Memory Ireland: Volume 1: History and Modernity

By Oona Frawley

Despite the ease with which scholars have used the term "memory" in re­cent decades, its definition remains enigmatic. Does cultural memory rely on the memories of individuals, or does it take shape beyond the borders of the individual mind? Cultural memory has garnered particular atten­tion within Irish studies. With its trauma-filled history and sizable global diaspora, Ireland presents an ideal subject for work in this vein. What do stereotypes of Irish memory—as extensive, unforgiving, begrudging, but also blank on particular, usually traumatic, subjects—reveal about the ways in which cultural remembrance works in contemporary Irish culture and in Irish diasporic culture? How do icons of Irishness—from the harp to the cottage, from the Celtic cross to a figure like James Joyce—function in cultural memory? This collection seeks to address these questions as it maps a landscape of cultural memory in Ireland through theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural explorations by top scholars in the field of Irish studies.

In a series that will ultimately include four volumes, the sixteen es­says in this first volume explore remembrance and forgetting throughout history, from early modern Ireland to contemporary multicultural Ireland. Among the many subjects address, Guy Beiner disentangles "collective" from "folk" memory in "Remembering and Forgetting the Irish Rebellion of 1798," and Anne Dolan looks at local memory of the Civil war in "Embodying the Memory of War and Civil War." The volume concludes with Alan Titley’s "The Great Forgetting," a compelling argu­ment for viewing modern Irish culture as an artifact of the Europeaniza­tion of Ireland and for bringing into focus the urgent need for further, wide-ranging Irish-language scholarship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9780815651505

Book preview

Introduction

OONA FRAWLEY

The field of memory studies has been growing steadily in recent decades, fueled by multidisciplinary interest in the ways in which a variety of social groups remember. Among humanities-based scholars, those with a stake in this area include sociologists, historians, literary critics, art historians, and anthropologists, while outside of the humanities, psychologists, neuroscientists and biologists all have the potential to contribute valuably to the field. The net cast by memory studies is so wide, in fact, that in forums like the journal Memory Studies (established in 2008), attention is often paid to describing the useful limits of a field that can seem boundless. Although it is daunting to delineate an area of studies that has the potential to link the neuroscientist’s work to that of a literary critic, it is, simultaneously, immensely exciting to witness work that is adventurous and challenges traditional disciplinary categories.

The aim of memory studies is not, of course, simply to force a reconsideration of the borders of academic arenas; the field developed in response to movements underway in several disciplines—most notably in history, with a domino effect for other fields—that sought critically to reconsider the past using new methodological and analytical tools. These movements, which to a certain extent usefully coincided with the growing attention to postcolonialism in the academy, provoked profound and heated debate in various contexts. Revisionist debates in Ireland from the 1960s onwards presented reinterpretations of Irish history from a variety of ideological positions that sought to use the past in order to explain the present, to create histories that provided a sense of release from traumatic or difficult pasts; because the debates occurred against the backdrop of the Northern Ireland Troubles, they had particular resonance and generated a great deal of partisan anger about the question of Ireland’s relationship to colonialism. In France in the 1970s, Pierre Nora began his influential assessments of the ways in which the French past was constructed, analyzing versions of historical reality on which it relied; Nora, along with others like Jacques Le Goff, declared himself to be working on nouvelle histoire, that, taking inspiration from cultural studies, sought to de-emphasize historical narrative and move away from documentled historical studies in favor of more inclusive histories that took account of social movements and mentalities. The history wars in Australia saw critics pitted against one another in interpreting Australia’s colonial past and Aboriginal heritage, and in assessing blame for the treatment of Aborigines.

What these and other movements shared, in the most obvious way, was a consideration of history from new and multiple perspectives that no longer privileged one particular narrative; overarching stories of a nation’s past tended to be rejected in favor of more nuanced, counterhegemonic interpretations. Within the context of the debates provoked by such movements, memory became a key term, often used in opposition to history, so that often memory came to signify an alternatively conceived approach to the past. I remain unconvinced that these terms represent consistently oppositional and thus conflicting approaches to the past and find Nora’s differentiation in his introduction to Les Lieux de mémoires suspiciously sure of itself: he concludes that Memory is an absolute, while history is always relative (Nora 1989, 3). It remains important, however, to retain awareness of a peculiar relation between these two terms, first of all, and, second, to recognize that the use of these terms as oppositional, however problematic, reductive, or provocative that might be deemed, marked a significant shift in historiography that contributed to the founding of memory studies as a field.

Another significant contribution to memory studies comes through the related field of trauma studies, first the territory of psychologists and psychiatrists but explored in the humanities initially by historians, many with expertise in the history of Nazi Germany. Using psychological theories of trauma and traumatic memory, critics have assessed the impact of an event like the Nazi Holocaust on remembrance in the context of social groups, particularly among victims and their descendants, but also in considerations of larger-scale social remembering by the nation. The use of psychological theory—premised originally on the impact of trauma on the individual—applied to groups has proven controversial, but there is no doubt that trauma studies broke ground and thus changed the way in which we consider trauma at the social level to be discussable. The result has been the production of innovative critical texts that attempt a variety of reconstructions of the past as well as reinterpretations: because social groups experiencing trauma are often bereft of more traditional historical records, trauma studies have relied on a wide range of material from the past—testimony, descendent testimony, photographs, memorials and so on—that attest to the impacts of social trauma.

The conjunction of these two strands—historical movements away from more traditional forms of historiography alongside the rising prominence of postcolonialism, and the impact of trauma studies in forcing a consideration of historical group trauma—is the point at which memory studies might be said to have met Irish studies. Movement in Irish historical circles, led by critics like Roy F. Foster and Kevin Whelan, began what has been a long cycle of reconsiderations of the Irish past: the prominence given to particular myths of Irishness, such as the Easter Rising and the achievement of independence, have been reexamined, and major figures in those myths like Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera reassessed; the Irish colonial situation—and the extent to which Ireland participated in British colonialism—has been opened for debate; critical moments from the Battle of the Boyne and the Battle of Kinsale to 1798 and the Famine have been scrutinized; the Irish relationship with the Catholic Church and its institutions has been critiqued; the significance of immigration as a fact of many centuries of Irish life has been addressed anew. In a diverse range of scholarship covering many periods and types of approaches, memory has been a prominent term, and trauma has been seen as an underlying theme and even cause of Irish history. During this period of reassessment, there is a strong sense in which the Irish past has come to be perceived not as an etched-stone memorial without change, but as a shifting subject that depends on present positioning and, to a large degree, on the revelation of and subsequent lightening of trauma; there is sometimes the sense among critics of battling against specters that, if brought to light, would vanish, allowing the island of Ireland to finally awaken from what James Joyce cannily called the nightmare of Irish history.

The result has been that memory is frequently heard in the discourse of Irish studies, used for discussions of the oldest literary traditions and for analyses of ongoing events in Northern Ireland fueled by past grievances; courses introducing students to Irish history and literature emphasize the presence of the past in Irish culture; historical and anthropological studies assess tradition and the hold of the past on the Irish present. So prevalent has such terminology become that the notion of having something called a long memory has become a stereotype attached to Irishness and the Irish, suggesting that there is something specific in the culture that creates a particular type of memory function. We witness this attitude in writing over the years that casually refers to what Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has called atavistic memory (Ní Dhomhnaill 2005, 95) and many more have termed more generally racial memory, both of which notions move—even if unwittingly or generously—toward a drawing of lines and parameters for identification on the one hand and the assertion of equally vague notions of collectivity on the other. Beyond suggesting that there is such a thing as a statewide or national cultural memory, phrases like atavistic memory and racial memory can also imply that there is such a thing as a national character, a national norm, and so on, in the manner of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tracts like those by Burke and Kant: we experience tremors at such ideas now, worried by the prospect of identifying a culture so specifically as to inter an exclusive and possibly racist ideology within a group that will be used to delimit against some other. There is a need to tread carefully around such generalizations, yet such ideas, it seems to me, are entwined with any real consideration of cultural memory. To speak of Irish cultural memory, then, is to walk dangerously near a cliff-edge overlooking crashing waves that are ideas of cultural hegemony and cultural nationalism. However risky such cliff-edge projects are, they can, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out (1995), be useful all the same, if one walks carefully enough and does not go too near the drop: information can be gleaned from stereotypes and use found for studies whose parameters are set in part by the idea of the nation, even in a postnationalist era.

This series of four volumes sets out to examine something that I call Irish cultural memory. Despite the prevalence of memory in Irish studies, there has been no sustained attempt to consider what memory means in the context of the Irish past and present, or how it might shape Irish identities. This might be, in part, because of the multidisciplinary nature of the work being done that encompasses both Irish and memory studies; scholars and critics have been quite literally separated at times by virtue of the different departments in which they work. It is also no doubt due, however, to the fact that attempting to delineate even this particular realm of memory studies—in Ireland—is an enormous undertaking. It involves attempting to come to terms with stereotypes of Irish memory and trying to wade through them to arrive at some more analytical view of what memory means in an Irish context; it also means confronting and accepting diverse representations of Irish memory. The first step in that process involves allowing ourselves to imagine Irish cultural memory as not something that we can seek to define in any ultimate way; it is not solid and graspable, but an idea that is itself phantasmagoric, illusive. Irish cultural memory, in the singular, contains a multitude of conflicting, overlapping, contradictory, and competing memories, in the plural; the phrase Irish cultural memory is intended to indicate and represent a wide—even unlimited—category and classification in which are situated multiple subspecies of memories that can be said to function not just at the level of the individual mind, but at a social level. By using the term Irish cultural memory I do not suggest that there is, after all, a monolithic, unitary, and unified body of memories shared by all who might identify with or be associated with Irish culture; on the contrary, I use this term to delineate classes of material so wide-ranging and diverse that it is necessary to attempt to embody them linguistically. I have avoided using the term "Irish cultural memories for particular reasons: this term, I feel, suggests that there is a listable quality to memorial experience and the potential to compile what is a finite group of materials, when very clearly this is not the case. Irish cultural memories also suggests that there is no way in which we can talk about the process of memory in larger terms, and that the only possible approach is to compile as opposed to analyze. As a result, I have opted to use Irish cultural memory, a broad, classificatory term that indicates a body of memories, which allows us to discuss memorial processes from philosophical and ideological points of view, and which, crucially, allows for the expression of an array of Irish cultural memories by different groups, at different times, and in different places. If we allow ourselves to think of Irish cultural memory as a body of material, that body seems to have an unwieldy shape that bursts beyond the borders of the mind: it is extensive, unforgiving—begrudging, even, as the stereotype goes—and also precocious, sustaining; yet it can be as blank as the raw slate of the cliffs on certain subjects. Irish cultural memory can be said to retain names of physical sites long since disappeared, genealogical histories of particular parishes, reverence for land even in the face of overwhelming modernization and urbanity. It can also retain mighty hatreds for individuals or for groups, and it can fortify itself with the illusion of forgetting major traumas such as battle failures, famines, religious violence, bombings. We hear these things: the stereotypes of what Irish memory contains or dispossesses, the words spoken or written in an attempt to describe a cultural condition of being that otherwise eludes us. These words are not enough, though; we need a good deal more language, much more serious analysis, in order to approach an understanding of how memory functions in Irish culture. Is it the case, as these stereotypes suggest, that Irish cultural memory is long and short," embodying both intense remembrance and forgetting at different moments and for different groups? What do such cycles or memory movements tell us about the Irish past, and about the presents in which various pasts were recalled or forgotten? Is it possible to say that a culture or society actively remembers or forgets, or do we need to examine far more specific representations of that culture or society—individuals, organizations, events, texts, memorials, and so on—in order to answer such questions? This project on Irish cultural memory sets itself the task of attempting to answer these large and often theoretical questions through an examination of multiple and diverse sites of memory.

Memory and Irish culture is a subject that has been attempting arrival for some time. Indeed, memory has become a catchall term; our persistent use, in Irish studies, of a generic, undefined memory not only leaves vague what kind of memory we are talking about, but also encroaches on other terms and ideas—on our general sense of history as memory and on tradition as a form of remembrance. When a range of meanings is possible, it seems particularly important to at least sketch parameters for what it is that we are talking about; in general, however, we have not taken the time to define our usages of memory, and, as a result, memory, now a recognizably significant issue and element within Irish studies and an even more significant one outside it, has become almost too large a concept to deconstruct: the project would be rather like removing one by one the bricks of a building whose construction occurred gradually, under the hands of many builders and architects, to see how the foundations were laid.

The four volumes of this project thus aim at producing a considered observation and discussion of the architecture of Irish cultural memory, as interested in examining the existing structures—for settlement or more serious cracks, for the lines that one sees only when standing back at a distance—as in constructing them. This is because Irish cultural memory, as we might expect, is far from being monumentally conceived; it is more haphazard. I make the distinction between monumental and haphazard cultural memory here in order to exaggerate the contrast between Memory Ireland and another larger and more broadly conceived project that aimed to consider a national cultural memory: Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire. Rather than, as was the case in Nora’s project, commissioning essays on specific topics deemed to be of significance to Irish cultural memory, the present volumes were formed from the opposite impulse: they draw instead, quite purposefully, on the work that is being done by many scholars and in many places, and thus hope to reflect a more spontaneous and organic sense of the conception of Irish cultural memory. In this sense, these volumes rely on current work in memory studies that perceives cultural memory as processual, fluid and dynamic. They also reflect my conviction that Irish cultural memory must necessarily be less monumental and more fragmented than other counterparts because of Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial experience: the volumes thus aim to gather sometimes disparate ideas and to further the ongoing debates that are Irish cultural studies’ engagement with memory.

Because it seeks to open that debate, this project proceeds in a way designed to demonstrate the range of possible interactions between memory and Irish studies. This first volume provides students and scholars alike with a way of considering the distinctions between history and memory; there has been such conceptual overlap between them, as Barbara Misztal makes clear in an introductory essay on the subject that situates Ireland’s particular experience in the broader context of critical debate. As part of this aim, my own essay advances a provisional theory of postcolonial memory as an example of what I term a cultural imperative in an Irish context. Together these essays hope to provoke other theorizations of memory in postcolonial and contemporary contexts and aim to provide, first, an overview of the ways in which memory is conceived of in larger critical circles and, second, an analysis of the ways in which these debates link more directly to an Irish context. The project then begins at one of the broadest points of entry into the debate on memory in Irish studies, considering a series of historical moments, historical figures, and historical situations with an eye on the way in which aspects of memory studies profitably enriches our understanding of them. This first volume thus provides an alternative approach to the chronological history and considers historicity more generally in relation to cultural memory, and not only from the perspective of the historian: rather than attempting to tell a particular story and engage a particular narrative of Ireland, the Irish, or Irish history, it attempts, instead, to present a series of insights into Irish history that unsettle the notion of one possible narrative. The volume moves chronologically, in a broad sense, but purposely disrupts that movement with crosscurrents, unusual emphases, and an awareness of gaps in time and includes the work of sociologists and literary critics, archaeologists and historians. We move through the Irish past, paying particular attention to critical moments and figures, all approached in different ways; there has been no attempt to impose a uniformity of theoretical perspectives on the essays, in order that the diverse nature of cultural memory itself is made evident. Just as this project has resisted the commissioning of essays on specific topics, it has also resisted an the temptation to exert an external pressure on essays to conform to a particular approach to memory. The result is that the work of cultural memory, in this volume, is evidenced in a range of ways: some essays consider cultural memory manifested in directly visible forms—as in the persistence of symbols like the harp or in the presence (and absence) of archaeological sites—while others trace cultural memory in texts, language, and ideology at different times.

In this, the main sections of this book—Remembrance and Forgetting in Early and Premodern Irish Culture and Modernity, History, and Memory—mimic the process of memory itself, which constructs and reconstructs itself in response to many different factors: memory is both a disruptive and generative force that reacts to what is around it, and these essays are placed in purposeful conjunction to one another in the hopes of highlighting both those generative and disruptive forces. This volume also challenges the linearity of traditional historical narratives in order to highlight the uneven quality of cultural memory and the way that it can appear to exert its own agency and hone in on particular subjects without regard for others. The essays here interact with one another in curious ways as a result, forcing us to consider the ways in which we construct our sense of history out of the very strangeness of memory. Thus we might be as surprised by what is absent as by what is present: to use but one possible example, that scholars are working more prominently on the events of 1798 than those of 1601, say, is revealing about cultural memory in an Irish context. Does this suggest that comparatively more recent events are of greater import to cultural memory in Ireland, or that there is significance to the particular events of, say, 1798 that make them more vital to senses of cultural memory? Such questions are raised by the presence of some topics here and not others: rather than commissioning essays in order to fill what might have been perceived as narratological gaps, and in order to cover what I or other individuals might have thought to figure in cultural memory, I have allowed—and encouraged—those gaps to stand and to strike the reader. Certain events, moments, figures, texts loom larger than others in what seems to be a cyclical patterning that sees ebbs and flows; what is remembered or forgotten does not remain constant, and nor does the amount of remembrance or forgetting. This first volume, then, offers the perspective of scholars in the field whose work provides a curious, provocative, and necessarily selective perspective on the interaction between historical cycles and cultural memory.

Considerations of cultural memory cannot be limited to historically oriented analyses, of course, and future volumes of this project operate from different organizational principles in order to highlight different aspects of the body of Irish cultural memory; the volumes are structured to progressively narrow focus, beginning with this broad historical approach, and moving toward a more tightly focused consideration of cultural memory. Volume 2 considers phenomena of Irish cultural memory in the diaspora, an area of Irish memory studies that has been neglected to a certain extent; within the fervent debates about Irish identity over the last decades, there has been surprisingly little discussion about the ways in which disaporic memory feeds back into and influences Irish identity in Ireland. Volume 2 seeks to rectify this lack by offering considerations of Irish cultural memory in different geographical spaces as well as at different times, bringing together scholars whose projects have not often had the chance to converse with one another. From the United States and England to Canada and New Zealand, and from the mid–nineteenth century to the present, diasporic Irish cultural memory has both flourished and struggled in processes reflected in literature, newspapers, song, oral tradition, souvenirs, and emblems. Volume 2 also seeks to examine the forms that cultural memory assumes: cultural memory can be analyzed not only through history—as in volume 1—or through groups of people—like those in the diaspora section of volume 2—but also through particular forms: organizations of individuals, cultural mediums such as photography, architecture, music, literature. What memorial impact does architectural form have on our sense of the past? What role does the photograph play in evoking, capturing, and representing cultural memory? How does music—in written form or in performance—function to embody cultural memory? What relationship does a consciously organized group such as the Gaelic Athletic Association have to Irish cultural memory, and what relationship do Irish Travellers have to cultural memory, as a group that has been consistently othered in an Irish context? The second half of volume 2 shifts focus to a series of such forms in an Irish context, looking at them as containers for different types of cultural memory, and with particular memorial functions of their own.

The third volume approaches the body of Irish cultural memory from a different perspective, homing in to consider two cruxes in Irish cultural memory—the Famine and the Troubles. In keeping with the overall plan for this project to narrow focus progressively in order to demonstrate the diverse range of interpretive possibilities available to memory studies, the volume chooses two specific periods and provides multiple perspectives on them. While there are many events or dates that might have been chosen as having particular importance to modern Irish history more generally—1601, 1798, 1916, and 1922 are perhaps the most obvious—the Famine and the Troubles have provoked tremendous debate among critics and are the subject of significant work on memory and Irish studies. In fact, some of the earliest work that brought theories of cultural memory to bear on the Irish past was performed in relation to the Famine; Kevin Whelan and Cormac Ó Grada’s work has been exemplary in this respect. Commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Famine occurred at a time when Irish studies had come into its own, at a moment when Ireland and the diaspora seemed somehow ready to reconsider that historical moment, and when the intellectual infrastructure of Irish studies allowed for an international discussion of the topic to occur. As a result, the Famine became the Irish studies topic around which memory issues were debated, often heatedly. As one of the first Irish topics, then, to enter into the realm of memory studies, the Famine is a significant period, and has been chosen as a focal point of this project as a result.

The period of the Troubles has similarly been at the center of memory debates in an Irish context, particularly since the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and the subsequent entrance into a period of détente formalized negotiation and disarmament. The establishment of a peace has led to multiple reconsiderations not only of the immediately preceding decades, but also of the larger sectarian and colonial past of the area and its relationship to the United Kingdom and to the Republic of Ireland. Much of the finest work being done on memory in relation to Ireland has focused on Northern Ireland and on the Troubles; the application of trauma theory and the importance of conflict resolution have led to innovative considerations that not only have had impact on the ways in which we think about cultural heritage, but also affect systems of contemporary governance and approaches to conflict resolution in the present. For these reasons, as well as because the much more contemporary issues of memory that the Troubles raise serve as a counterpoint of sorts to the Famine, the Troubles have been focused on in volume 3. The two topics have been brought together for one final reason: in Irish studies, there has not infrequently been a divide between critical work from the North and from the Republic, effectively mirroring and exacerbating the lines of a conflict that was rancorous for so many years. These subjects are brought together here not as a simplistic attempt to make peace between critical arenas, but to demonstrate forcefully the parallels in critical work that is being done, and to suggest and point to possible links for future work.

The final volume in this series narrows focus more still to consider one particular figure, in this case James Joyce, in relation to cultural memory. While those working outside of literary studies might think this a strange or anomalous choice of focus in a broadly conceived project on Irish cultural memory, those with any familiarity with Joycean studies of recent decades will be unsurprised. As with the Famine and the Troubles, James Joyce has become a fulcrum for questions and debates of memory in Irish contexts; for several decades now, Joyce scholars have been unearthing and excavating and debating about a plethora of cultural memorial forms, processes, and representations in Joyce’s work, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, and most particularly in Ulysses. While this final volume will undoubtedly appeal to Joyceans for gathering for the first time the major work being done by scholars in this area, it is intended to provide nonspecialists as well with further insight into the ways in which cultural memory is embodied: in this case in the work of one of Ireland’s most prominent literary figures.

As this sketch should make evident, the role of this first volume is in part to set the stage for those that follow by presenting myriad examples of how it is that cultural memory and ideas of cultural memory work to unsettle and preserve our notions of historicity and time, of the past and the present. It is hoped that these volumes will themselves serve not as a monument to an Irish past or to a particular invocation of Irishness, but will instead illustrate and point to the breadth and depth of the debates about multiple pasts and identities. As a word for an abstract notion, memory has been subject to metaphor for millennia, as Douwe Draaisma’s wonderful study on the topic demonstrates (2000). Apart from his fascinating thesis that our metaphors for memory have followed developments in technology, Draaisma presents us indirectly with a larger comment on the concept of memory: memory seems to be something that we need to make concrete, that we need to realize in the world. It is so vital an idea to our notions of ourselves as humans, so utterly indispensable to all we do, that memory has been transformed over and over again from an ether, an energy, into a tangibility that we want to see. Memory Ireland produces what I hope will be new considerations of this oldest and most important of terms for an Irish context and aims to begin a dialogue within Irish studies of one of its most referenced but neglected critical terms.

Introduction to Theories of Memory

1

Memory and History

BARBARA A. MISZTAL

Paradoxically, despite the fact that contemporary society is commonly conceptualized as terminally ill with amnesia (Huyssen 1995, 1), memory has established itself as a major discourse; interest in memory in the last thirty years has been unprecedented. This interest accounts for the discovery of ethnic and local roots as well as for the construction of common pasts to bind communities and give meaning to their collective fates. The intensification of a memory discourse can be illustrated by the epidemics of public commemoration, the growing recognition of memory as both a constitutive component of political culture and an important base of collective identities, the increasing popularity of the genre of autobiography, the growing importance of sites of remembrance for tourism, and the popular focus on heritage and museumania (Huyssen 1995, 7).

A belief that democracy’s health depends upon social remembering of the past has encouraged a growing interest in groups’