“Justice in the War and at Home – Utopian Hopes of Fair Solutions in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End”
Hedda Friberg-Harnesk, Mid-Sweden University
If one definition of justice is “ceaseless individual responsibility for the victims…of wars and violence”, it is safe to say that injustice is the ceaseless shirking from such responsibility. In Days Without End, a novel of Irishmen involved in wars in nineteenth-century United States, Sebastian Barry is unsparing in his critique of such avoidance. His depiction of atrocities committed by whites against Native Americans – and also, more briefly, against black Union soldiers in the Civil War – leaves no doubt about the extent of that which he refers to as “the sheer…brutality of it all.” The novel is grim, but funny and gentle, too – remarkably so in the light of the ground it covers.
If, moreover, justice is a “complex term for finding fair solutions to challenges in personal relations,” then, indeed, the central characters in Barry’s tale – Thomas McNulty, “child of poor Sligonians,” and John Cole, “whose people were run out” of the American East long ago – find themselves enmeshed in questions of justice. They are professional soldiers, but they also, seemingly nurturing an unspoken – arguably utopian – hope, pursue possibilities of finding sustainable alternatives to conventional modes of being in society. My paper will explore how, driven by silent hopes of fair solutions in their lives, Thomas and John come to engage, not only in warfare, but in cross-dressing, adoption across ethnic boundaries, and same-sex marriage. In doing so, they attempt to resist the false and destructive boundaries by which individuals of certain ethnicity or sexual orientation are separated from mainstream society.
“‘A Map of Bird Migration’: Redefinitions of National Identity through Transnational Mobility and Multidirectional Memory in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky”
Carmen Zamorano Llena, Dalarna University
Evelyn Conlon’s novel Not the Same Sky (2013) was published almost twenty years after the 150th anniversary of Ireland’s An Gorta Mhór, the Great Hunger or Famine. Nowadays, this dramatic historical event is unquestionably acknowledged as playing a crucial role in the making of Irish national(ist) identity and determining the fate of the subsequent relationship between Britain and Ireland. However, the significance of this event was not made explicit until its 150th anniversary, when political manifestations as well as scholarly enquiry started to acknowledge the dramatic socio-cultural and historical consequences of the Irish Famine. The 150th anniversary did not only bring about a change in approaches to the Famine, but it also posed the question of the nature and role of remembrance in tragic historical events and the construction of collective national identities. In the field of literature, Terry Eagleton’s seminally observed the lack of literary expressions relating to the Famine before 1995 (1995). Since then there has been a proliferation of studies focusing on the study of Famine literature, which quite often has included a variety of genres beyond fiction, poetry and drama (Fegan 2002). This body of literature and its scholarly analyses have often focused on the impact of this event on individuals and on Ireland as a contribution to the shaping of national identity (Fegan 2002: 5). A number of literary texts and studies have focused on the Irish diaspora caused by the Famine and its crucial role in narratives of national(ist) identity. However, Evelyn Conlon’s historical novel Not the Same Sky invites a re-examination of the role of the Famine and the Irish diaspora in Irish narratives of national identity. Conlon’s novel offers a critical engagement with forced migration as represented by an understudied chapter in the history of the Irish diaspora, namely the Famine orphan girls migration to Australia as part of the Earl Grey’s assisted migration scheme. This paper considers how Conlon’s novel foregrounds transnational mobility and the transcultural migration of memories interconnecting nineteenth-century Irish migration with contemporary transnational mobility in the post-2008 financial crisis. This paper contends that the migration of memories, transformed under the influence of the present vantage point from which they are revisited, contributes to redefining past lieux de mémoire as “noeuds de mémoire” (Rothberg 2010), thereby challenging inherited narratives of Irish national identity.
‘“Out of the Lamp-Bestarred and Clouded Dusk’: The poetries of Lola Ridge and Rudolf Nilsen in Comparative Perspective”
David Toms
On the face of it, Lola Ridge and Rudolf Nilsen are not two poets one might ordinarily put together. Ridge, born in Dublin and living in Australia and later America, was a modernist and avant-garde poet who was until recently all but forgotten in her country of origin. Nilsen, on the other hand, lived his entire life in Norway, though he travelled, focussing his efforts on his journalism and poetry. His poetry was popular and remains so. Where both poets intersect in their interests was their deep commitment to the class struggle of the period following the Russian Revolution right through the interwar period. In this paper, I will explore similarities and contrasts in the poetics of Ridge and Nilsen and the tensions in their practice between radical politics and a radical poetics. In doing so, I will attempt to bridge the gap between both poets’ search for justice, across linguistic barriers, enacting an internationalism for which they both stood and suggest that though they were separated by language and distance, their poetry aimed towards the same goal.