Postcolonialism and Stories of the Irish Troubles

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Postcolonialism and Stories of the Irish TroublesAuthor(s): Michael StoreySource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 63-77Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557531 .

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Michael Storey

Postcolonialism and Stories

of the Irish Troubles

The story of the Troubles, a subgenre of Irish fiction, originated in early twen

tieth-century anticolonial events in Ireland?the 1916 Easter Rising and the sub

sequent Anglo-Irish War and civil war?and will end, presumably, only with a

satisfactory solution to the seemingly intractable problems in the North; satis

factory, that is, to Irish nationalists. In other words, the story of the Troubles1 is

co-extensive with the Troubles themselves. This suggests that the Troubles story is an ideal genre by which to track postcolonial, i.e., anticolonial, attitudes in

Irish literature. And in many ways it is. But such a study reveals that the em

phatic anticolonial sentiment of the early stories of the Troubles disappears in

recent stories and is replaced by an attitude that challenges essential postcolo nial concepts, particularly those of cultural identity and violence.

Most of the early Troubles stories, those by Daniel Corkery, Frank O'Con

nor and Sean O'Faolain, exhibit the elements of postcolonial literature,2 as iden

tified by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back and Cairns

and Richards in Writing Ireland. There are the themes of exile, displacement and

the need to reestablish cultural identity, as well as "the celebration of the strug

gle towards independence."3 These stories also utilize postcolonial stylistic fea

tures, including cultural allusions, allegory, and the use of native (i.e., Gaelic) names, words, phrases and syntax, designed to appropriate English, the language of the oppressor, and reconstitute it as Anglo-Irish, thereby making it an es

sential element of Irish identity in the emerging Irish nation.

Violence, another recurrent aspect of postcolonial literature, either perpe

trated or threatened by Irish rebels, appears frequently (though in palatable

form) in these early stories, sanctioned as requisite for the attainment of the

new nation. As David Lloyd, invoking the concepts of Walter Benjamin, explains

i. I define the story of the Irish Troubles as a piece of short fiction that treats, in the foreground or background, any of the violent twentieth-century conflicts that have come about as a result of

political turmoil in Ireland.

2. I use the term "postcolonial literature" in the way that postcolonial scholars use it to refer to

any literature written by a colonized people, whether it be while still under colonial rule, during the

struggle for freedom, or after independence has been achieved.

3- Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice

in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 27.

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW/IRIS ?IREANNACH NUA, 2:3 (FOMHAR/AUTUMN, I998), 63-77



Postcolonialism and Stories of the Irish Troubles

in Anomalous States, "bloodshed is subordinated to the founding of the state."4

Unabashedly nationalistic, early Troubles stories present rebel heroes in quest of the Irish nation.5 The typical story, such as Corkery's "On the Heights," O'Connor's "September Dawn," and O'Faolain's "Fugue," is about a rebel hero,

often the narrator, on the run (or, to use the Irish phrase, "on his keeping"6) from imperial forces? British soldiers, Black and Tans, or the Royal Irish Con

stabulary. An exile in his own country, the hero seeks and receives shelter and

sympathy from the Irish peasantry, thereby assuring that he will continue the

struggle for Irish independence. The major thrust of these early Troubles stories is to create, in Antonio

Gramsci's term, a "sentimental connection"7 between the intellectual leaders (as

represented by the writers through the first person rebel heroes) and the peo

ple (readers) of the emerging nation-state. The necessity of this connection is

signaled in the recurrent plot device of the rebel's request for help from the peo

ple, but it is achieved through the re-creation of Irish identity, shared by lead

ers and people alike and distinct from that of the English colonizers, and through a pervasive tone of celebration in the struggle for independence despite the ab

sence of any significant rebel military victories. One of Corkery's characters, for

instance, speaks of "a sense of spiritual exaltation" (HB 95) among the Irish peo

ple and rebels, and another, a rebel sheltered by the people, exclaims, "How their

Irish welcome went round my heart! Gaels of the Gael, they received me, spoke to me, welcomed me, slaved for me in the true Gaelic spirit..." (HB 25). Rebels

and people are united in their Irish identity and celebrate their struggle for

independence.

The theme of cultural identity in these stories raises the question of the exact

nature of that cultural identity. In Writing Ireland, Cairns and Richards show

that the key cultural elements of ethnicity, language, religion and class are for

mulated and reformulated over time in the effort to portray the "true" Irish iden

tity. Claims for the authenticity of Gaelic, Catholic, and peasant are established

and then challenged, though never completely overturned, by counterclaims for

the authenticity of Anglo-Irish, Protestant, and bourgeoisie. The result is a sue

4- David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1993), p. 126.

5. See also Michael Storey, '"Not To Be Written Afterwards': The Irish Revolution in the Irish Short

Story" Eire-Ireland 28:3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 32-47.

6. Daniel Corkery, The Hounds ofBanba. (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 118;

hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: {HB 118).

7. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks, 1971, quoted in David Cairns and Shaun

Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester Univer

sity Press, 1988 ), p. 14.

64




cession of shifting Irish identities, revolving on the axes of Gaelic and Anglo

Irish, Catholic and Protestant, peasant and bourgeoisie.8 While these early stories, set mostly in rural Munster, portray the Irish as

Gaelic and peasant, they do not make a particularly strong case for either the

Gaelic language or Catholicism as essential Irish elements, though all three writ

ers were Catholic and proficient in Gaelic. The telling fact that these stories are

written in English (except for occasional snatches of Gaelic) precludes any claim

that Irish identity must be rooted in the Gaelic language. True, the narrators fre

quently mention that the characters speak in Gaelic, particularly in moments

of patriotic fervor, but what the characters say is recorded almost entirely in

English, obviously for the benefit of the Irish reader lacking a knowledge of

Gaelic.

The fact that these writers, all proficient in Gaelic, chose not to make the

language an essential component of Irish identity is understandable. O'Connor

and O'Faolain wished to associate their stories with the broader literary revival

that had been effected largely in English by such Anglo-Irish writers as Yeats,

Lady Gregory, Synge, and O'Casey. Corkery insisted on a narrower (i.e., Gaelic

and Catholic) definition of Irish than did O'Connor or O'Faolain, but he al

lowed for, even admitted the necessity of, English as the language of Irish cul

ture by not insisting, in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, on the Gaelic language as one of his criteria of the "Irish national being."9

As for Catholicism, Cairns and Richards point out that, while it had become

a fundamental tenet of the political movement of the people-nation in its move

towards national self-determination, it simultaneously became for many writ

ers the cause of an even more profound enslavement than that of Union with

England?the enslavement of the self.10

O'Connor and O'Faolain might certainly be included among these writers tak

ing the latter view of Catholicism, though the evidence would come from their

stories of Irish domestic life published in later collections. Their Troubles sto

ries contain very little of Catholicism as an influential national element.

O'Connor presents only one major Catholic figure, a Gaelic-speaking nun who

shelters rebels in "Nightpiece with Figures." Two of O'Faolain's stories contain

extensive Catholic references, but neither makes a strong connection between

Catholicism and nationalism. In fact, "The Small Lady" raises serious questions about the morality of the rebels. In that story, Irish rebels hold the title charac

ter, an English woman who has betrayed other rebels, in a monastery while wait

8. Cairns and Richards; see especially chapters 4,5 and 6.

9. Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork: Cork University Press, 1931), p. 19.

10. Cairns and Richards, p. 71.

65




ing to execute her. One of the Catholic rebels has a brief affair with her, for which

he is struck with profound guilt. Richard Bonaccorso puts the irony aptly: "It

seems the ultimate in moral evasion that he should be so single-mindedly con

cerned with the purity of his soul while the woman he has just made love to is

going to her execution."11

Corkery, on the other hand, listed "The Religious Consciousness of the Peo

ple," by which he meant Catholicism, as an essential element of the "Irish na

tional being."12 His treatment of Catholicism as an influential cultural compo nent in his Troubles stories is, however, problematic. Only one of the nine stories

in The Hounds ofBanba presents a strong Catholic element, and it does so in an

ambivalent manner. In "The Price," the heroine, Nan Twohig, fuses a Catholic

piety with nationalist fervor, sheltering, nursing, and praying for a wounded

rebel and otherwise supporting the local volunteers. But Nan's fusion of Catholi

cism and nationalism is countered by the priest's separation of the two. He

speaks out against the rebels and takes offense when, during Mass, Nan requests

that the people pray for the soul of Roger Casement. Cairns and Richards argue that the Church Hierarchy was not officially against rebel activities during the

War of Independence, and sometimes in fact offered "tacit endorsement of the

I.R.A."13 in the period before the Civil War, but Corkery suggests otherwise

through his depiction of the priest. The abandonment of the goal of reestablishing the primacy of Gaelic as a

cultural component did not mean an acquiescence to English. The alternative,

which these writers pursued, was to appropriate English and reconstitute it as

Anglo-Irish, a process that postcolonial critics argue is effective in establishing

a national identity by distancing the postcolonial text from the imperial cul

ture.14 The process is carried out, as noted above, through a variety of tech

niques, including cultural allusions, allegory, occasional use of glossed or un

glossed words and phrases of the native language, and syntactic fusion of the

native language with the colonial language. These early Troubles stories are littered with Gaelic names, words, phrases

and sentences, as well as with lyrics from Gaelic songs and ballads, glossed when

the writer thinks it necessary. Corkery sometimes uses the Gaelic spelling of a

character's name, such as Tomas O'Miodhachain or Eibhlin ni Charta, and

Gaelic place names, such as Cnoc na gCaorach, glossed as "the Hill of the Sheep"

(HB 132). Gaelic exclamations ("wisha"; "whisht,"), greetings ("Dia bhur

il. Richard Bonaccorso, Sean O'Faolain's Irish Vision (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1987), p. 62.

12. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, p. 19.

13. Cairns and Richards, p. 116.

14. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, p. 38.

66




mbeatha, a dhaoine maithe": "God be your life"15), and phrases of affection ("my

gradh gear-."my bright love" [HB 159h"" ghilen:"0 Brightness" [GN 133]) also

frequently appear in the stories.

Irish pronunciation and syntax, particularly in dialogue, are also used to give the English an Irish quality, thereby creating Anglo-Irish. Characters say"ould" for old, "wan" for one, "dacent" for decent, "aisy" for easy, "lave" for leave, "tink"

for think, "ye" for you, "meself" for myself, and "'tis" for it is. Syntactic fusion,

a common feature of postcolonial literature,16 frequently occurs in characters'

speeches, the Gaelic syntax giving the English a distinctive Anglo-Irish quality. The most common Gaelic construction found in Anglo-Irish is the use of the

verb "to be," especially at the beginning of the sentence, followed by the word

or phrase that the speaker wishes to emphasize17: "Tis there he lives" (HB 20); "

'Tis late ye'er stopping from yeer home" (GN 25). The progressive form of the

verb, in place of simple present tense, is another readily recognizable Anglo Irish construction:18

" 'Tis a great consolation ye're giving me" (HB 33); "I do be

deceiving myself, I do be fancying I hear voices" (HB 29); "Ach, sure, I do be only

taking a rise out of her, boys" (GN 63). Another common feature is the prefer ence for participles, especially in "after" and "and" constructions:19 "only that

'tis how a tourist is after losing his way in the fogs" (HB 47); "He don't know is

it on his head or his feet he is, with the column in on him and he keeping it quiet from the abbot."20 Other linguistic features of Anglo-Irish include the use of

"sure" or "surely" to preface a remark ("sure you can see for yourself

. . ."

[CSSO 71]) and the aspiration of consonants ("sthream," "shcattered,"

"dhrinkin,""shtop").

English is also appropriated and reconstituted as Anglo-Irish through the

technique of allusion.21 Allusions to Celtic and Gaelic culture are pervasive in

these early Troubles stories, including names of Irish mythical heroes and hero

ines (Cuchulain, Emer, Oisin, Naisi, Deirdre), as well such as historical and po litical heroes as the O'Neills, O'Donnells and O'Sullivans, Wolfe Tone, Robert

Emmet, Parnell, John O'Leary, O'Donovan Rossa, Roger Casement, Pearse and

MacDonagh. Popular Irish songs, poems and ballads,22 like "Wrap the Green

15. Frank O'Connor, Guests of the Nation (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 62; hereafter cited parene

thetically, thus: (GN 62). 16. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, pp. 68-72.

17. Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 44-45.

18. Nicholas Grene, Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 66.

19. Ibid., pp. 66 and 68.

20. Sean O'Faolain, Collected Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), p. 79; hereafter cited parenthet

ically, thus: (CSSO 79). 21. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, p. 57.

22. Thomas Davis advocated ballads as an effective means of spreading Irish history and culture

to the people. See Cairns and Richards, p. 35.

67




Flag 'Round Me, Boys" and "The Felons of Our Land," are also frequently al

luded to or quoted in these stories.

All of these cultural allusions?to mythical and historical heroes and hero

ines; to anti-imperialist songs, ballads, and poems; to nationalist groups, such

as Fenians, Whiteboys, and Cumann na mBan; and to code names, such as Cath

leen ni Houlihan and the Wild Geese?have the effect of creating a sense of

shared identity among colonized readers, while culturally distancing them from

the imperial power.

Allegory is another technique used in postcolonial literature to appropriate the language and establish cultural identity.23 The central allegory of the Irish

nationalistic movement is that Ireland is a woman (Cathleen ni Houlihan, Dark

Rosaleen, the Shan van Vocht) in need of young men to rescue her lands seized

by strangers. This allegory appears in somewhat veiled form (far less obvious,

say, than in Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan) in Corkery's "An Unfinished Sym

phony," O'Connor's "September Dawn," and O'Faolain's "Fugue." In each of

these stories the protagonist is a young rebel on the run, and in each case he

meets or seeks union with a beautiful young woman somehow linked to the na

tionalist movement. In each story, the rebel hero is denied permanent union

with the young woman and is forced to continue his struggle against imperial forces. The allegorical meaning is clear: consumation and permanent union

with the woman will be achieved only when the Irish nation is established.

One final aspect of these postcolonial Troubles stories to be mentioned is

the theme of displacement and the concern for place. The authors of The Em

pire Writes Back note that a "special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into

being" when a colonized people suffer a sense of displacement, the destruction

of "an effective identifying relationship between self and place."24 This sense of

displacement need not result from a literal displacement from one's native coun

try; it may result as well from "cultural denigration, the conscious and uncon

scious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly su

perior racial or cultural model."25

Writers of these early Troubles stories attempt to re-establish this "identify

ing relationship" between the Irish people and the land by evoking the natural

beauty of the land and its Gaelic identity. To this end, they refer frequently to

Gaelic placenames, and they use Gaelic-derived words for landscape features:

bog, glen, coom, cairn, and bohereen. All three writers also dwell at length on

the natural beauty of western Ireland, a beauty linked to a sense of Gaelic iden

tity. In his autobiography, Vive Moi!, O'Faolain writes of the intention of the re

23- Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, p. 28.

24. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

25. Ibid., p. 9. Italics in original.

68




publicans to preserve the aspects of western Ireland that held great symbolic

import: "the Gaelic-speaking West, its hard ancestral memories, its ancient ways, its trackless mountains, small cottages, lonely lakes, ruined hermit chapels, [and]

wild rocky seas."26 These early stories of the Troubles help to preserve these nat

ural symbols by recreating them in the reader's imagination.

The reaction against these nationalistic (i.e., republican) stories of the Troubles

came not from writers with opposing political stances (such as Free State sym

pathizers) but from two of the creators of the nationalist stories?O'Connor

and O'Faolain?and from Liam O'Flaherty, all of whom chose to fight on the

republican side in the civil war, though O'Flaherty's involvement was brief. It

was the deep disillusionment with republican ideals experienced by these writer

rebels in the civil war that resulted in their writing stories that take a negative, ironic attitude toward identity-thinking and violence as means toward the cre

ation of the Irish nation.27

Lloyd argues that in the postcolonial moment, the hegemony of the imperial

power is replaced by the counter-hegemony of the emerging nation, thereby

"drowning out other social and cultural possibilities" for its people.28 O'Connor,

O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty explore, in these stories, that hegemonic shift and

suggest that enforcement of postcolonial concepts of identity-thinking and

violence destroyed these "other social and cultural possibilities." Most of these

stories are set during the Irish Civil War, which can be viewed, of course, either as a

struggle for hegemony between two anti-imperialist forces, republicans and

Free Staters, or, if the Free State government is seen as capitulating to the British, as another stage of the nationalist struggle against imperial forces. The civil war

thus raised questions about the cultural and political identities of the opposing forces, as well as about the use of violence in nation building.

The dominant theme of these stories is disillusionment. O'Faolain's "The

Patriot," O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation," and O'Flaherty's "The Mountain

Tavern" all strongly evoke their authors' deep disappointment in the national

ist movement. A pervasive subsidiary theme is that of betrayal, the ironic con

verse of the theme of identity. This theme is prominently developed in such

stories as O'Connor's "Jo," "Alec," and "Jumbo's Wife"; O'Faolain's "The Small

Lady" and "The Death of Stevey Long"; and O'Flaherty's "Civil War." Betrayal

26. Sean O'Faolain, Vive Moi! (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), pp. 188-89.

27. Corkery also, of course, chose the republican side, but he did not become disillusioned in the

republican cause; however, after The Hounds ofBanba he wrote no more stories of the Troubles.

28. Lloyd, p. 3.

69




is often effected through the act of informing. The informer, of course, is ab

horrent in any political organization but particularly in an emerging nation

state, and this is especially true in Irish nationalism. The informer, such as

O'Connor's Jumbo, is anathema not only because he has betrayed members of

the nationalist cause, but also because he has done so in secrecy and remains a

threat to do so to others. While the theme of betrayal might be developed in

order to encourage identity-thinking among those betrayed, these writers sug

gest that betrayal is a natural outcome of the concepts of identity-thinking and

state-sanctioned violence.

Furthermore, although the betrayals often occur among combatants, as in

O'Connor's "Jo," in which the title character, a republican irregular, executes an

other man who has switched sides from the republicans to the Free State army. A more damaging kind of betrayal is that which severs the "sentimental con

nection" between the rebels and the people. In O'Connor's "Alec," three repub

lican irregulars are betrayed to Free State soldiers by a caretaker of a house where

they have sought shelter. Similarly, in O'Flaherty's "The Mountain Tavern," the

owners of the destroyed tavern refuse to help three republican soldiers, one fa

tally wounded, and instead allow approaching Free State soldiers to arrest them.

Both stories suggest that revulsion to violence, even violence committed in the

name of nationalism, has caused the people to sever their relationship with the

rebels.

There is a terrible irony evoked by the theme of betrayal. Cultural and po litical identity, the very means by which the nation-state is to be established, be

comes the greatest liability for the members of the state. Irony is also evoked in

a different, more poignant way by O'Flaherty in "The Sniper" and O'Connor in

"Guests of the Nation" to expose the shallowness of political and cultural iden

tity when measured against deeper family and human identities. In "The Sniper," a republican sniper manages to outwit and kill his opponent, a Free State sniper,

only to discover that he has killed his own brother. Political allegiance has de

stroyed family bonds. In "Guests of the Nation," Bonaparte and Noble, Irish sol

diers, are told to execute their English prisoners, with whom they have devel

oped a close relationship. The ironic result is that both Irish soldiers experience enormous anguish because the human identity they have established with the

prisoners runs deeper than the political identity they share with the Irish

nationalists.

In their reaction against identity-thinking, these stories also forsake the post colonial stylistic features used to promote cultural identity. They are nearly de

void of cultural allusions to Irish mythical and historical figures; they present few quotations of Irish ballads, songs and poems; they contain few expressions of Gaelic words, phrases,

or sentences. Two of O'Faolain's stories seem outright

70




rejections of the allegory of Ireland as a woman saved by nationalists. In "The

Bombshop," Mother Dale, an old woman symbolizing Ireland,29 is accidentally shot and killed by rebels feuding with each other. And in "The Patriot," Bernie, the disillusioned rebel protagonist, decides to quit the republican cause, for

saking Cathleen ni Houlihan for Norah, a real woman.

Although Irish political violence has extended over nearly the entire twentieth

century, the most intensive periods of violence have been the 1916-1923 period from the Easter Rising through the Civil War and the period of the last three

decades which has produced, mostly in the North, near-constant acts of ter

rorism by both nationalists and Unionists: bombings, assassinations, reprisals,

kneecappings, proxy bombs, and other atrocities. Just as the earlier period of

Troubles resulted in a flourish of fiction, so also has the recent period produced its share of notable stories.

Stories depicting the Irish "Troubles" of the last three decades differ in sig nificant ways from the earlier stories. A major difference regards the origins of

the authors. The four principle authors of the early period?Corkery, O'Con

nor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty?had much in common. They were all male

Catholic nationalists who were committed to the revolution and who chose the

republican side in the Civil War. And they were all from areas that subsequently fell within the boundaries of the Republic (Corkery, O'Connor, and O'Faolain

were all from Cork; O'Flaherty was from the Aran Islands). Writers of the later stories, on the other hand, are more diverse. There are

several women writers?for example, Fiona Barr, Anne Devlin, Val Mulkerns,

and Maura Treacy. There are both Catholic and Protestant writers, from both

the Republic and Northern Ireland (William Trevor, for example, is a Protes

tant from Cork; Benedict Kiely is a Catholic from Tyrone). Also, these later writ

ers (Gerry Adams excepted) do not, for the most part, take a political or sec

tarian stance in their stories, probably because none of them, except Adams, has

taken an active role in the conflict. Many have changed their geographical lo

cations, a sign perhaps of their lack of a fixed political stance. Trevor left Cork

for Devon, England; Kiely migrated south from Tyrone to Dublin. Bernard

MacLaverty was born in Belfast but lives in Scotland; Eugene McCabe was born

in Glascow but lives in County Monaghan. Another difference between the early stories and the later ones is the shift in

setting, from the South, where most of the Troubles of 1916-1923 took place, to

the North, where most of the violence since the 1960s has occurred. The moun

29. Paul Doyle, Sean O'Faolain (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 29.

71




tainous regions of Munster were the favored locale in the stories of Corkery,

O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty. In the stories of Adams, Devlin,

MacLaverty, Jennifer Cornell, and other contemporary writers, Belfast becomes

the prominent site of "the Troubles." The Falls and the Shankill Road districts

of Belfast provide both a literal setting and a convenient symbol of Catholic

Protestant division and antagonism. Small towns and villages, rural farmlands,

and coastal resorts in the northern counties of Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Antrim

are often chosen as settings, in part because violence does in fact occur in these

places, but also because the sharp contrast between the peace and tranquillity associated with villages, resorts, and farms and the violence can be particularly

poignant. Trevor and McCabe are especially powerful in effecting this contrast

in their stories of "the Troubles." Trevor, for example, sets "Beyond the Pale" in

a seacoast resort in County Antrim, where his English characters come every

year for their holidays because it is "Perfection"?until "the Troubles" intrude.

The border is also an obvious choice for setting in these later stories. For

many Irish, the border is both the major source and the symbol of "the Trou

bles," separating as it does the Republic from Northern Ireland, and thus pre

venting a united Ireland. The IRA has attacked customs houses and police bar

racks along the border, something that has been depicted in such stories as

O'Faolain's "No Country for Old Men" (published in the early 1960s just before

the outbreak of major violence). Travel across the border by all citizens is often

marked by difficulty and aggravation, a point raised in such stories as Mary Beckett's "Failing Years." Nora, Beckett's elderly protagonist, a Catholic widow,

attempts to return to her family home in Belfast from Dublin, where she has

spent most of her married life, but she is told that the train no longer connects

the cities because of the bombings in the North.

The South, of course, has not been immune to violence in these last decades.

Val Mulkern's "Four Green Fields" depicts a bombing in downtown Dublin that

kills twenty people, including two small children. Trevor sets "The Distant Past"

in a small town sixty miles south of the border, close enough to the North to

be affected by its violence. The impact of "the Troubles" extends overseas.

Trevor's "Another Christmas" is set in London; Mulkern's "The Torch" takes place in Paris; and Jennifer Cornell places "The Start of the Season" in Italy. In each

of these stories the Irish protagonists cannot escape being affected by the conflict.

The most significant differences, however, between the early and contem

porary stories lie in the radical positions the contemporary stories take on the

themes of violence and identity. While O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty re

acted in some of their stories against the uses of violence and the insistence on

identity-thinking of the nationalists, contemporary writers have taken this re

action further, showing the ultimate effect of violence on cultural identity.

72




The most notable shift in the use of violence in these contemporary stories

is the manner in which the writers depict violence. In the early stories violence

is usually in the background and always palatable. It is there as a necessary con

comitant of the struggle for nationhood. In contemporary stories, the violence

is brutal, random, senseless, pervasive, and most often presented front and cen

ter. It often happens to innocent civilians. The victims are both Catholic and

Protestant, from the South and the North, and usually with no active allegiance to either nationalism or Unionism: a Catholic Belfast fruiterer gunned down by a Protestant paramilitary; two BBC officials and three of their television crew

blown up in their Land-Rover by an IRA bomb; a Catholic Fermanagh farmer

and his idiot farmhand slain with their own farm implements by a UDR mem

ber; a Dublin family of four, the parents maimed and the children killed, by a

terrorist bomb; a young Englishman studying Irish history in Belfast betrayed to the Provos by his Irish lover. All of these innocent characters are randomly,

senselessly, and violently killed.

Furthermore, the violence often occurs unexpectedly and is described

graphically. In David Park's "Oranges from Spain," for example, the violence

comes without warning in the last two pages after most of the story has dealt

with the narrator's relationship with his boss, the fruiterer Gerry Breen. Breen

is executed in his shop, while holding a tray of oranges, by a Protestant extrem

ist in a blue crash helmet who arrives and departs on a motorbike. The random

execution, apparently in retaliation for an IRA execution of a Protestant, is de

scribed in gruesome detail:

Suddenly the man pulled a gun out of his tunic_The first shot hit Gerry Breen

in the chest, spinning him round, and as he slumped to the floor the oranges

scattered and rolled in all directions. He lay there, face down, and his body was

still moving. Then, as I screamed an appeal for mercy the man walked forward

and, kneeling over the body, shot him in the back of the head. His body kicked

and shuddered, and then was suddenly and unnaturally still_Blood splashed

his green coat, and flowed from the dark gaping wound, streaming across the

floor, mixing with the oranges that were strewn all around us.30

This is a revolting portrait of sectarian violence at its most brutal and senseless,

made all the more so for being reported by a firsthand observer. But no story

conveys the traumatic physical and psychological effects of "the Troubles" more

powerfully than Trevor's "Attracta." Trevor's object is quite clearly to make the

violence so vivid and so repugnant as to move the reader as much as it does his

protagonist, Attracta. The actual violence?murder, decapitation, rape, and sui

30. David Park, "Oranges from Spain," in The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, ed.

Dermot Bolger (New York: Vintage, 1994)? P- 3*8.

73




cide?would be gruesome enough even if reported once matter-of-factly, but

Trevor wants the reader to imagine it in all of its astounding detail, almost to

the point where it makes the reader ill. To do this, Trevor repeats the account

of the violence several times.

We first learn of the violence through the consciousness of Attracta, an el

derly schoolteacher, as she reviews a recent newspaper account. Penelope Vade,

an Englishwoman, has committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of aspirin after

having been raped repeatedly by seven men, her husband's murderers. The men,

probably IRA terrorists, gunned down her husband, a British army officer sta

tioned in Belfast, and then decapitated him. They then sent the severed head,

"wrapped in cotton-wool to absorb the ooze of blood, secured within a plastic

bag and packed in a biscuit tin," to Penelope Vade in England. "She hadn't known

that he was dead before his dead eyes stared into hers "31 In response to such vi

olence, Penelope Vade joined the Women's Peace Movement in Belfast, but her

husband's murderers retaliated by raping her, thus provoking her suicide.

The newspaper account triggers in Attracta memories of her own victim

ization decades earlier (thus linking the current violence to that of the past). When she was eleven her parents were accidentally killed in an Irish rebel am

bush of Black and Tan soldiers during the War of Independence. She links Pene

lope Vade's tragedy to her own and determines to try to prevent other such

tragedies by telling her students?sixteen Protestant children?about her ex

perience and reading to them the newspaper account of Penelope Vade. She

"read[s] it slowly because she wanted it to become rooted in their minds as it

was in hers. She lingered over the number of bullets that had been fired into the

body of Penelope Vade's husband, and over the removal of his head" (CS 686). The irony is that the children are unmoved by the account: "Sure, isn't there stuff

like that in the papers the whole time," one child remarks (CS 687). Neverthe

less, Trevor's readers are moved by the account which becomes rooted in their

minds.

One does not have to be killed to be a victim of "the Troubles." Recent sto

ries are filled with victims that live through their traumatic experiences: in

MacLaverty's "Walking the Dog," a Belfast man out walking his dog is forced

into a car at gunpoint, interrogated and beaten by a pair of Protestant extrem

ists before being released; in Kiely's Proxopera, IRA terrorists, who demand that

one family member drive a proxy bomb to town, threaten the family, kneecap the son, and burn down the family home before leaving.

Then there are the victims of nonphysical violence. Although not physically harmed, they suffer severe psychological and social damage. In Fiona Barr's "The

31. William Trevor, "Attracta " The Collected Stories (New York: Viking, 1992), p. 676; hereafter cited

parenthetically, thus: (CS 676).

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Wall-Reader," a family is threatened by messages painted on the walls outside

their Belfast home because the wife has innocently carried on conversations

with a British soldier. Fearful for their lives, they are forced to flee to Dublin in

a rented van in the middle of the night, never having actually met their accusers.

In Kiely's "Bluebell Meadow," a Catholic girl and her Protestant boyfriend, a new

member of the B-Specials, are warned by adults with extreme sectarian views

to break off their romance. Trevor's "The Distant Past" depicts a Protestant

brother and sister in the South ostracized by their longtime Catholic friends be

cause of the renewed violence in the North.

Sometimes the most minor of incidents can dramatize the potential explo

siveness of life in Northern Ireland. In Maura Treacy's "A Minor Incident," British

soldiers in a truck taunt a group of (apparently Catholic) women and their chil

dren, some in prams, walking along a road. In the climax, a soldier shoots and

kills a dog belonging to one of the children. The killing is not simply an impul sive act. The soldiers jeer the dog and pelt it with stones, and when one of the

mothers restrains the dog from running after the truck, they taunt her to release

him so that they can shoot it. When she appeals to them that it belongs to a

child, one soldier cruelly jokes that perhaps she might prefer that he "shoot him

where he is ... take two birds ... ,"32 The story dramatizes how the animosity

underlying "the Troubles" can erupt even in seemingly innocuous situations.

Lloyd explains that Irish violence has been interpreted in two opposing ways

by historians: "For nationalist historiography, the violence of Irish history is

symptomatic of the unrelenting struggle of an Irish people forming itself in spo radic but connected risings against British domination," whereas for imperial

historiography, "[v]iolence is understood as an atavistic and disruptive princi

ple counter to the rationality of legal constitution as barbarity is to an emerg

ing civility, anarchy to culture."33

What interpretation of violence do the writers of Troubles stories evoke?

Certainly, the early stories by Corkery, O'Connor, and O'Faolain interpret vio

lence from the nationalist perspective?as "symptomatic of the unrelenting

struggle ...

against British domination." But what about the later stories of

O'Connor and O'Faolain, those of O'Flaherty, and those by contemporary writ

ers about the current "Troubles?" In these stories, particularly in recent ones like

Park's "Oranges from Spain" and Trevor's "Attracta," violence is clearly presented

as atavistic, barbaric and anarchic. Does that fact give these stories the per

spective of imperial historiography? No; rather, they present a tertium quid, a

32. Maura Treacy, "A Minor Incident "

in Stories by Contemporary Irish Women, ed. Daniel J. Casey

and Linda M. Casey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 107.

33. Lloyd, p. 125.

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third view that aligns them with neither the nationalist nor the imperial view

of violence.

That these stories do not support the imperial view of violence is indicated

in part by the fact that the violence depicted is not solely IRA-inspired (though there is, to be certain, plenty ofthat in them). Much of it is committed, as in ac

tuality, by Unionists?the British soldiers in Treacy's "A Minor Incident"; the

Protestant paramilitary in Park's "Oranges from Spain"; a UDR member, in

McCabe's "Heritage," who slays a Catholic farmer and his idiot farmhand. And, as these and other examples illustrate, colonial violence can not be justified as

a state response to terrorism because it is often as senseless, random, and bru

tal as nationalist violence. Extremist Protestant groups, such as the Ulster Vol

unteer Force (UVF), are depicted in these stories as being equally as atavistic,

barbaric, and anarchic as are the nationalist terrorists. Of course, an imperial

ist historian might see these extremists (and extreme acts by legitimate groups, such as the British army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary) as aberrations, un

derstood though not justified, as a mimicry of nationalist violence.

Hence, a more convincing indicator that these stories promote neither the

nationalist nor the imperialist view of violence lies in the point some of them

make regarding the effect of violence on cultural and political identity. Lloyd

says that, for both nationalist and imperialist historians, "the end of violence is

the legitimate state formation."34 In other words, violence will end when either

Irish nationalist or British Unionist identity achieves complete hegemony in

Northern Ireland. Hegemony of one identity, of course, means suppression of

the other, suppression that has been promoted largely through sectarian vio

lence.

Sectarian violence depends on the perpetrators' ability to discover the sec

tarian identity of their potential victims. While the identities of many in North

ern Ireland are easily known by the pubs or churches they attend, by the neigh borhoods they live in, or by their open participation in political marches and

rallies, some enjoy a degree of political and religious anonymity that may be

necessary to maintain for the sake of their personal safety, even survival. When

their identities are discovered, the results can be disasterous. In Cornell's "Out

take," for example, the protagonist carelessly lets slip his Catholic background, first to a woman he meets in a pub and then to strangers in a taxi he shares. For

his mistake he will be beaten by the strangers, who are Protestant extremists.

Cornell's story dramatizes the danger of letting one's cultural identity be

known to strangers, but it also hints at the converse advantage of having no cul

tural identity?of suppressing, repudiating, or severing one's ethnic, religious, and political affiliations. The ultimate effect of violence in Northern Ireland

34- Ibid.

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might just be, if neither state, nationalist or Unionist, is able to achieve com

plete hegemony, the end of cultural identity. MacLavertys "Walking the Dog" offers that possibility by dramatizing a Belfast man's refusal to divulge any reli

gious or political identity in order to survive an abduction by extremists.

Shortly after leaving his house on the outskirts of Belfast to walk his dog,

MacLavertys protagonist is forced at gunpoint into a car by two men claiming to be "from the IRA." But the man senses (correctly, as it turns out) that his ab

ductors may possibly be Protestant paramilitaries looking for a Catholic victim.

In order to discover his sectarian affiliation, they demand that he reveal his name,

his school, his and his parents' religion, and his employer?any of which might reveal his identity. They also ask whether he knows anyone from the Provos, and

they order him to recite the alphabet, based on the belief (as he knows) that

Catholics and Protestants pronounce "h" differently. At each turn he thwarts

them, giving an ethnically neutral name (John Shields); refusing to name his

school; claiming that neither he nor his parents profess a religion and that he

knows no one in the Provisional IRA. He also manages to pronounce "h" in both

ways ("aitch, haitch"). He does, however, reveal that he works at the Gas Board,

apparently thinking that it is not a decisive clue to his identity. In fact, it is on

this basis that they let him go (and thereby reveal their own sectarian identity): "There's not too many Fenians on the Gas Board,"35 one of them remarks.

One of the ironies of McLaverty's story is that, although we fully experience the man's terror, we never discover his cultural identity. We do not know whether

he is Catholic or Protestant, nationalist or Unionist, or if in fact what he claims

is true?that he has no allegiances. He may very well be a man with no cultural

identity. But for all his cultural nonentity, this man may, in fact, be the citizen

of the future in Northern Ireland. Perhaps violence will eventually result in one

or the other powers establishing a legitimate state; but the end of violence may also bring about, for many citizens, the end of cultural identity.

r^, COLLEGE OF NOTRE DAME OF MARYLAND

35- Bernard MacLaverty, Walking the Dog and Other Stories (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 9.

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Documents

Postcolonialism and Stories of the Irish Troubles