Tá Súil Agam: Deadly Visions of History in Ireland

Ray O Neill

doi:10.37389/abei.v21i1.3246

Abstract

In Antigone the unburied dead, and the too quickly buried narratives of their deaths are more than a ghostly present-absence or absent-presence, they are an undead over-presence that haunts/ consumes/destroys generation/s. Trauma is never about episodes, so much as how episodes cannot be symbolised, therefore remembered/known. The Irish lost over two million people within five years, but more significantly, their language, their capacity to linguistically symbolise their loss. The Great Irish Famine known in Gaelic as ‘An Gorta Mor’ evokes both the word gort , (crop/field) and more significantly gortaigh , (to wound/injure). Nationalist Irish history proffers narratives of suffering that can only be incorporated within a dead filled history, a deadly present with horrific statistics and frequencies of child abuse, endemic national alcoholism, suicide and depression. The historical legacies inherited within the Irish unconscious, are forged through narratives of suffering, while disavowing re-memorying, silently repeatedly denying the transgenerational trauma of Irish subjectivity.

Highlights

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the unburied dead and the too quickly buried narratives of their deaths are more than a ghostly present-absence or absent-presence, they are an undead over-presence that haunts generations
For Jacques Lacan, Freud’s psychoanalytic unearthings were not like those of Columbus discovering a new continent but rather those of Jean-Francois Champollion, the decryptor of the Rosetta Stone: “A psychoanalyst is not an explorer of an unknown continent, or of great depths; he is a linguist. He learns to decipher the writing which is under his eyes, present to the sight of all; that writing remains indecipherable if we lack its laws, its key”. (Lacan, 1957)
In Hiberno-English, the English variant spoken in Ireland, there is an inclination to the using of ordinarily negative and violent words and phrases to describe things positively; “went down a bomb” means worked successfully and popularly

Summary

Holocaust Studies and the Impossibility of History

Theodore Adorno calls all historical representations into question. For him, the Holocaust was not merely a crisis in itself, but it became a crisis beyond its own events, its past, because it destroyed the possibility of conceiving of history in the traditional way, as a rational progression but instead can only be understood as discontinuity. For Adorno, the barbarism of writing after Auschwitz lies in a narrative’s inability to acknowledge its own inadequacy for representation. The need to bear witness is the obligation of a testimony that can only be given—and given only in the singularity of each individual—by the impossible witnesses—the witnesses of the impossible--; some have survived, but their survival is no longer life, it is the break from living affirmation, the attestation that the good that is life (not narcissistic life, but life for others) has undergone the decisive blow that leaves nothing intact From this it would seem that all narration, even all poetry, has lost the foundation on which another language could be raised— through the extinction of the happiness of speaking that lurks in even the most mediocre silence. From this it would seem that all narration, even all poetry, has lost the foundation on which another language could be raised— through the extinction of the happiness of speaking that lurks in even the most mediocre silence. (Blanchot, 1985, 68-69)

The Holocaust is Real

Transgenerational Trauma

Findings

Works Cited