2Whereas O’Flaherty’s alleged realism was actually underpinned by a desire to convey his personal views on the Famine and the way it had been grievously mishandled by the various authorities involved – the British government, the local authorities, the shop-keepers, the Catholic clergy – Joseph O’Connor’s mode of narration in Star of the Sea results in a questioning, on a revisionist mode, of traditional interpretations of the Famine, especially as far as the class of landlords was concerned. As a result, the contrast between the aesthetic modes of the two novels tends to overlap with the historiographic debate about the origins and the nature of the Famine and the official responses to it. O’Flaherty’s style of historical realism matches the nationalist historians’ tendency to rely on emotion and pathos, in order to emphasise the criminal nature of the British government’s response, whereas O’Connor invites the reader to reflect on the constructed nature of historical discourse and therefore on the reality of these accusations.

• 12 Luke Dodd, “Famine Echoes”, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 95, no. 1, 1996, p. 101; quoted in S (...)

An understanding of how famine is experienced is fundamental to an understanding of its causes and effects, but this past experience cannot be meaningfully retrieved by historical discourse alone. It requires a methodology which combines the tangible and the intangible12.

9In Grace Lynch offers none of the comforts of traditional realist narration, as is perceptible right from its opening page where the reader experiences a powerful effect of de-familiarisation when he / she must wrestle with a fragmented, a-grammatical syntax, in which personal pronouns are often used before or without their referents, stirring confusion as to which character does what. This creative language, a mix of Irishisms, orality and sheer dislocation of grammatical language, is used throughout the novel, drawing attention to the artificiality of the device, a far cry from realism’s claim to the transparency of the medium. Anomalous usage of ordinary language prevails, adverbs becoming verbs as in “she would like to be able to go back to where she has been suddened out of’” (p. 175); sentences are reduced into improbable compounds: “she is shout-trying, shout-trying” (p. 168), “the everything-falling of dusk” (p. 219); syntax is dismantled as in: “the where of it she does not know” (p. 165), or as in the striking: “Or perhaps he is just thinking himself forward step by step, his teeth set, his eyes staring into the far-off as if to unthink himself into will” (p. 267).

10This systematic dislocation of language, which is meant to reflect Grace’s gradual psychic and physical decline, is stretched to an extreme when the character’s inner monologue dissolves into mere stammering and silence as the young woman’s consciousness approaches extinction in the last segments of the book. Lynch’s poetic language owes nothing to any authentic oral tradition or to the traditional usage of Hiberno-English as a marker of authenticity, so frequent in Irish literature – from Edgeworth to O’Casey to O’Flaherty and even Roddy Doyle. Its aim is on the contrary to create an effect of estrangement and surprise. This strange language – or language made strange – defers meaning, resists immediate understanding, and makes the connection between the sign and its referent unstable and uncertain – a way of suggesting the limits of language in describing the extremes of suffering caused by the Famine.

11The de-familiarisation effected by language is further emphasised by the absence of the time and space markers generally used in realist fiction, particularly fiction based on real historical events. A comparison with some aspects of O’Flaherty’s Famine brings to light the antirealist, anti-narrative streak in Lynch’s re-writing of the Famine novel, beyond the similarities. O’Flaherty situates the action of his novel in a remote place called Black Valley – a name strikingly close to Lynch’s Black Mountain – starting at the same period as Grace, that is to say Autumn 1845; the incipit contains similar allusions to the harmful rainy weather. Like Grace, Famine lingers on the first two years of the Famine, when the blight struck for the second time but the worst of the disaster was still to come. O’Flaherty’s characters live in the same type of derelict cabin as Grace and her mother. There is talk as well among them of the stench coming from the rotting potatoes. Many of the characters suffer the same fate as those encountered by Grace: they experience hunger, disease, and death. But all along the novel, O’Flaherty traditionally alternates narrative comments, dialogue and description, attempting through this device to cover all aspects of the Famine – social, political, religious – including nuances regarding the role played by the various political forces at play, such as the O’Connelites, the Young Irelanders, the Mitchelites, highlighting the dichotomy in Irish history between the tradition of constitutional action and that of revolutionary force. Characters are used to embody types, which range from the poorest cottiers to the middleman, the devoted doctor, the parish priest, the landlord, the government representative, and the corrupt shop-keeper who wants to take advantage of the people’s misery. Some of the scenes are meant to epitomise some of the most salient aspects of the management of the Famine by the government – a meeting of the relief committee, an eviction, the visit of the sick and the dying by the local doctor – while the narrator summarises the background to the crisis. He also introduces long digressions to convey his opinion on the events and the conduct of the British government. In accordance with the rules of classic historical fiction, individuals are seen to become inextricably enmeshed in a web of events which they cannot control, and the plot takes them in a downward spiral towards decay and disintegration.

12One essential aspect that differentiates Grace from other realistic accounts of the Famine, such as O’Flaherty’s, is the use of a single internal focaliser, in the person of 14-year old Grace, whose interior monologue is recreated all along the novel, interspersed with the words she hears being uttered by the people she comes across. This choice entails the absence of any guidance on the part of a narrator who would supply background information and comments on the characters’ actions and behaviours: the reader is made to experience the same overwhelming feeling of disorientation as the one suffered by the young girl. After she is torn away from her native home by her own mother in the middle of the night, and cast out into the unknown, bewildering world that was Ireland at the onset of the Famine, emphasis is laid upon that single character’s disorientation, and her reliance on her physical perceptions only – eyesight, hearing, touch – stressing her profound lack of understanding of what is happening to her, except through her bodily sensations. As a result, Lynch does away with the markers of referentiality proper to realist fiction. The story does follow a chronology, but one which depends solely upon the character’s perception of the passing of the seasons and is organised according to the only type of calendar the young girl is aware of, the one transmitted by popular customs and beliefs. Beginning with the Samhain, and this “flood October”, with its “rains like something biblical” (p. 9), Grace’s ordeal for the most part derives from the alterations of the weather as the year unfolds, inflicting on her the pains of cold, rain and snow, her hopes of surviving being rekindled by the return of spring: “Guesses it must be April, for the rains have come to pull colour from the earth that will bring forage to live on” (p. 142), or of summer: “everywhere she sees the betiming of summer – a con man’s trick, she thinks” (p. 180).

13Space like time remains also for the most part undefined in Grace’s mind, except for the only place that she is familiar with, her native Donegal homestead. After she is driven out of this original birthplace like a cursed wanderer, her eyes discover a vast tract of unknown places, where she is cast away adrift without any sense of direction: “She has walked deeper into the world, spent nameless days on these nameless roads that twist and turn with no ending” (p. 106). She can only pick up the few pieces of information available to her as she enters new localities: “Donegal town, a road sign announces” (p. 53). “Welcome to Clones, County Monaghan” (p. 110), or when she is advised to find work “out past Cavan town near Felt” (p. 145). Her journey is delineated by a few scattered landmarks which also suggest the unending nature of her wanderings: “The dreaming world is shaking free its shadows when they reach Athlone town” (p. 197), “The Slieve Bloom Mountains rising before them” (p. 209), “They pass through Nenagh town” (p. 246), “They have lucked themselves a lift towards Limerick” (p. 249). Contrary to many other Famine stories, the novel contains little information as to the exact context of the tragedy. The potato blight itself is only alluded to a number of times, for example through the stench it releases: “What a strange year it’s been, she thinks, the rain and the storms that upturned summer into winter and the heat of September and then that bilgewater stench that came from the fields” (p. 9); in the young girl’s private language, the failure of the crops becomes “the wintering”; the repetition of the blight in the second year of the Famine is marked by her disappointment on realising that “the lumper stalks have become slippery with rot, the crops become scrawny old legs withering to their last moment” (p. 232). The situation of cottiers who soon became unable to pay their rents and faced eviction is fleetingly called forth at the onset of the novel when Grace remarks to her brother that “they have nothing for him”, “him” meaning Boggs, a middleman who as we are made to understand, has granted Grace’s mother his protection in exchange for sexual services and has fathered two of Sarah’s children. He is part of the reason why Sarah wants to send Grace away, when she realises he has started to covet her. Apart from these few elements included in the plot, Lynch provides no overview of the political situation of the country on the onset of the Famine, in the way that O’Flaherty’s novel Famine does. Grace contains only a few scattered allusions to the role of government, and to the relief measures that were taken. The British government is referred to as “the Crown” by the few characters Grace encounters who hold an opinion on the events, but it is mostly the difference between rich and poor that they resent, as is the case for her travelling companion John Bart: “the have-it-alls and well-to-doers who don’t give a fuck what is happening to the ordinary people” (p. 189). The one episode which comes closest to a traditional, history-based evocation of Famine times is when Grace, dressed up as a boy, is encouraged to take part to the public works and experiences the harshness of the labour on a “road to nowhere” under the supervision of the guards. At one point of her journey she also overhears rumours of a rebellion: “The town diamond is strewn with loose straw and masonry and almost as many official men and soldiers from the barracks. The people are beginning to stir up, Colly says. Some kind of gathering or protest has turned violent” (p. 121). But evidence of the pervasiveness and depth of the tragedy is mostly provided by Grace’s being struck by the ghostly appearance of the people she comes across during her wanderings, whom she views as “raggedy little shapes” (p. 47), “their rag clothing upon them as if it were the wind that dressed them” (p. 80), “how they look like they are losing both their inwardness and outwardness” (p. 107), “a man made only of bones as if he had borrowed his body from what hides in the earth” (p. 279). As opposed to O’Flaherty’s Famine which alternates dialogue, narrative summary and narrative comment in order to deliver precise information about the context of the Famine, Lynch’s Grace therefore only fitfully alludes to historical events and makes no allusion at all to historical characters, in accordance to some extent with Eric L. Berlatsky’s definition of the “anti-narrative” mode.

15O’Flaherty, writing Famine the same year as Ireland gave itself a Constitution, had a clear political agenda, which was to instil in his readers’ minds the creed in the nation’s necessary struggle for independence, to remind them of the cruelty of landlordism and colonialism and to condemn social injustice. O’Connor for his part was writing in the context of the revisionist / nationalist debate which opposed diverging interpretations of the Famine, raising suspicion as to the truth of any historical account since it could be retold and reshaped any number of times according to what political bias underpinned it. Writing at a different period, Lynch’s novel presents a different strategy, which consists in both avoiding the pretence of representing the past as it really happened, claimed by the realist historical fiction, and to overcome the postulate that it is impossible to give access to the reality of the past. Lynch is also writing at a time when, as noted before, a certain “post-revisionist” consensus has been reached on interpretations of the Famine, and certain facts can no longer be contested.

16Consequently, what matters now is no longer to persuade the reader of interpreting the Famine as evidence of colonial oppression, or to warn him of the deceptive nature of history, which is only story, but to find a new language to establish contact with the reality of past events. It is also crucial to re-establish an embodied link with the victims of the natural, social, political and cultural disaster that was the Famine at a time when other disasters are lurking, or are already taking place. That is why, while not denying that the reality of the past reaches us mostly through discourses and representations, this new language aims nevertheless at forcing the reader to forget what he already knows about the Famine through books and discourses, so as to look upon the event with fresh horror.

18For besides the use of a defamiliarising language, as pointed out before, the creation of a gothic atmosphere in the novel corresponds to the image that underpins the novel, namely that of the haunting of the living by the dead. It starts of course with the blending of two voices in the ongoing flow of thoughts and impressions that makes up the narrative, Grace having literally incorporated the voice of her dead brother Colly, who drowns at an early stage of the story. The device suggests that all the descendants of the dead are the bearers of their extinguished voices – thus establishing the “familial form of mediation” referred to by Hirsch; it is also an embedded image of the role of the writer who must speak up for all the Famine victims who disappeared and were reduced to silence, the same silence that many commentators and historians of the Famine and its literature have deplored: “Nobody will have heard of me”, Grace thinks (p. 101); “all memory eventually falls into a great forgetting that will include herself and everyone at Blackmountain and everyone on earth” (p. 193). But language falters as its horror cannot be fully fathomed or apprehended except in the shape of nightmarish, unspeakable images: hence the multiple allusions to dreams and nightmares which recur through the narrative, expressing Grace’s horrific experience of utter disorientation: “she is haunted again by that dream image of Boggs-as-wolf” (p. 48), “dreaming is a tricky business because all dreams are timeless”(p. 105), “she dreams her old self”(p. 106), “rising from the dream through half dream” (p. 119), “within the dream she is an ageless child trying to speak to Sarah” (p. 144), “and anyhow who can tell this dreaming from real, there is no such thing as real anymore” (p. 280), etc. Besides emphasising this fearful blurring of the frontier between dream and reality, Lynch endows the narrative with a supernatural dimension by including Grace’s childish, popular superstitious beliefs in her flow of thoughts. The girl alludes to Samhain – the festival when the dead return to visit the living – but also to the pooka, to “the she-wolf that stole the baby boy from the woman’” (p. 87), to Ossian and Bran (p. 101). Grace is also visited by the vision of the woman her travelling companions killed in an attack: “She is talking to the dead woman from the coach” (p. 226), or by the ghost of her dead mother at the very end of the novel when she is expecting a child.

19The experience of the substitution of a rational, familiar reality by chaos, meaninglessness and death brought about by the Famine is also rendered through the figure of inversion that runs through the narrative. It starts with her mother’s decision to dress Grace as a boy so as to give her a greater chance to fend for herself when she sends her wandering on the roads. Her incorporation of her brother’s voice also changes her into a “he-she” creature so that Grace herself seems to transcend the laws of nature. For it is mostly nature which seems to have inverted its course in the devastated universe that Grace walks through, as is suggested by the pervading device of personification that Lynch deploys throughout the narrative, the non-human elements being granted an agency that the humans have been deprived of: “the rain comes yoked to a hooded sun, unfastens and falls like a cloak” (p. 21), “there is some power here contained in the earth that rise up and has an effect on the brain, makes you sleepy, the trees whispering their madness to you and it is not you who will eat the trees but the trees that will feed on the dust of your bones” (p. 278). Nature is no longer regarded as the benevolent purveyor of food and life in the service of mankind, but as a cold, indifferent, or even hostile agent, so that Grace can only witness “the silence of nature” (p. 132). Conversely, the people Grace encounters along her wandering journey are deprived of their humanity: they are turned into “raggedy little shapes”, into “fright-shapes in the dark” (p. 268), or return to a state of sheer bestiality, sucking rocks, eating from roots and trees, hankering after the purely animal sensation of warmth and comfort, and finally burying the dead in raw earth.

• 25 John Charles Hill, “The Creaturely Life of Carol Reed’s Cities: Eric Santner and Walter Benjamin”, (...)

[…] each individual person is a particular creature, in that sense, of the unique history they are born into, and that history, especially in the twentieth century, is likely to be a history of mass violence and disruption […] The creaturely therefore rescues the individual from the anonymity of the mass […]. However, it then installs that individual in the lonely torment, the living death, of those who find themselves caught up in that mass, constituted from the wreckage of history, among Rilke’s street people, or, as Santner footnotes, among Primo Levi’s concentration camp “Musselmanner”: those prisoners in extremis, unable to work, or even speak, awaiting only selection for the gas chamber, and from whom we turn away in fear, seeing ourselves reflected in their degradation25.

• 28 Ibid., p. 106.

Postmemory shares the layering of these other “posts” and their belatedness, aligning itself with the practice of citation and mediation that characterize them, marking a particular end-of-century / turn-of-century moment of looking backward rather than ahead and of defining the present in relation to a troubled past rather than initiating new paradigms28.

23Grace is a very rich novel encouraging other readings than just another piece of Famine narrative fiction. Indeed, if Grace may be looked upon as an example of “postmemory”, namely an attempt to define the present in relation to the past, it also resonates with very contemporary issues. In particular we should not overlook the central role Lynch attributes to the natural elements, through close attention to details of the landscape and the weather and the device of personification; so that Grace, instead of a historical novel, could also be interpreted as an apocalyptic scenario staging the general collapse of natural resources in a universe much closer to our own. Grace’s predicament, as she wanders alone through a devastated landscape, amid wreckage of former forms of life, can be aligned with that of other protagonists of post-apocalyptic dystopias such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2013) or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). The same imagination of an environmental disaster prevails in these novels, the difference being that Lynch turned to 19^th-century Irish history to find a model for such an apocalyptic vision, whereas Atwood and McCarthy found inspiration in the present to imagine an undefined future.