Irish Literature and the First World War. Culture, Identity and Memory

Irish Literature and the First World War. Culture, Identity and Memory Terry Phillips Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015 ISBN 9783034319690 292pp. 55.60 [pounds sterling]. Paperback In any place, at any time, remembering war is a capricious exercise. In the context of Ireland's relationship with the First World War over the last century, the particularities of the island's history and politics have dictated what is celebrated and what is repressed at various points. Memory is not transmitted in a straight line through time. Rather, it is a malleable mediator between then and now, yesterday and today, past and present. Old fears and pain are stored differently than happiness in the mind. They are secreted away so time cannot work its healing powers. A tension emerges between the will to deny distress and the will to confront it openly. The private and public spheres of memory are also often disconnected and fragmented--memory can be personal as well as political. For every officially sanctioned state commemoration, there will be an enduring dissident version. Culture, identity and memory are inextricably intertwined and are informed not only by what is remembered but also by what is forgotten. In an instinctive reaction to trauma, certain elements are occluded, banished to a kind of no man's land by deliberate but inevitably incomplete acts of deliberate forgetting. Terry Phillips' anatomy of Irish writing on the 1914-1918 war does full justice to the complexities of this phenomenon, to the construction, evolution and reinvention of culture, identity and memory, and to the contradictions inherent therein. Phillips emphasises the intricate positions adopted by writers in relation to the international conflict and to Irish debates about nationhood, which resist reduction to the simple binaries of unionist/pro-war and nationalist/anti-war. This is not a radical position but it is a fundamental starting point. Studies of the literature of the war are no longer restricted to the battlefield verses of "soldier-poets", and there is a broad and generous medley of authors and genres throughout here. The question of selection for inclusion must have been influenced by Ireland's fluid status within and outside the Empire, and by its own mutation into two distinct but closely related entities. Phillips' subjects represent a variety of social, political, religious and cultural backgrounds, all with nuanced interpretations of the war. The sheer density of interconnections between Ireland and Britain (including some shared literary inheritances) was most powerfully expressed in the mass volunteering of Irishmen for service in the British army (a majority of whom were Catholic), for a variety of reasons. One link in the British-Irish chain was then further cemented on the western front, while another was simultaneously being sundered by the republican campaign for independence at home. Just as Irish identity and self-definition have never been fixed or one-dimensional issues, Irish writing about the war has never been not one-dimensional. Phillips points out, for instance, that "[t]he influence of a revived interest in Celtic mythology may, paradoxically, be seen in both radical nationalist writing and writing about the First World War" (4). Phillips initially analyses poetry and prose written by combatant and non-combatant Irish writers during the conflict. He goes on to discuss the literature of the following decades, looking at how the conflict was remembered in the two parts of post-partition Ireland, both by individuals and collectively, and investigating the dynamic interrelationship between personal recollection and public memory. In conclusion, the author discusses contemporary literature about the war, which often examines family memory as well as collective memory, and explores its role in the chronicle of nationhood, both north and south of the border. The extent of what the historian F. …