Amnesia and the Nation

173 Pages·2018·2.309 MB·English

by  Vincent J. Cheng

NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
AMNESIA AND
THE NATION
History, Forgetting,
and James Joyce
Vincent J. Cheng
New Directions in Irish and Irish
American Literature
Series Editor
Claire A. Culleton
Department of English
Kent State University
Kent, OH, USA
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Vincent J. Cheng
Amnesia and the
Nation
History, Forgetting, and James Joyce
Vincent J. Cheng
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature
ISBN 978-3-319-71817-0 ISBN 978-3-319-71818-7 (eBook)
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For my family—Maeera, Gabi,
Mom, TC, and Chiqui—
and the memory of my father
P
reface
This book is a study of the relationships between memory, history, and the
nation—relationships that have preoccupied me, as well as our contempo-
rary culture, for some time. Most particularly, it explores the roles forget-
ting and amnesia play in forming national identities and histories—in a
series of particular case studies and through interdisciplinary analysis of a
number of modernist literary texts, especially the works of the great Irish
writer James Joyce, but also a number of other literary texts by Milan
Kundera, Ford Madox Ford, F.  Scott Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy.
Drawing on thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Ernest
Renan, Sigmund Freud, A.R.  Luria, Benedict Anderson, and Yosef
Yerushalmi, this study explores the burden of the past, a past that one
would like to forget and extinguish. More generally, the book’s two cen-
tral focuses are Ireland and the American South, both burdened with the
“nightmare of history”—from the Battle of the Boyne to the Good Friday
Agreement, from the Civil War to the 2015 Mother Emanuel killings in
Charleston, South Carolina.
Chapter 1 (“Introduction: Memory, Forgetting, and the Imagination”)
begins by noting that amnesia—as a neurological condition—is always
represented as a negative thing, a loss of a personal identity that one des-
perately needs to recover. Much scholarly and scientific work has been
done, in recent decades, on issues having to do with memory, Alzheimer’s,
trauma, remembrance, memorials and monuments, truth and reconcilia-
tion. But hardly anyone ever talks about the desirability or usefulness of
forgetting—which is a central concern of this study. Drawing on
Nietzsche, Marx, Renan, Freud, Luria, Anderson, Yerushalmi, and others,
vii
viii PREFACE
this introductory chapter considers the importance of forgetting—and
then goes on to consider the complex relationships between remember-
ing, forgetting, imagination, desire, and narrative.
William Faulkner wrote famously that in the American South “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past.” The second chapter (“The Nightmare of
History and the Burden of the Past”) discusses how, for the modern
world, the past seems a burden that one—whether an individual or a com-
munity—has to carry around in the present. Many modern thinkers have
been thus engaged in a “memory crisis” arising out of this obsession with
the power—and the burden—of the past, what Milan Kundera calls “the
burden of memory.” This chapter goes on to explore the issues involved
in trying to extinguish the past (and the memory of the past)—focusing
particularly on Joyce’s and Kundera’s novels, but also on novels by Ford
Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy—within Nietzsche’s
and Renan’s arguments about the desirability of forgetting.
Chapter 3 (“The Will to Forget: Nation and Forgetting in Ulysses”)
begins with a discussion of Ernest Renan’s influential 1882 lecture “What
Is a Nation?” and its argument for the importance of national forgetting
to the peace and unity of a nation-state, and then focuses on one particular
literary case study, Joyce’s treatments of these issues in Ulysses. The second
half of this chapter continues pursuing the complex realities of national
“memory” and the nation-state—by considering the role of “place” and
“space” in Irish memory and the Irish national imaginary through a series
of controversies about the nature of “Irishness” and the Irish nation, from
the eighteenth century to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern
Ireland.
The fourth chapter (“The Memory of the Past: National Memory and
Commemoration”) takes up two case studies involving Irish national
memory and commemoration. The first explores the ways that Joyce’s
works—from “The Dead” to Finnegans Wake—treat the historical mem-
ory of William III, Prince of Orange (and his horse) at the Battles of
Aughrim and the Boyne, the events that sealed the future of Ireland as a
British colony and as an island of divided allegiances (orange vs. green),
with Unionists revering the memory of King Billy and Republicans despis-
ing it. The second case study takes up a more recent battle, the 1916
Easter Rising, and explores the varying and conflicting ways that it has
been remembered for the past 100 years, including during the recent
2016 centenary commemorations.
PREFAC E ix
The last two chapters focus on the American South, most particularly
the relationship between the Irish and Southern American history. Chapter
5 (“Joyce, Ireland, and the American South: Whiteness, Blackness, and
Lost Causes”) explores the historical connections between Ireland and the
American South—particularly the shared dedication to lost causes, the
role of Irish nationalism and Irish immigration in the formation of Irish
American identity, and the divisiveness of racial issues involving the Civil
War and slavery. The Irish—considered racially “other” at the time, not
white—nevertheless managed to become accepted by Southern natives as
white Southerners, so much so that Gone with the Wind, the most influen-
tial cultural representation of Southern culture of the Civil War era, could
have its heroine (Scarlett O’Hara) be the daughter of an Irish immigrant
whose Southern white status is not even questioned. The chapter discusses
how this union between Irishness and Southernness came about—and
explores Joyce’s depictions of the South in several of his works, conclud-
ing with a discussion of the opening pages of Finnegans Wake, which have
much to say about the Irish presence in the South, the Ku Klux Klan, and
racial strife.
Chapter 6 (“Slavery, the South, and Ethical Remembrancing”) probes
the ethics of historical memory by considering two contemporary devel-
opments having to do with Southern race hatred, slavery, and the complex
dynamics of remembering and commemorating problematic histories in
our contemporary moment: the killings by Dylann Roof at the Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; and
the recent revelations about Georgetown University’s slaveholding past
(having to do with Irish Jesuit priests) and the University’s current
attempts to come to terms with that past.
Throughout this book, I explore the complexities, nuances, and ethical
issues involved in the processes of historical memory and national identity.
A brief Afterword reconsiders the relationships between history and nar-
rative, between the historical past and interpretive/imaginative fiction,
and what is at stake in these matters at our contemporary moment.
Salt Lake City, UT, USA Vincent J. Cheng
a
cknowledgments
Several people have been instrumental in helping me develop this project
at different stages. I would like to thank Oona Frawley and Katherine
O’Callaghan, and also Michèle Mendelssohn, for publishing essays of
mine that first helped me formulate and articulate this project. Later, it
was Joe Kelly’s invitation to give the keynote address at the 2013 James
Joyce Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, that inspired me to start
thinking about the Irish in the South—and which eventually led to both
Chaps. 5 and 6. Joe Kelly, Margot Norris, and Viet Nguyen have been
generous and astute readers of this manuscript, and I am very grateful to
them—as I am also to Claire Culleton for her support and encouragement
as series editor of the Irish and Irish American Literature series at Palgrave
Macmillan. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Utah for
their sharp observations and helpful comments on different chapters-in-
progress; and for the University of Utah Faculty Fellowship which allowed
me, during 2011–2012, the release time to begin working on this project
in earnest. Finally, I am most grateful to Maeera Shreiber—my best reader,
interlocutor, and supporter.
* * *
Some of the material in both Chaps. 1 and 3 was adapted from two earlier
essays of mine which helped launch this book project—and which appeared
in James Joyce and Cultural Memory, eds. Oona Frawley and Katherine
O’Callaghan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), and in 21st-
Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern, 1880–1920,
xi