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Galway and Irish Writing

PRE-APPROVED PANEL - THIS PANEL IS NOW CLOSED

The Impossible “I”: Dis-figuring the Self in Irish Writing

Panel Chair - James M. Smith, Boston College

Panel Speakers -Rebecca Troeger, Amy Witherbee, Richard Murphy,James M. Smith (Boston College)

Each of the four papers examines different aspects of the 'autobiographical impulse' in twentieth century Irish writing, in particular the challenge of narrating the subject. Writers examined include Louis MacNeice, Sam Hanna Bell, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright and James Ryan.

Each of these papers deals with writing the self.  Unlike traditional autobiography, the works here exhibit a strong sense of the fictiveness of selfhood, the way in which individuality is already “genred,” a function of formal conventions, narrative structures and ideological constructions.   At the same time, however, each holds to a provisional belief in a self, the sense of an ‘I’, that might yet achieve expression once oppressive narratives of collective identity—whether institutional and State-sponsored, or ‘literary’ and generic —can be unwritten and new mediums created.

In both Moore and Bell’s novels strained individual narratives unfold within the confines of a rigid communal identity.  The tensions between individual possibility and collective need erupt in a series of visual tableaux that resist assimilation to narratives of realist fiction or to sectarian affiliations. Louis MacNeice eschews linear autobiography in favor of presenting a collection of isolated moments, as he attempts to present his sense of self outside the temporality of narrative.  Rather than escape history, however, his work aims for a kind of higher realism in its representation of identities that refuse integration and exceed available categories. Edna O’Brien’s heavily autobiographical trilogy, The Country Girls, faithfully follows the conventions of the Bildungsroman, a genre dedicated to narrating the representative individual. Despite the narrator’s often-strenuous assertions to the contrary, however, Caithleen Brady cannot make sense of a past that she tries to understand though the inadequate tools of traditional storylines and inherited forms of imagining female subjectivity in mid-century Ireland.  Both Ann Enright’s and James Ryan’s novels look back to mid-century Ireland and examine how adoption enabled State inscribed narratives of identity. The characters in these novels seek a ‘true’ self-history in the search for their birth parents, exposing the State-sponsored fiction of the Irish family in the process, but they are still left with the task of reconciling contradictory elements of multiple pasts.

IASIL 2004 is hosted by The National University of Ireland, Galway