Leszek Drong

In the summer of 1912, James Joyce spent several weeks in Galway, visiting Nora Barnacle’s family and writing essays for Il Piccolo della Sera. Two essays produced during his stay in the West of Ireland are directly concerned with the region and its inhabitants: one describes the past and present of Galway city and the other is an account of his trip to Aranmor, the biggest Aran Island off the west coast of Galway. Joyce’s selective focus on the past glories of those places and utopian vistas connected with the development of the Galway Harbour is interesting as a counterpoint to the notion of the West of Ireland, shared by representatives of the Anglo-Irish Revival who saw a relatively homogeneous repository of traditional Celtic values in the region. Joyce’s journalistic representation of Galway and Aran deserves attention also because it anticipates late twentieth-century emphasis on hybridity, miscegenation and transcultural mobility. Finally, Joyce’s two 1912 essays are a significant reflection of his own fluctuating attitudes to Ireland and its history, at a point when he was gradually abandoning his epideictic rhetoric of “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” to embrace a more cosmopolitan view of the West of Ireland as a milieu shaped by various European influences.

Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) is a prime specimen of post-Joycean heteroglossia in Irish fi ction. The novel exhibits a programmatic dialogical/intertextual orientation orchestrated with its own parodic and ironic modes, which makes McBride’s work uniquely capable of re-energizing Irish cultural tradition. Simultaneously, her novel contributes its own distinct voice to the impressive amplitude of artistic expressions which have emerged from Irish culture in the wake of Joyce’s writings. Mikhail Bahtin’s approach to the novel (as discussed in The Dialogic Imagination), in turn, is particularly relevant to McBride’s fiction because of her incorporation (as well as adaptation) of a variety of voices and perspectives. As a consequence, in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, the categories of heteroglossia and dialogism appear to be responsible for creating and sustaining a vital cultural dimension, a dimension which is subject to being perpetually rewritten in the present, even though it crucially depends upon ur-texts from the past.  

This article addresses avenues for reconciliation and the persistence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the interconnected contexts of politics, remembrance culture and public discourse during the peace process, with particular attention focused on the operations of transitional justice and restorative memory (a category I derive from restorative justice and restorative truth). I argue that the peace process realities in Northern Ireland actively invite a mode of social and political evasion of the past by consigning recent history to cultural discourses, to be explored and chronicled mostly by works of fiction, rather than weighed on the scales of justice in the first place. Post-Troubles fiction offers carefully selected patterns, scripts and templates of the past (preserved in ‘restorative memory’) which, rather unsurprisingly, tend to promote a mood of reconciliation over the idea of reckoning and retribution. Thereby fiction as such (exemplified here by David Park’s The TruthCommissioner, Five Minutes of Heaven directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and Lucy Caldwell’s All the Beggars Riding) becomes a key player in the contemporary politics of memory.