As RTÉ and Gill & Macmillan launch a €10,000 writing competition for true life stories, Liam Harte asks why critical literature on Irish autobiography remains so slight despite the genre's prevalence
If, in these days of voluminous literary criticism, Irish literature can be said to have a Cinderella genre, then surely it is autobiography. When weighed against the welter of scholarly work on Irish poetry, drama and fiction, the critical literature on autobiography seems remarkably slight, in quantity if not quality. This critical neglect seems all the more curious when one considers the preponderance of life-writing in contemporary Irish culture, spectacularly spearheaded by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996). By the time its sequel, 'Tis, appeared in 1999, booksellers' shelves were sagging under the weight of copycat texts, proof that the autobiographical gesture was becoming endemic in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The commensurate success of Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody? (1996) - described by the author herself as "an emotional episode" in Irish public life - suggested that, in an era of secular individualism, stories that were once told only to partner or priest were now more likely to be committed to the page. In a culture of diminished faith and discredited clergy, the cathartic appeal of the confessional memoir would appear to have eclipsed that of the confessional box. If anything, that appeal looks set to intensify with the launching this week of a non-fiction writing competition on RTÉ Radio 1's The Tubridy Show, in partnership with Gill & Macmillan. They're seeking true personal stories of all kinds for which the prize is a €10,000 publishing contract.
Critics have been quick to bemoan the baneful influence of many such memoirs on Ireland's international image. Parody followed in the shape of Arthur Mathews's Well- Remembered Days (2001), the fictional memoir of one Eoin O'Ceallaigh, which mocked multiple targets. At the other end of the literary spectrum, however, the emotional profundity and poetic grace of works such as Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark and Dermot Healy's The Bend for Home, both of which appeared within months of Angela's Ashes, suggested that sensationalism and sales were not the only factors underpinning the new confessionalism in Irish culture. Rather, these genre-defying works were animated by a desire to express hitherto unspoken truths and explore the obstacles to self-knowledge in a culture maimed by violence, colonialism and religion.
What makes these works doubly interesting is the way they play subtle variations on what, historically, has been the master motif of the Irish autobiographical tradition: the symbolic projection of the individual life through the lens of nation and society. The fusion of individual and collective identity was a strategic part of the 19th-century nation-building project, such that much early Irish autobiography effectively became, in Declan Kiberd's words, a "promissory note for a yet-to-be-implemented nation". Examples of such idealised autobiography abound, from the memoirs of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke to those of Ernie O'Malley and Maud Gonne. In these and other works, there is a continual slippage between personal experience and collective aspiration.
FROM THE START, however, there were tensions between the writer's assertion of uniqueness and nationalism's demand for exemplary self-narratives. Autobiographers such as John Mitchel and James Clarence Mangan found themselves unable to resolve the discrepancies of subjective experience into a narrative of heroic identity. Instead, their texts raise troubling questions about the reliability and integrity of both personal and national identities. Mangan's impressionistic narrative deviates sharply from the political demands of national subjectivity, not least in his refusal to be singularly identified, and Mitchel's Jail Journal (1854) suggests that subjectivity is always constituted provisionally, never definitively. In each case, the narrative voice oscillates between the singular and the collective, between inherited ways of scripting the self and fresh forms of self-articulation.
The complex relationship between language and identity lies at the heart of such oscillations. Many Irish autobiographies are shadowed by the unsettling suspicion that both selfhood and nationhood may be no more than rhetorical fictions, mere effects of the process of writing. Yet such uncertainties can also become sources of creativity; the story of the self is narrated, despite the treacheries of language. Again and again, we come upon acts of Irish self-portraiture that show writers taking a paradoxical delight in doubleness and ambivalence, even as they strive for self-completion, suggesting that the Irish autobiographical self is most itself in the very process of becoming.
The Yeatsian concept of subjectivity is typical in this regard, being largely founded upon ideas of self-division and reinvention. The Yeatsian "I" that wrote "Whatever happens I must go on that there may be a man behind the lines already written; I cast the die long ago and must be true to the cast" is engaged in a sustained process that blends self-discovery with self-creation. This performative mode is a feature of 20th-century Irish autobiography. Think, for instance, of the multiple selves conjured up in the autobiographical writings of Louis MacNeice, whose early self-interrogation - "I am 33 years old and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle?" - reads as an oblique response to Yeats's earlier admission that "It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels to know what the feeling is".
MANY IRISH WOMEN writers have found the traditional nationalist fusion of the feminine with the national even more problematic than their male counterparts. In their autobiographies, Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O'Brien reject the female muse of the male imagination - Ireland as mother, maiden, mistress, whore - in favour of flesh-and-blood figures whose personalities and perspectives complement their own. Contemporary feminist autobiographers tend to be more explicit in critiquing the barriers to female self-revelation. In Almost There (2003), Nuala O'Faolain details her private battles with the "inner voices that mocked my self-importance" and explains how, despite her "male" job as a journalist, autobiographical authorisation did not come easily. The inhibiting effects of family and nation far outweighed any speaking rights she could lay claim to as "an honorary man". Only later did she realise the extent of her narrative self-creation: "Writing has brought me up from underground. I've been my own Orpheus."
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that patriarchal narratives have lost their definitional power completely for contemporary women autobiographers. O'Faolain's memoirs are punctuated by anguished dialogues with dead fathers, both actual and symbolic, and Máire Cruise O'Brien's The Same Age as the State (2003) reads at times like a roll-call of legendary Irish patriarchs. Two earlier, very different, feminist autobiographies - Edna O'Brien's Mother Ireland (1976) and Eavan Boland's Object Lessons (1995) - are similarly concerned with the problem of writing the female self up from under the latticed layers of patriarchal Irishness. In these cases, however, the experience of emigration to England is presented as an important catalyst for self-expression, O'Brien's cool detachment - "Leaving Ireland was no wrench at all" - contrasting sharply with Boland's sense of radical severance: "an ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine".
Memory, of course, is both a sanctuary and a torment for the emigrant. The backward look can soothe, but nostalgia can also be brutal. In this regard, much recent Irish autobiography is concerned with the processes of memory itself, with what the critic Walter Benjamin called "the mysterious work of remembrance - which is really the capacity for endless interpolations into what has been". Benjamin's own attempts to penetrate the enigmas of memory led him to think of it as a labyrinthine city, and echoes of his spatial imaginings are audible in works such as Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory (1997), Michael Cronin's Time Tracks (2003) and Chris Arthur's Irish Nocturnes (1999) and Irish Willow (2002). Each of these writers shows how identities and social relations are defined not only by the accretions of time, but by a spatialised landscape of everyday objects and activities. As Arthur puts it: "Things play their part invisibly in a thousand human dramas, whether ordinary or extraordinary; the fabric of circumstance is woven into all manner of shapes without our cognizance."
Other autobiographical acts are more overtly political in nature, the record of personal experience being made to bear witness to shared privations. This communal ethic is especially strong in the memoirs of Northern Irish politicians and paramilitaries, yet here too there are telling silences that are exposed by narrative lacunae. The motifs of secrecy and disclosure are also prominent in the recent spate of abuse- survival memoirs, a sub-genre that includes the testimony of the former residents of Ireland's vast network of industrial and reformatory schools. Works such as Paddy Doyle's The God Squad (1988) and Bernadette Fahy's Freedom of Angels (1999) represent the very antithesis of traditional nationalist autobiography. The nation that was once the object of heroic self-identification is now portrayed as a pathological entity capable of sanctioning violence and exploitation. It is not just a matter of giving voice to grievance or setting the record straight. By situating personal accounts of pain and suffering within wider social and institutional contexts, these autobiographies represent a damning critique of what one critic calls Ireland's "architecture of containment", which functioned to render invisible whole segments of the population.
NOT ALL IRISH childhoods were miserable, of course, or at least not only miserable. Two of the finest autobiographies of recent years, Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People (2003) and John McGahern's Memoir (2005), unflinchingly describe the pain of childhoods blighted by terrifying fathers, while also evoking the antidotal power of loving mothers. There is no more moving hymn to maternal love in all of Irish autobiography than the closing paragraphs of McGahern's memoir. Both his book and Hamilton's have as their secret protagonists those conjoined twins, language and memory, which seemingly never lose their mystique for Irish writers.
And, in illuminating the complex local histories and geographies within which Irish identities are formed, both Hamilton and McGahern bear witness to Irish autobiography's continuing capacity to reconjugate the collective "we" as so many splintered "I"s.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish literature at the University of Manchester. This essay is based on his introduction to Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society, just out from Palgrave Macmillan
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