “sense of Irishness” as an unresolved affair (19).
In The Sea, Banville may not be directly discussing Irish history and culture, but
the journey he portrays through his narrator, Max, is a distinctly Irish one. Banville
cannot simply ignore the issues of Irish identity and culture in his works even though
they may not be his focus, for his nation’s trauma is part of his cultural unconsciousness
and will inevitably affect the shape and construction of any narrative. The search for
recovery of self that Max undergoes mirrors the Irish search for a satisfying postcolonial
world. Max’s experiences of loss, grief, social ostracism, self-doubt, and ultimately selfexpression all exhibit the current Irish struggle to recreate a world that is satisfying in the
wake of decolonization, and viewing this novel as a manifestation of the Irish struggle
both adds to the depth of the novel and expands the contemporary discussion of the
progress of Ireland as a nation in the process of recreating itself.
The Irish plight can notably be seen in the relationship to mothers and fathers in
The Sea. There is a distinct lack of healthy father figures in the novel, and because of
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this, the narrator develops a peculiar relationship with the mothers. Max knows two
father figures as a boy--his own father and Carlo Grace, perceiving them as quite similar
in one key aspect: their cruelty. When Max first sees Carlo, the man gives him a wink
that is “faintly satanic” (6). As they become better acquainted, this comparison only
increases. Max regards Carlo as “unpredictable, even slightly mad” and “given to the
sudden feint, the unexpected pounce” (89). Carlo was a man who needed to be watched,
for at any moment he might “shoot out a hand quick as a striking snake” to pull hair,
pinch, or even “make a sham grab at one’s throat and laugh hissingly through his teeth”
(89, 90). In Max’s eyes, Carlo’s treatment of his wife, Connie, was equally animalistic.
While Carlo watches Connie at the beach, Max describes, “his nostrils flared wolfishly as
if he is trying to catch her scent. His look is one of arousal, amusement and faint
contempt; he seems to want to see her fall down in the sand and hurt herself” (24).
This viciousness toward family is also seen in Max’s own father. In the one
extended interaction shown between the boy and his father, he watches his father with
“disgust,” splash water in his mother’s face while he “seized her wrists and wading
backwards hauled her through the water. She shut her eyes tights and shrieked at him
furiously to stop” (27). He recounts that his father then turned on him, “upending me and
grasping me by the ankles and pushing me forward wheelbarrow-fashion off the edge of
the sandbank and laughing” (27). He notes that his father’s hands where strong “like
manacles of cold, pliant iron, I feel even yet their violent grip” (27). The interaction ends
with Max twisting “out of his grasp in a panic” and “retching” in the water (27). Max
further describes his parents fighting every night when they thought he was asleep until
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the winter the man “ran off to England, as fathers sometimes did, in those days, and do
still, for that matter” (53, 25). The violence here could be seen as only playful if Max
recounted any instances of his father that were positive, but the majority of what Max
says about his father is either about his violence or his abandonment of their family.
Max’s assertion that his father ran off to England “as fathers sometimes did” and that his
father “had to leave” point to this as a cultural problem, rather than merely a personal one
(25, 27).
Max’s negative relationship with father figures translates into an unhealthy
relationship with his mother and motherhood in general. When Max’s father leaves his
mother, her bitterness over the abandonment shifts to Max, so he undertakes the
responsibility of making up for his father’s wrong. Max describes his mother giving him
a “level look, harsh and unblinking” which, he says, she would “often turn on me after
my father had gone, as if to say, I suppose you will be the next to betray me. As I
suppose I was” (79). Because Max’s father abandons his mother, he is unable to leave
her as well, something natural for a child to do, without it being a betrayal. His mother’s
blame follows him into adulthood, for when he and his new wife, Anna, visit his mother
and take her to the zoo, she again accuses him, saying “I suppose you’d like to leave me
here, put me in with the monkeys and let them feed me bananas” (156). Then, when they
do leave, she “wept, backing for cover behind the open door of the flat, lifting a forearm
to hide her eyes, like a child” (156). Here, Max’s mother has been relegated to the
position of wounded child, a position Max should have occupied when his father left, yet
the boy is forced into the role of abandoning caretaker. Through his family dynamic,
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Max is forced to identify with his father despite his unwillingness to do so, and later in
life wonders, “am I turning into him?” (6).
The dysfunction in Max’s family is further seen in his view of pregnancy as an
adult. When his wife, Anna, suffers from stomach cancer, he describes the tumor, “. . .
there it was, squatting in her lap, the bulge that was big baby De’Ath, burgeoning inside
her, biding its time” (14). Then later, when Anna is in the hospital, she takes photos of
the patients, and Max notes one as striking, “a large and at first sight formal study . . . of
a fat old wild-haired woman with her slack, blue-veined legs lifted and knees splayed,
showing off what I presumed was a prolapsed womb. . . . heralding perhaps the mockbirth of the pink and darkly purple thing already protruding from her lap” (135). Both of
these instances show pregnancy gone entirely awry: rather than a woman’s womb giving
birth to life and a viable future, it holds only death and illness.
As in Edna O’Brien’s Night and Anne Enright’s The Gathering, the parental
relationships in this novel act metaphorically, especially since Max ties his family’s
situation to a national crisis with his assertion that running off to England is just
something “fathers sometimes did” and still do (25). The mother figure, wounded and
guilt provoking, represents Ireland, while the violent, abusive father who has hurt and
disposed of the mother makes a convincing portrayal of England. In Double Visions:
Women and Men in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction, James Cahalan notes that
“It is indeed telling and significant that while colonial powers such as England and the
United States were personified as men . . . Ireland, a country colonized fro eight
centuries, was mythologized as a woman” (15). He further asserts that the “tradition of
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personifying Ireland as a woman was originally a native one” but that “native images of
Ireland as a woman were appropriated and rewritten by English and Anglo-Irish male
colonialists into terms of righteous dispossession” (15-16). Daphne Watson, in “The
Cross of St George: The Burden of Contemporary Irish Literature,” also notes that
“England’s past and present relationship with Ireland has been consistent with a
subconscious defining of Ireland as a feminine ‘Other’ subject to an imperious male”
(40). The relationship depicted in The Sea, under these terms, does not personify
colonization, but rather the trauma of decolonization. The father in the story is violent
and dehumanizing, then absent. The story is thus not about what the father does, but
what happens after he leaves. Hence, Max represents the generation of Irish citizens who
still suffer to overcome wounds left by the past. He is left with a need to rescue the
mother/Ireland, but also with a desire to escape, a dilemma seen in Night as well. The
abusive father/England has left, but that does not mean that all is well. The children of
these past wounds are left to discover a way to cope with the trauma not only of having a
history of violence and oppression, but also of being part of a generation that is lost in
terms of self-definition and national allegiance.
This struggle to cope with the trauma of decolonization also manifests itself in
Max’s profound interest in Greek mythology. Banville opens the novel with Max
narrating, “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide” (3). Max goes on to
explain that he has interest not in “God, the capitalized one,” but rather “the idea of the
gods, that it, the possibility of the gods. I was a keen reader and had a fair knowledge of
the Greek myths” (54). This interest in the gods is expressed with his awe of the Grace
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family, who represent deities. Myles has the “marks of a godling,” Chloe the actions of
Pan, Connie is a “manifestation of the goddess,” and Carlo an “old grinning goat god”
(45, 86, 91). Max attributes the center of power to Carlo, “I think now that it was from
Carlo Grace I first derived the notion that I was in the presence of the gods. . . . he was
the one who appeared to be in command over us all, a laughing deity, the Poseidon of our
summer, at whose beck our little world arranged itself obediently into its acts and
portions” (90). Max’s interest, ultimately, proves to be an examination of the structure of
power. In his discussion on power structures in Orientalism, Edward Said reminds
readers that there is
nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated,
disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes
canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain
ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it
forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be
analyzed. (19-20)
The arbitrariness of power becomes especially clear in cultures that have suffered from a
social and political oppression, which inevitably requires the disempowerment of the
people.
Max, whose family is notably without any god-like qualities, has the opportunity
to understand the source of power and gain some for himself through association with
these representations of power. He admits, “What was it that I wanted from Chloe Grace
but to be on the level of her family’s superior social position, however briefly, at
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whatever remove? It was hard going, scaling those Olympian heights” (153-54). The
social separation in Max’s world is akin to the distinction between gods and humans, and
only through association does he think he can gain access to the power. Max’s family is
quickly established as inferior in his own eyes, for when Chloe and Myles stumble upon
his family, the twins only watch with an attitude expressing their view that Max’s family
is not interesting, but rather “peculiar only,” and Max’s immediate wish is to “[cancel]
my shaming parents on the spot, [I] would have popped them like bubbles of sea spray”
(28). Max further notes that his parents would never meet Mr. and Mrs. Grace, for
“People in a proper house did not mix with people from the chalets” (79).
However, Max is able to challenge, however briefly, the social structure of his
society, for he is allowed in with the Graces and comes to feel their godliness in himself.
At the height of his obsession with the Graces, Mrs. Grace in particular, Max notes when
he scratches his leg on fern that it does not bleed, but rather produces “a clear ichor,”
ichor being in Greek mythology the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods
(84). Here, then, Max has felt he can achieve that power and sees himself emulating the
god-qualities of the Graces. This would be the first inclination that the power he sees in
these godly people is not something innate in only them, for he has the same ichor that
they do. This is a clear indication for Max that power is assigned arbitrarily and is
therefore transferable.
In this context, Max’s later return to the home the Graces inhabited that summer,
the Cedars, represents an attempt to claim the power they had there. By returning to the
house when Anna dies and living in the rooms Carlo and Connie lived in, Max attempts
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to gain the power he felt as a child not by association anymore, but through
reappropriation. He is able to move up the social ladder as he aspired as a child, but only
through marrying Anna, who was wealthy and provided with the means he needed to act
out the “dilettante” he felt inside (153). Once she dies, he is again left without the person
who provided him social status. This time, however, instead of merely associating with
someone else “godlike” to gain power, he takes it upon himself to acquire it on his own.
Edward Said asserts of an oppressed people that “One of the first tasks of the culture of
resistance was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land . . . The search for authenticity,
for a more congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history, for a new
pantheon of heroes and (occasionally) heroines, myths, and religions—these too are made
possible by a sense of the land reappropriated by its people” (Culture 226). As the
Graces represent the oppressor and Max the disempowered, he must claim authority over
the house the Graces held before he can continue on his journey of self-discovery.
When Max first returns to Ballyless, he does not stop at the house because “There
are moments when the past had a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it”
(35). This fear is one that speaks to the decolonization experience, for the violent power
the oppressive culture had in the past is not absent in the history of the present. Just
because the colonizer is gone, it does not mean the fear is. Instead, the fear has been
ingrained in the disempowered group and so any attempt at reappropriating authority
would be couched in the fear of annihilation. However, when Miss Vavasour shows him
into the room that had once been the Graces and is now his, he sits on the bed and “felt
that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the
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destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must
stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me” (117).
On entering the house, he feels relief because he has overcome the initial fear and
trepidation one would feel at reappropriating a land that had been wrenched from one’s
possession. He opens his narration remembering when he was there “years ago, in the
time of the gods,” a time when others ruled what he felt that he should, a time when
power was arbitrarily ascribed to Carlo Grace, a violent and unfair dictator, but now he
has overtaken what was once the Graces (4). He has developed claim over what was
denied him, and now, as Said would have it, can continue his “search for authenticity.”
Max’s decision to return to Ballyless and claim authority over the power the
house represents is prompted by the death of his wife, Anna, a seemingly unrelated event
from the time he spent with the Graces as a child. However, in Max’s loss of Anna he
loses his sense of self, for Max is only able to define himself through his relationship to
another, as he does with both Anna and Chloe. This lack of self that Max suffers is
common among a postcolonial people. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin note that many
early postcolonial writers were “forced into the search for an alternative authenticity
which seemed to be escaping them, since the concept of authenticity itself was endorsed
by a centre to which they did not belong and yet was continually contradicted by the
everyday experience of marginality” (Empire 40). This experience of disbelief in
authenticity in general as well as of self is prevalent in Irish writing both directly after
decolonization and in contemporary writing. Andrew Carpenter, in “Double Vision in
Anglo-Irish Literature,” argues that the “Anglo-Irish writer from Swift to Hugh Maxton
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seems to revel in the exploration of and sometimes the triumphant defence of a personal
lack of security; his insecurity is, if you like, his roots” (177). This insecurity and
mistrust of authenticity is due in large part to the attempt of colonizers to not only strip
colonized peoples of their original cultures and social structures, but also to use violence
to keep “these enslaved men at arm’s length [and] to dehumanise them” (Sartre 13).
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, argues that
a colonizing force will do everything to “to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our
language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours” (13). This
leaves a colonized people with an undeveloped sense of self, their original identity ripped
from them, with no viable new one. Part of decolonization, then, is reestablishing an
identity capable of incorporating all aspects of the colonial experience.
Throughout the novel, Max clearly demonstrates this colonial experience of a lack
of self. He views himself as only an object of the world rather than as a subject by
recounting a dream in which he was trying to write his will “on a machine that was
lacking the word I. The letter I, that is, small and large” (52). In the dream he can only
speak of himself in the passive voice with himself as the direct object. In a will, it is
paramount for a person to claim authority over the objects they leave behind, but Max is
unable to do this, for he is the object, not the subject. Even in his waking state, Max sees
himself as an absence rather than a presence, describing at dinner with Miss Vavasour
and the Colonel, “I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian
something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in
the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible. It was very strange. I saw the scene as
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if from outside myself” (143). Here, the colonizer’s attempt to dehumanize the colonized
has come to fruition in Max’s view of himself as a “dark simian something” (143). He
does not see himself has having an identity because he does not see himself as human.
Max’s solution for his lack of self has not been a journey of self-discovery but
rather identification with others, specifically Anna and Chloe. Anna and Chloe are both
part of the upper class social word to which Max would like to belong, so by aligning
himself with them, it gives him the opportunity to view himself as part of this class and
have an identity with which he is satisfied. With Chloe, Max explains that he
experienced his first sense of “absolute otherness” and that she was the cause of his
awareness of “self-consciousness” (125). Declan Kiberd notes of the interaction between
England and Ireland that part of the development of self is through encountering the
other, stating, “it was from that other that a sense of self was derived. A person went out
to the other and returned with a self, getting to know others simply to find out what they
think of him or herself. This seeing of the entire world through the other’s eyes was an
essential process in the formation of a balanced individual” (48). This balance, however,
is not achieved in Max’s process, for with Chloe he does not try to know the other to
learn about himself, but rather so he can become more like the other he idolizes. Max
insists that since Chloe “was the one on whom I had chose, or had been chosen, to lavish
my love, she must be preserved as nearly flawless as possible, spiritually and in her
actions” (123). Her perfection is important to him, he explains, not because of her selfesteem, for “Her self-esteem was of far less importance to me than my own, although the
latter was dependent on the former,” but rather because “If her sense of herself were
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tainted, by doubt or feelings of foolishness or of lack of perspicacity, my regard for her
would itself be tainted” (124). Max’s self-esteem and identity are thereby dependent
upon his ability to view Chloe as the perfect Other he should aspire to. If his sense of her
is shattered, he loses the foundation for his self-definition and goes back to being a mere
“nothing.”
Max’s desire to become other is not something that he overcomes with age, for as
a adult with Anna, he develops an undifferentiated sense of self, expressing that although
he “never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have” and that
he has “always been a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct
someone” (160). When he met Anna, he saw that she “would be the medium of [his]
transmutation. She was a fairground mirror in which all [his] distortions would be made
straight” (160). Anna provides him with an identity because he can try to be a reflection
of her. In postcolonial terms, she provides him with the colonizer identity, but one that
cannot be sustained, for he admits in her he found “a way of fulfilling the fantasy of
myself” (159). It is ultimately only a fantasy that is not sustainable after Anna is no
longer there to act as the funhouse mirror. Once she dies, he is once again left with no
viable identity and must look for a new way to establish himself.
With Anna’s death, Max has two options: he can either remain dependent upon
her for identity and thereby experience a type of death himself, or he can establish
himself as his own person. Here, Max becomes analogous to Myles as the inferior twin
who seems more shadow than human. Myles exists as Chloe’s Other, dependent upon
her for his existence. From the beginning, Max describes Myles as the “voiceless other”
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(6). Later, in asking Chloe to explain the connection, the “state of unavoidable intimacy
with her brother--her other,” she explains that she and Myles are “Like two magnets . . .
but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing” (60). In this way the relationship
between Chloe and her brother greatly mirrors Kiberd’s description of Ireland and
England, for he described the relationship as having a “forced intimacy” and that despite
their dislike and mistreatment of each other, “Each nation badly needed the other, for the
purpose of defining itself” (6, 2). Chloe and Myles mirror this dynamic, for they want to
separate but cannot; they want to be independent but are unavoidably linked through their
opposition. Their relationship is even as abusive as Ireland and England’s, for Max
describes the play they participated in as more like fighting, and a fight that Chloe almost
always won. Max recounts at one of Chloe’s triumphs that Myles snatched
his fingers from her steely claws he threw his arms around himself--he
was a great clutcher of the injured or insulted self--and began to cry, in
frustration and rage, emitting a high, strangled whine, his lower lip
clamped over the upper and his eyes squeezed shut and spurting big,
shapeless tears, the whole effect too dramatic to be entirely convincing.
And what a gloating feline look victorious Chloe gave me over her
shoulder, her face unpleasantly pinched and an eye-tooth glinting. (81-82)
Myles, the Other, through Chloe’s triumph is made even more animal-like in his
“strangled whine.” Chloe, gloating in her domination, does not suffer from the pain she
inflicts, while Myles is used to coping with an “injured self.” This injured self is
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established through the continued domination he must suffer through, a domination
similar to that which Ireland suffered at the hands of England.
Although Chloe is abusive toward Myles, he is more dependent on her than she
on him. In fact, more than his sense of self, but even his life seems to rely on her. At the
climax of Max’s narration, it is because of Chloe’s mental state that the twins walk into
the oddly high tide together. After Myles goes to be with Chloe when she argues with
Rose about her sexual encounter with Max, Max recounts that the two calmly “stood up
and waded into the sea” where, once they were out far enough to be nothing but “pale
dots between pale sky and paler sea,” “one of the dots disappeared. After that it was all
over very quickly, I mean what we could see of it. A splash, a little white water, whiter
than that all around, then nothing, the indifferent world closing” (180). For the twins, the
suicide of one unquestionably requires the suicide of the other. Neither can stand alone,
and under Max’s estimation, it is Myles who follows Chloe to her death. It is not only
because of Chloe’s emotional trauma that the twins walk into the water, but Max asserts
that it is Chloe who goes under first, “I believe, I should say, on no evidence, that it was
Chloe who went down first, with Myles following after, to try to save her” (192).
Because the twins are linked, as Max thinks, with “an invisibly fine thread of sticky
stuff” and that they “were tied to each other, tied and bound,” there is no option of only
one going under. Once Chloe’s head ducks under the surface, it is inevitable that Myles’s
goes as well, for his being is entirely dependent upon her (60). As nothing more than
Chloe’s “voiceless other,” Myles cannot sustain an independent identity from his sister.
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Max, as Anna’s “voiceless other,” must decide at her death whether he will be
like Myles and follow her under, or if he will stay on the shore and recreate himself as an
independent person. Max yearns to follow Anna into the sea of death, for in the closing
line of the novel, he recounts what prompted his entire journey, Anna’s death. When the
nurse comes to tell him that Anna had died, “I turned and followed her inside, and it was
as if I were walking into the sea” (195). It is this event that prompts his journey to
Ballyless and to the ocean. With the loss of Anna, he already feels that he is following
her into the sea as Myles did Chloe, so he returns to Ballyless to better understand how to
cope with this experience. His journey, in fact, ends with his contemplating literally
walking into the sea. Max finds himself at the beach at night imagining he sees lights
bobbing in the water, just as he watched Chloe and Myles bob in the water, “I may even
have had some idea of wading into the sea and swimming out to meet them. It was at the
water’s edge, anyway, that I lost my footing and fell down and struck my temple on a
stone. I lay there for I do not know how long, fluttering in and out of consciousness,
unable or unwilling to move” (187). Max would have followed suit with Myles and
chosen to lose himself with the loss of his other, but luckily the unexpected savior figure
of the Colonel finds and brings him back to the Cedars. It is not quite through Max’s
own will that the choice is made, but ultimately because of the circumstances, a
combined rescue by the Colonel and a sea that “was on the ebb” rather than unnaturally
rising as it had been with Chloe and Myles, Max does not follow Anna into the sea and
remain the non-entity he has seen himself as, but rather he is given the chance to
complete the process of forming the balanced self Kiberd speaks of (187).
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This relationship, once again, speaks not of the struggles of colonization, but of
the difficulty of decolonization. Max and Myles both act as the colonized Other who has
been degraded and dehumanized. Myles in particular represents the dehumanizing nature
of colonization, for he is once described as a “wild beast . . . running in from the ferns
and snatching handfuls of food and loping off again, hooting and whinnying” (83). Max,
although allowed to keep his humanity, is still placed as the uncivilized Other in regard to
both Chloe and Anna. Specifically, Max’s name is criticized. When he first tells it to
Chloe as a child, she responds by repeating it, “as if it were a suspect coin she was testing
between her teeth. ‘Morden?’ she said. ‘What sort of a name is that?’” (57). Later with
Anna, readers find that Max has changed his name, for his mother notes, “’Why does she
keep calling you Max?’ she hissed at me when Anna had gone to the counter to fetch a
scone for her. ‘Your name is not Max.’ ‘It is now,’ I said” (156). Max, in order to fit into
Anna’s world, changes his name to one accepted by the dominant group, just as in Ireland
Irish names of places were changed to English names with colonization. For Max and
Myles, then, with the deaths of Anna and Chloe, they face an arduous process of
decolonization. They must redefine their entire identities and cultures in order to exist on
their own, a process that proves too difficult for Myles.
The Colonel, doing much more than saving Max’s life by stumbling across him
on the beach, gives him a way to develop his own identity rather than remaining
dependent upon others for his sense of self. The influence of the Colonel represents a
move back towards Irish identity and away from the English identity Max has been trying
to adopt. In the novel, the Colonel’s Irishness is undeniable. Max notes that the Colonel
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“does a good job of hiding his Belfast accent but hints of it keep escaping, like trapped
wind” and that further, “Miss Vavasour confides that she has spotted him on more than
one occasion slipping into church of a Sunday for early mass. A Belfast Catholic
colonel? Rum; very” (110). Not only does Max find it odd that the Colonel hides his
Northern accent, but further, he finds the combination of a Belfast Catholic Colonel
unexpected. The Colonel, as a figure who combines three complex identities, represents
the ability to have the identity Max so longs for. As a Catholic in Belfast, the Colonel
would have been the minority during the Troubles, but despite the discrimination he
would have faced, instead of changing who he was as Max has done, he moved
somewhere his identity would be more readily accepted. Although the Colonel tries to
hide his ethnic and religious identity, it escapes “like trapped wind.” This shows Max
that people are able to retain an identity that feels authentic even in the face of
oppression.
The Colonel further guides Max on his journey of self-discovery by giving him a
father figure who is encouraging and caring rather than violent and abandoning. Max
notes that as the Colonel walks, “at every step he swings out his left foot in a tight
sideways curve, exactly as my long-lost father used to do” (140). Further, when the
Colonel rescues him from the beach and brings him back to the Cedars, Max wakes to
find “a strange and unnerving scene” with the Colonel “pacing the floor with a frown”
out of concern for him and Miss Vavasour sitting “on a chair a little way off from me,
against the wall, sideways on, in the very pose of Whistler’s mother” (189). Miss
Vavasour and the Colonel, in this time of great insecurity and desperation for Max,
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provide him with the image of a caring mother and father he has lacked. In this instant,
he does not need to fear the father or take care of the mother. Instead, he is given the
freedom he needs to develop a sense of security.
The Colonel’s final act as Max’s savior comes in his parting gift, “a fountain pen,
a Swan, it is as old as he is” (193). Max notes of the gift, “I am graving these words with
it, it has a graceful action, smooth and swift with only the occasional blot. Where did he
come by it, I wonder? I did not know what to say. ‘Nothing required,’ he said. ‘Never
had a use for it myself, you should have it, for your writing, and so on” (193). With this
gift, the Colonel gives Max the tool that allows him to define himself through writing.
This new, healthier Irish pater familias gives him back the right to define his own identity
rather than remain dependent upon the colonial other. The push the Colonel gives him is
one that prompts Max to move from object to subject position, a move that mirrors the
struggle to move out from under the remnants of colonial oppression.
This move, however, is not as simple as it may seem. For the Irish, using writing
as a mode of self-definition is complicated by their long, traumatic history with the
English language. The linguistic problems present in a society where the native language
has been destroyed and the colonizer’s tongue has been imposed interfere with the ability
to use authorship to move from object to subject. Andrew Carpenter, in “Double Vision
in Anglo-Irish Literature,” notes that this relationship to language is a specifically Irish
one, explaining, “I find a constant and pervasive sense of authorial doubt and questioning
in Anglo-Irish literature--a questioning which is far less noticeable elsewhere” (174).
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin explain that this authorial doubt occurs in societies that
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have suffered from colonization, specifically, “that imperialism results in a profound
linguistic alienation is obviously the case in cultures in which a pre-colonial culture is
suppressed by military conquest or enslavement” (Empire 10). In order to cope with the
inability to express experience left by this alienation, authors consciously play with
words, allowing them to challenge the colonizer’s authority over language and
simultaneously claim, if not the ultimate meaning behind the words, at least the ability to
contort to words into necessary shapes of expression.
Max, as a narrator of his life, proves himself over-articulate to the point of
ineffectiveness. Throughout telling the story of his life, Max questions the words he uses
and how to express himself. For instance, he describes the experiences of his childhood
as “uncanny,” but then cites the oddness of feeling that they were uncanny, for
“according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known
returning in a different form” (8). Here, the words Max uses to describe his experiences
fail him, for the word and the experience do not match. When he calls himself, Chloe,
and Myles children, he rethinks, “were we children? I think there should be another word
for what we were” (63). Max further notes with seeming frustration at his inability to
find the right word, “how imprecise the language is, how inadequate to its occasions”
(49). He struggles to recreate himself by narrating his life because the language he has
been supplied is not adequate. The connection between linguistics and experience fails
him.
The self-referential nature of Irish fiction, as in The Sea, arises because of this
need for writers to re-adopt the English language into Irish culture in order to express
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distinctly Irish ideas and life. Yet, this leads to the hyper-awareness that the language
used is a construction and cannot fully represent the narrator because English is not the
language of the Irish land and history. Linguistic acts of expression for Irish writers in
English are, at least in some part, Irish ideas, perspectives, or experience translated into a
foreign means of communication. Neil Murphy notes of Banville that his “work is
overtly self-referential because the author is unwilling to allow us to accept the validity of
any of his fictions as final arbitrators of truth. His work is a process of stripping away all
epistemological systems until one is confronted with the essential mystery of
imagination” (106). In this way, Max’s inability or unwillingness to express himself
concretely is a strength rather than a weakness. For, his awareness of linguistics allows
him to tell his story, highlight for the reader the faults in language as a medium of
expression, and express the inauthenticity of anything called “truth.” Max, in discussing
his lack of identity, asks, “. . . where are the paragons of authenticity against whom my
concocted self might be measured?” (161). The issue of authenticity is highly
problematic for the postcolonial writer, for the world of “civilized self” and “primitive
other” was presented in terms of truth that the colonizer defined. Questioning what is
considered truth and how truth is created, then, resides at the heart of decolonization.
Max takes on the challenge of rewriting himself despite the linguistic challenges
this will pose for him. Once the Colonel gives him the pen which allows him to write, he
is able to begin the journey of recreating a hybrid identity that incorporates who he was
before he knew himself as an Other with Chloe and Anna and who he becomes after their
deaths. Through writing, he enters the process of decolonization with the authority to
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assert control over his identity. As the dehumanized Other, stripped even of his name,
Max suffers from an inability to see himself as anything other than an object at the will of
others. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin explain, in a society that is unable to define
what is authentic,
the simple relationship between the individual and language [becomes
problematic], replacing human nature with the concept of the production
of the human subject through ideology, discourse or language. These are
seen as determining factors in the construction of individual identity,
which itself becomes an effect rather than a cause of such factors. (Key
Concepts 220)
The problems with accuracy Max faces in writing thereby only allow him to more clearly
recreate himself through his narration, for Max becomes aware of the shifting nature of
language which mirrors the shifting nature of the self. Max can thereby use his newfound
power over language to create a satisfying identity that is no more “authentic” than the
language he uses. This knowledge frees him from the burden of the professed “truth” of
the colonizer and gives him the power to create what is true for him. Once free, Max can
begin the process of searching his past and rewriting it as an act of establishing a self
independent from the colonizing other.
In the past, Max has been unable to write at all about himself, and instead wrote
about art, art that he sees himself reflected in. In discussion of the painter Bonnard, the
subject of his book, and Bonnard’s wife, Max settles on discussing Nude in the bath, with
dog, where Bonnard painted his wife during her death (113). By examining the
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relationship of the artist and his wife and the art he created, Max hopes to understand
better his own relationship with his wife, “She too, my Anna, when she fell ill, took to
taking extended baths in the afternoon,” and “[we] shut ourselves away in our house by
the sea, just like Bonnard and his Marthe at Le Bosquet” (114). Rather than writing his
own identity, Max sees it mirrored in others, as the object in another’s art. However,
with the loss of Anna, he has lost his ability to even examine art to see himself, “I cannot
work. But I keep to my table, pushing paragraphs about like the counters in a game I no
longer know how to play” (30). Max further states that he is unable to work because he
has come to realize that he has “nothing of any originality to say” (30). With Anna’s loss,
he again becomes aware of his lack of self because his mirror is gone. This puts him in a
limbo state where he sees himself no longer quite as an object, but has not yet grasped
himself as a subject. It is not until the Colonel gives him the pen that he is able to start
the process of creating a balanced identity.
At the close of the novel, when Max’s daughter tells him he is coming to live with
her, he seems again to accept domination. Max says of his daughter, “She says it is time
I got down seriously to work. ‘He is finishing’ she informed her betrothed, not without a
gloss of filial pride, ‘a big book on Bonnard’” (191). Furthermore, when Miss Vavasour
says her goodbyes, Max explains, “Leaving the Cedars is hardly of my doing, I tell her, I
am being forced to it,” yet she tellingly responds, “Oh, Max . . . I do not think you are a
man to be forced into anything” (192). Most signs at the end of the novel point to Max
remaining as the passive object, allowing his daughter to dictate his identity as “art
critic,” just as his self was dependent upon Anna and Chloe before her. However, Max
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does not do what his daughter asks of him. He may return with her and move into her
house, but he does not go back to work on his “big book on Bonnard” as she hoped.
Instead, he uses the pen the Colonel gave him and writes his own story, creating his
identity through telling it. Max is no longer burdened with a typewriter with no “I,” but
holds a pen that represents the inescapable connection to Ireland and the Irish identity he
has been lacking. Through this, he is able to write with smoothness and is at no shortage
for the letter “I” in what he composes.
Like Enright’s Vee and O’Brien’s Mary, Max has discovered the will and the
power to face the process of decolonization. Max’s struggle to cope with the loss of his
colonial powers, Chloe and Anna, shows readers that even when the oppressor leaves, the
struggle is not complete. Through Max, Banville demonstrates the great hole left in
Ireland from its colonial past and the many struggles Ireland’s citizens must still face
despite their freedom. The process of decolonization is long and arduous, and, as Declan
Kiberd states, “it was less easy to decolonize the mind than the territory” (6). Through
The Sea, Banville shows the journey Ireland and its citizens have ahead. Max does not
pose the end goal for the country, but rather the starting position. Max has taken up his
pen to write who he is, just as the Irish must continually claim their right to create and
recreate who they are in the wake of their past.
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Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
In addition to the three figures discussed earlier, Irish novelists such as William
Trevor, Val Mulkerns, Colum McCann, Mary Morrissy, and Sebastian Barry, to name
only a few, are currently experiencing unprecedented success not only in Ireland but on
the world stage as well. This success speaks to each writer’s ability to address personal
and social concerns that are deeply localized, yet also universally accessible. This ability
to dually appeal to such a wide audience while still working through specifically Irish
issues speaks to the complexity of the works currently produced. The creation of cultural
artifacts in Ireland is bound to be a complex one given the psychological journey its
citizens must progress through. Despite cultural and economic prosperity, Ireland has not
yet discarded the effects of eight hundred years of English colonization. For Irish
citizens, years of violence, forced relocation and exile, and degradation of cultural values,
art, and language created doubt for the people in their authority over Irish history and
identity. The process of Irish decolonization began long before England rescinded its
authority over much of Ireland and will continue long after freedom was gained. Each
generation of Irish artists and writers makes progress towards a healthier, more firmly
established sense of Irish personal and national identity, but the process is far from
finished.
Frantz Fanon, in his treatise on an oppressed nation’s reaction to colonization,
argues that the literary process through which writers progress during decolonization
takes place in three stages. In the first stage, “the native intellectual gives proof that he
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has assimilated the culture of the occupying power” (179). The second stage is one in
which the “native is disturbed” because of her or his alignment with the colonizer and
“decides to remember what he is” (179) which requires the reexamination of “old
legends” and “bye-gone days” (179). The third and final of Fanon’s stages is “the
fighting phase,” in which the oppressed “turns himself into an awakener of the people;
hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature”
(179). This “final stage,” as Fanon calls it, took place in Ireland in the early twentieth
century during the fight for freedom from colonial rule. The Irish authors and activists of
the early 1900s made huge strides towards decolonizing the land and the minds of
Ireland. Writers like Douglas Hyde, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, and Lady
Augusta Gregory worked tirelessly to establish Ireland as an independent nation from
England that could produce its own literary and cultural identity. These authors faced the
struggles of a generation attempting not only to gain its long sought after freedom, but
also to cope with the psychological trauma of Liam O’Flaherty, and Elizabeth Bowen
continued this trend into the mid-twentieth century even after the Republic of Ireland had
won its independence. These authors truly were the fighting authors Fanon speaks of, for
they used their literature to spur a beaten country into its sense of nationhood. This,
however, was not the end of Ireland’s colonial struggle.
Despite Fanon’s insistence that there are three phases of colonial literature, a
fourth stage exists, and it is this fourth stage in which contemporary Irish writers find
themselves. Ireland has established its independence and its national literature, and
although the people have successfully decolonized much of the Irish land, the
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decolonization of the mind remains a continuing process for years to come. The three
authors discussed in this study all work to cope with the lasting effects of colonization in
their writing. Anne Enright, Edna O’Brien, and John Banville’s works exhibit the
symptoms of a traumatized nation even though all three authors have lived the majority
of their lives with a freed Ireland. In their novels, all three, despite their varying subject
matters, examine Irish place and displacement; national, familial, and personal history;
the impact of the loss of the Irish language; the need to recreate a satisfying sense of self;
and the role of narration and authorship in establishing a personal identity in the wake of
decolonization. All of these traits are symptomatic of a nation still struggling to integrate
a traumatic colonial history with a present sense of cultural and national freedom and
productivity.
These traits appear as a much larger cultural trend among contemporary Irish
authors. In addition to these three writer, Sean O’Faolain’s 1989 novel And Again?
works through the ways a distorted understanding of personal and familial history in
Ireland can interfere with the construction of a satisfying personal identity. Brian Friel’s
play Translations (1980) directly addresses the impact of the loss of the Irish language on
a person’s sense of self and ability to express oneself adequately. Seamus Deane notes
Thomas Kilroys’ Double Cross (1986) and Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1985) as speaking
to the Irish “anxieties of naming, speaking, and voice and the relation of these to place,
identity, and self-realization” (14). In “New Ireland / Hidden Ireland: Reading Recent
Irish Fiction” Kim McMullen discusses six contemporary Irish writers--Roddy Doyle,
Jamie O’Neill, Colm Tóibin, John McGahern, Nuala O’Faolain, and Patrick McCabe--in
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terms of their relationship to a colonial past. She asserts, “The persistent presence of the
past animates, to a considerable extent, the current renaissance of Irish fiction,” including
the novels of the six authors her study examines (126). The focus of contemporary Irish
authors on postcolonial themes is more than a trend, but rather a symptom of a nation of
people still struggling with their sense of personal identity. These authors, through the
journeys their narrators undertake, exemplify the process of self-conceptualization Irish
citizens still undergo. The books not only guide the author on her or his own journey, but
also mirror, and thereby validate, the experiences of an entire nation.
Irish literature, like all national literatures, is complex and multifarious; therefore,
viewing it from a variety of theoretical angles can only add to the depth of understanding
of Irish literature and culture. However, neglecting the postcolonial aspect not only
denies a deeply important piece of the psychology of the works, but negates the
seriousness of the country’s history. Denying the lasting effects of colonization on a
nation such as Ireland that suffered violent and degrading oppression for centuries both
minimizes the trauma of the past and legitimizes British actions. Colonization is not
something that can simply be undone with the colonizer’s withdrawal from the nation.
Instead, the trauma a culture suffers is passed down across generations, and even in a
freed state like the Republic of Ireland, the people must learn with each new generation
how to cope personally with national history, despite the advances of their predecessors.
When critics view the texts Irish writers produce through a postcolonial lens, it not only
recognizes and validates this struggle, but it also adds depth to the novels themselves and
to the understanding of Irish history in general.
93
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