‘Intertextual Quotation’: Troubled Irish Bodies and Jewish Intertextual Memory in Colum McCann’s ‘Cathal’s Lake’ and ‘Hunger Strike’

Abstract

In addition to his enduring commitment to the exilic subject in its many guises, Colum McCann is particularly concerned with the embodied affects of displacement and shared interstices of transcultural memory. Through a discussion of two stories, ‘Cathal’s Lake’, from Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994), and ‘Hunger Strike’, from Everything in This Country Must (2000), this chapter highlights how McCann’s fashioning of bodies affected by political violence relies heavily on codes—visual and textual—that he transcribes from Jewish history and cultural memory. In this way, we can read McCann’s work as galvanised by what Michael Rothberg has termed ‘multidirectional memory’; his fictions animated by ‘borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant’.¹ For both Rothberg and McCann, this ‘productive, intercultural dynamic of multidirectional memory … has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice’.² McCann’s invocation of multidirectional memory has a twofold ethical impetus. Firstly, in borrowing from Jewish cultural memory to write about Ireland, McCann creates spaces for imaginative, transcultural empathetic relations. Moreover, his intertextual aesthetics—narratives mediated through other narratives—illustrate his remove from the subjects he writes about and ensures he does not appropriate an experiential reality beyond his own.

In addition to his enduring commitment to the exilic subject in its many guises, Colum McCann is particularly concerned with the embodied affects of displacement and shared interstices of transcultural memory. Through a discussion of two stories, ‘Cathal’s Lake’, from Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994), and ‘Hunger Strike’, from Everything in This Country Must (2000), this chapter highlights how McCann’s fashioning of bodies affected by political violence relies heavily on codes—visual and textual—that he transcribes from Jewish history and cultural memory. In this way, we can read McCann’s work as galvanised by what Michael Rothberg has termed ‘multidirectional memory’; his fictions animated by ‘borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant’.¹ For both Rothberg and McCann, this ‘productive, intercultural dynamic of multidirectional memory … has the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice’.² McCann’s invocation of multidirectional memory has a twofold ethical impetus. Firstly, in borrowing from Jewish cultural memory to write about Ireland, McCann creates spaces for imaginative, transcultural empathetic relations. Moreover, his intertextual aesthetics—narratives mediated through other narratives—illustrate his remove from the subjects he writes about and ensures he does not appropriate an experiential reality beyond his own.

The overlap between Irish and Jewish experience has received some attention from scholars, with Robin Cohen arguing that Irish and Jewish migration are both ‘victim diasporas’ marked by ‘scarring historical calamities’.³ In a similar way, Richard Kearney notes that both Ireland and the Jews could be viewed as ‘migrant nation[s]’ that ‘embrace all those emigrants and exiles who live beyond the territory of the nation-state’.⁴ In addition to sharing the Jewish experiences of dispossession and diaspora, the Irish and Jews both suffered the prejudices of being marginalised within Europe. There is also, perhaps, something in the idea of the shared experience of partition in both Ireland and Israel, territory that Joe Cleary explores in Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (2002). McCann’s textual fashioning of the confluence between Irish and Jewish experience also draws on the fault lines within the (Northern) Irish nation, but it is not the geopolitics of partition that draw McCann’s attention, but the biopolitical legacy of this.

Through the Northern Irish body, traumatised by sectarian conflict, McCann engages an affective aesthetic that draws on transcultural Jewish memory. In the stories under discussion here, McCann puts the Famine spectre in dialogue with the Holocaust camp victim and hunger striker; the adolescent body of a Catholic nationalist killed in a street riot by a British solider into dialogue with an Irish farmer and a Jewish Zaddikim, or, Tzadikim Nistarim, a hidden righteous one. Of McCann’s tendency to establish relations between disparate events, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of ‘connective’ rather than ‘comparative’ literary practice is illuminating: Hirsch prefers the term ‘connective rather than comparative’ because ‘it eschews any implications that catastrophic histories are comparable, and it thus avoids the competition over suffering that comparative approaches can, at their worst, engender’.⁵ McCann’s connective practice does not appropriate the sufferings of others in order to ‘indulge in the self-absorption of victim culture’ but, rather as Luke Gibbons asserts, ‘the opposite: to engage in an act of ethical imagination in which one’s own uneven development becomes not just a way in, but a way out, a means of empathising with other peoples and societies’.⁶

In addition to the clear intertextuality of McCann’s work, which will be discussed in greater detail below, McCann’s use of ancient Irish myths and Jewish folklore performs an act of ‘remediation’.⁷ This term, drawn from the work of Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, describes the endless intermedial cycle of reproduction and replication, arguing that all cultural memory is formed through remediation: the infinite borrowing and refashioning of stories and tropes across different media.⁸ Through this process, Erll and Rigney assert, ‘memorial media borrow from, incorporate, absorb, critique and refashion earlier memorial media’.⁹ In his story ‘Cathal’s Lake’, McCann draws upon the Irish myth of the Children of Lir and the Jewish folktale of the Tzadikim Nistarim, or thirty-six hidden righteous ones, and, through this process of remediation, creates a transcultural space for solidarity. You will note the similarities between Erll and Rigney’s concept of remediation and Allen Feldman’s assertion that ‘[p]olitical violence is a mode of transcription; it circulates codes from one prescribed historiographic surface or agent to another’.¹⁰ McCann’s literary constructions of Northern Irish bodies in the two stories under discussion here perform exactly this: the re-transcription of codes from one cultural memory to another, a process we can productively understand as a form of transcultural remediation.

McCann’s remedial art privileges the role of ethical imagination within print (rather than oral) storytelling, as an embodied cultural practice that is sustained through the retelling of narratives. In an interview with Cécile Maudet, McCann argues that the central role of the writer is to rewrite and retell moments from history that have been silenced, so that writers become a form of ‘unacknowledged historian’.¹¹ McCann goes on to state that ‘Jewish culture is really interesting in the sense that it has always known that it must tell a story over and over and over again’, or risk having ‘people appropriate’ their history and claim ‘it’s untrue’. For McCann, ‘Irish culture forms its own truth much like the Jewish culture because we are storytellers’. While we should be suspicious of McCann’s quasi-essentialist depictions of both Irish and Jewish culture here, the parallels that McCann draws between the importance of storytelling in both cultures is revealing of the ways in which his Troubles stories, as we shall see, remediate a text from one culture to retell a story about another.

Transcultural Aesthetics and ‘Troubles’ Literature

It is unusual, and significant, that McCann’s remediation is transcultural in its remits. For, as Joe Cleary has noted, the Northern Irish Troubles have been dealt with ‘in hermetically compartmentalised terms’, divorced from any international context.¹² Cleary is primarily concerned with the ways in which this writes out the involvement of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, suggesting that the Troubles ‘are viewed not as part of a shared history that produced both states [the Republic of Ireland and the UK], but as a distinct regional problem with which Southerners may engage, but which has still little to do with the South’. Cleary also highlights that when Southern writers do write about the North, there has been an overwhelming trend for their fictions to be exclusively ‘Northern’: located in the North of Ireland, with Northern Irish characters and, more often than not, narrative material that focuses on the ‘distinct regional problem’ of the Northern Irish Troubles. However, McCann is a Southern writer (although his mother is from Derry) whose work constantly seeks to put the North into its wider Irish context—such as the move from Derry to Galway in ‘Hunger Strike’—as well as into a transcultural context, as demonstrated by his coupling of Irish and Jewish narratives. In broadening his range of focus, McCann goes some way towards avoiding entrenched sectarian politics. This being said, by identifying Catholic nationalism with Jewish history, McCann inevitably creates a sympathetic link between the two situations, which could be read as underscoring a shared or echoed narrative of victimhood and oppression. It is also imperative that we recognise that, despite McCann’s desire to fashion a redemptive imaginative relationship between the Irish and the Jews, the Irish have not always been particularly welcoming of Jews.¹³

Cathal’s Lake and Irish Zaddikim

‘Cathal’s Lake’ from McCann’s collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994), draws upon the Irish myth of the Children of Lir, but McCann has asserted that ‘really, it goes back to a Jewish myth’,¹⁴ that of the Zaddikim, or thirty-six hidden ‘just’ or righteous men (also known by Tzadikim Nistarim, Lamed Vav(niks) (from the Hebrew characters thirty and six) or Lamed-vovniks in Yiddish).¹⁵ Cathal, an Irish farmer with ‘his own peculiar curse’,¹⁶ finds that every fatality of the Northern Irish Troubles is transmogrified into a live swan, which he finds buried under the earth in his garden, and that he must dig out of the soil and settle on the lake in his farmland. Through this fantastical element, then, McCann imagines Cathal as one of these hidden righteous men of Jewish folklore; ‘Cathal is very much an Irish figure, he’s a farmer, but he goes back to this Jewish myth: he is carrying the sorrows of the world, and he has lost his line of communication with God’.¹⁷ Over the course of the story, Cathal is forced to dig up another swan from his garden due to the death of an adolescent boy in Derry. The teenage victim had been involved in a street riot and, although Cathal does not know the specifics of his death, he imagines that he might have been killed by a British soldier, when a ‘plastic bullet slam[med] his chest … hurtling against his lung’, which results in him dropping the petrol bomb he is carrying and becoming engulfed in flames (173).

As with McCann’s other Northern Irish short fiction, he is keen to engage empathetically with various voices from the numerous communities that shape the social fabric in Northern Ireland. In attempting to find humanity in the young soldier who killed the teenage boy, Cathal suggests that ‘maybe the soldier who fired the riot gun was just a boy himself’, who wanted nothing more than ‘to be home’ (175). Cathal imagines this teenage soldier ‘having to call [his girlfriend], heartbroken’ and explain that he ‘didn’t mean it’ (175). Alternately, Cathal thinks, this soldier might have had a ‘face like a rat’ and have celebrated this death as a kind of victory, ‘glorious in his black boots, being slapped and praised’ (177). The insight that McCann gives us to Cathal’s internal monologue suggests that Cathal is a sensitive man, troubled by the violence of his home state and carefully thinking through the conflicting causes and loyalties that might have led to the death of the adolescent boy.

Despite the magical component to Cathal’s ‘own peculiar curse’ (184), McCann’s fashioning of him depicts him very much as an ordinary middle-aged man. Cathal is ‘a big farmer with a thick chest’, a ‘balding scalp’, and is plagued by ill health, coughing and wheezing as he fulfils his tasks (174). He is somewhat cantankerous in spirit and burdened by the role that he must play in digging the swans from the soil, lamenting ‘the things a man could be doing now if he wasn’t cursed to dig’, even though he undertakes this work with painstaking precision and care (178). This resentment is enhanced by his great sorrow for ‘all these young men and women dying’ (175). Cathal’s labour evidently brings up great sorrow and involves a huge degree of physical exertion; at one point he asks himself ‘[w]hy all this sweating in the rain, in a clean white shirt, when there’s a million and one other things to be done?’ (182). However, the compassion with which he releases the live swan from the earth is noteworthy: ‘[w]ith great delicacy Cathal makes a tunnel out of which to pull the neck and head. With the soil loose enough he gently eases the long twisted neck out and grabs it with one hand…. Deftly he lifts the swan out of the soil’ (183). Although he is ‘cursed to dig’, he still tackles his work with pronounced tenderness.

In this way, then, the modesty of Cathal’s existence, despite the unusual and fantastical quality of his curse, is evocative of the Tzadikim Nistarim, a ‘legend, widespread in Jewish folklore, [that] speaks of thirty-six Zaddikim, or just men, on whom—though they are unknown or hidden—rests the fate of the world’.¹⁸ Gershom Scholem argues that ‘[i]n the ancient Jewish sources of the tradition, the motif of the thirty-six just men is quite separate from that of the existence of hidden just men. Already in the biblical Proverbs of Solomon we find the saying that the just man is the foundation of the world (Prov. 10:25) and therefore, as it were, supports it’.¹⁹ Throughout the centuries, this folktale has been recycled—or remediated—endless times and the ‘just men’ became hidden just men. The folktale was especially popular with Ashkenazim (Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Interestingly, the folktale forms the backbone of André Schwarz-Bart’s novel The Last of the Just (1959): a novel that, in its twinning of the traumas of the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, Rothberg turns to as a primary example of his multidirectional memory paradigm.²⁰ McCann’s transcultural remediation of this Jewish folktale, then, in entangling Irish and Jewish narratives, uses multidirectional memory to generate textual spaces marked by a ‘productive, intercultural dynamic’.²¹

McCann’s intertextual remediation also mobilises the Irish myth of the Children of Lir. The myth recounts how Aoife, the second wife of Lir, was jealous of the four children from his first marriage and so turned them into swans, dooming them to 900 years roaming around Ireland before the spell was broken. In McCann’s remediation of the Lir myth, the swans are the reincarnated souls of Troubles casualties and live on Cathal’s lake before ‘they leave, the whole flock, every New Year’s Eve’ for some unknown destination (179). The swans themselves are ‘[a]ll of them generally shaped, sized and white-feathered the same’, erasing the differences which proved so deadly for them in their human lives: ‘[t]he girl from the blown-up bar looking like a twin of the soldier found slumped in the front seat of a Saracen’ and this soldier, ‘the twin of the boy from Garvagh found drowned in a ditch with an armalite in his fingers’ (181). While the lives of these victims end in horror and violence, there is some strange sort of redemption for them, reborn and peacefully co-existing. Although the number of fatalities ensure that ‘the lake [is] almost full’, the swans ‘never seem to quarrel’ (179).

Despite the relative peace and harmony that exists between the swans on Cathal’s lake, the story is still marked by tragedy, melancholy, and motifs of the body in pain, animal and human. For, while the swans ‘never seem to quarrel … they never sing either’ and Cathal ruminates on how he ‘never hears [their] swansong’ (179). Of course, swansong is associated with death, a bittersweet and beautiful dying song, itself a ‘mythological invention’ based on the sound after ‘a bird was shot in the air, and the escaping breath from the windpipe sounded to some poor foolish poet like a song’ (179). McCann’s detail about the lack of swansong is somewhat incongruous to the narrative because Cathal reveals that these swans migrate before they die; this reference associates the swans even further with trauma through the foreshadowing of a violent death and the silence that will accompany this. Therefore, while McCann’s transcultural aesthetic gestures towards the ‘new forms of solidarity’ that Rothberg finds in multidirectional memory, this solidarity produces a sombre, mournful elegy to victims of the North’s conflict.

‘Hunger Strike’: The Famished Body as Transcultural Trope in Irish and Jewish Memory

Just as ‘Cathal’s Lake’ is underpinned by a remediation of Jewish and Irish folklore, McCann’s story ‘Hunger Strike’ is also haunted by Jewish and Irish transcultural memory: specifically, the starving body. In the Irish cultural context, the ‘intertextual’ nature of the emaciated body has received much commentary and I will focus here on the ways in which McCann utilises both the history of fasting-as-protest and the history of the nineteenth-century Famine. In ‘Hunger Strike’, these Irish histories are twinned with McCann’s allusive references to the starvation and trauma of the Holocaust.

‘Hunger Strike’, from McCann’s trilogy of Troubles stories, Everything in This Country Must (2000), is set during the Long Kesh/Maze hunger strike of 1981 and acts as an intertextual tissue troubled by the spectral hauntings of not only these famished Irish bodies but memories of bodies of other traumas. The novella traces an unlikely friendship that forms between an adolescent, Kevin, whose uncle is on hunger strike, and an elderly Lithuanian couple. A close reading of the novella suggests that this couple are survivors of the Holocaust. In this novella, Kevin’s mother has relocated our narrator from Derry to Galway, because she is keen that they avoid the inevitable and unrelenting updates from the media as Kevin’s uncle’s condition deteriorates. Kevin’s uncle has been in prison for the entirety of Kevin’s life and the two have never met; he has been, then, a persistent but haunting absence in Kevin’s lived experience and Kevin’s narration is full of reflection on his uncle’s current famished state. His uncle’s presence in the text reads like a ghost of a never-fully-realised trauma in a fashion imitative of the much commented upon textual hauntings of the Famine spectre.²² The textual hauntings of an unknowable trauma are also echoed in the backstory of the Lithuanian couple, which is alluded to but never fully explained.

Maud Ellmann maintains that ‘the starving body is itself a text’ and that, as ‘quotations’, these bodies became a part of a textual inscription of history, putting them into a dialogue with other historical texts.²³ In conversation with Ellmann, Seamus Heaney suggests that we should read the bodies of the 1980–1 hunger strikers as ‘quotations’ of an Irish history of hunger and the political ‘afterlife’ of hunger as a form of protest.²⁴ According to Heaney, the hunger strikes of the early 1980s make reference to an Irish tradition of fasting to shame a wrongdoer or oppressor. In early Irish law, the Brehon legal codes (Senchus Mor), a plaintiff could fast outside the door of his debtor’s house and this debtor would be compelled to pay up (Troscad or Cealachan). Heaney’s comment picks up on W.B. Yeats’s play, The King’s Threshold (1904), wherein a poet, Seanchan, fasts on King Guaire’s threshold. What is more, the power of Yeats for the nationalist is picked up by McCann, too; his hunger striker starts reading ‘poetry and a play by W.B. Yeats’ while fasting.²⁵ If, as Heaney suggests, we are to read these hunger strikes as a legacy of previous fasts, then, in addition to referencing a historic tradition of protest, these starving bodies also function as a visceral reminder of the nineteenth-century Great Famine.

Heaney’s assertion that the bodies of hunger strikers can be read as ‘intertextual’ and as part of a codified cultural memory echoes Christopher Morash’s suggestion that ‘even before the Famine was acknowledged as a complete event, it was in the process of being textually encoded in a limited number of clearly defined images’.²⁶ These images were the stalking spectre and the green-mouthed corpse, which Morash locates as haunting the work of William Carleton and Patrick Sheehan, contemporary accounts and newspaper articles, and an anonymous poem published in 1851 in London entitled ‘The Spectre’. How to represent the sheer scale and horror of the Famine proved challenging; the repeated insistence of those who saw its effect was: ‘It cannot be described’.²⁷ The Famine, through defying logic and reason, came to be visually represented by the phantom figure of the spectre, occupying the liminal position between life and death. Morash notes how these symbols, the stalking spectre and the green-mouthed corpse, became part of what he labels ‘the propaganda war’ in the bid for Irish independence and that by the turn of the twentieth century, ‘such images were so widely known that they could be said to constitute a form of collectively maintained “memory”’.²⁸

What is most interesting in Heaney’s use of ‘quotation’ is the suggestion that hunger and fasting are part of a textually coded system of representation through which connections can be made to other textually coded traumas. In this way, intertextuality, with its allusive references to other texts and textual codes of representation, can actually be read as a form of haunting. Critics have noted that, under the weight of unimaginable horrors, traditional literary forms begin to break and instead of logical and chronological plot development, argues Morash, ‘we find that the Famine as a textual event is composed of a group of images whose meaning does not derive from their strategic location within a narrative, but rather from the strangeness and horror of the images themselves, as dislocated, isolated emblems of suffering’.²⁹ Kali Tal, too, contends that ‘traumatic events are written and rewritten until they become codified’, suggesting that we can now read the Holocaust as a ‘metonym’ with a ‘set of symbols that reflect the formal codification of that experience’.³⁰ The skeletal body is one such symbol that reflects the formal codification of the Holocaust. This codified symbol is shared with the most common symbol of the Irish Famine—a vision of the emaciated body that Morash has labelled the ‘stalking spectre’. There are complete narratives that we would associate with both the Holocaust and the Famine but the image of the skeletal body acts as visual somatic shorthand for both. This code of representation was not lost on the hunger strikers either: a former prisoner from Long Kesh/Maze remarked that the situation ‘just reminded [him] of the Jews in the concentration camp because … we were all very thin and frightened’.³¹ We might also think of Steve McQueen’s film Hunger (2008), the final third of which charts Bobby Sands’ (Michael Fassbender) fast to death; when Sands is at his most dangerously emaciated, McQueen elected to dress Sands in blue striped pyjamas—a metonym for the narratives associated with concentration camp victims. This illustrates the ways in which one textual code of representation can be collapsed onto another, using this intertextual referencing to intensify meaning.

McCann’s ‘Hunger Strike’ is haunted by spectral narratives that are alluded to but not explained. Indeed, the opening paragraphs of the text frame the novella as a ghost haunted narrative, with ‘the boy’, Kevin, watching the Lithuanian couple walking their kayak down to the harbour and taking it out to sea (41). Kevin’s presence is unobtrusive to such a degree that the reader is led to believe that it is the couple—and not Kevin—who will be the main focus of the story. The narration lasts in this omniscient manner for two pages before switching subject and focusing on Kevin instead. In opening the story with these two figures, McCann deftly establishes an associative haunting of the text. Firstly, given the scrutinising gaze that the young narrator fixes upon these two ageing bodies, particularly the ‘rakethin’ Rasa, the text sets up a connective association between the hunger strikers that haunt the title and the bodies with which we are presented (41). The focus on the bodies of the elderly couple is later echoed in the focus on the starving body of Kevin’s uncle; Kevin’s thoughts are dominated by ‘what his [uncle’s] body might look like—the chest caved in, his arms thin, his hipbones showing through his pyjamas’ (125). Secondly: why are we denied the narrative of these two elderly figures? In gesturing towards their story but refusing to tell it, McCann positions it as a ghostly parallel to the central narrative—much akin to the absent presence of the hunger striking uncle—and these echoes suggest McCann’s positioning of Kevin within an immediate and historical context of starvation and trauma.

Underpinning the novella with these spectral narratives of starvation is one of the many textual hints that McCann invokes to suggest that the Lithuanian couple, Rasa and Vytis, have fled from the horrors of Nazi occupation. The couple are highly unusual examples of immigrants to Ireland in the 1980s and, in conversation with Kevin, Vytis remarks that the couple have been living outside Lithuania for over thirty years, ‘living in different parts of Europe’ (103). These dates would indicate that the couple left their country in the middle of the twentieth century, making it highly likely that they fled from the terror and instability of war-torn Europe. When Kevin attempts to find out why Vytis left Lithuania, Vytis responds by stating that he ‘do[esn’t] think about these things anymore … [b]ecause it’s easier not to’ (128). In reaction to the furtive looks and gestures that Kevin observes between the couple, he decides ‘that there must be a secret between’ them, the memory of which constantly and painfully infiltrates the present (130); the remnants of a painful past that they avoid discussing with others but one that joins the couple together. When Kevin and Vytis first take the kayak out to sea, Vytis is described as ‘walking towards days that once had been’ (100). After learning about Kevin’s uncle, Vytis remarked that ‘he too had been unhappy as a boy for a reason that no longer mattered, that his joy was now in simple things that needed no memory’ (110). McCann depicts Vytis as haunted by memory; indeed, the vestigial power of memory has a central place within contemporary debates in trauma theory, whether it is the repetitive, compulsive remembering of painful events—or forcibly forgetting them.³²

Rasa, too, is haunted by a painful history and, in response to Kevin’s worries for his uncle, she tells him ‘when you get older … you will learn that pain is not much of a surprise’, again, indicating that they have suffered a great trauma (131). Rasa reacts with such horror to the beginnings of a tattoo on Kevin’s hand, saying ‘something quick and guttural in her language to her husband’, that readers might deduce that she has witnessed the tattooed identification numbers of concentration camp internees (130). It is significant, however, that after this outburst in ‘her language’—with the emphasis on her foreign tongue—that ‘she touched the boy’s hair’ (130). This caring, compassionate act indicates that her own experiences of trauma provide her with enhanced empathy for Kevin. This, to some degree, corresponds with Rothberg’s ‘Multidirectional Memory’ paradigm, although, of course, Rothberg’s focus is on the performance, or remediation, of traumatic memory across transcultural texts, rather than the affective construction of empathy between individuals. However, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), Cathy Caruth argues ‘trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures’.³³ Indeed, Rasa and Vytis become an essential support network for Kevin, reaching out to him in friendship, offering emotional companionship and physical distraction through inviting Kevin to join Vytis on his daily kayaking exertions.

Through the shared experience of kayaking both the couple and Kevin are able to counteract psychologically difficult experiences by turning to the corporeal. The physicality of ‘kayaking kept the thoughts away’ because ‘[i]n the repetition there was quietness’, offering relief from traumas both past and present (126). Through their excursions in the kayak, Kevin and Vytis enjoy a productive experience of synthesis; ‘[t]he boy sensed he had achieved a rhythm with the old man, that there was some invisible axle that joined them, making their arms rotate at the same time, that they were part of the same machinery, and together they were distancing themselves from all other machines’ (127). The valuable and shared space that kayaking opens up is positioned in antithesis to the isolationist trauma of starvation that haunts them both. It is no coincidence that this redemptive activity takes place at sea—away from the problems of land: territory, borders and nation-states. The neutral space of the sea offers the chance to reject these in favour of fluidity in a borderless place: ‘[t]he boy felt dizzy from the vast geography that was contained in the harbour’ (103). McCann, through putting the violence of this trauma into dialogue with the horrors of a different violence, seeks to push past this conception of a world that articulates who has a right to belong and who doesn’t. In forging intercultural connections, he rejects the rhetoric of nationalism, or a politics of racial or ethnic exclusionism. Kevin’s uncle dies towards the end of the novella and Kevin responds by smashing rocks against Vytis’s kayak. Despite this, McCann makes it clear that this couple will remain an essential support network for Kevin—the text ends with them watching him from their house, Rasa’s eyes ‘large and tender’ (143).

These textual allusions to a severe and constantly unsettling trauma, combined with the specifics of their flight from Lithuania in the mid-twentieth century, suggest that Rasa and Vytis have either lived through, or fled from, the Holocaust. However, in refusing to speak for this couple, or tell their story, McCann avoids laying claim to their history and so cannot be accused of appropriating their traumatic narratives. This refusal becomes, then, a moment of strategic silence and, as such, an ethical position. Through allowing the intertextual body of the hunger striker to stand in as a codified metonym for multiple traumas, McCann ‘self-consciously signal[s] his historical and cultural remove from, and his inevitably mediated mode of access to, the reality he represents’.³⁴ The connective, spectral associations that McCann establishes between traumas are devoid of complete narratives; in this way, McCann also self-consciously signals his remove from these histories. This avoidance of directly naming the Holocaust parallels the nineteenth-century avoidance of directly naming the Irish Famine and representing the narrative of it through the image of the spectre.

Finally, McCann’s use of ‘Hunger Strike’ as a title stands as an intertextual wordplay on Franz Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’, providing further examples of literary haunting. Kafka’s story focuses on the skeletal body of a hunger artist, an individual who performs self-starvation for a career; at the end of Kafka’s story, the eponymous hunger artist gives up his fast because it is no longer drawing an audience and, therefore, there is no one to witness his performance. Therefore, this titular intertextuality draws attention to the performative dimension of hunger striking and, as a result, the role of agency. Kafka’s hunger artist starves to earn a living; the Long Kesh/Maze hunger strikers starved to earn the right to political recognition. In each case, survival is at stake and for each figure—as opposed to the victims of the Famine and the Holocaust—their starvation is, to a degree, elective. In the case of the prisoners in Northern Ireland, Emilie Pine contends that the numerous protests of Long Kesh/the Maze, including the hunger strike, were ‘always intended as performances’.³⁵ This conscious decision to court witness is evidence of the control that the strikers had over their fasts and their awareness of the function of culture to translate and codify experience and history into, as Morash put it in relation to the Famine, a ‘limited number of clearly defined images’. The strikers deliberately manipulated the images through which their protest would become transcribed, ensuring that these images tallied with their political aims. With their long hair and beards, the prisoners became Christ-like and, although the strikers always insisted on the secular nature of their protest, it was ‘precisely the “pacifist” and/or “religious” iconography surrounding the 1981 Hunger Strike that gained it wide popular support and sympathy throughout Ireland and the international community’.³⁶ It is through this religious iconography that Kevin gains imaginative access to his uncle: ‘he found his uncle’s face once more and it was hard and worn and looked like it belonged in some catechism’ (56). While taking Communion with his mother, upon hearing the words ‘[t]his is the body of Christ’, Kevin’s mind immediately turns to ‘the hunger strikers who had already died’ and whether they ‘had taken the Last Rites’ (111). Imagined diary entries punctuate McCann’s novella, which trace the decreasing weight of Kevin’s uncle and list the numbers of days that he has been without food; Kevin highlights at the forty-day marker that it is ‘the amount of time Jesus went without food’ (114). In drawing our attention to the Christian iconography that underpinned the strike’s visual manifestation, McCann implies how easily internalised, and how effective, the republican paramilitary organisations were at controlling the external reception of the strike. Finally too, McCann’s invocation of New Testament stories and religious rituals suggests the way in which ‘Hunger Strike’ is, like ‘Cathal’s Lake’ imbued with cultural mythology, illustrating how as children and as readers, we interpret the world through remediated codes of memory and story.

Conclusion

McCann’s remediation of Jewish folklore and cultural memory seeks to unlock shared transcultural spaces of redemption and healing, encouraging readers to echo the affective construction of empathy between cultural groups that is the key preoccupation of McCann’s fiction. Feldman argues that the Jews, persecuted throughout history but most brutally by the Nazi regime, and ‘those bodies violently staged as political texts in Northern Ireland share a uniform genesis: the process by which an entity violently expelled from the social order is transformed into an emissary, a cultural donor and bearer of seminal political messages’.³⁷ Though, as Feldman argues, these bodies have been transformed into political texts, McCann’s use of the affective body as an intertextual sign can be read as a metonym for multiple traumas that, through his emphasis on connectivity, in turn create possibilities of ethical transformation. In this way, McCann’s transcultural aesthetic, and his fashioning of multidirectional memory, performs acts of ethical imagination, galvanising a remedial art that finds in the shared experience of pain a space for connection. Through these intertextual allusions, McCann articulates a hope for a more convivial future, beyond the isolationist experience of trauma.

Notes

• 1. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p.5.

• 2. Rothberg, p.5.

• 3. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2008), p.4.

• 4. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), p.5.

• 5. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p.206.

• 6. Luke Gibbons, ‘The Global Cure? History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger’, in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. by Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp.89–105 (p.104). Emphasis mine.

• 7. I am grateful to the editors of this volume for suggesting this term to me.

• 8. See Erll and Rigney’s edited collection Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012). Erll and Rigney adopt the concept from David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

• 9. ‘Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics’, in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012), p.5.

• 10. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.7.

• 11. Maudet Cécile, ‘Deux entretiens avec Colum McCann’, Transatlantica 1 (2014), 1–26, all quotations p.4.

• 12. Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition and the Nation State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), all quotations p.77.

• 13. See Bryan Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), especially pp.59–86, for a discussion of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Republic of Ireland; see also Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland, ed. by Ronit Lentin and Robbi McVeigh (Belfast: Beyond the Pale, 2002). Although anti-Semitic sentiment is rare in Northern Ireland, in July 2014a synagogue in North Belfast was attacked. See Colin O’Carroll, ‘Outrage as Belfast Synagogue Target of Two Attacks by Thugs’, Belfast Telegraph, 22 July 2014.

• 14. Alison Garden, ‘“Making it Up to Tell the Truth”: An Interview with Colum McCann’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 18.1 (2014), p.13.

• 15. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p.255.

• 16. Colum McCann, ‘Cathal’s Lake’, Fishing the Sloe-Black River (London: Phoenix House, 1994), pp.173–184; p.184. All subsequent quotations in parenthesis.

• 17. Garden, p.13.

• 18. Scholem, p.251.

• 19. Scholem, p.251.

• 20. Rothberg, pp.135–72.

• 21. Rothberg, p.5.

• 22. See Chris Morash ‘Literature, Memory, Atrocity’, in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine, ed. by Chris Morash and Richard Hayes (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996), pp.110–118; Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); and Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997).

• 23. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.16.

• 24. Ellmann, p.14.

• 25. Colum McCann, ‘Hunger Strike’, in Everything in this Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories (London: Phoenix House, 2000), pp.41–143; p.91. All subsequent quotations in parenthesis.

• 26. Morash, p.113.

• 27. Steven Marcus, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp.10–11.

• 28. Morash, p.113.

• 29. Morash, p.114.

• 30. Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.6.

• 31. Begoña Aretxaga, ‘Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence’, in Violence in War and Peace, ed. by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp.244–53; p.247.

• 32. For more on this, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

• 33. Caruth, p.11. Emphasis mine. Despite this assertion by Caruth, her work, and trauma studies more broadly, has come under criticism from various figures in recent years for its Eurocentric bias. See Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), particularly pp.14–19.

• 34. Craps, p.98.

• 35. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p.125.

• 36. Feldman, p.220.

• 37. Feldman, p.8.