The indigent sublime: Specters of Irish hunger

Representations

Volumn 92, Issue , 2005, Pages 152-185

  Lloyd, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 43249170608     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2005.92.1.152     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis, 1997), 7
2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), xix
3. See Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal, ed. Breandan Mac Suibhne and David Dickson (Dublin, 2001), 68-71
4. R.N. Salaman, in his classic The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge, 1985), 234, notes "the similarity amounting almost to identity, of the Irish method [of potato cultivation], and that which has been in use for untold ages in the great uplands of Peru and Bolivia" and on its common status as "a communal undertaking."
5. By the same token, the Irish forms of communal work and their later appropriation as exacted labor seem to resemble those of the indigenous Peruvians as described by Jose C. Mariategui in his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin, Tex., 1971)
6. have noted the uncanny convergence between Mariategui's understanding of the survival of "Inca Communism" and the Irish Marxist James Connolly's invocation of "Celtic Communism" in "Rethinking National Marxism: James Connolly and 'Celtic Communism,'" Interventions 5, no. 3 (2003): 357-58
7. For further detail on meitheal and other pre-Famine customs and attitudes, see Cathal Poirteir; Famine Echoes (Dublin, 1995), chap. 2
8. Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration (Oxford, 1995), 16
9. Estyn Evans, cited in Scally End of Hidden Ireland, 13
10. Frantz Fanon, "Racism and Culture," in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York, 1988), 41-42: "The culture of the enslaved people is sclerosed, dying. No life any longer circulates in it." On the "out of kilter" relation of the nonmodern to modernity see David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork, 2000), chap. 2
11. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63-64
12. James Connolly has been the foremost Irish theorist of the ways in which colonialism itself preserves the memory of practices and customs that, although not pristine hold-overs from the past, represent in the popular imagination communalist alternatives to capitalist modernity. I have discussed Connolly's ideas at length in "Rethinking National Marxism."
13. See Kevin Whelan, "Pre- and Post-Famine Landscape Change," in Cathal Poirteir, ed., The Great Irish Famine (Cork, 1995), 19-33. I have also drawn liberally from this essay in my description of the clachan. For further description of Irish social life, and its recalcitrance to externally imposed change, see Scally's brilliant and moving account in The End of Hidden Ireland
14. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London, 1977), 1:652-65
15. See L. A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland, 1500-1920 (Oxford, 2001), 59-87
16. Thomas Malthus cited in Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved: A Quantative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850 (London, 1983), 38
17. Thomas Carlyle, "Chartism" (1839), in English and Other Critical. Essays (London, 1915), 182-83
18. Thomas Carlyle, "The Nigger Question" (1849), in English Essays, 307-8
19. For "white negroes" and "Poor-slaves," see Sartor Resartus: On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, Dent 1908), 204-14
20. have discussed this passage in Carlyle, and its emphasis on the "inauthenticity" of the Irish, in Nationalism and Minor Literatme: James Clarence. Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural. Nationalism (Berkeley, 1987), 204-8
21. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992), 33-34
22. Charles Trevelyan, "The Irish Crisis," Edinburgh Review 79 (January 1848): 229-30. The best summary of the "providential" view of the Famine among British evangelicals and others is Peter Gray, "Ideology and the Famine," in Poirteir, The Great Irish Famine, 86-103
23. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), 81
24. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild, intro. Tadeusz Kowalik (London, 2003), 350
25. See Chris Morash, "Literature, Memory, Atrocity," in Chris Morash and Richard Hayes, eds., Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine (Blackrock, 1996), 116-17 and 114. In his essay in the same volume, "Reading Lessons: Famine and the Nation, 1845-1849," 160-62, Sean Ryder argues that the notion of "undescribability" has a conventional base in the Romantic sublime and suggests that it may indeed cover for the fact that, politically, the Famine and its causes were all too interpretable. Margaret Kelleher also comments at length on the tension between the claim of undescribability and the constant efforts to describe the Famine in The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Durham, N.C., 1997), 16-19
26. See Chris Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford, 1995), 97-127
27. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1982), 131-32, for his extended critique of Burke's "physiological exposition" of aesthetic judgment
28. See also Vanessa L. Ryan, "The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason," Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 265-79
29. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 115: "In fact, without the development [Entwickelung] of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture [durch Kultur vorbereitet], we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored man as terrifying."
30. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1974), 190
31. Kelleher, Feminization of Famine, 19-28
32. For an extensive catalog of spectacles of animal metaphors, "stalking skeletons," and "spectres" in the travel literature of the Famine, and of the overwhelming and often repulsed horror of the spectators, see Melissa Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine, 1845-1919 (Oxford, 2002), 91-96
33. Cathy Caruth, in her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, 1995), 6, points out that in trauma "immediacy paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness," and she cites Freud's example in Moses and Monotheism of the victim who "gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident" (7). The symptoms of trauma - "repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with the numbing that may have begun during or after the experience" - and their "haunting power" (4) bear some relation to the experience of observers of the Famine, yet it cannot be said that they themselves have undergone the traumatic event and "got away."
34. Alexander Somerville, Letters from Ireland During the Famine of 1847, ed. K. D. M. Snell (Blackrock, 1994), 41-42
35. On this returning of the gaze, see Rey Chow; Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington, 1993), 51: "Contrary to the model of Western hegemony in which the colonizer is seen as a primary, active 'gaze' subjugating the native as passive 'object,' I want to argue that it is actually the colonizer who feels looked at by the native's gaze. This gaze, which is neither a threat nor a retaliation, makes the colonizer 'conscious' of himself, leading to his need to turn this gaze around and look at himself, henceforth 'reflected' in the native-object." Writing on this same scene, Fegan, Literature and the Irish Famine, 95, remarks: "This cannibalistic interchange is so disturbing because famine victims first should not have names, and secondly should not look back." I am not sure, however, that "cannibalistic" quite captures the effect of fusion and penetration that haunts Somerville
36. Somerville, Letters, 153
37. Nassau Senior, "Ireland," Edinburgh Review 79 (January 1844): 189
38. On this peculiarity of Nicholson's narrative, see Kelleher, Feminization of Famine, 80. As she also notes, Nicholson's familiarity with the poor, her "fondness" for them, could also be taken as a crossing of the thresholds of proper objectivity (78)
39. Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland, ed. Maureen Murphy (Dublin, 1998), 38-39
40. See Gordon Bigelow, "Ireland and the Colonial Critique of Political Economy," in Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2003), 134-41
41. Nicholson, Annals, 58-59
42. Nicholson's emphasis. The rosy picture of the consequences of Lord George Hill's "improvements" are, however, fiercely critiqued in D. Holland's The Landlord in Donegal (Belfast, 1856-1863), 60-79. Noting that "nowhere will pleasanter delusions meet the tourist's eye than in that wild district of Guidore [sic]" (61), Jordan proceeds to show the processes of "fleecing," taxing, expropriation, and enclosure by which "rents are made": "This he called 'improving' the natives - the reader knows what Americans mean when they talk of 'improving the Indians'" (73). I am indebted to Breandan MacSuibhne for drawing my attention to this text
43. Hugh Dorian gives a considerably more sympathetic picture of the rhythms of collective work, and the integration of labor and recreation, in another part of Donegal around the same period in The Outer Edge of Ulster, 69-71. His descriptions bear witness, here as elsewhere, to a complex, if materially poor, form of sociality that refuses the division of labor from pleasure that characterizes the capitalist work ethic
44. See David Lloyd, "Adulteration and the Nation," in Anomalous States: Irish Writing in the Postcolonial Moment (Durham, NC, 1993), 112-14, and Ireland After History, chaps. 1 and 2
45. Such contradictory stories are to be found everywhere in the oral records of the Famine in the Irish Folk Archives, National University of Ireland, Dublin. A number are reproduced in Poirteir, Famine Echoes, chaps. 14 and 17. The greater ease with which Irish American culture conceives of the Famine as a genocidal event probably derives from the fact that Irish Americans are to a greater extent the descendants of those whose survival was permitted only by the loss of their land and culture
46. Nationalist melancholy functions in disavowal, and resembles in this the "heterosexual melancholy" that will not speak its loss in Judith Butler's account: see Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990), 63-65. Indeed, just as the formation of the heterosexual entails the prohibition of the early same sex object as "unspeakable," in a certain sense the Famine is proscribed within nationalist memory as an unspeakable trauma that is disavowed or displaced rather than thematized
47. See James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1986 [1922])
48. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London, 1982 [1958])
49. Kate O'Brien, The Ante-Room (London, 1993 [1934])
50. and Tom Murphy Bailegangaire, in After Tragedy: Three Irish Plays by Tom Murphy (London, 1988 [1985])
51. Joseph Roach has written very suggestively about the echoes of the Famine in Beckett's Waiting for Godot: see his "'All the Dead Voices': The Landscape of Famine in Waiting for Godot," in Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor, 2002), 84-93
52. Máirtin Ó Cadhain, "The Year 1912," in The Road to Brightcity, short stories trans, by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (Swords, 1987), 25-39. Given the preoccupation of the story with the intimacies of emigration and death, the title may well allude to the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, a fact that would have been well disseminated in Ireland by the autumn of that year, wdien the story is set, due not least to the large number of Irish emigrants who drowned, trapped in the steerage quarters of that vessel. The dangers of the Atlantic crossing would have been well understood by western Irish communities, and doubtless the sinking of the Titanic casts a pall over the story as it may have recalled the numerous "coffin ships," filled with Irish emigrants fleeing the Famine, in which so many died either by drowning or from the fevers that communicated rapidly in their crowded quarters
53. Ó Cadhain, "Year 1912," 31
54. See my "The Memory of Hunger," in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (New York, 2000)
55. It is tempting to suggest that the word trunc itself, with which the story so baldly begins, as a borrowing from English, is a reminder of a seed of alienation and death at the heart of the language itself. Breandan MacSuibhne, however, finds it unlikely that the word, already long naturalized in Irish, would have had such connotations. He notes, however, that the word for the sidecar, hearselike according to the logic of association established by the end of the text, is given in English as the "jaunt." Personal communication, March 25, 2005
56. I borrow the neologism "rememory;" obviously enough, from Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York, 1987). The term seems peculiarly apt given her deployment of it in relation to the Middle Passage, an atrocity that for many the Irish experience of the coffin ships recalled
57. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "Ghosts," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Gumming (New York, 1972), 215; translation modified. I am grateful to Avery Gordon whose astute comments on this fragment drew my attention to a passage that I had overlooked