Paul Lynch’s Grace and the “Postmemory” of the Famine

Abstract

This paper starts as a discussion of Paul Lynch’s novel Grace as a Famine novel and on the ways in which the Famine is represented historically, but also emotionally. It questions the limits of language and fiction in representing history, trauma and affects and discusses the specificity of Grace, comparing it with Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea. Grace, it is argued, manages to evade the nationalist versus revisionist debate and constitutes, at an aesthetic level, the same type of middle-ground as the one achieved by the “post-revisionist” historians, situated half-way between the mythologising of the first interpreters of the Famine and the revisionists’ controversial attempts at writing “value-free” narratives of the tragedy. Drawing on Eric L. Berlatksy’s model of an anti-realist narrative mode and its application in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory applied to the Shoah, the essay posits that Lynch’s novel offers the reader a renewed mode of understanding the reality of the past, and in particular, of horrifying historical events that resist representation – in this case, the Great Famine.