Representing the Irish in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter. Swift’s American Resonances?

Abstract

Race is at the centre of Russell Banks’s grand scale novel Cloudsplitter (1998) which traces John Brown’ struggle to abolish slavery in the years before the American Civil War. While Brown’s (and Banks’s) sympathy with Negro slaves is prevalent, the treatment of other social and ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and the Irish immigrants offers insight into the racial and cultural complexity of the United States. The essay identifies the three instances in which members of the Irish immigrant community in the aftermath of the Great Famine that drove them across the Atlantic play a role in this work, including: an extremely young prostitute, a “sad lot” of miners dwelling in shanties, and a gang of “Irish laddies” in Boston who beat up the narrator. It is suggested that these beings could be reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the Irish in A Modest Proposal, and the Struldbrugs and Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels, in their circumstances, characterization, and actions.