THE treatment of the Famine in Irish literature has been more widespread than is often thought the Yeats Summer School was told yesterday.
Within years of the event a number of now forgotten novels took the Famine as their subject, said Dr Margaret Kelleher of the Mater Dei Institute. This continued at the end of the 19th century with novels like The Chronicles of Castle Cloyne by, Margaret Brew, who was concerned with the sufferings of landlords.
The most extensive use of the Famine as a theme in the literary revival was by Maud Gonne and this carried over into the work of Yeats. Gonne wrote the famine play, Dawn, told of her own part in relieving famine in Co Donegal in A Servant of the Queen, and produced significant Famine journalism.
Yeats published a lecture on the Famine given by Maud Gonne in Paris in 1892, with a commentary. Gonne said: "It has seemed to me at evening on those mountains of Ireland, so full of savage majesty when the wind sighed over the pits of the famine where the thousands of dead enrich the harvests of the future, it has seemed to me that I heard an avenging voice calling down on our oppressors the execration of men and the justice of God."
However, as well as speeches like this about the Famine of the 1840s, in the 1890s Maud Gonne wrote angry reports of the contemporary famine in Co Mayo. "They are filled with detailed and angry portrayals of the continuing reality of famine - a reality which we can be in danger of forgetting when we wonder why writers of the time weren't commemorating an earlier famine," said Dr Kelleher.
Liam O'Flaherty's novel, Famine, written almost 100 years after the event, was a best seller for decades. Its familiar motifs - the ships leaving Irish ports laden with grain, others laden with people, the raised fist of an emigrant - were clear signals to a significant part of O'Flaherty's intended readership, Irish Americans.
The 100th anniversary did produce one play, Gerard Healy's The Black Stranger, which was very well received at the time. "Reviewers are particularly drawn to what is a central preoccupation of Healy's: the quest for emigration . . . Patrick's argument is that by emigrating, his son will make the famine matter since none will be left to carry on when things get right again."
Dr Kelleher appealed for time to reflect on the Famine during these years of commemoration. There is an unfortunate parallel between the decision to end official commemoration in summer 1997 and the fatal declaration 150 years earlier by another official body that the crisis was past. Time is necessary for some of our current arguments to settle, for new trends to appear.