Sounding the Margins

But ‘writing the margins’ does not simply mean depicting rebels, social misfits and victims of injustice. It also involves the literary process itself. The creative act is constantly undergoing revision depending on the fashion of the time, the various discoveries of how the mind works, how memory impacts our behaviour and how we are moulded by our social and material circumstances. Realism, romanticism, naturalism, modernism, existentialism, cubism, postmodernism, feminism, ecocriticism, all these movements influence how writers see the world and set about depicting it. In this regard, France tends to be ahead of Ireland and is the testing ground for some of the newest and most radical ideas in relation to literature and literary criticism. It was in France that the ‘Nouveau Roman’ (New Novel) first came into being. It involved a questioning of the traditional idea that a novel should have a plot, a linear narrative and well-developed characters. In 1925, André Gide describes an interesting exchange in what many rate as his chef d’oeuvre, Les Faux-Monnayeurs:

The interesting point about this exchange is the way in which certain accepted norms are called into question. Why should a novel have a subject? Why should it be seen as producing a ‘slice of life’, a realistic and linear account of an existence which is not, in fact, either logical or linear. Gide’s title already gave a hint as to his motivation, as ‘faux-monnayeur’ means counterfeiter in English, something which Gide felt writers were in danger of becoming. As the discoveries of psychology and other sciences began to show the mysterious workings of the mind, literary practitioners felt the need to reflect these developments in their writing. Thus, instead of smooth prose and predictable behaviour, writers’ style became fragmented and notions of time more fluid, as narratives jumped from the past to the present, to the future, without any warning. The omniscient narrator was no more, as literary theorists announced the death of the author. It is certainly no coincidence that three of Ireland’s most famous fin-de-siècle writers, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and George Moore, spent prolonged periods in Paris and were to the forefront of literary initiation, especially Joyce and Beckett, who pushed language to its limits. For Beckett, the ultimate margin for language was silence, a theme that is discussed in some of the chapters which follow.

Grace Neville’s chapter examines the extent to which the French were familiar with Ireland’s Famine in the 1840s, and also the ways in which contemporary French and Québécois writers reengage with this aspect of Irish history. As Neville notes, ‘Scholars have tracked the Famine in Irish writers major and minor from Edgeworth and Trollope to Beckett and Eavan Boland’ – but what she adds is an astonishingly comprehensive catalogue of French texts which refer to the Great Irish Famine. With her research sparked by some references to the Famine in Balzac’s La Cousine Bette, 1846, Neville went on to discover several thousand Famine-related publications in French from the 1840s onwards. Some of the texts analysed confirm that those living in working-class Paris districts may themselves have known the strains of constant hunger. Others provide a different perspective: ‘Again and again, they highlight the transatlantic crossing, the flight from the periphery to the centre, from Ireland to the Promised Land of Canada’. As Neville shows, while the Famine, and recent literary and artistic revivals of it, may appear particular to Ireland, the experiences, long-term consequences and symbolism are not only understood elsewhere but, notably, form a traceable part of French and Québécois literature.