I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
So, here we go again... back to Sligo! Oh, look, even the geography is favourable and encourages me to tackle the issue with a little help from Seamus Deane. Sligo must be just a couple of hours away from Derry. Even though I hate repeating myself, in this case I prefer that than leaving a textual gap in these lines you are reading. So first just let me make a little summary of why Deane and Barry are so tightly together in my private imagery. I received Reading in the Dark and The Secret Scripture as presents for Christmas. I read one book following the other. First, Deane; then, Barry. During the unforgettable Barry reading process, I filled my book with many “DEANE” pencil marks. The similarities were of many kinds: plot, characters, themes, historical references.
But there were some contrasting characteristics too. I confess: I have not checked out any academic information or googled this possible Deane/Barry comparison-contrast. As I said in the previous post, I am of the opinion that one works best when free. I am basing my writing essentially on my reading of the texts, on the notes I made of them, on my knowledge of literature in general, of Irish literature specifically. The final magic touch: my wacky romantic imagination :) I believe any writer of fiction gives you a novel, the baton, and now it is your turn to continue the race. Because all novels are unfinished. If finished, it is rubbish, not a novel. We are constantly fighting to find words. The right words. The wrong ones. For many different situations. Transcendental or trivial. To fill in the gaps. The others' and ours. We are surrounded by them. Gaps of knowledge, gaps of Memory, gaps of emotion. But probably the greatest one –of which most people are unaware of although we are the victims of it every day– is the insurmountable gap that exists between soul and language, mind and language, the pre-linguistic and language. Nature and Man (the masculine gender, of course. Nature is female, Artifact is Man, to tame the first. Good! A new topic for a future post!).
The novel, as the extension of life it is, is of course no more gapless! The correct way of reading a novel is filling in these gaps. Moreover, the way you fill in these gaps defines you. So, at the end of the day, it is the novel which reads you. Needless to say, the filler of those holes will necessarily be different from person to person. Every single human being is a filter of reality, and as such, the way we approach a particular novel would result in as many readings as readers. That is why we celebrate literature! Literature puts human beings at the same level, we are all filters of reality. A novel provides the raw materials for us to a.) dream b.) be critical c.) change our life d.) … change the world! It empowers us. When we read a novel we produce a reading, a meaning that will be as equal and great as any other's. Because everything in life depends on perspective. A person who is sitting on the first row at the cinema does not see the screen in the same way as a person who is on the back row on the furthest left. Life works like that, too. As I said somewhere in this blog before, a sublime novel marks the difference when it never leaves you alone. Double meaning here! Alright, it is food for the mind and soul, there is no space for desolation but also it keeps coming back to you. It haunts you. It reminds you of forgotten obligations. Of uncomfortable thoughts. Of celebrating the greatest pleasures of life.
So all this long talk just to say that I am responsible for the contents exposed in this blog, they are creations of my own humble genius, and that if someone does not agree, or is bothered by them, deeming them absurd conclusions because s/he thinks the author did not intend that, I would just say that real History is made up of histories, a lesson these two novels do not cease to remind us. Even though my excessive imagination can be clearly seen to be at work in my writing, the raw material my rambling is based upon is the written word on the books. What then comes into play is the filler of the gaps: I provide an interpretation of what is not said –deliberately or unconsciously– and why. To read between the lines, to put it clearly. But remember that at the end of the day I will be writing about myself, not about Reading in the Dark and The Secret Scripture, because I just cannot come out of my skin. Every single word I utter is conditioned by my personal experience. That is another great lesson to extract from these two novels. So, do you wanna read me? :) To begin with, it is better to state the obvious first. Both
Seamus Deane (Derry, 1940) and
Sebastian Barry (Dublin, 1955) are Irish authors dealing with an Irish theme in the two novels we are discussing here,
Reading in the Dark and
The Secret Scripture, respectively. Both also aim at rewriting Irish history. If you allow me the comparison, this process is very Faulknerian. For instance, in
William Faulkner's
Light in August the author implies that to make sense of the present we inexorably need to go back to the breaking up of the country, the American Civil War. I am not saying American and Irish histories are similar, but what I would really dare to say is that the history of the Western (=Christian) World is. As a matter of fact, if you need to make sense of the disastrous and painful current situation of Spain, you also have to go back to a point in our history where the country suffered the agony of being split in two. And I guess the list of examples could go on and on. Despite the fact that both Deane and Barry locate the first pages of the novel in the present of the narrator who is talking, the core of the story, the conflict in their lives, makes the narrators travel in time back to the 1920's.
The Treaty. Division. Curiously enough, Barry, writing within and about the Republic (or Free State), chooses a narrator from the Protestant side of the conflict, whereas Deane's narrator is an Irish boy from a Catholic area of Derry, outside the Republic.
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| Michael Collins, Merrion Sq, Dublin. |
This peculiarity aside, both novels work as a sharp critique on and a denunciation of the institution of the Irish Catholic Church. Both narrators have in common that they belong to a “marked family”. We will be dealing with this later, so for a moment let's go back to straight facts. Seamus Deane was born 15 years before Sebastian Barry and the novels discussed here are also separated by a span of a bit more than a decade, 12 years. However, as you know, I think they are inextricably related. They are similar but they differ in their personalities. Each author has its own literary profile and voice. That is what makes these two novels so interesting, specially reading them together. They provide a different perspective on the same period and national preoccupation. Ultimately, both novels reach the same conclusions: the celebration of the little (hi)stories that form History. There is not a History with a big capital letter, but (hi)stories. Furthermore, Deane and Barry seem to agree that memory and silence shape human lives. Note the sharp contrast between silence and noise in this extract from Reading in the Dark:
“Now, as the war in the neighbourhood intensified, they both sat there in their weakness, entrapped in the noise from outside and in the propaganda noise of the television inside” (D: 231)
Here the narrator describes his home during a visit from Belfast where he attends university. Silence and (silenced) memory have dominated his parents' pasts, before their marriage and after. They remain in that silence despite, or because of, the horrifying turmoil of The Troubles outside and the brainwashing uproar supplied by the media inside. To go from the present to the past we need memory. For this reason, Deane and Barry make memory a central concern in their respective novels. To penetrate into memory, both authors explore such aspects as “(...) versions of memory, the absolute fascist certainty of memory, the bullying oppression of memory” reaching the conclusion that, after all, memory is “a type of indiscretion of the mind.” (B: 185). The narrator in Reading in the Dark collects through the novel the broken pieces of memory their family let slip. The novel is a quest for identity. He has to reconstruct the family story, to make the unspoken speak. To fill in the gaps. To read between the lines.
“Some of the things I remember I don't really remember. I've just been told about them so now I feel I remember them, and want to the more because it is so important for others to forget them.” (D:225)
I think the most heartbreaking part we find in Deane's text is for the reader to be witness of the growing apart of
Mother and son. From the moment it starts you know it is just going to get worse before it gets any better. So, that is why the narrator's quest is to put all the jigsaw pieces together. The family's secret is getting her mother further and further away from him. The mother knows that he knows something so she just avoids him. He knows she is ignoring him. All that process takes place in silence. The child has to fill in the gaps. Meanwhile, the mother is tormented by memory, by stories, by histories, by History.
“But she didn't like me for knowing it (...) I hated him not knowing. But only my mother could tell him. No one else. Was it her way of loving him, not telling him? It was my way of loving them both, not telling either. But knowing what I did separated me from them both.” (D: 187)
As regards Barry, he has two narrators, Roseanne and Dr Grene. The way they talk to us is through their diaries so we have here again the theme of memory. Their current private lives are marked by guilt, because of the past. Is there a way of changing the past at all? Well, maybe there is. Talking about it. Or better yet... writing about it! Deane and Barry give us private (hi)story that sheds light on the most obscure period of Irish modern history. The trickiness of memory! "A choice, an election, was to be made between what actually happened and what I imagined, what I had learned, what I kept hearing." (D: 182)
Both writers make silence an indispensable characteristic of memory, as I have already mentioned before. They are practically synonyms. Two sides of the same coin, but never antonyms, that's for sure. The bleeding heart at the core of both narratives turns out to be “[t]he mystery of human silence and the efficacy of a withdrawal from the task of questioning” (B: 309). According to Dr Grene, Roseanne “has helped herself, she has spoken to, listened to, herself. It is a victory” (B:290)
I think the main point that made me stop and think about the possible similarities between Reading in the Dark and The Secret Scripture is the mother figure. Both Deane's (okay, the narrator is unnamed but it is known that it is autobiographical...) and Roseanne's mothers suffer seriously from mental health. In contrast, or as a consequence, the fathers act motherly. Okay, I'll dissect that in a second, but let's go back to the mothers first. I guess it is not coincidental that they are so alike. They are a critique on the claustrophobic conditions for women in Ireland during the time discussed in the novels. A woman could only have one life, the married one, and at home. Deane's mother ends up devoured by the past (“That's what punishment does; makes you remember everything” D:193) and guilt and regret and present frustrations, stasis (Doris Lessing's “To Room Nineteen” anyone?). Roseanne's mother's fate is no better. It is worse, to tell the truth. Her daughter, our heroine –because she has her own flaws, she is not perfect, that's why she is human– unfortunately, is of no help, quite the contrary. Her story might probably be sadder than Roseanne's. In short, the mother figure comes to epitomize women as victims of a male-oriented and misogynistic Ireland obsessively controlled by the demented Catholic Church. History has proved no better for this institution. In my opinion, Barry –since his text is more recent– really wanted to talk in his novel about the Catholic Church and its bloody role in the most important chapters of Irish history. I mean, in 2008 and still today in 2012 we keep on hearing about the most serious/most heinous crimes committed by this institution with (practically) no condemnation by Rome. It was a topic that was significant, relevant to the context of the publication of the novel . Again, present and past are the same thing. We will discuss more about that in the Nature Vs. Society segment okay? :)
But what about the fathers? Men in any Christian society are also manipulated, of course. They do not choose to be patriarchal, they are brainwashed since childhood, the same as many women still nowadays accept they are dependent on men and enslaved by the beauty standards set forth by the media. I found Roseanne's father very motherly. Her mother is practically no mother at all, but the father is more a mother than a father (here meaning “father” as defined by Christian standards, same for “mother”). Her father is a central element in the development of the story, an – the – essential piece of her own heart too.
As regards Deane, the thread of narrative that softens your heartbreak a bit –from witnessing the abysmal distance between mother and son– is the bond father-son, the father figure as a whole. He is not the prototype of the Catholic father figure. He takes care of his wife when she is getting ill and at no point condemns her. Both narratives ultimately came out to be father narratives; both stories are family stories in which the father is an essential piece for them to make sense of themselves, to find their own private –family– and public –society– identity. However, in spite of the fact that these two fathers are inscribed into a Christian faith –Protestant for Roseanne, Catholic for Deane– their roles as fathers are free from the rules of their churches. They are not patriarchal: they love their sons and that's enough guide for a father to be one. As a matter of fact, we do not have many –or unfiltered– information on Roseanne's parents, so I am just analysing them by Roseanne's words. Within the context Deane and Barry are locating their narratives it is very important to analyse how religion shaped both private and public lives. For these two stories, it proves to be a force that rather than enlighten your life, ruins it. Politics in Ireland are unfortunately inextricably related to religion. As regards Derry, Deane declares that “[p]olitics destroyed people's lives in this place.”(D: 204). For Roseanne, life works in a similar fashion: “Sligo made me and Sligo undid me” (B:4). However, Barry goes further away and his beautifully wise Roseanne reaches the conclusion that if that was to be true,
“then I should have given up much sooner than I did being made or undone by human towns and looked to myself alone. (…) I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortars against the horrors and cruel dark tricks of time that assails us, and be the author therefore of themselves.(B:4).
TO BE CONTINUED...the original text has been split in two.
