UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
CATEDRA DE STUDII ANGLO-AMERICANE
PROGRAMA ANALITICA
Titlul cursului: Twentieth Century Irish Fiction
Titularul cursului: Florentina Anghel
An de studii: III, semestrul 2
Specializarea: ID Limbă şi literatură română - Limbă şi literatură engleză
TEMATICA
James Joyce
Dubliners
Crossing chronotopic borders in ”The Dead”
A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Stephen's Quest of the Father as a Quest of Identity
Depersonalization through Individuation in Joyce's A Portrait
Epiphany
Seamus Deane
Narrative Strategies Reading in the Dark
The Identity Problem Reading in the Dark
Repetition compulsion. A Freudian approach to Reading in theDark.
Reaching silence in Reading in the Dark
William Trevor
The identity problem in Fools of Fortune
Indulging in suffering. Reshaping love in Fools of Fortune
Bibliografie selectivă
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bucureşti: Prietenii Cărţii, 1993.
− Dubliners. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.
Bahtin, M. Probleme de literatură şi estetică. Trans. Nicolae Iliescu. Bucureşti: Univers, 1982.
Coste Didier, Narrative as Communication, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989
Deane Seamus, Reading in the Dark, New York, Vintage Books, 1998
Delaney, Frank. The Celts. London: Grafton, 1989.
Durand, Gilbert. Structurile antropologice ale imaginarului, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 1998
Genette, Gérard. Figures I, II, III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969, 1972.
− Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell
University Press, 1987.
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Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Ryah Hackney. The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book.
Avon, Massachusets: Adams Media, 2004.
Lintvelt Jaap, Incercare de tipologie narativă, Punctul de vedere, trad. Angela Martin,
Bucureşti, Univers, 1994
Moody, T.W., and F.X. Martin, eds. The Course of Irish History. Lanham. United States and
Canada: Roberts Reinhart Publishers in association with Radio Telefís Éirean, 2001.
Trevor, William. Fools of Fortune. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
Evaluare
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JAMES JOYCE
(1882-1940)
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a
fairly prosperous southern suburb of Dublin. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was from
Cork, where the Joyce family had been merchants for some generations, and where they
had married into the O'Connell family, who claimed a connection with the famous Daniel
O'Connell, "the Liberator." James Joyce was the eldest surviving child; two of his
siblings died of typhoid, a disease encouraged by the family's poverty.
But in 1888, when James Joyce was sent to board and study at Clongowes Wood
College, most of these embarrassments and tragedies lay in the future. Clongowes, run by
the influential Jesuit order, was perhaps the best preparatory school in Ireland (sons of the
wealthier Anglo-Irish families were often sent to still better schools in England). Despite
the repressive picture he paints of the school in Portrait, Joyce later spoke warmly of his
experience there; unlike Stephen, whom we only see unjustly punished, Joyce received
punishment that he admitted he deserved on several occasions, including once for bad
language. Joyce was a good student at Clongowes despite his youth, and in some ways
never abandoned the habits of thought with which the Jesuits inculcated him. But public
events in Ireland were equally important to him, at least as they reached him through the
talk of his parents and their friends.
Joyce's relationship with his father appeared friendly to others, while Stephen's is
increasingly bitter and tense. At parties Stephen is aloof, while Joyce, who could indeed
be distant in manner, was also known for his songs (he had a voice of professional
quality), his impersonations, and his occasional manic, spidery dances.
His family fortunes continued to worsen, in part because Joyce's father had been a
paid canvasser for Parnell. Joyce began attending the Jesuit Belvedere College in Dublin
in 1893. The following year, in a nation-wide examination, he won one of the top prizes,
or "exhibitions," worth twenty pounds. That year or the next, he began to patronize local
prostitutes. Meanwhile, he was chosen Prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary
at school, an honor meant to recognize both his academic achievements and his moral
character, and one that might well indicate that the boy was thought to have a vocation
for the priesthood.
Joyce's University experience was crucial in forming his character and public
image. Modern thought and modern art were condemned or ignored. When Joyce began
to enthuse about the playwright Ibsen, who had been praised by the London intelligentsia
for years, he gained a great deal of local notoriety as a dangerously radical thinker. By the
time he left University College Joyce had met a number of figures in the Revival,
including Yeats, George Russell, and Yeats's patron and collaborator Lady Augusta
Gregory.
In 1902 Joyce graduated from University College with a rather undistinguished
B.A., briefly enrolled as a medical student, and in December left Dublin for Paris, armed
with introductions from Yeats and others and the possibility of supporting himself
meagerly by writing book reviews for newspapers.
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Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of stories about people who are too timid and conformist
to see things as they really are. The stories are case histories, all pointing to Joyce
diagnosis of “moral paralysis”. The stories in Dubliners deliberately employ musical
effects and imagery with a precisely calculated effect. Another device is the use of
repeated motifs in the action. The same action or relationship recurs in different forms at
various points in the plot. Thus Gabriel, in “The Dead”, is rebuffed by Lily at the
beginning, by Miss Ivors in the middle, and at the end by his own wife. Another repeated
motif is mourning. In addition to the examples already referred to, Gabriel, in his after
dinner speech, mourns the passing of old-fashioned hospitable virtues, and the guests
discuss the great singers of a bygone era. Complementing this is the idea of the
anticipation of death expressed in the idea of ‘going West’, and the talk about monks who
sleep in their coffins. They link it with previous stories, in which thoughts of the dead and
dying repeatedly occur.
Joyce’s use of symbols in his stories is exactly what Pound required: images of
everyday objects, occurring naturally in the action of the stories. The only fantastic
images are reproductions of the characters’ own fantasies, like the child’s dream of the
dead priest in “The Sisters”. The author’s imagination works entirely upon ‘these present
things’ to endow them with extra-significance. What is new about Joyce’s practice is the
intensity and consistency of his use of this device.
Another point about the symbolism is its explicitness. There is nothing vague
about the correspondence between the image and its meaning. Its interpretation is clear,
although various symbolism devices are employed.
One such device is the use of personal names, such as that of Gabriel, the central
character of “The Dead”. In Hebrew mythology the angel Gabriel is the prince of fire and
the angel of death, as befits this character’s attachment to warmth and his dull,
compromising existence. Warmth itself, in the form of the cosy interior of the house as
opposed to the bleak cold of the winter night outside, is another symbol – of huddled
sociability and cosseted lust. As such it is imported into the story from common speech,
where warmth conventionally suggests these qualities. Much of the symbolism in the
story is of this kind, as for example the symbol of the goose. The wild goose is the
conventional Irish symbol for the man who, refusing to surrender his freedom, flees
abroad. Gabriel is a tame goose: his ventures abroad take the form of holiday cycling
trips with friends. To refer again to common idiom, his goose is cooked and he is called
to carve it. Colour symbolism is also involved in the image of the cooked goose, which
has lost its whiteness and become well browned, and the white snow outside is opposed
to the cosy interior (not to mention the ubiquitous and bogus guest, Browne).
The significance of all these symbols is derived from a common code, already
available in the reader’s mind before he starts on the story.
Other significant
correspondences are created in the course of the narrative. Thus Gabriel tells a family
anecdote about a horse so conditioned to working a mill that it failed to trot out proudly
‘with the quality’, walking round and round in a circle instead. Additional symbolism
inheres in the detail that it was ‘King Billy’s statue’ – symbol of the English yoke – that
the horse walked round, and from Gabriel’s insistence that the mill belonged to a glueboiler (boiling down the bone of dead horses). As he tells this story himself walking in a
circle, he present a parable of his own enslavement.
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In addition to such analogies there is a pervasive metaphoric pattern, which
polarizes contrasting moral attitudes – living death versus life in death. The inhabitants of
the warm, brown, cosy world are still alive, but at the cost of spiritual death. The pure
uncompromising world of snow has begun to melt. Those, like Michael Furey, who
belong to that world are dead, but Michael ( the highest angel) will always live in the
memory of Gabriel’s wife. Nevertheless this moral pattern is not unambiguous. There is a
lot to be said for staying alive physically, and the guests are not condemned in Joyce’s
presentation of them. They are presented with sympathy and affection.
All the images are clear. There is nothing mysterious about them. They are coded
messages that can be deciphered and translated into non-figurative terms. The image in
the end of the story, Gabriel’s vision of the falling snow, is different, it seems that it
cannot be adequately interpreted ( the force it represents is beneficent, Gabriel’s vision is
a sign of returning health). The snow no longer stands in a binary opposition of life and
death but it reconciles that opposition.
Crossing chronotopic borders in The Dead
People generally define their existence by considering the spatial and temporal
coordinates which they transformed into instruments helping them to measure their life
and coordinate their actions. In his poem “Crossing the Bar” Tennyson saw death as an
escape “from our bourne of Time and Space” (Tennyson, 1215), thus, memorably
limiting human existence, through temporal and spatial conventions. Both time and space
owe their importance to man who, by inventing them, minimized and limited himself.
With his acute sense of history, Yeats states “man has created death” in his poem “Death”
(Yeats, 2193).
Man’s mind, yet, refused to stay in line and, after investigations, scientists
discovered that time and space are relative notions and even that they can be represented
through one another. If one can accept temporal relativity, it is much more fascinating to
understand spatial relativity, mainly possible because of “pathological” experiences such
as hypersensitivity to spaces (Cotrău, 42). Chronotopic studies in literature are related to
Bakhtin who published a study on space and time Forms of Time and Chronotope. He
introduced the concept chronotop defined as the essential connection between the
temporal and spatial relations artistically turned to good account in literature. Bakhtin
sustained the indissoluble character of space and time, time being seen as the fourth
dimension of space (294). Thus, time is condensed, becomes visible while space becomes
more intense and enters the movement of time, of the subject, of history (294); they are
understood and rendered through one another (294).
Besides Bakhtin’s theory I would also mention Bergson’s philosophy of a
durative time, measuring the intensity with which people live their life events and a pastpresent simultaneity that he promotes in relation with an implicit spatial simultaneity
(1995). Investigations of man’s psyche showed that man’s perception of things is relative
in both intensity (time) and form (space). Such theories reflected in a literary work lead to
various time-space interrelations analysed in such works as Genette’s Narrative
Discourse (1988).
This study aims at bringing evidence to sustain spatial and temporal relativity
restricted to James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” published in his volume Dubliners. As
we deal with time and space, a contextualization of the short story is more than welcome,
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if we consider the revolutionary theories in philosophy, psychology and literary theory at
the beginning of the twentieth century. I mention the contextualization for the sake of a
theory of synchronicity, since a work of art is more or less determined by the time when
it was written. Joyce’s work suggest his being informed about aesthetics and philosophy
starting from Plato and Aristotle to his contemporaries.
The title of the short story, “The Dead”, is a violation of people’s ability to
perceive reality, as it suggests a state beyond human existence, therefore beyond temporal
and spatial boundaries. However, the characters in the story act within chronotopic limits
being presented in a very common situation: “the Misses Mokan’s annual dance” in “the
dark, gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr.
Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor” (Joyce, 1995: 122).
Joyce uses spatial units, enclosures contained in other, larger enclosures,
attempting boundlessness. The main space is the house of Gabriel’s aunts, vertically
presented: the guests have to go upstairs where the party takes place. While what is
represented in space is generally perceived as a quantity, the aunts’ house suggests a
qualitative perception of space (Cotrău, 44): the ground floor, being closer to the streets
of Dublin, may suggest an ordinary perception of the Anglo Irish cohabitation at the end
of the 19th century, somehow dissimulated by a pragmatic adjustment for survival. By
going upstairs, Joyce’s characters acquire freedom within a “highly spiritual“ space: they
can freely talk about their condition, promote their tradition, revive Irish customs by
creating a space within a space, an oasis of Irishness. They actually attempt a syntopy
(Cotrău, 40), simultaneity of spaces which paradoxically is supposed to mean a denial of
their contemporary spatial context, although their space is part of this contemporary
space. They mentally revive a past creating a contemporary simultaneity. Similarly,
temporal sequences are self-contained while the house artificially suggests separation
between present − the ground floor, Gabriel’s contemporary Dublin, and past − upstairs,
Irish customs revived within an Anglo-Irish cohabitation.
The space that the characters create is not isolated because they make it interfere
with elements of contemporary cohabitation. The conversation between Miss Ivors and
Gabriel stands for a dialogue between free Ireland, space suggested by Miss Ivors’
invitation to an “excursion to the Aran Isles” and by her mentioning other places with old
Irish resonance like Connacht, where Gabriel’s wife is from. Her almost aggressive plead
for preserving Irish customs and language, for promoting Irish history is made visible
through “… the large brooch which was fixed in front of her collar” and which “bore on
it an Irish motto” (130). Miss Ivors’ effort to revive the past deepens her into the present
as she wouldn’t have worn the brooch, had the British not conquered Ireland. The effect
is twofold: on the one hand it encloses past and present, Irish and Anglo-Irish spaces
making them all interdependent and simultaneous; on the other hand it sharpens the
discrepancy between a pure past/free Ireland and the contemporary Anglo-Irish Ireland.
The dialogue brings several glimpses of the outside present into the inside
present: when Miss Ivors calls Gabriel “a West Briton” (130); when Gabriel admits to
himself that he writes a column in The Daily Express (131) (a British newspaper); when
Gabriel states that Irish is not his language (132) and culminates with Gabriel’s words:
“O, to tell you the truth, I’m sick of my country sick of it!” (132). Another moment that
relates the present with the past is Gabriel’s speech in which he describes the past as a
“more spacious age” because of the great names of the singers and of the qualities of
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humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour (142). The present is described as a “less
spacious age” (142) because the new generation lack all those qualities and names. He
sees their gathering as a revival of the past tradition and the people present there “cherish
the memory of the dead” (142).
“The Dead” in the title, which apparently refers to the fact that the guests used to
mention dead people in their conversations making the latter be always present at their
gatherings, may also be a metaphor for the past and present fusion, for the Irish space
vertically and horizontally coexisting with the Anglo-Irish space. Since the story is
presented from Gabriel’s perspective, Joyce also reveals the “map “ of his protagonist’s
psyche, torn between Irish tradition and European openness. Gabriel’s speech doubled by
his thoughts and attitude emphasizes the uselessness of his aunts’ effort to revive the dead
past.
The event the short story focuses on represents a cycle that at least the three ladies
and Gabriel’s family re-experience every year. The narrator announces it in the
introduction but also contextualizes it both spatially ad temporally. Although a routine,
the event is not comfortably received by Gabriel who, for the first time, is late. Such a
detail creates a slight tension and anticipates differences, as the reader may expect the
short story to reveal and overstep the routine of these annual meetings. While describing
everything Gabriel sees and hears in detail, Joyce makes him reveal the space where the
dance takes place and where the refreshments are served in time. It is a three dimension
conquer of the party in time:
‘I’m the man for the ladies,’ said Mr Browne, pursuing his lips until his
moustache bristled and smiling in all his wrinkles. ‘You know, Miss Morkan, the reason
they are so fond of me is −’
He did not finish his sentence, but, seeing that Aunt Kate was out of earshot, at
once led the three young ladies into the back room. The middle of the room was occupied
by two square tables placed end to end, and on these Aunt Julia and the caretaker were
straightening and smoothing a large cloth. On the sideboard were arrayed dishes and
plates, and glasses and bundles of knives and forks and spoons. The top of the closed
square piano served also as a sideboard for viands and sweets. At a smaller sideboard in
one corner two young men were standing, drinking hop-bitters. (Joyce, 1995: 127)
He uses the focalization technique, starting from larger spaces and presenting
objects and details, therefore, three dimension spaces linearly described by passing from
one point to another (space presented in time): the back room, two square tables in the
middle of the room, the caretaker straightening a large table cloth − a movement
suggesting that people need time to perceive space−, sideboards, dishes arrayed, the top
of the square piano.
“What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space”
(Joyce, 1993: 253), yet, objects can be apprehended in time by “passing from point to
point, led by its formal lines”, by analyzing its parts which may make the beholder “feel
the rhythm” (Joyce, 1993: 253) of the object’s structure. What makes Gabriel pass his
time is what he hears and what he sees. To be more precise in the interdependence spacetime, Joyce chose to show how music (audible) is followed in space:
“Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of
runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. (…) The only person who
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seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board
or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and
Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page”. (Joyce, 1995: 129)
There are two movements suggesting time-passing: “The hand racing along the
key-board” and Aunt Kate turning the page. Any movement implies time-passing as it
unites two points drawing a line: The “nebeneinander” expressed by “nacheinander” in
Joyce’s Ulysses (49). To suggest the same thing Joyce makes Gabriel’s eyes “wander to
the wall above the piano” (Joyce, 1995: 129).
It is obvious that Joyce wants to follow the chronological sequence of events as
they are perceived by Gabriel during the party. Thus, he needs one page to inform the
reader about what Gabriel sees while his aunt is playing the piano. He actually replaced
the audible through the visible, time and space becoming interchangeable. However,
there are moments when Gabriel gets lost in his thoughts, time becomes durative in a
Bergsonian way.
The story is structured on more complementary plans. A parallel chronotopic
matrix is related to Gabriel’s wife and their relationship. Gabriel is never close to his wife
at the party, he even admires her and notices her being caught in by the Irish spirit of the
party, which he does not share. The physical distance between them spatially marks their
difference in opinions and attitude. When they get closer, it is obvious for him that they
are not compatible since she seems absent, turned on the past, while he belongs to the
present and projects his future plans outside Ireland, in Europe. Their marriage is an
almost metaphoric coexistence of different spaces and times: she is more domestic and
related to a dead past and space, Gabriel is expansive and oriented towards outer spaces.
Gabriel’s investigation of her chronotopic limits turns out to be painful: he finds
out the love story that marked her youth and that she could not forget; the memory of the
young fellow who died because he had waited in the rain to see her is more present than
Gabriel is. He actually gets aware of her living too much and too intensely in the past
with a dead person while he becomes almost absent. He is also fascinated by people’s
tendency to ignore the now and here for the sake of a then and there, which implicitly
supposes a past-present synchronicity and a here-there syntopy.
Chronotopic limits can be crossed at the level of the narrative by using
anisochronies (Genette, 86) and anisotropies (Cotrău, 42), which render the story
fragmentary but also reinforce the idea of spatial and temporal simultaneity. The time of
the short story combines the Greek and the Hebrew paradigms, namely the cyclic time
and the linear time. Within the Hebrew linearity according to which time meant a “linear
succession of instants” (Cotrău, 48), we can speak about a chronology of events: the
guests come to party, they sing and dance and eat at the party, they leave the party. To
disrupt the possible boredom of such a monotonous process, Joyce also implied a cyclic
representation of time, the Greek paradigm, rendered through recurrence or eternal
present. The entire event organized by Misses Morkan is repeated every year, Gabriel has
to deliver the speech and cut the goose: ‘It is not the first time that we have been
recipients − or perhaps, I had better say, the victims − of the hospitality of certain good
ladies.’ He made a circle in the air with his arm and paused” (Joyce, 1995: 141). This
routine determines him not to believe in freedom and entraps him in an endless cyclic
movement similar to that of the horse that he laughs at in his joke.
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Besides these two patterns, the reader can identify several epiphanies which are
characterized by “timeless eternity” (Cotrău, 48), or duration according to Bergson’s
viewpoint. The first one happened when Gabriel realized that there was grace and
mystery in his wife’s attitude ”as if she were a symbol of something”, perhaps a
regressive/catamorphic symbol as he would suggest in the title of the picture he
imagined: “Distant music” (Joyce, 1995: 146). Another epiphany appears in the end,
when Gabriel’s identity “was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world
itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling”
(Joyce, 1995: 156). With Joyce, we cannot speak about pure time, the time patterns
mentioned above overlap one another assuring the complexity of the work. Besides the
concrete spaces such as the house, Dublin’s streets, Gabriel’s bedroom and the garden,
there are references to Irish space and a very interesting syntopy at the end of the story
when Gabriel sees his wife’s dead lover, Michael Furey, in his garden.
James Joyce’s temporal models were illustrated in his portrait, realized by
Brâncuşi, and representing a vertical line and a spiral, meaning coexistence of two
fundamental time paradigms − the Greek and the Hebrew −, which implies coexistence of
spaces, too.
A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Stephen's Quest of the Father as a Quest of Identity
Being a novel with a predominant masculine presence "A Portrait" raises the
patriarchal problem reflected in the relation father-son and engaging the son's identity in
an endless quest of the appropriate father. The process of psychological maturing follows
a spiral circuit implying on the one hand a slow progress and on the other hand the
reiteration of what might suggest the finding of Stephen's bearings in himself or the
opening towards himself. As the relation father-son evolves from the biological level to
the spiritual one the individuation of the hero draws an ascendant line from the concrete
to the abstract, from the exterior to the interior paradoxically reaching the climax with an
abyssal depth.
The quest of the father, which automatically becomes the quest of his identity,
makes Stephen experience a series of cycles similar to initiations. During each cycle the
hero finds a father and he also escapes his father's influence through a tumultuous
euphemized "fall". This perspective supposes the reinterpretation of Icarus' myth which
acquires positive meanings if we take into account the evolution towards the status of the
artist. The archetype of the father is inexorably linked to height and power and on the
other hand to the "sovereign domination" so that knowing the father means both flight
and rebellion, the defiance of the parental power by acquiring knowledge, experience,
therefore power.
The attempt to conquer the heights as a result of "associating the sky with the
monarch" / father determines all the heroic "filiations" of the "sons of the sky".(Durand
1998, 137) Thus the Icaric leap must be seen as an ambitious, heroic way towards the
heights while the son detaches from his earthly father by ignoring the latter's advice and
by following his aspirations which overtake Dedal's. The apparent carelessness of the son
stands for his ability to overstep the human limits engaging himself in an instinctive reply
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to the sun's call. The euphemization of the Icaric leap leads to the depreciation of the
artisan father who becomes "a technician" in D'Annunzio's opinion. 1 With Gabriele
D'Annunzio Icarus is raised to the rank of an artist while Dedalus is only considered a
technician, which shows that Icarus' submission to Helios overwhelms his submission to
his father.2
Icarus' leap and fall represent only a step in the concatenation of the events which
mark the artist's life seen as an initiation by Durand: sacrifice, death, thumb birth. At the
end of the fourth chapter Stephen realises that life has a sinuous evolution and it cannot
be complete unless all the stages are gone over: " To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to
recreate life out of life!" The last stage stands for rebirth, for the perpetuance of the
artistic personality in creation preceded by the other stages which suppose the leap and
the fall until the character gets lost and tries to find himself again in another cycle. The
same stages are crossed by the hero several times during the quest first of his biological
father and later of his imaginary father, Daedalus. The quest implies cycles in spheres
like history, religion and art. Each level of the artistic becoming supposes the assumption
of an identity in accordance with the hero's chosen father.
Confusion is echoed by his rejection of the religious father embodied by Father
Dolan who unfairly punished him or by Father Arnall who vividly pictured a terrifying
hell and a threatening God. Although he had been led toward church since he was a child,
Stephen couldn't embrace it as he was disappointed by the churchmen. Simon encouraged
his son to follow this way but the first contradiction appeared when Parnell died being a
victim of the church. On the other hand Stephen's artistic maturity is constantly denied by
the priests and he is forced to remain "a son". This attitude expresses the fathers' fear of
not being replaced by their sons.
Depersonalization through Individuation in Joyce's A Portrait
Supposing that myths represent depersonalized dreams3 and one's dreams are the
most personal and involuntary manifestations of one's unconscious, Joyce's work shows
an extremely complex method of deliberately becoming impersonal. A simple analysis of
his work (A Portrait) makes the reader approach it as a "buildungsroman", which is a
traditional way of presenting the novel. Yet, other critics chose concepts like
"metamorphosis" or "transformation", seen as partly deliberate or, anyway, dependant
upon the main character. Attempting an interdisciplinary analysis, namely psychological
and archetypal, one may confer more value to the text by plunging into its latent
meanings. I prefer Jung's term "individuation" meaning psychological growing up which
refers to the discovery of those aspects that make one different from the others, therefore
unique.
Following the line of the psychological portrait, Joyce seeks to make both reader
and Stephen understand the investigation of the unconscious depths by using concrete
elements which are to be deciphered. The text becomes a puzzle for the hero, for the
reader and, unexpectedly, for the writer himself who needed ten years to create the image
of a moving consciousness. The book is much closer to an intriguing dream because it
1
Harkness Marguerite, Storytellers and Patriarchy: from Simon Dedalus to Father Daedalus in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man Voices of the Text, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1990, p.68
2
E. Harding, Les mystères de la femme, Payot, Paris, 1953, p. 223
3
C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, New York, Pantheon, 1959
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avoids the positivist explicit concatenation cause-effect, despite its being classified as a
realist piece of literature due to Joyce's decision to use real names and stories.
Apparently simple in the beginning because of its language and apparently complex in
the end because of the way in which Stephen uses some theories to explain his feelings
and thoughts, the work turns out to be fragmentary, dense and hermetic in the beginning
and explicit and "limited" in the end, "limited" since it offers an answer to the initial
problems.
Stephen's individuation could be considered successful because in the end he
seems a well-balanced individual aware of his unconscious. Yet, considering his
deliberate exile / isolation and his need to project the unconscious element in some
external "inherited forms" called archetypes, the process of psychological maturation may
be perceived as a failure unless one takes into consideration the fact that the character is
an artist in formation. For Jung projection is an "unconscious automatic process whereby
a content that is unconscious to the subject transfers itself to an object so that it seems to
belong to that object. The projection ceases the moment it becomes conscious, that is to
say when it is seen as belonging to the subject."4 Stephen seen as an artist would mean
that he wants to share his experience, which could be done by "translating" his
unconscious element that has become conscious into some forms people can understand
and interpret. The great artist is a person who possesses the "primordial vision", a special
sensibility to archetypal patterns and a gift for speaking in primordial images that enable
him or her to transmit experiences of the "inner world" through art.5 Thus, Joyce's
complexity leads to parallel approaches - psychological and archetypal - applied to the
same work in order to reveal his opinion about the process of creation, depersonalization.
In A Portrait Joyce defies Bachelard's theory concerning the becoming of water
by presenting a reversed process, the water euphemization. A metaphor for Stephen's
psychic becoming, euphemization echoes the steps from physical suffering to awareness.
Internal water appears as "watery eyes" and "tears" in the first chapter suggesting the
hero's weakness, then "dew" - "the purest water" - in the last chapter. The dew
overwhelms the artist not only through its purity and perfection but also through its
"sweet" firmness. Nothing in Stephen resists it. Furthermore, he tries to prolong this unity
with the divine mediated by the dew, as awakening means fall: "His soul was waking
slowly fearing to awake wholly."
In between the two hypotheses of the internal water, several projections in
external water forms support Stephen's individuation. Thus they become metaphors for
the way Stephen perceives society. Cold and dirty, limited by the walls of the ditch,
doomed to continue backwardness, to acute opaqueness completed by its fluidlessness,
always marked by human touch - implying the social element - the water in which
Stephen is "baptized" embodies all his fears.
The other form of the external water is the sea seen at night and represents the
dark and cold water as the epiphany of death for Stephen who notices that the relation
water-death confirms his transience. The sea he saw did not mirror him, it was the sea
whose darkness makes it an eternal and immense danger, the image of the unplaited death
4
Idem, p.60
C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, New York, Harcourt, 1933, -- in A Handbook of Critical
Approaches to Literature, 3d edition., New York, Oxford UP, 1992, p.168
5
11
seducing its victims in whispers: Parnell's death becomes the epiphany of Stephen's
death.
The doubleness of water also appears in the episode with the Icarian flight,
echoing the cosmogony of the Bible mythology according to which the sky was made by
separating it from the waters through land. The mirroring of the sky in the water sustains
its aquatic origin and creates the illusion of the unlimited depth of the sea. "A prophecy
of the end he had been born to serve", Stephen's name, Dedalus, implies death/"end" - it
is not physical death but an exhaustible flowing of the creative personality into the work
until it disappears behind or beyond the text once it is finished. This means both
"auctorial death" and reaching the end the artist was born to serve. The water presented in
this paragraph is seen at day time as the sea-water in the epiphany with the girl.
Dew is not the water of death unlike the other forms of water which were
connected to material - concrete death or spiritual - abstract death. Stephen's fusion with
celestial water represents the last step in his artistic becoming after an optimistic refusal
to protect himself in the dark water of the beginning of the novel. The hero's successful
individuation is supported by the water euphemization as a way towards creative
impersonality.
Epiphany
The paradox of Joyce’s epiphany would be the fact that any thing which is around
the artist, any repressed or forgotten monet that he has lived, any moment that he is to
live may represent sources for epiphanies and yet, he shouldn’t wait for them, he
shouldn’t wait for the epiphany to happen but to look for it.
The concept of epiphany as Joyce sees it does not correspond to the religious meaning
it has in dictionaries: 1. a Christian festival which takes place on the 6th of January
commemorating a manifestation of Christ to the Magi; 2. an appearance or manifestation
especially of a deity; 3. in literature a) a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the
reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or
commonplace occurrence or experience; b) a literary piece of work presenting such a
moment. With Dan Grigorescu epiphany refers to the legend of the Holy Ghost coming
over Christ’s head, during the mystery of baptism.
According to M.Kain Joyce’s epiphanies are not insights because the latter contains
the commentaries of the narrator while with Joyce the epiphanies are some sketches
which are not commented on. These epiphanies are generally introduced by ‘He was
sitting/ standing…’ implying spiritual activity only. According to Dan Grigorescu
Joyce’s epiphanies ‘were some sketches observing some ordinary moments the narrator
wasn’t going to transform into pieces of literature: communication is produced by
mentioning the most insignificant gesture, the fragments of some objects which
simultaneously turn up. In fact it is a sort of prose anticipating the American
behaviourism, echoes of naturalism, of narrative poem in prose.
Joyce’s epiphanies may be classified as: epiphanies of the surroundings,
epiphanies of the history, epiphanies of the disgust characterized by ambiguities, figures
of speech, exploitation of the phonological level of language. They belong to the
subjective world manifesting themselves as dream and visions.
Bibliography
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bucureşti: Prietenii Cărţii, 1993.
12
− Dubliners. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.
− Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1961.
Bahtin, M. Probleme de literatură şi estetică. Trans. Nicolae Iliescu. Bucureşti: Univers, 1982.
Bergson, Henri. Eseu asupra datelor imediate ale conştiinţei. Trans. Horia Lazăr. Cluj-Napoca:
Editura Dacia, 1993.
− Gîndirea şi mişcarea. Trans. Ingrid Ilinca. Iaşi: Polirom, 1995.
− Mind Energy: Lectures and Essays (1919). Trans. H. Wildon Car. London: Macmillan,
1920.
Cotrău, Liviu. The Scythe of Time. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Napoca Star, 1999.
Durand, Gilbert. Structurile antropologice ale imaginarului, Editura Univers, Bucuresti, 1998
Genette, Gérard. Figures I, II, III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969, 1972.
− Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell
University Press, 1987.
− Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1988.
Tennyson, Alfred. “Crossing the Bar” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fifth
edition, vol.2, Abrams M.H. (ed). New York and London: W.W.Noton & Company, 1986,
1215.
Yeats, William Butler. “Death” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Fifth edition,
vol.2, Abrams M.H. (ed). New York and London: W.W.Noton & Company, 1986, 2193.
13
SEAMUS DEANE
(1940 - )
Born in Derry in Northern Ireland in 1940, Seamus Deane was educated at
Queen’s University in Belfast and earned his doctorate at Cambridge University. He
taught literature at University College Dublin for many years but he currently teaches at
the University of Notre Dame. As a poet, he published Gradual Wars (1972), Rumours
(1977), History Lessons (1983), Selected Poems (1988). His first novel, Reading in the
Dark, appeared in 1996 and was followed by Wizard (1999). He contributed to literary
criticism and also promoted the image of Ireland in non fiction works: A Short History of
Irish Literature (1986); Strange Country (1999); Future Crossings. Literature between
Philosophy and Cultural Studies (2000); The Irish: A Short History (2003).
Narrative strategies Reading in the Dark
Enchantment and frustration wrap up readers’ mind while they are letting
themselves be caught in the magic web of an almost fantastic soul openness. On the edge
of diary, fairy tale, social and cultural document, latent poetic document, Seamus Deane’s
unnamed narrator confesses the complexity of Irishness. Written at the end of the
twentieth century, Reading in the Dark pays its tribute to a century of impressive
narrative innovations − deliberate fragmentariness and ambiguity, intertextuality,
complex point of view, the identity issue insisting upon impersonality, repetition and selfreflectiveness. The more striking the similarities with other works and styles, the deeper
and more challenging the differences, so that the novel is an invitation to explore the dark
beyond the text.
Built on contrasts and ambiguity Reading in the Dark, gathers up in a harmonious
combination of narrative techniques the answers to the readers’ expectations. First of all
it announces itself as a self-discovery, self-revelation, an illumination of the unknown
(dark) paratextually promised in the title. Reading, a half-creative process, implies the
decoding of a given text; in the dark annihilates the given text, which simply leads to:
reading equals a creative process. Reading, and not creating or imagining or dreaming,
reveals the author’s awareness of his being a product of the hard work of an Eliotian
initiation into the authorial secrets so much theorized and debated on during the twentieth
century; the product of the intermingling of social, cultural and historical events. Reading
becomes creating as it suggests the exploration of the abyssal depth beyond the textual
surface of the narrator’s life, of the novel’s world. Therefore, the title stands for a
metaphorical reflection of the novel.
Although the title suggests an external projection of one’s thoughts −
investigation of something that already exists−, the diary-like form of the novel implies
telling about one’s thoughts and feelings, internal projection, while the novel imposes a
conciliation of the two: telling about reading in the dark, a deeper self-revealing through
an implicitly metafictional novel.
Reading in the Dark is a work merging the form of a diary, as dated entries
chronologically arranged lure the reader into a confessional work, and that of a novel, as
every entry has a title and the body is structured in chapters. Both titles and dates seem to
avoid their immediate tasks as most of the titles lack artistic depth while the dates betray
a retrospective selection of events closely connected to each other, which stands against
14
the idea of diary (a daily record, esp. of the writer’s own experiences, observations,
attitudes, etc.) (Webster, 1994: 399).
The ambiguous form that Seamus Deane gave to his novel supports the ambiguity
of perspective and of content. The ambiguity of perspective is an outcome of the first
person narrative, the use of an internal narrator who reveals his most intimate thoughts,
fears and feelings. Although at the beginning fragmentariness makes the novel look like a
diary, reading on to its end reveals a deliberate retrospective selection of the only events
that could have assured its coherence and unity. Disappearances, a subchapter referring
to an innocent response to a clown’s performance at the circus (“Everyone was laughing
and clapping but I felt uneasy. How could they all be so sure?”) may be connected to the
field where birds disappear and to the mysterious disappearance of McIlhenny. All the
characters know something about McIlhenny’s disappearance and Eddie’s death, they all
had contributed to them, but they pretend not to know anything. The reader experiences
the suspense of an investigation and the unexpected evolution from circus/fantasy to
reality. Towards the end of the novel the reader is given the impression of knowing more
than the other characters, being equal to the narrator. Yet, the dark frustratingly absorbs
the protagonist’s need to communicate and makes the novel’s end sink in silence.
Emptied of magic, the last subchapter After mirrors his parents lives and seems to clear
up the dark of the entire novel in a telegraphic style:
The beginning and the end of her [mother’s] relationship with McIlhenny, the
death of Eddie, the birth of Maeve, the disappearance of McIlhenny, marrying my father,
Una’s death, her mother’s, her father’s death, our births, Maeve’s marriage… (240).
Another argument supporting the confusion created by the diary form and the
confessional tone of the novel is the use of the approximate dates followed by gaps that
may stand for approximate memories: something that might have happened in February
1945 looked like what is written in Stairs, the first subchapter. The mature return to such
an event echoes a deliberate “deconstruction” and “reconstruction” of the story with
challenging dark gaps. The protagonist’s struggle to tear up the dark secrets resulted in a
painful finding:
her small figure at the turn to the stair; when I had left home, that was how I
remembered her. Haunted, haunted. (242)
and his father:
The man behind the door, the boy weeping in the coal shed, the walk down that
dusty road, the ruined rose bed, the confession in the church, his dead, betrayed brother −
Was that all? In a whole lifetime? How bitterly did he feel or was he saddened into
quietness? How much did he know or not know(238) […] he so innocently lay(246).
S.Deane’s narrator does not conceal the pain of finding out life’s secrets, pain that is
shadowing the thrill of discovery, although reading in the dark resulted in a successful
understanding of his world: haunted by secrets and innocent in the dark.
Despite the chronological unfolding of the events imposed by the diary-form of
the novel there are frequent internal and external analepses meant to unpuzzle the forest
of mysteries and secrets overwhelming the reader. Grandfather’s story about Eddie, the
15
narrator’s uncle, is an external analepsis, as it goes back to a moment before the first
narrative. Besides, the impression of fragmentariness given by the isochronies is
reinforced by stories within stories and the oscillation between fantasy and reality.
Repeated titles of diary-entries invite the reader to retrospective associations of
events, which makes it easier to follow the evolution of each character. They are treated
both as individuals (separate entities), which contributes to the mysterious atmosphere
and fragmentariness based on the lack of communication, and as a family united by their
own secrets. Repetition is much more complex and it takes different forms: one and the
same story told twice in Eddie November 1947 (8) and Haunted December 1953 (168)
becomes almost unrecognizable standing for evidence of the impact of six years on the
narrator’s soul, mind, information, way of seeing things. Differences induce awareness of
the protagonist’s metamorphosis from a prisoner of magic to a mature person initiated in
what life in postwar Ireland meant. While the former story sounds like a fairy tale with
unnamed characters strangely wrapped in legendary magic, the latter − despite some
elements of exorcism and superstition outlining people’s mentality − seems well
anchored in reality, the characters have names and belong to the narrator’s social context.
Being aware of the ambiguity of a multitude of perspectives more or less reliable,
more or less subjectively altered, the reader could experience and enjoy the novel’s
incertitude. He is given more and more puzzle pieces, some of them insistently “refalling under his eyes” and stubbornly directing him outwards, like a centrifugal force.
Crazy Joe seems to be an exotic distraction apparently dragging the narrator out of the
gray flow of events, although he was the piece the narrator looked for:
It was Crazy Joe who almost completed the story for me. He was regularly
consigned for periods to Gransha, the local asylum. (195) (…)
He tapped his forehead with his finger, beaming at me.
“Eternal Youth. The secret of the insane.”
He took a step away, turned round again.
“That’s what punishment does; makes you remember everything.”
(…) So that was the tip-off, Joe? Joe identified McIlhenny as the informer? It
seemed unlikely, but there it was. (201)
Sergeant Burke turns out to be another important puzzle piece, despite his being
placed among the negative characters. Similarly unexpected disclosures and intricacies
contribute to the suspense of a detective story. Each time the narrator got a story, he
reviewed and reorganized the possible evolution of events without forgetting to doubt:
But everyone who had been there was dead or in exile or silenced one way or the
other. And how did I know I had been told the truth? (217)
Seamus Deane tried to foster the personality of the most impersonal I. The writing
I is the Unknown, the Unnamed and probably the “Unnamable”, the Other who can find
or figure out a meaning in the dark. I stands for the sensitive and creative personality of
an author who uses his life to foster an almost fantastic story. Although the author makes
his narrator elucidate mysteries and illuminate the dark gaps, he cannot give a name to
the product and the creator of all these. The intimate I telling such a touching story with
tenderness is deliberately impersonalized by being given no name. I could say that
16
Seamus Deane goes further than James Joyce who used a prophetic name for his
character.
The narrator can also be seen as a manipulator who feeds the reader’s imagination
with sequences of his real life and tries to lure him into a world of darkness where logic
and reason have been “sucked into a great whirlpool of flames”.(5) He has no interest in
identifying himself as he oscillates between confession and creation while the reader
hesitates between sympathy and frustration. Emotion charged moments piercing the
narrator’s most intimate thoughts and feelings alternate with fragments of objectively retold fantastic stories about legendary exorcism, a housekeeper trapped in a country house
with two changeling children, a field where birds disappear.
The reader becomes the prisoner of a diary-like novel whose most important parts
are missing. He is therefore invited to find a meaning in the dark gaps that do not fail to
deepen between the diary’s entries. The narrator gives the impression that he himself is
caught in the same trap and tries to figure out a meaning for himself and for the reader.
Yet, the mechanism of the narrator’s imagination trying to create order, to solve the
mysteries and the feuds by practicing his storytelling is revealed to the reader in the
subchapter entitled Reading in the Dark. The author might have wanted to convey the
idea of creatively reading the text of the world and what he gets to is the fiction beyond
the fiction in a mock-diary.
In a novel like a long self-discovery and self-formation through integration and
initiation into an adult world of secrets and mysteries, the reader is introduced to an
unshaped and unnamed person. The young boy becomes a “recipient” where mysterious
disappearances, family and political problems, murders and fantastic stories gather to
darken his childhood. The separate pieces given at the beginning of the novel eventually
converge in a meaningful and resigned story. Each character has a secret and the narrator
unwillingly becomes their mute confidant.
The dark atmosphere, characterizing the novel in point of setting and inner life,
deepens with each new entry in the boy’s diary. The confessional tone of the book heavy
with sadness reveals the impact of the bitterness of the unspoken secrets on a boy who
can “read them in the dark”. His ability to understand and keep the grown-ups’ secrets
unexpectedly leads to aloofness and rejection on behalf of his “confessors”. Inheritor of
sadness and bad social relations within an Irish postwar context the narrator makes his
characters die and bury their secrets with them. His writing/telling the story of his life
comes as a therapy helping him to escape the “ghost” that separates him from the others
and unload the burden of his sadness.
Reading in the Dark October 1948 is an innocent, honest and direct description of
the narrator’s initiation in storytelling: education/cultural background: the narrator
reading the novel The Shan Van Vocht; imagination and involvement: the protagonist
imagining a dialog with Ann, the heroine of the novel; creativity: the narrator trying to
continue the novel in the dark; ability to use the text of his own experience: the impact of
a story inspired from reality upon readers; and the ability to transform reality so that it
could include latent messages “behind and above”. Two short fragments clearly illustrate
the author’s intention to involve the reader in an exploration of the deliberate dark in his
work:
17
I’d switch off the light, get back in bed, and lie there, the book still open, reimagining all I had read, the various ways the plot might unravel, the novel opening into
endless possibilities in the dark. (20)
I felt embarrassed because my own essay had been full of long or strange words I
had found in the dictionary − “cerulean”, “azure”, “phantasm” and “implacable”− all of
them describing skies and seas I had seen only with the Ann of the novel. I’d never
thought such stuff was worth writing about. It was ordinary life − no rebellions, or love
affairs or dangerous flights across the hills at night. And yet I kept remembering that
mother and the butter on the table, while behind and above them were those wispy,
shawly figures from the rebellion, sibilant above the great fire and below the aching, high
wind. (21)
The above texts strategically placed in the first chapter invite the reader to look
for the author’s message beyond the text, reminiscent of Joyce’s artist who, “like the God
of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,
refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (J. Joyce, 1993: 256) Thus,
the almost innocent directness and concreteness of the storytelling may be understood as
a need to catch the attention of any reader while a hidden message will always be there
for those who want to figure it. The novel abounds in apparently individual short stories
similar to Joyce’s epiphanies, revelations in moments of sadness that projects the writer
into a creative space.
If we consider the social and historical context of postwar Northern Ireland, the
narrator might have set himself as an ordinary Irish child who had to cope with his life in
an ordinary Catholic family to strategically depersonalize the narrator by rendering a
concrete common frame sunk in sadness, so touching for any reader. The family story
that remains incomplete, since the tensions are only repressed and not solved, is a
reminiscence of the nationalist novel The Shan Van Vocht (meaning The Poor Old
Woman, a personification of Ireland).
In a less obviously self-reflective novel, Seamus Deane succeeded in
interweaving an unnamed internal narrator telling anisochronous stories, repetitions of
real stories magically filtered or variants of possible stories, intertextuality, multiple
points of view and epiphanies. Complex and original in technical combinations and form,
Reading in the Dark proves to be an inexhaustible novel written for all exigencies.
The identity problem Reading in the Dark
Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark deals with Ireland’s postcolonial problems
and presents them from a child’s perspective. A mixture of magic and reality, this work
succeeds in defining the Irish social and cultural space in contrast with the colonists’
aggressive attempt to impose their culture and laws. Although the action is placed after
World War II (1945-1971), the novel in its entirety takes the reader back to the Irish
cultural revival of the late nineteenth century, which may also be seen as a return to
innocence. With Anne Fogarty, the Irish revival was a movement seeking “to fuse culture
and politics”: “It aimed to foster the burgeoning energies of nationalism and awaken a
spirit of national pride by re-evoking the archetypal, memorial landscapes of the Celtic
past and by re-inventing romanticized images of the primal purity of the countryside of
the West of Ireland” (Fogarty 80).
18
The unnamed narrator helplessly witnessing the evolution of a common Irish
family encapsulates in his apparently ingenuous story all the aspects necessary to offer a
thorough description of his contemporary historical and political context. Thus, the novel
intermingles cultural elements (fairy tales, myths, religion, legends, superstitions,
language) with social elements (family, social problems, social gatherings) with historical
elements (World War II, the British colonisation, the Irish fight for independence) and
with the maneuvering within the community in order to gain control and power
(Webster’s 1113).
Depicting an evolution from childhood to maturity, Reading in the Dark
introduces the reader into the realm of Celtic fairy tales, myths and legends, creating the
image of an innocence violated by external (social and historical) intrusions. Therefore,
most of the cultural elements aimed at defining the Irish identity become metaphors for
the alteration of the cultural identity. For example, the changelings, human children
whose souls have been taken over by fairies, may stand for the Irish who have lost their
tradition and culture. The legend with the people haunted because of having broken a
moral law encodes the Irish’s reluctance to the British-Irish collaboration. The metaphor
of the Field of the Disappeared suggests a spiritual involution since the field appears as a
magic “island” where the souls of the Irish are taken, where the Irish tradition and culture
are buried.
According to Irish legends there are fairies whose children are stunted or
deformed creatures or who do not have children at all. These fairies replace the souls of
their children with souls taken from human children. The human children whose souls
have been replaced become mean and destructive, they enjoy their families’ problems,
sing at night, can (ex)change parts of their bodies. Seamus Deane mentions the
changelings twice: at the beginning of the novel in “Disappearances” and in “Katie’s
story”.
In “Disappearances” the author establishes the major difference between
Celticism and Christianity: the souls of the changelings (which are fairies’ souls) “would
go into the fairy mounds” and not to heaven, purgatory or hell: “People with green eyes
were close to fairies, we were told; they were just here for a little while, looking for a
human child they could take away. If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown
eye we were to cross ourselves, for that was a human child that had been taken over by
the fairies. The brown eye was the sign that it had been human. When it died, it would go
into the fairy mounds that lay behind the Donegal mountains, not to heaven or purgatory
or hell like the rest of us. These strange destinations excited me, especially when a priest
came to the house of a dying person to give the last rites, the sacrament of Extreme
Unction. That was to stop the person going to hell.” (Deane 5)
This excerpt reveals the situation in Ireland from a religious perspective, outlining
a space where pagan and Christian elements and practices intermingle. The fairy tales are
orally transmitted (“we were told”) and they seem reliable because of their longevity and
because all the Irish had knowledge of them. These fairy tales symbolise Irishness as they
are very well anchored in the Irish Space: “the fairy mounds that lay behind the Donegal
mountains” (5). Christianity means alteration of Irishness as Seamus Deane suggests
when he refers to “the rest of us” (5). Heaven, purgatory and hell are destinations for the
dead souls irrespective of the place they belong to and they are terms introduced by
Christianity, which implies colonisation and assimilation of the colonists, therefore
19
coexistence of both pagan and Christian elements. Unlike the fairy mounds, hell is a very
abstract notion for an Irish child (“Hell was a deep place”) suggesting uprooting, a place
where you disappear forever “sucked into a great whirlpool of flames” (Deane 5).
Changelings versus “the rest of us”, the Donegal mountains versus nowhere (deep place)
define a lack of cultural identity as a result of colonisation.
Although the author does not mention the name of the “chosen children” (5), their
identity becomes clear when he inserts Katie’s story about two orphans who lived “away
down in the southern part of Donegal”(5) where they still spoke Irish. Donegal stands in
opposition with Derry where the old Irish was no longer spoken. The children’s uncle
hired a woman called Brigid to take care of them. In response to the first restriction
Brigid imposed on the children, they switched the colour of their hair. Brigid’s next
intervention made them switch their voices and the story continues until the two children
die, being taken by their dead parents. In this terrifying story pagan and Christian
symbols face each other within a fight where nobody wins: symbols of Irishness, the
changelings pass away letting themselves be last seen in a green light by the Christian
priest who was powerless and eventually fell on his knees, while the children were
disappearing; the green light can stand for Irishness as it is one of the colours on the Irish
flag.
Brigid, the woman who took care of the children, has a symbolic name, that of the
Celtic goddess who was incorporated into Christian religious beliefs. As Amy Hackney
Blackwell and Ryan Hackney state in the book The Everything Irish History and
Heritage Book, Brigid was Daghdha’s (Good God) daughter and she had two sisters with
the same name. They were goddesses of fertility and patrons of poets, one was associated
with craftsmanship and the last one with healing. Later, Brigid transformed into the
Christian St. Bride or St. Brigid. (Hackney 27) Brigid in Katie’s story could speak the old
Irish that the children spoke and also English, the language spoken in Derry, bridging the
past and the present. The evolution of the character is spatially traced from Donegal to
Derry, from Celtic tradition to Christianity. She is the voice that echoes the traditional
calls of a Celtic Ireland, but her voice is absorbed, silenced and isolated by the
indifference of the Irish. She stops telling the story and thus becomes one of them.
Another metaphor describing the ever-present Irishness is a stone cashel called
Grianan whose ancient burial site is believed to belong to the Neolithic Period (1700
BC). An old story advises people not to whisper a secret within the walls of the fort
because everyone will know it since there is a secret passage that echoes what is told and
seems to never stop (Deane 68). Thus, the Irish transmit their Celtic myths and legends in
time, from generation to generation, and in space, all over Ireland, forever, which helps
them preserve their tradition.
The Field of the Disappeared, a place where the souls of the people from
neighbourhood who had disappeared gather several times a year on special days like St.
Brigid’s Day, on the festival of Samhain, on Christmas Day, emerged from the mists of
Celtic mythology and Christianity. It’s a place where the souls mourn their fate and all
those who dare to enter the field will share the same destiny and suffer the same pain.
The days when the souls gather refer to both Celtic and Christian religions: St. Brigid’s
Day can be connected to both Celticism and Christianity because of the Celtic goddess
Brigid and because of Brigid of Kildare who converted to Christianity and advanced
Christianity in Ireland. She is also called the Mary of the Gael. Belonging to both
20
religions, Brigid is a beloved Irish Saint and is celebrated on February 1, the same day
being dedicated to the Irish fertility goddess Brigid, “a pagan-Christian combo” as Amy
Hackney and Ryan Hackney call it (49-51). The festival of Samhain is a Celtic
celebration similar to modern Halloween and it used to mark the end of summer: “This is
the day that tombs opened and ghosts walked about with gods and goddesses” (Hackney
29). The last celebration mentioned is a Christian one, the day when Jesus Christ was
born, and it creates equilibrium, actually showing that Irishness is defined by both Celtic
and Christian elements.
Another example of story orally circulating within the narrator’s social context
refers to a family: the husband was a sailor and, while he was away his wife lived with
another man and refused to return to him, thus breaking a moral law. He then took a room
in the house opposite his wife’s house and stared at the latter until he died. He was
thought to have punished his wife because she was found dead within a year of his death,
which determined people to call for a priest who could face the evil spirit of the dead
man. The narrator describes a ritual the priest followed in order “to seal” the spirit (Deane
9). Therefore, this apparently simple story reveals the coexistence of pagan and Christian
practices in the Catholic Church of the time. Later, when the boy retells the story, he
introduces the idea of spell and superstition.
What emphasizes most the alterity of the Irish identity is the fact that Irish is no
longer spoken in Ireland. First, in Katie’s story it is mentioned that the two children “still
spoke Irish, but an Irish that was so old that many other Irish speakers couldn’t follow
it.”(Deane 63). Brigid had been brought up in Donegal and could speak the same old
Irish; she went to Derry (Northern Ireland) later. Thus, Donegal seems to be an oasis of
Irishness where the magic of the fairies’ realm get more fascinating due to the old Irish
spoken there. But there are stories that should be told in Irish, as the narrator wants to tell
us towards the end of the novel when he writes all the story in Irish and reads it to his
father, pretending that it was an essay for school. Speaking Irish is not something real or
contemporary for the protagonist’s father, nice but still dead: “…I read it all outright in
Irish to him. It was an essay we had been assigned in school, I told him, on local history.
He just nodded and smiled and said it sounded wonderful. […] My father tapped me on
the shoulder and said he liked to hear the language spoken in the house.” (Deane 203).
The narrator’s mother knew no Irish, yet she tried to understand fragments of poems and
songs, she felt the need to be told an Irish poem, which shows the longing for the lost
Irish Identity, and the irreversible evolution of history.
Despite the cultural wisdom arising from the “pagan-Christian combo” (Hackney
49-51) in folk literature, social life and history reveal a more traumatic British−Irish
cohabitation. Historical events, such as the world wars and postcolonization, are echoed
in social life: in families, in groups of children, in the community, in religion. The reader
can identify three categories of people: the Irish, the English colonists and the informers.
Within a rough religious association the Irish are Catholic and the English are Protestant.
Yet, the idea of conversion and/or the idea of old English colonists, whose status is a kind
of Irish-English, are/is floating around.
The perspective upon society and history comes from inside an Irish family
involved in the IRA movement. The first thing that stirs the child’s curiosity is his uncle’s
disappearance mysteriously talked about at the beginning of the novel. The secret of
Eddie’s disappearance follow him all along the novel and affects the characters’
21
behaviour and relationships. He eventually finds out that his uncle was executed by his
own people at his grandfather’s order because they thought he was an informer. Later,
Crazy Joe, who only pretended insanity, told the IRA members who the real informer
was. Some of the characters had to live with the burden of their mistake which remained
a secret. The narrator’s maternal grandfather, his mother, he and Crazy Joe seem to be the
only people who knew the truth. The narrator’s father knew that his brother was an
informer, while the rest of the people had not been informed at all about the reason for
Eddie’s disappearance.
Eddie’s death became an ever present shadow in the narrator’s family and it
hindered them from being happy and open to each other. The novel begins when the
mother warns her child about the presence of the “shadow” which may affect his life and
their relationship. The boy doesn’t listen to his mother’s warnings and for the sake of his
love for her he decides to share the “burden” of the “shadow”, without knowing that his
gesture would mean silence and aloofness. While the mother wants to protect her child,
the grandfather guilty of Eddie’s death chooses to share the burden with the boy (the
narrator), thus spoiling his life and his family relationships. The narrator’s father draws
him back to tradition and innocence as he tells him about the Field of the Disappeared, he
enjoys hearing Irish spoken in the house and believes that his brother died because he
was an informer. Both his parents are victims of the Irish-English conflict and do not
manage to protect their children from it.
The control over power and influence is shared between the police and the IRA,
the police standing for the English colonists, the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, whose
members were also called “Blue shirts” because of their uniform (Moody 277). The
narrator’s family was of interest to the police since more members were IRA members
(grandfather, uncle Eddie). The child’s first experience with the police was traumatic and
it was a result of his mistake: he showed his father’s pistol to his friends, a young man
who was an informer saw them and told the police. His father was not allowed to have a
pistol, and, more than this, he had the pistol from a German whom he helped in the war.
The fact that he had a pistol was condemned twice: first because of his being an Irish
person and considered in conflict with the other Irish people, second because he should
have served the British interests instead of helping a German during the war. The police
destroyed the boy’s house and took him, his brother Liam and his father to the police
where they were beaten with violence. The section “Pistol”, the last one in the first
chapter, justifies the father’s fears related with the Irish − English relations:
“Where was the gun? I had had it, I had been seen with it, where was it?
Policemen with huge faces bent down to ask me quietly at first, then more and more
loudly. They made my father sit at a table and then lean over it, with his arms outspread.
Then they beat him on the neck and shoulders with rubber truncheons, short and gorgedred in colour. He told them, but they didn’t believe him. So they beat us too, Liam and
me, across the table from him. I remember the sweat and rage on his face as he looked.
When they pushed my chin down on the table for a moment, I was looking up at him. Did
he wink at me? Or were there tears in his eyes? Then my head bounced so hard on the
table with the blows that I bit hard on my tongue.” (Deane 30).
Childhood and innocence lose their meaning since everything is patterned
according to the social-political relations of the time. When he proudly showed his
father’s pistol to his friends, the boy unconsciously exposed himself and his family to the
22
social rules governing the community, he actually chose a position that placed him in
opposition with the police. Yet, three years later a second experience makes it clear for
the boy that he must avoid any contact with this institution. Trying to avoid being beaten
by Willie Barr and some other boys, the narrator threw a stone at the police car, sergeant
Burke took him in the car nicely behaving with him to make the other boys believe he
was an informer, just as they believed about his uncle, and took him home to show all the
community that the boy was in the police car without being badly treated:
“Fuck off”, I muttered and the constable turned round angrily. Burke laughed and
restrained him. No,no. We can’t hit the wee lad; that’d make a hero of him. Just what he
wants. Right, son?” (Deane 100)
“… I’ll do you one favour. I’ll tell you this − Barr’s got it wrong. I’d say your daddy has
it wrong too. Maybe you should ask your mother, now her daddy’s got sick − none too
soon either. Still, there you are. Once an informer, always an informer. That’s what
they’ll say. And we’ll see what comes out in the wash, eh?” (Deane 101)
This time his father punished him harshly being afraid that the boy might share
his uncle’s fate. Everything led to father-son aloofness symbolically materialized in the
boy’s gesture of destroying his father’s roses, burying thus both life and hope in their
family. Conciliation with the community and with his family, without erasing the scars,
was brought by the bishop’s interventions, which showed that cohabitation means both
fight and compromise. The development of the boy’s personality was strictly molded and
also refrained from free self-expression by the reality that he lived.
Besides violence, the effort to gain control and power meant to impose Protestant
celebrations despite the reduced number of the Protestant English in Derry. Some of the
celebrations were simply defiant as they celebrated the death of an Irish hero or the defeat
of a Catholic/ an Irish attack:
“It was a city of bonfires. The Protestant had more than we had. They had the twelfth of
July, when they celebrated the triumph of Protestant armies at the Battle of the Boyne in
1690; then they had the twelfth of August when they celebrated the liberation of the city
from a besieging Catholic army in 1689; then they had the burning of Lundy’s effigy on
the eighteenth of December. Lundy had been a traitor who had tried to open the gates of
the city to the Catholic enemy. We had only the fifteenth of August bonfires; it was a
church festival but we made it into a political one as well, to answer the fires of the
twelfth. But our celebrations were not official, like the Protestant ones. The police would
sometimes make us put out fires or try to stop us collecting old car tyres or chopping
down trees in preparation. Fire was what I loved to hear of and to see.”(Deane 31)
The boy sees the difference between “them” and “us” as a religious difference
between the Protestants and the Catholics, which is a rough identification. This
identification, as well as the reasons for which the Protestants celebrated, is far from
referring to Gaelic Irish aspirations and identity. For instance the Battle of the Boyne in
1690 represented the conflict between the Old English (Catholics) and the new Protestant
English. James II “with his one shoe English and his one shoe Irish” led Ireland to a
major crisis. (Moody 171) The battle that took place on 1 July by the old calendar (12
July new style as it appears in the novel) did not end with a decisive victory: “The Irish
cavalry fought well, but at the end of the day James had fled, his army was in full retreat,
23
and William was clearly the winner. In a military sense it was not a decisive victory; the
Irish losses were small and their army lived to fight another day”. (Moody 171) The fact
that the victory was reported all over Europe had a great psychological effect, created
disorder and led to unconditional surrender. (Moody 171)
The Catholic community were prevented from their only church festival
celebrated on the fifteenth of August, which shows that the main task of the police was to
preserve the Protestant order and interest. The last sentence of the above excerpt shows
the child’s indifference to the reasons for which the fires were made: “Fire was what I
loved to hear of and to see.” (Deane 31) as he couldn’t simply identify with either the
Catholics or the Protestants.
A series of internal agents coming from family and relatives and reviving the
narrator’s Irish origin combined with a series of external agents coming from the
institutions of the community that he lived in and, imposing the new British order,
contributed to build the personality of a young man who eventually accepted, without
inquiring, a discoloured, “strange world” (as his father said) (Deane 245) that killed them
symbolically in his case and concretely in other cases: Eddie, the young British soldier.
Repetition compulsion. A Freudian approach to Reading in theDark.
Introduced in 1920 in Freud’s work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the concept
repetition-compulsion became relevant to literature. The repetition of traumatic events
taking the form of dreams, storytelling or even hallucination seems to contradict Freud’s
early theory of the dream, according to which one’s dreams intend to fulfill the dreamer’s
wishes and are in the service of the pleasure-principle.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud established the existence of two major
instinctual drives: the sexual instincts and the death-instinct, the latter standing for those
“ conservative organic instincts ” which give the “ deceptive appearance of being forces
tending towards change and progress ” while they are seeking to reach “ the goal of life ”,
that is “ the initial state from which the living entity has departed ”, therefore death. Thus,
the conservative instincts impel towards repetition, “ the restoration of an earlier state of
things ” (Freud, 1990 : 52).
Besides the adult subjects affected by the First World War whose repeated
nightmares contradicted the psychologist’s early theories, Freud also observed the
children whose some games concentrated on unhappy experiences, which made him
conclude that such a compulsion seeks to determine the subject to meet the situation and
make an effort of control: “ The child repeats even the unpleasant experiences because
through his own activity he gains a far more thorough mastery of the strong impression
than was possible by mere passive experience. ” (Trilling, 1972 : 289)
Assimilated by literature, Freud’s theory about repetition compulsion and the
death instinct led to Trilling’s essay “ Freud and Literature ”, first published in 1941,
according to which there are two aspects that bring closer the psycho-analytic theory and
the Aristotelian tragic theory, the latter emphasizing a “ qualified hedonism through
suffering” (Trilling, 1972 : 289). Thus, “ the cathartic resolution is perhaps the result of
glossing over terror with beautiful language rather than an evacuation of it ” (Trilling,
1972 : 289), which means that the reader focuses on the form while the content gets
psychologically important for the writer who repeats it in the storytelling process. On the
other hand, Trilling got closer to Freud’s theory of traumatic neurosis by referring to the
24
use of tragic, as “ the homeopathic administration of pain to inure ourselves to the greater
pain which life will force upon us ” (Trilling, 1972 : 290).
As regards the storytelling, Freud’s essay “ Creative writers and day-dreaming “
establishes a relation between the dreams at night and day-dreams, on the one hand, and
creating and playing, on the other hand. He states that “ the creative writer does the same
as a child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously − that is,
which he invests with large amounts of emotion − while separating it sharply from
reality.” (Freud, 1972 : 36) Besides the ludicrous aspect of creation which thus becomes a
substitute or surrogate for children’s play, it is important to mention that writers’
fantasies or day-dreams are wish-fulfilments in the same as night-dreams and that they
can follow a pattern in which the dreamer achieves his goals.
Seamus Deane enclosed the history of a people, the life of a man and the depth of
an unknown personality (the author’s other personality) in a novel announced as an
analysis or investigation (“ reading ”) of the dark (unknown/unconscious). Apparently
meaningless flashes of dreams piercing the dark sleep of the narrator’s consciousness
invite the reader to follow his words gradually forking an enlightening story. Therefore,
the novel Reading in the Dark is psychoanalysis in itself, suggesting the author’s full
awareness of the traces and the methods that he should follow to reach the complete
meaning.
Besides its being metaphorically promoted as an analysis in the title, the novel’s
sections and embedded stories bewilder the reader through repetition, apparent
incoherence, fragmentariness, magic and mysticism within a traumatic context which is
approachable from a Freudian perspective. Although Reading in the Dark was published
at the end of the twentieth century, after the declaration of the first IRA ceasefire on the
31 August 1994, it refers to the postwar Ireland when there was an open conflict between
the English colonists and the Irish. The novel was actually completed during the period of
political negotiations in Northern Ireland (Harte, 2000 : 149). The author creates the
tension by mentioning the evil spirit or fairies of the Irish legends ; the disappearance of
some IRA members ; the fact that the narrator, his father and his brother were beaten by
the police because they had a pistol at home ; the conflict between the police and the Irish
community ; the fact that the Protestants (identified here with the English colonists) had
more celebrations although they were fewer than the Catholics (the Irish here) who had
only a church festival that they tried to transform into a political celebration : “ It [Derry]
was a city of bonfires. The Protestants had more than we had. […] But our celebrations
were not official, like the Protestant ones. ” (Deane, 1998 : 31) The boy/narrator had to
live in this tension without being told anything about his family involvement in it.
The novel is built on the background of the dark, of the shadow and of silence
showing a challenging coexistence of flashes (of light) – the text/the section – and of
darkness – silence/gaps between the sections. The author tried to make the book well
anchored in the postwar Irish reality and conferred it a confessional tone, which reveals a
compulsion of the repetition of his life experience, altered, of course, by the later
perspective upon things and the deliberate transformation into art/fiction. Although the
novel is centered on the narrator, it shows how one’s personality is moulded by the
others’ fears and obsessions. The protagonist is a postwar born but his parents’ traumatic
experiences acquiring a diluted, magic and mysterious form are inherited as drops of pain
tearing the deliberate and obstinate silence. In “ Creative writers and day-dreaming ”
25
Freud compared writers’ fantasies with dreams and noticed that “ a happy person never
fantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of fantasies are unsatisfied wishes,
and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality
”(1972 : 38).
The storytelling with everything that is real and distorted offers the author a
chance to control the evolution of his past life through words. Seamus Deane confessed
his intention to tell the story of his family seen as a pattern within the Irish context. At the
same time he focused only on the sad experiences of his life outlining extremely sad
characters dealing only with problems. The distortion of the events, for the sake of art
one may say, can be a result of the teller’s desire to find a way to face his problems, to
solve them, to control them. By translating the story into words and by publishing it, the
author reveals maturity, detachment and the awareness of his having found the best
variant of his life, which becomes the life of the other, the unknown, as he recognizes
perhaps the difference leading to the control of the situation. The protagonist tells his
story twice : he wrote an essay in Irish and read it to his father pretending that it had been
written for school and he repeated the experience of storytelling later as an adult in the
form of the confessional text of the novel. While in the first situation the reader is warned
about the child’s hesitation to communicate his fears and problems in his essay, which
makes him present them as unreal, the novel’s amazing directness may show the
narrator’s success in controlling his feelings.
The novel is more than a repetition of Seamus Deane’s life within an artistic
“verbal vesture” that stops the chain of uncertainties and quests by fixing it into a definite
and final form. It is the story of the storytelling at the same time since the text is
deliberately created to reveal all the obsessions and the fears that forced the narrator to
forge a quite unpoetic, demystified, telegraphic presentation of his life in the section “ All
of it ” which seems emptied of the dark, the shadow and the silence that were feeding it.
The chapter that brings to light all the secrets, the mysteries and the characters’
fears also means the achievement of the narrator’s final goal: to find out the secrets of his
family and (re-)establish the calmness and the peace that he was longing for, which
means the end of the novel, therefore his death, a return to the initial silence of nonexistence. What is the final death of the narrator is only a repetition of the story for the
author, a variant of his life and the death of only one unknown other of his.
An analysis of the evolution of the main character supposes a close reading and an
analysis of the text following the Freudian pattern of the interpretation of dreams, which
actually meant the interpretation of the telling about dreams including deliberate and
accidental distortions. What strikes the reader is the repetition of words, stories,
emotions. What gives the meaning of this obsessive repetition is the “ progress and the
production of new forms ” (see Freud, 1990), a repetition in alteration.
The narrator tells a story like a dream in the first section of the book where there
is a shadow between him and his mother, shadow that only his mother can see and fear.
The unknown that separates the two takes the form of a secret, then of silence and leads
eventually to the identification of the narrator with the shadow: “ I had became the
shadow ”(Deane, 1998: 228). The untouchable shadow acquires a very concrete
representation pushing the mother’s fear to an unbearable extreme, which justifies her
breakdowns and leads to her decision in the end to face the shadow in the episode where
she tears the flower given by her son.
26
The son lives with great intensity all the fears that overwhelm his parents and
turns into an investigator himself. The tragic or mystic stories he is told at a very fragile
age have the effect of a “ homeopathic administration of pain to inure himself to the
greater pain which life will force upon him ”(Trilling, 1972: 289). Thus, the boy has to
deal with the mystery of different disappearances: the disappearance of the clown at the
circus:
“ They were all laughing. But were they all sure of what had happened? ”
(Deane, 1998: 6); the disappearance of children’s souls taken by fairies; the
disappearance of uncle Eddie; the field of the disappeared where the souls of the
disappeared gathered and “ any human who entered the land would suffer the same fate;
and any who heard their cries on those days should cross themselves and pray out loud to
drown out the sound. You weren’t supposed to hear pain like that; just pray you would
never suffer it ”(Deane, 1998: 54).
The mystery of the disappearance of his uncle is brought to light in the novel
when he finds out that his uncle was killed by the IRA members at his grandfather’s
order, which was a mistake. Reality is as shocking and painful as the mysterious story of
the field of the disappeared. In a similar way, the story of the great exorcism presented in
the second section is repeated within a real context towards the end of the novel, emptied
of any mysticism.
When the narrator speaks about his father in the end of the novel he admits his
having reconstructed his father’s life and suggests detachment and control :
So, I celebrated all the anniversaries: of all the deaths, all the betrayals − for both of them
[his parents] − in my head year after year, until, to my pleasure and surprise, they began
to become confused and muddled, and I wondered at times had I dreamed it all.(236)
I’ve reconstructed his [father’s] vigil behind the door in that noisy room a
hundred times since, just as I reconstructed his life out of the remains of the stories about
his dead parents, his vanished older brother, his own unknowing and, to me, beloved
silence. (238)
In a very symbolic way the story of the Irish fairies stealing children’s souls and
replacing them with their mean/evil souls is repeated within a more concrete context – a
story his aunt Katie tells him – and can be seen as a reflection of the novel itself since the
narrator is a child whose soul has been “ stolen ” by the “ Irish fairies ” because of the
social and historical context that outlined his family’s life.
All these experiences repeated in new forms, more and more realistic, reveal the
narrator’s progress, maturity, his capacity to face his family’s problems, self-awareness
and control which eventually lead to the achievement of the desired goal : the end of the
storytelling, death.
On the other hand, considering Freud’s theory about creative writers and daydreams the reader may wonder how much of the story is reality and how much of it is
“ read in the dark ”, as the author says, therefore fantasy. Thus the novel can be seen as a
distorted repetition of the protagonist’s life whose storytelling may be just a figured
solution to his and his family’s problems. When the narrator reveals how he reads in the
dark the novel The Shan Van Vocht distorting the story and becoming the hero himself,
the reader is actually warned that what follows may not be the truth but the story will be
told in a way that makes it seem real.
27
While reading The Shan Van Vocht the narrator was also dreaming about his
being the hero and being different from the actual hero, Robert:
The heroine was called Ann, and the hero was Robert. She was too good for him. When
they whispered, she did all the interesting talking. He just kept on about dying and
remembering her always, even when she was there […]. So I talked to her instead and
told her how beautiful she was and how I wouldn’t go out to rebellion at all but just sit
there and whisper in her ear and let her know that now was for ever […]. (Deane, 1998 :
20)
After his brother asks him to turn off the light, the narrator continues to dream : “ I’d
switch off the light, get back in my bed, and lie there, the book still open, re-imagining all
I had read, the various ways the plot might unravel, the novel opening into endless
possibilities in the dark ” (Deane, 1998 : 20).
In the same section he tells the reader what determined him to choose the style for
his storytelling : the fact that his master at school appreciated more ordinary life told in
simple language than his essay.
I felt embarrassed because my own essay had been full of long or strange words I had
found in the dictionary […]. I’d never thought such stuff was worth writing about. It was
ordinary life […]. And yet I kept remembering that mother ands son waiting in the Dutch
interior of that essay […]. (Deane, 1998 : 21)
The long and frustrating quest of the truth about his family problems, which is the
novel, may thus stand for a fantasy, a way in which the “ plot might unravel ” and a way
in which the narrator might fulfill his wishes. This day-dream is both a repetition and a
distortion of reality but it has as an incentive the narrator’s wish to re-establish the order,
the calmness before his getting informed about his parents’ secrets, to face reality.
Reaching silence in Reading in the Dark
Reading in the Dark seems to have been written to show how silence can
encompass everything becoming a means of life for a family, a necessity in the logic of
narrative economy, the goal of life in a Freudian meaning, the openness of the novel
itself. Although silence has been considered another form of death or attribute of death,
Seamus Deane makes it an inexhaustible source of communication and imagination, the
dark where the process of dying turns into a “birth into death” since only there, free of
any constraint, the narrator’s imagination can “give birth” to his story, live through his
storytelling and die as an everyday ego. This also means the end of his quests and
uncertainties because of shaping them as a text.
Within a theoretical frame generated by Didier Coste’s work Narrative as
Communication there are two drives that make silence an inherent presence in the
narrative. Coste states that “every narrative […] has at least one textual beginning and
one textual end (on the narrational plane); most narratives also have beginnings and
endings on the plane of the narrated and on the plane of story” (Coste, 1989:246).
According to Raymond Russel the author should provide a “link between a beginning and
an ending that cannot be identical but should have an air of family resemblance” (Coste,
1989:246). There is a common logic that Coste thinks about implying a causal etiological
28
and teleological orientation of all narratives (1989:247), thus silence becomes a logical
end of the story.
Another drive refers to the narratives that employ characters whose evolution has
to reach a point where their problems are solved, has to “reach silence”, otherwise the
story may fail becoming tedious. Knowing when to stop is part of the artistry. The
author’s choices are somehow restricted by the narrative itself, therefore rhetorical, moral
and aesthetic constraints can determine the way in which the characters can reach silence.
In Seamus Deane’s novel the whole story is born out of silence and shadow, the
shadow develops within magic, mystery, darkness and silence to end in death and silence.
In the first section with a symbolic positive title “Stairs” (“On the stairs, there was a
clear, plain silence.”), since it implies the idea of ascendance, mother and son are
separated by a shadow that only the mother can see:
“Don’t move”, my mother said from the landing. “Don’t cross that window”.
I was on the tenth step, she was on the landing. I could have touched her.
“There’s something there between us. A shadow. Don’t move.”
I had no intention. I was enthralled. But I could see no shadow.
“There’s somebody there. Somebody unhappy. Go back down the stairs, son.” […]
“I’m sure I could walk up there to you, in two skips.”
“No, no. God knows. It’s bad enough me feeling it; I don’t want you as well.”(Deane, 3)
Seamus Deane creates suspense and magic on the background of which he wants
to build a child’s personality and identity. Both silence and shadow are good incentives
for a child who wants to discover his identity. They may also mean freedom since his
story seems to be forged out of nothing, in the dark, therefore it seems to be the fruit of a
resourceful imagination that shapes its own way and erects its own obstacles, such as the
obsessive disappearances that the character has to deal with. Despite his mother’s
warning according to which the investigation of the shadow would bring something bad
to him, the boy chooses the darkness, that is to stay by his mother and try to understand
and help her as a proof of his love for her and for his father.
I was up at the window before she could say anything more, but there was
nothing there. I stared into the darkness. I heard the clock in the bedroom clicking and the
wind breaking through the chimney, and saw the neutral glimmer on the banister vanish
into my hand as I slid my fingers down. Four steps before the kitchen door, I felt
someone behind me and turned to see a darkness leaving the window. (Deane, 4)
The reader is introduced to the cause, the birth of the reason for which the novel
should happen, that is the existence of a shadow in the life of the boy’s mother. The
existence of the shadow encapsulated in silence was revealed by the first words related to
its existence and betraying his mother’s fears. Hadn’t she told anything about the shadow,
it wouldn’t have appeared in the boy’s life and, of course, the novel wouldn’t have been
written. He was challenged to look for something unknown where there shouldn’t have
been anything. Absurdity and frustration hardens the boy’s childhood by making him see
darkness by the window. When he passed by the window he identified with the shadow
and annihilated the fragile glimmer on the banister. The light coming through and the
window might have projected the shadow, which could have been his mother’s within a
surface literal meaning. Otherwise the shadow that only his mother could see may be
29
symbolically perceived as her secret and her feeling guilty because of it. His mother’s
sense of guilt hindered her from sharing the secret but also overwhelmed her becoming
an almost palpable presence haunting her. The existence of her secret could be heard in
the silence. Her mentioning the shadow broke the silence that she would have actually
liked to engulf her secret. What the reader is made to experience is exactly the opposite:
the protagonist reads the story of the family in the dark and insists on speaking about the
silence that he and his family were supposed to keep until they wisely embraced it.
In the eternal economy of the novel, dealing with the etiological orientation would
reveal the text as the outcome of hard labour, transformations, planning energy. On the
way from silence to words, sentences, texts, novel, from shadow to person, and from
magic (apparently innocent stories for children) to “reality”, the author needed another
ambiguous term, “disappearances”, that might be seen as a symptomatic solution to back
up the evolution of the novel towards silence. Disappearances implied sudden events
which turned people or people’s souls into shadows haunting the other people’s
memories and imagination. The disappearances the narrator has to deal with gave birth to
contradictory stories, those characters who tried to find a meaning were actually
inventing stories. The protagonist is again caught between magic and reality: children
whose souls disappear because they are stolen by Irish fairies (pooka); the disappearance
of a clown which makes the boy worry “Was Mr. Bamboozelem all right? I looked up
into the darkness, half fearing I would see his boots and candystriped belly sailing up into
the dark beyond the trapeze lights” (Deane, 1998:6); the disappearance of uncle Eddie
and of McIlhenny; the field of the disappeared where the souls of the disappeared
gathered. The hypotheses launched around all these disappearances ranged from magic,
hiding, leaving to cruel death, everything became chronic.
The narrator lost in the thicket of mysteries which gradually were transformed
into secrets had to find a way to solve them. This is how the reader finds himself
entrapped between “reality” and “fiction”, incertitude metatextually sustained in the
section “Reading in the Dark” where the narrator confesses how he used to imagine
stories when he couldn’t read them but also that the stories people appreciated were those
simple and close to reality. Therefore, the title of the novel may refer to the fact that the
narrator had to investigate the secrets of his family to find out who the shadow was, why
his mother was afraid of the shadow, and it may also warn the reader that the solution the
protagonist brings into light is in fact part of the plan of the narrative in the internal
economy of the text.
Seamus Deane succeeded in veiling everything in silence, outer and inner life:
silence is cause, is setting, is goal. The author avoids the description of the setting
because events and characters seem to rise out of silence: when the police came because
they had found out about the pistol the boy “was still in the silence. Objects seemed to be
floating, free of gravity, all over the room.”(Deane, 1998:30) Describing his father’s
family the protagonist states: “So broken was my father’s family that it felt to me like a
catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord
like a dangerous fire … A long, silent feud… (At other times it seemed to be as cunning
and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the end of it.)”
(Deane’1998:42) The son wanted to punish his father for not telling him about the
problems his family had with the police by destroying his roses, the only colour in his
life. He reduced them to silence: “Walking on that concreted patch where the bushes had
30
been was like walking on hot ground below which voices and roses were burning,
burning.” (Deane, 1998:111) Love for his mother and father means silence: “I hated
having to love her then for it meant I couldn’t say or ask anything…” (Deane, 1998:134)
Everybody who knew the secret of Eddie’s death “was dead or in exile or silenced one
way or the other”. (Deane, 1998:217)
The son who feels the need to communicate is reduced to silence by a kind of
community law, which makes voices, and words burn everybody, as his mother felt when
she had a breakdown and couldn’t speak to release her soul. The son chooses to
communicate by using other means: he destroyed his father’s roses and told him that he
knew why, his father not telling him the truth about their family had destroyed the boy’s
childhood and innocence. He reads his father the story of the secrets of their family in
Irish pretending he was reading an essay for school, which turned out to be a test because
he found out that his father didn’t know all the secrets while his mother knew them and
reacted. He felt relieved because he had told his father the secrets that he knew but his
last attempt to communicate with his mother was a failure as well:
“Don’t worry any more. I’ll never say a word. Don’t worry about it. It’s all past.”
She took the flower with its three heads and three petals on each.
“Look’, she said, tearing the petals off, one at a time, and letting them drop on
the floor:
“If you want to, you can tell”,
One petal dropped off.
“If you don’t, that’s just as well.”
Another swirled on the linoleum.
“Get it over, get it done,
Father, lover, husband, son.”
She laughed coldly and threw the remains on the floor, folded her arms across
her breast and rocked back and forth, humming tunelessly. […] She was nearly gone
from me. (Deane, 1998:227)
For the sake of his love for both his parents, the boy, now an adolescent chooses
silence, but it seems to be too late for his mother who feels haunted by her son’s presence
and paralyzed by shame. When he makes his choice, the narrator becomes the shadow:
“Now the haunting meant something new to me − now I had become the shadow”
(Deane, 1998:228), which is the logical end of the story. What comes after this moment is
a diving of events and people into silence: sergeant Burke who is the representative of
the police and who brought them suffering dies; father dies (“innocently lay…”) before
his retirement without knowing the secret, mother retires into her bedroom in silence.
Thus, the third stage in the evolution of the events is reaching silence, which turned out to
be either physical death or spiritual death (mother, son, Crazy Joe). Besides the fact that
by reaching silence in the end of the novel the author succeeds in finding/establishing the
link with the beginning, the structure of the novel also reveals a teleological orientation,
the fact that the novel is designed so as to move towards certain goals of self realization,
here silence or death.
The other perspective upon the internal economy of the text is closely connected
to the first since, at least in Reading in the Dark, all the characters find a solution to their
problems and/or die. Thus, the reader may assume that some characters’ death (Una,
Eddie, Father’s sisters) contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of suspense and
31
suffering and have a traumatic effect upon the other characters meant to carry on the
story until they themselves find their end in death, in silence or in shadow. The cyclic
structure of the novel as shown above may be translated into a successful achievement of
the goal of life, according to Freud’s theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The major
instinctual drive which he called the death-instinct stands for those conservative instincts
which give the “deceptive appearance of being forces towards change and progress”
while they are seeking to reach the goal of life, that is the initial state from which the
living entity has departed”, therefore death. Thus, the conservative instincts impel
towards repetition, “the restoration of an earlier state of things” (Freud, 1990:52). Both
adult subjects affected by the First World War and children whose games concentrated on
unhappy experiences made Freud conclude that such a compulsion seeks to determine the
person to meet the situation and make an effort of control.
The young protagonist of the novel consumes his energy trying to discover the
secrets of the adults, his action is born out of silence and shadow to return to them in the
end, as his grandfather had anticipated:
“We live, boys, in a world that will pass away. The shadows that candle throws
upon the walls of this room are as insubstantial as we are. […] But there is an inner peace
nothing can reach; no insult can violate, no corruption can deprave. Hold to that; it is
what your childish innocence once was and what your adult maturity must become”
(Deane, 1998:26).
Grandfather wisely brings together life and death, light and darkness, candle and
shadow with their inexorable coexistence and dependence. Both people and shadows are
insubstantial, which seems a good incentive for the writer to have the story told by a
narrator without identity, insubstantial, unreal. Such a narrative device confers openness
for the narrator. There are at least two drives the work offers: on the one hand the
ambiguity of the text (like a shadow) implies repeated attempts to find a meaning which
is only a version “in the dark”; on the other hand the unknown narrator is a shadow
himself if we consider him the artistic personality of the writer, personality that exists
only in relation with the work of art, the one that created the novel and was shaped by it
(Mavrodin, 1982).
From a poststructuralist perspective the text of the novel may be seen as the
concatenation of the phases of one’s existence. The novel may be seen as birth which
here means becoming aware of the shadow; deconstruction − investigation of the dark
leading to the identification of separate elements which seem meaningless until the
narrator succeeds in establishing a connection between them; a reconstruction that is a
harmonious combination of the previous elements so that they reveal a meaningful story;
and the annihilation of a personality since the end of any story means the “death of the
author” (Barthes, 1988), the author’s artistic personality, the Unnamable, the Other who
created the work. A release of creative inner energy, Reading in the Dark is the story of
the storytelling as well revealing the appearance of the author’s shadow, the consumption
of the energy generated by the conflict and the moment when inner peace is reached
because everything has been told or understood, adult maturity, compared here with
childish innocence, has been reached, and everything would be at rest at last.
32
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, 1988, The Death of the Author, in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A
Reader, Macmillan Education LTD
Coste Didier, Narrative as Communication, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989
Deane Seamus, Reading in the Dark, New York, Vintage Books, 1998
Fogarty, Anne. “Remapping Nationalism: The Politics of Space in Joyce’s Dubliners” in
C.A.P.E.S./Agrégation Anglais, Dubliners, James Joyce; The Dead. John Huston, Pascal
Bataillard and Dominique Sipière (eds). Paris: Ellipses, 2000.
Freud Sigmund, 1990, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York, WW.Norton & Company, Ltd.
Freud Sigmund, 1972, “Creative writers and day-dreaming” in Lodge David (ed), 20th Century
Criticism, London, Longman, p. 36-42
Genette Gérard, Narrative Discourse An Essay in Method, trad. Jane E. Lewin, New York, Ithaca
, Cornell University Press, 1987
Genette Gérard, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trad. Jane E. Lewin, New York, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1988
Hackney Blackwell, Amy, and Ryah Hackney. The Everything Irish History & Heritage Book.
Avon, Massachusets: Adams Media, 2004.
Harte Liam, 2000, “History Lessons : Postcolonialism and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark
”, in Irish University Review, special issue Contemporary Irish Fiction, Anthony Roche
(ed), vol. 30, no 1, p. 149-162
Joyce James, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, Bucuresti, Prietenii Cartii , 1993
Lintvelt Jaap, Incercare de tipologie narativă, Punctul de vedere, trad. Angela Martin,
Bucureşti, Univers, 1994
Moody, T.W., and F.X. Martin, eds. The Course of Irish History. Lanham. United States and
Canada: Roberts Reinhart Publishers in association with Radio Telefís Éirean, 2001.
Delaney, Frank. The Celts. London: Grafton, 1989.
Ricoeur Paul, Oneself as Another, trad. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago and London, The University
of Chicago Press, 1992
Trilling Lionel, 1972, “Freud and Literature” in Lodge David (ed), 20th Century Criticism,
London, Longman, p. 276-290
*** Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Gramercy Books,
New York, 1986
33
WILLIAM TREVOR
(1928 - )
William Trevor Cox, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1928, has been a full time
writer since 1970, although he initially worked as a sculptor. He graduated from Trinity
College, Dublin, with a degree in history. He worked in wood, clay and metal and
exhibited in Dublin and in several places in England. He started writing prose in 1958
and two years later he abandoned sculpture as his work had become too abstract. Both
themes and the form of his literary works echo his education and experience in sculpting.
He was awarded Hawthornden Prize for Literature (1964) for The Old Boys and in 1965
he published The Boarding House; Royal Society of Literature for Angels at the Ritz and
Other Stories (1975); Whitebread Award for The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of
Fortune (1983) and Felicia’s Journey (1994); Allied Irish Banks Prize for fiction (1976);
Post Book of the Year Award for The Silence in the Garden (1988). His last novel is The
Story of Lucy Gault (2002).
The identity problem in Fools of Fortune
Can we really choose how to live? Shall we believe in faith/fortune and accept the
idea that our identity is moulded or blunted by the context within which we live? Fools of
Fortune raises the problem of choice as well as that of futility. It makes us wonder how
much the national, cultural and social context affects one’s decisions and why the Irish
sometimes choose to escape their country and themselves. As D. Morley and K. Robins
state in Space of Identity the foreigners, the strangers are ‘not only among us, but also
inside us’, which leads to a ‘sense of existential unease’ (25) and alienation: ‘What has
been alienated in the construction of our identities comes back to haunt our imagination
and disturb our peace of mind’ (25). The Irish’s split identity is the result of a continuous
process of rejection − assimilation of the intruder (the British).
In 1983, William Trevor, an Irish novelist born in Cork at the beginning of the
twentieth century and educated at Trinity College in Dublin, published one of his most
appreciated novels, Fools of Fortune, winner of the Whitbread Fiction Award. Traumatic
events within a context of uprooted identities and of frustrating feelings of lack of
belongingness combined with the characters’ extreme sensitivity contributed to an aware
indulging into suffering.
The beginning of the first chapter, entitled ‘Willie’, informs the reader about the
narrator’s intention to take him about one hundred years back, to a moment when there
were intensive fights for Ireland’s independence. Willie, who is the narrator in the first
chapter, is a descendant of a mixed family (Anna Woodcombe who was English and her
Irish husband William Quinton − Willie’s great-grandparents) who lived in Co.Cork.
Two generations later the daughter of an English colonel, ‘a poor relation of the
Woodcombes’ (Trevor 1) married a Quinton and had three children. The boy, the abovementioned Willie, made history repeat by marrying his cousin, an English related to the
Woodcombes. Such a complicated genealogy, meaning the interrelation of different
cultures, intermingled with the Irish − British conflict and eventually led to a symbolic
descendant: a daughter, Imelda, with a mental illness that isolated her from the
community, a daughter who seems to have been the recipient of all the misfortunes that
had attended her family.
34
The evolution of such a family as presented by William Trevor represents the
essence of the marriage between Ireland and Britain by pointing out how it affected the
characters’ social and cultural identity. The smallest social unit that marked Willie’s
identity was his family: his parents (the English mother and the Irish father) made him
different, the persons living with them (aunt Pansy, aunt Fitzeustace, Father Kilgarriff,
Josephine, Mr. Derenzy) created a community where tolerance was established. Thus,
Kilneagh becomes the Edenic space that could be shared by people belonging to different
cultures, nations, professions, and an oasis of peacefulness. Yet, Willie can remember
‘slips’ revealing his relatives’ hidden, repressed identity.
In order to adapt Willie to the place where he lived he had to be taught Irish
history. His first contact with Irish history was a result of the lessons Father Kilgarriff
gave him. Being informed about historical events from an Irish perspective, Willie’s
personality was moulded so as to embrace the idea of Irish freedom and sympathize with
the Irish people. An event that Father Kilgarriff considered very important was the battle
that took place on 15 August, 1598, in which the Irish were victorious. Yet, Father
Kilgarriff describes it as ‘the Irish victory which the clever English had later turned into
defeat’ (Trevor 20). According to Hayes McCoy the above mentioned battle, one of the
most important in Ulster, was begun by some of the Ulster lords in 1593 and joined by
Hugh O’Neil, earl of Tyrone: ‘Until 1597, the English merely marched into the Irish
territories and left garrisons in castles or roughly constructed forts. O’Neil’s great victory
at the Yellow Ford, north of Armagh, in 1598 made them more cautious (Hayes-McCoy
149). O’Neil submitted in 1603, the Battle of Kinsale, which meant ‘the end of the old
Irish world’ (Hayes-McCoy 151).
Father Kilgarriff’s lessons were continued by Evie Quinton who spoke about the
English occupation and about how the Irish helped the English to do now what they were
done during the Ulster war (Trevor 21), by fighting in a war which was not theirs.
Willie’s mother, Evie Quinton, spoke less about her English origin, but whenever she did
she showed dignity. In a very short conversation she had with Michael Collins, the
revolutionary head, the latter asked her if she was English and she confirmed:
‘My mother’s voice conveyed no note of apology. I could not see her from where
I stood in the shadows of the hall, but I guessed that as she returned his stare the eyes that
in calmer moments reminded me of chestnuts had gleamed fierily, as they always did
when she was challenged or angry. There was injustice in Ireland was what my mother
maintained: you didn’t have to be Irish to wish to expunge it. She told Michael Collins
that she was the daughter of an army colonel and did not add that her marriage had taken
place in an atmosphere of disapproval and distrust, just before her father’s regiment had
been recalled to England’ (Trevor 28-29).
Hidden tensions are intuitively grasped, although Willie is of a very fragile age.
He is not informed about the reality around him, the people who love him try to shelter
him from the problems raised by the Irish − British conflict, from ‘the shadows’ he steals
glimpses of the reality outside the harmonious family life he is made to believe in. He is a
‘creature of the shadows’: rootless, with a fragmentary (‘truncated’) life, unable to adjust
to what Kilneagh offered him after his parents’ death.
Collins’ revolutionary status placed him in conflict with Evie, despite her
isolation and her choice to share her life with an Irishman. His question was indeed a
35
challenge, as he knew the answer beforehand, which may mean that he was more
interested in her attitude. The way in which she continued to talk showed her
understanding of the Irish problem and that she did not consider herself the enemy but
implied that she shared the Irish faith and would like to expunge the injustice. She
showed the same understanding and wished the Irish to get their independence when she
referred to the Easter Rising (1916), which might make her one of them: ‘I wish the rising
had succeeded that Easter’ she said, ‘The whole thing would be over by now’ (Trevor
21).
Later, after her husband and her daughters died killed by sergeant Rudkin, she
could not find power to continue to soberly live her live and eventually committed
suicide. She was not angry because of the war itself, as she could not understand the
reasons for it. However, she could not understand why an Englishman destroyed their
family, how could such a person continue to talk to people and have his own business,
how could the others buy his products. She would have probably liked the same Irish for
whom her husband was killed to punish him by isolating him. As the novel reveals, the
Quintons were to continue to suffer, not because of how they were, but merely because
they had English origins and sympathized with the Irish people.
Willie’s father did not forget his Irish origin and tried to keep himself informed
about the Irish problem and even to help the Irish revolutionary movement. Therefore, he
received back to his mill a former employee, Doyle, who had returned from the World
War I and who, despite his Irish nationality, turned out to be an informer. This
demonstrates Doyle’s alienation, a result of the displacement of his national framework
(Morley 34). Mr Quinton also used to read the Irish Times, which shows his interest in
and sympathy with the Irish cause. Later, he got involved in the Irish movement by
inviting the revolutionary head, Michael Collins, to his home and by helping him with
money, exposing his family to violence and death.
The episode refers to the Civil War which lasted until May 1923 and which was
the effect of the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921. Referring to both
Griffith and Collins, P. Lynch stated in The Course of Irish History: ‘If the treaty failed to
offer the full independence for which so many had fought, it did offer, Griffith suggested,
a large measure of Irish control over Ireland’s destinies. It offered what Michael Collins
called the “freedom to achieve freedom”’(Treaty Debates, 19 Dec. 1921: 32 in Lynch
272).
When Doyle was murdered because of being an informer, his tongue was cut.
This news brought agitation at Kilneagh, the adults worried because of the unexpected
violent turn of the revolution and because it was brought too close to their home. The
idea of revolution stirred the children’s imagination. They were not really aware of what
a civil war might mean and were terrified at the cruelty of the images: Deidre, one of
Willie’s sisters, wondered what the murderers had done with Doyle’s tongue; Willie had
a dream in which he killed a Black and Tan (a British soldier) (Trevor 37).
It didn’t take long to the Black and Tans to arrive at Kilneagh and destroy both
the family and the house. Father and daughters were shot, Willie experienced everything
as if it were a nightmare in which strong sensations intermingled with elements of the
family history and images of the dead. Two of their employees helped Willie to escape:
‘There were further gunshots and one by one the dogs stopped barking (…).
Something touched my leg, the edge of a boot, I thought. It grazed the pain, but I knew
36
that I must not call out. I knew what Josephine had implied when she’d whispered to be
still. The men who were walking away must not be seen […]. My eyes were closed, and
what I saw in the darkness was Geraldine’s drawing of Doyle hanging from the tree, the
flames of the drawing-room fire making a harmless black crinkle of it’ (Trevor 44).
The way in which events unrolled for the Quintons emphasizes the fact that
‘Everything in Ireland was unsettled and on the edge.’ Although the Quintons were
Protestants and had more English ‘roots’, they had helped the Irish since 1797 (Trevor
28) and eventually were punished by the English as they were considered ‘traitors to our
class and to the Anglo-Irish tradition’ (Trevor 28). On the other hand, Irishmen like
Doyle, who was among the few returned from the war, betrayed their own nation and
people, informing the British about the revolutionary movement. Both situations suggest
an alienation of identities either determined by the social and economical context or by
more intimate scopes, as the love story in this novel wants to reveal. The Quintons chose
to share the Irish fate, neglecting the fact that their mixed origin made them more
vulnerable. Their way should have always been equidistant to what the British and the
Irish people represented: ‘We [father and son] made our way then, slowly, through the
village, between the tow rows of colour-washed cottages, past Driscoll’s shop and the
Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven’ (Trevor 42). This way between the British
economy and the Irish tradition symbolizes father’s decision not to challenge the British
with his attitude and deeds. When he chose to help Michael Collins with money,
following the example of his ancestors (Willie’s great –grandfather who refused to host
Major Atkinson of the militia in Fermoy and his ‘band of soldiers’, Anna Quinton of the
famine who was rejected by her British family because she helped the Irish), he was also
reluctant to taking revolutionary soldiers to his house. Because of being fewer and less
attached to the place, the British reply to Doyle’s murder was much more cruel. The
survivors remained traumatized for the rest of their lives, as the story continued to tell us
referring less to historical circumstances and more to the pain caused by the above
mentioned deaths.
Willie’s life changed radically: he was brought up by Josephine as his mother
chose to drink and refused to overcome the tragedy, not even for the sake of her child. He
had to attend a Protestant school, which made him share the social life of the British
minority. As evidence of the reiteration of history, he fell in love with his British cousin.
Marriages between cousins within the Protestant community was a local habit which
helped them preserve their tradition but also affected their psyche and the capacity of
integration into the larger Anglo-Irish community. The continuity of the misfortunes was
stimulated but Evie’s suicide.
Another element that influenced the characters’ evolution was love which
transcends national and cultural borderlines. Willie loved his cousin very much and he
would have liked to marry her. Unhappily, his mother could not provide him with the
warmth, tenderness and support that he needed. He also felt guilty of her suicide because
he left her alone in Cork and went to Kilneagh that afternoon. The impact of his mother’s
death was much greater than his love for Marianne and he left Ireland.
At this point, William Trevor chose to change the narrator with Marianne who
decided to go to Ireland and live her life at Kilneagh. Marianne means a new perspective
upon things since her problems are more personal and domestic than those concerning
Ireland’s fight for independence, which might explain Evie’s attitude to her son’s
37
education and her interest in preparing him for his life in Ireland. As women and mothers,
both Evie and Marianne choose their families first and repress their cultural identity.
Marianne’s choice choice was disapproved by her British parents who refused to visit her
in Ireland. Therefore, she had to redefine herself in the middle of the ruins of an AngloIrish family and create a sane environment for her daughter in the absence of the latter’s
father. On the other hand she tried to transmit the Irish tradition and culture to Imelda,
with the help of Willie’s friends and aunts: ‘And Imelda’s mother replied by speaking of
Irish martyrs and Irish battles, and of the Easter Rising that years ago had taken
place’(Trevor 164).
Marianne’s bitterness and anger flew over Imelda’s fragile soul and mind and
instead of helping her to integrate in the community that her mother considered right for
her, she isolated herself in her own world with her father as an Irish hero or as the boy in
the photograph ‘in one town after another’. Marianne wanted her daughter to be brought
up as an Anglo-Irish girl in Ireland, with her parents around, which made her refuse her
parents’ offer to give the child for adoption: ‘To have my child brought up as someone
else’s? To have forgotten her existence?’(Trevor 165).
Because of Willie’s unexpected departure, he and Marianne did not have the
chance to get married, which hardened the position of the child in the Irish community.
She was accepted at a Catholic church, although she was a Protestant, people loved her.
Only one colleague kept on addressing her by ugly words and rejected her. The Irish
people did not forget what the Quintons had done for them for centuries. In spite of the
tolerant environment Imelda could enjoy at Kilneagh and in the community, she was very
much affected by everything she had heard about her birth and life, uncertain information
about an absent father who could have justified their life at Kilneagh. Imelda has the most
shattered identity and apparently the most acute sense of not belonging to the place
indulged by her mother’s bitterness and a series of secrets that she happened to find out.
Imelda becomes a symbol of Ireland itself, repeatedly ‘invaded’ by the British and
abandoned by the Irish, a country whose lost bearings lead to a ‘cultural psychosis’, to
identity disorder. The girl’s curative power so useful for the others and useless for herself
implies a complete surrender of identity and thus of the rejection of the others (Kristeva
in Morley 25). Her complete alienation and uprootedness/displacement suggest a ‘nonreferential’ (placeless and timeless) sense of identity (Morley 39) and an oasis of
peacefulness for both the Irish and the British who visit her and try to help her.
Willie, Marianne and Imelda, the last standing for Ireland, are ‘creatures of the
shadows’, alienated as they have lost their sense of belongingness/of identity and open as
borderlessness mutilated their ability to respond to both internal (Irish) and external
(British) stimuli and made them accept everybody, irrespective of nation/culture, religion,
social group/class.
Indulging in suffering. Reshaping love in Fools of Fortune
Assuming that love is emotion and relationship within its very basic meaning, we
also realize that the way in which love evolves is determined by the context in which the
two partners live. They cannot be decontextualized as human beings are social and unfold
their life and emotions in relation with the time, space and community in which they live.
Moreover, the relationship follows certain political rules as Elizabeth Belfiore states:
“Thus it appears that human beings are ‘political animals’ because they are living things
38
whose nature is to function within a community through the philia relationships of family
and polis. They are ‘political’ in the same way they are philial: because they engage in
mutual duties that maintain the cooperative relationships of people who contribute to a
common function” (1992 : 78).
The characters involved in William Trevor’s novel experience such terrifying
moments that their ability to love and share their feelings and emotions is paralyzed. The
main pattern the author follows shows how a character who lost a beloved person
becomes unable to engage in a reciprocal emotional relationship, choosing to indulge in
suffering. The novel is thus mainly built on the physical or emotional absence of one
partner and reflects the other partner’s thoughts, emotions, suffering determined by this
absence. Thus they waste their life and their partner’s life.
Starting from Heli Tissari’s book, Lovescapes. Changes in prototypical senses
and cognitive metaphors since 1500 (2003), in which the author presents different
categories of love – such as family love (storge), friendship (philia), sexual love (eros),
religious love (agape) and love of things (khreia), I attempted an identification of these
types of love in the novel and a presentation of the way in which they are related, as the
same character is involved in more such emotional relationships without enjoying any of
them.
The novel begins by focusing on the concept of family love. Kilneagh is a place
where people love each other in a friendly way while each of the characters has his/her
own love-story. However, they are perceived as a great family as they share the same
space and are engaged in mutual duties in order to maintain the domain and themselves
as a family. Besides his relatives, Aunt Pansy and Aunt Fitzeustace, Mr Quinton who is
the owner of the domain allows other persons to be part of the family and live with them:
Father Kilgariff, their maid (Josephine), the mill manager (Mr Derenzy), and other people
working there.
When Josephine is accepted to be a member of the family, both she and the
Quintons are tolerant to each other:
“Josephine had liked Kilneagh from the start. She hadn’t minded Geraldine and
Deirdre giggling at teatime and she considered my father easygoing, even though she
wasn’t allowed to rattle the crockery in his presence. He was nice, she thought, sitting
there at the breakfast table wondering how he should dress himself for the day. But it was
my mother who made her feel at home in a world she did not know and in a house that
seemed enormous to her.” (Trevor, 1983 : 26)
Since Josephine is not a kinship, her belonging to the Quintons and her
involvement in the family’s business are restricted to her maid duty. Therefore, when the
narrator states that his mother made Josephine “feel at home”, he actually means
“familiar” with the environment, comfortable with their relationships and with herself for
having chosen to be there; his mother puts Josephine in the right place to “function”
efficiently within the “institution” called family. After Mr. Quinton’s death and his wife’s
indulgence in drinking, Josephine is the one who bringhs Willie up, she is a mother to
him.
In a similar way they must have “familiarized” father Kilgarriff who acts as a
teacher to Willie. Father Kilgarriff’s love story that led to his unfrocking and perhaps to
his being at Kilneagh fascinated the young man who shortly presents the other
39
“employee’s” love stories, which makes them overstep the boundaries of the domain
where they live together. Another element that makes those strangers feel “at home” with
the Quintons is that their sins are forgiven there, Kilneagh being an example of tolerance
and lenience, a place that gives people another chance, as it generally happens with
families. An example of reciprocity consists of the fact that the Aunts nurse Father
Kilgarriff when he was shot (Trevor, 1983 : 46). Mr Derenzy, the manager of Mr.
Quinton’s mill, is a trustful person who cares after Aunt Pansy and accompanies the
Quintons to the church.
However, there is a hierarchy within this family: a nucleus formed by Mr. and
Mrs. Quinton and their three children, whose authority is unquestionable; the Aunts, who
are direct relatives; and the other people brought there to help the Quintons with different
works and who have become “members” of the family. As Elizabeth Belfiore states in
her definition quoted at the beginning of this article, family relationships imply both
philia and political relationships.
Despite the harmony that seems to govern this family, its existence and evolution
are determined by the conflict between Ireland and England. While readers might expect
internal/domestic conflicts based on intercultural misunderstandings, Trevor via Willie,
the main narrator and the protagonist of the novel, depicts a happy family enjoying a
beautiful, sane and apparently safe spatial context. Mr Quinton (the father) is of mixed
Irish-British origin, lives in Ireland and marries an English woman, who is a relative of
his family. Because of the 1921 fights in Ireland, Mr Quinton and his daughters are killed
and Mrs Quinton remains with her son Willie in a ruined house. Instead of directing her
love, and I refer here to family love, towards her son who needs her, she chooses to drink
and wonder why the soldier who destroyed their family is not punished for this, why the
members of their community accept him. Thinking too much of the dead, she neglects
the living, indulging herself in suffering and making her son’s life miserable. It is a
continuous love of the absent, these characters turning into a self-victimizing type who
are not able to move on and thus they miss their chance of being happy.
Willie needs his mother’s love, advice, he wants to share his school experience
and his feelings with her: “I couldn’t tell my mother about the awfulness of the
schoolroom because it would be upsetting, and the doctor who sometimes came to see her
said that upsets should be avoided.” (Trevor : 50) Instead, by showing his almost mature
love for her, he tells her unimportant things that he sees in the street but he does not get a
feedback: “She listened vaguely, occasionally making the effort to smile. The letters
which came from India, from my English grandparents, remained unopened in her
bedroom, as did the letters from Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy.” (Trevor : 50) When
Mr Derenzy goes to Cork to report the financial situation of the mill, the woman does not
listen to him, she keeps on thinking and asking about Rudkin, the soldier they suspect to
have put fire on Kilneagh, being surprised that nobody punished Rudkin for what he did.
The people avoid him, but do not shoot him, as she would like: “In the circumstances”,
she says, ‘isn’t it surprising that no one had the courage to shoot Sergeant Rudkin?”
(Trevor : 56). Mrs. Quinton’s refusal to live the present, her being too anchored in the
present and her overwhelming suffering for the dead lead to her sacrificing Willie who is
denied family love although he offers his love and care.
Later on, Willie meets his English cousin, Marianne, whom he falls in love with
(family love turns into sexual love) when they are still children. She seems to feel the
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same for him, but they have to live in different countries until she chooses to move to
Ireland for him. Because of her choice, her parents decide to simply abandon her, they
refuse to talk to her or visit her, preventing her from enjoying family love. Their choice is
actually determined by their community, mentalities, the shame that such a marriage has
brought to them. They care more about the way in which their community perceive them
than they do about their daughter. It might have been, although debatable, a rational vs
emotional choice, which leads to self-victimization again and to indulging in suffering.
Both Marianne and her parents suffer because of their choices. While the former’s
choice is determined by sexual love and family love, at the same time, since she is
pregnant and wants to have her family, trying to obey the social rules, her parents submit
to another hierarchy of the social structures in which the community comes first. The
attitude of the British is different from what Marianne knows about Kilneagh. Although
the parents invoke morality, their gesture may be qualified as a political one: the
colonizers who do not want to intermingle with the colonized. The solution they suggest
(they asked Marianne to give her child to another family and lie about her status) defies
morality.
Marianne’s parents choose to preserve their position in the British community,
they choose between body and soul revealing an outwards interest that is more powerful
than their feelings. Algirdas J.Greimas and Jacques Fontanille speak about the
degradation of the theories of passions in relationship with economic politics. Actually
politics and needs replace passions and desires. The pragmatic dimension affects and/or
determines the body that determines the soul, when we refer to passions, or the spirit,
when we refer to needs (Greimas, 1997 : 80). It is an itinerary that eventually leads to
pragmatic awareness.
In the economy of the narrative William Trevor succeeds in rendering the
dominant pragmatic feature of the British in opposition with the passion characterizing
the Irish. By administrating their lives with their soul, the Irish choose to suffer since they
seem not to be aware of their interests within the context and are not able to adjust and
survive. Unadaptable wanderers, they indulge in suffering: Mrs. Quinton’s mind tries to
understand why the community does not punish a criminal and she neglects her son;
Willie leaves the country overwhelmed by his feelings and refuses to draw things back to
what they used to be, refuses to live together with his new family. Paradoxically,
selfishness can define both categories.
Unlike the above mentioned categories, Marianne is the bridge between the
British pragmatics and the Irish passion. Her love for Willie and her daughter makes her
migrate to Kilneagh and reconstruct a surrogate Quinton family. The only positive
connotation of her choice is that she makes life go on in Kilneagh, otherwise she shares
the almost absurd Irish indulging in suffering.
Therefore, the third example of destroyed family love appears when Marianne
comes to Kilneagh to have her child and live a happy family life with her cousin-lover.
The latter has chosen to leave the country and although he himself had suffered because
of his mother’s indifference to his needs, he stays away from his family, preventing his
lover and his daughter from enjoying their life.
In the above-mentioned examples the reader can notice that love comes second
for certain characters, either after other loves (Willie’s love for his mother and her death
determine him to leave the country) or because of certain external, community
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mentalities. In both cases we deal with the absence of reciprocity, the lack of mutual
engagement, therefore unbalanced love. Family (love) is more like an institution similar
to the Irish-British relationship where the two, although in opposition, are not
complementary.
Fools of Fortune is impressive due to the love-story representing the skeleton
around which everything else is built. By using the stream of consciousness technique,
the author succeeds in demonstrating what Dylan Thomas used to say: “Though lovers
may die, love shall not” (Dylan Thomas, And Death Shall Have no Dominion), because
in the end Willie, Marianne and their daughter are together. Yet, it seems that nothing can
be perfect in this novel. If we refer to sexual love we’ll notice that this time the author
decides to combine it with other “lovescapes” such as family love and friendship,
reaching a form of perverse, distorted love.
Willie’s first experience involving sexuality is related to an almost strange
character, his teacher at the Protestant school. While he is a child unable to understand
and distinguish, Miss Halliwell turns out to be immature from a psychological
perspective and an immoral person. She cannot distinguish or choose between friendly
love (philia) and sexual love (eros) simply harassing the boy. While his attention and love
are clearly directed towards his mother (storge – family love) and his cousin
(combination of family –friendship and sexual love), both of them lacking reciprocity at
the moment, he is ‘assaulted’ by Mrs Halliwell’s love, a mixture of maternal and sexual
love. Miss Halliwell’s excessive care about Willie reveals her solitude and good intuition
at the same time. It is obvious that the woman does not have a family or friends to spend
her time with and she has become a dedicated teacher. She projects her love (which
includes all the categories: motherly love, friendship, sexual and religious love) on her
students. She chooses Willie because she knows the boy needs motherly love, yet she
crosses the boundaries and becomes obsessed with the boy. Her love turns into hatred
projected on Marianne and sends a letter in which she condemns the love that brought
together Willie and Marianne and led to Imelda’s birth. Miss Halliwell voices the
mentalities of the community in which Protestants and Catholics reject such marriages.
A similar experience marks Marianne during her stay in Austria. Her supposed
German teacher there is a pervert. With his wife’s agreement he harasses the young girls
who come for a short period to his house to learn the language. Although a very short
episode in Marianne’s life, this experience seems to be an appalling alternative to the
time spent in Kilneagh. It eventually leads to a much more embellished image of the Irish
place and of Willie’s love.
As beautiful as Willie and Marianne’s love may seem, they fail to meet when she
goes to Ireland, to Kilneagh, as it happens in adventure-romance novels. ‘Creatures of the
shadows’, they waste their life and love because one of them cannot overcome the impact
of the previous experiences. Willie makes Marianne and Imelda suffer by letting them
love him in his absence, as his mother did to him. He is the picture of a wandering boy on
his daughter’s table, she loves that image and imagines that her hero-father will return.
When he returns it is too late for all of them: he and Marianne are very old, their daughter
is mad, Kilneagh is a ruin. They all had been given the chance to chose, and chose against
themselves.
What brings them all back is the almost edenic place, Kilneagh, that they all love.
Although it is a ruin, they do not leave it, and even Willie who lived his happiest and his
42
saddest moments there cannot stay far from it forever. Eventually they transform the
place into a legend since what makes it survives is love.
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