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Stuart McLean is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at the University of
Minnesota.

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THE EVENT AND ITS TERRORS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................ix1 Writing After the Event....................................12 This National Disaster.....................................193 An Irish Journey...........................................344 The Most Difficult People in the World.....................505 Wild Hunger................................................706 In the Theater of Death....................................947 Haunted....................................................1128 Hungry Ghosts and Hungry Women.............................1299 The Coming Event (Before and After)........................151Notes........................................................165Bibliography.................................................199Index........................................................219

Chapter One

Modern Historiography and the Uses of Disenchantment

How does one give death its due? This book sets out to engage a perennially human question through the prism of a particular place-Ireland-and a particular time-the period known to posterity as the Great Famine, commencing with the potato failure of 1845. To speak of death is always to speak of the gratuitous, the excessive, at once symbol-laden and unsymbolizable, of that which simultaneously founds and threatens the ordering of the human world. It is to speak also of a certain elusive materiality, flickering at the limits of signification and discursivity, a materiality of the corpse, of nature-in-becoming, of dissolution, flux, transformation, rebirth. My concern here is with the ways in which the publicly enacted signifiers of social memory, including colonial discourses, academic historiography, and latter-day, state-sponsored acts of commemoration, can be seen to implicate the death function, to the extent that the cultural forms through which disaster, mass mortality, and social upheaval are imagined in the Ireland of the 1840s and later are obliged to predicate themselves on a notional past antecedent to symbolization, the "prehistory" from which the present struggles to detach itself, but which continues to underpin the possibility of culture-making and historical agency. The resultant drama of disavowal and return, it will be suggested, is one that has been played out with singular force and urgency under the auspices of colonial and postcolonial modernity, never more so than today, at the turn of the twenty-first century, when that same modernity's own dominant self-images have been increasingly subject to critical scrutiny and questioning.

My point of departure is not the classical punctuality of in medias res, but the more vexed and asymmetric space of hindsight. It is here, arguably, that the famine and its various legacies first appear on the horizon of historical intelligibility. Writing in 1849, the Irish-born surgeon and antiquarian William Wilde, future husband of the poet Jane Elgee ("Speranza") and father of Oscar, looked back on what he termed a "revolution" in the lives of the Irish peasantry. Starvation, sickness, and mass emigration had wiped out many rural communities. The result, he feared, would be an entirely new social order, in which long-established customs and traditions would have no place. Wilde's reflections, which were published as the preface to a volume entitled Irish Popular Superstitions (1852), express concern that a centuries-old, Irish-language-based oral culture, including beliefs relating to fairies, ghosts, holy wells, and miraculous cures, is fast disappearing from postfamine Ireland under the combined influence of depopulation, the establishment since 1831 of an English-language-based National System of Education, and the efforts of a reinvigorated Catholic Church. The result was, in Wilde's estimation, a cultural catastrophe: a landscape once populous with supernatural presences now appeared newly denuded, just as its human inhabitants too had been carried off by death or economic exile.

What was the "great convulsion" to which Wilde referred? The appearance in Ireland, during the summer of 1845, of the fungus Phytophthora infestans (causing a disease known as potato murrain or potato blight), which had previously swept through North America and continental Europe? Its impact on a rural economy that, since the seventeenth century, had become increasingly reliant on the potato both as a subsistence food and, to a lesser extent, a cash crop? The relief measures implemented by Robert Peel's Conservative government and subsequently curtailed under the Liberal administration of Lord John Russell? A million or more dead, many of them buried where they fell in fields and ditches, with a further million having sought refuge in Britain or North America?

As an employee of the commission for the 1851 Census of Ireland (the first to be conducted in the aftermath of the potato blight) and coauthor of the report accompanying the Table of Deaths, Wilde was all too familiar with what were to become the staples of future historiography. Yet his account is notable for registering also a profound sense of cultural loss. In this respect, the most telling aspect of his characterization of Ireland in the wake of the potato failure is his identification of the present as a time of disenchantment. Ireland is seen as emerging into an increasingly secular world, in which the spirits, rituals, and sacred places of popular belief have given way to the more strictly regulated observances of institutionalized religion, in the guise of the Roman Catholic Church and the (Anglican) Church of Ireland.

These misgivings find an echo in the (possibly apocryphal) words of one of Wilde's own informants, "Darby Doolin, an old Connaughtman of our acquaintance." The latter, as quoted in the text, has the following to say about the changes taking place in Ireland:

The good people [fairies] are leaving us fast: nobody ever hears now the tic-tac of the leprechaun.... Sure, the children wouldn't know anything about the pooca [a mischievous spirit often taking the form of a horse].... The warning voice of the banshee [a supernatural death messenger, often associated with native landowning families] is mute, for there are but few of the "rare old stock" [the native aristocracy] to mourn for now; the sheogue [fairy] and the thivish [ghost] are every year becoming scarcer; and even the harmless linane shie [fairy lover] is not talked about nowadays.

The inventory of supernatural beings set forth here takes its cue from the presumed fact of their imminent disappearance. For Darby Doolin, as for Wilde himself, the contemporary world is understood with reference to the perceived encroachment of the present on earlier modes of life, a movement associated in equal measure with the demise of popular supernaturalism and with the concomitant effacement of collective memory. It is not only the "good people" who are fast disappearing, but also the ability to tell stories about them.

Such a view had previously been a staple of romanticism's critique of the emergent industrial order of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. It was, moreover (as George Stocking notes), a commonplace of early Victorian social thought to conceive of the changes accompanying industrialization in terms of a polarity between, on the one hand, "the age of steam," and, on the other, an "old world" of small-scale, tradition-bound local communities, the latter thought of sometimes as spanning the entire period from early human settlement to the onset of the new era. Stocking reminds us that a similar polarizing tendency was inherited by the twentieth-century social sciences. Thus, the origins of European and global modernity have been explicated with reference to a "great transformation," defined in contradistinction to "the world we have lost" and seen as entailing the "disenchantment" of the world (Entzauberung, a term borrowed by Max Weber from the writings of Friedrich Schiller), accomplished through institutionalized Christianity's assault on popular animism and, more specifically, through the Protestant Reformation's break with notions of divine immanence and church-mediated salvation. According to the now-familiar teleology implicit in such accounts, modernity, whether personified by capitalism, industrial technology, or the secular political rationality of the nation state, is understood as originating at a specific moment in Europe and as spreading outward in its effects to encompass the non-European and colonized worlds (including, in this instance, Ireland), which are themselves seen as destined to experience, belatedly and at secondhand, the same series of transformations.

The present study aims to challenge this view. The trope of disenchantment should not be understood here as designating an established social-historical given. Rather, my concern will be with the ways in which such a figure contributes to the discursive perpetuation of the very realities whose passing it purports to mark. As Wilde's account makes clear, to point to the disenchantment of the world necessarily entails the contrapuntal invocation of a nondisenchanted world, a still-spiritualized nature, albeit one constituted under the sign of imminent loss. Such a juxtaposition has become newly significant in the context of an early twenty-first century present that appears to contradict many of the canonical definitions of modernity proposed by the social sciences. Thus, in place of the often-predicted secularization of politics and the relegation of religion to the private sphere, the contemporary world has witnessed a proliferation of highly public and in many instances overtly politicized manifestations of religiosity, many of them directly associated with new media and representational technologies. Anthropological studies of the present point to the contemporary persistence of phenomena such as witchcraft, once labeled as "traditional" and moribund. The concept of modernity itself is questioned or pluralized to accommodate the seeming variety of its local manifestations. Ideologies of modernization are interrogated on the basis of their links to colonial power and its historical legacies. Meanwhile, scientific theories of chaos and complexity have disclosed a natural world, which, far from being a passive object of knowledge, quietly subservient to instrumental reason and the invariant laws of classical mechanics, appears instead irreducibly marked by the play of chance and indeterminacy and therefore irreducible, finally, to the operations of human knowledge production. These developments I take to be indicative less of a break with the past (of the kind that modernity itself was once thought to represent) than of the fact that the world has never corresponded to the official self-descriptions promulgated by theories of modernization. The opportunity that presents itself today is not, therefore, that of embarking on a new, "postmodern" epoch, but rather of thinking the history of modernity otherwise. The figure of disenchantment provides a suggestive starting point for such a task insofar as it holds together the secular and the supernatural in a relation of contrast and opposition that is also, necessarily, one of interdependence. It is to the implications of that interdependence for the writing of history in the modern period that I now turn.

Wilde's forebodings have been echoed and corroborated by many commentators in the twentieth century. The Belfast-based geographer and folklorist E. Estyn Evans, writing in 1954, described the famine years as a "watershed," marking the end of "prehistoric times in Ireland," a point he proceeded to back up with a list of vanished cultural forms, from traditions relating to fairies, ghosts, and holy wells to the practice of early marriage. More recently, Angela Bourke of the Department of Modern Irish, University College, Dublin, has characterized the 1840s as a moment of "cultural loss," marking the disappearance not only of specific practices and idioms, but of an entire corpus of orally transmitted knowledge and belief, actualized through the lived relationship between people and landscape. It is striking that Wilde and his successors should situate their accounts not in the midst of catastrophe, but in its aftermath. Indeed, it appears to be a precondition for such an interpretation of the changes occurring in Ireland that the event alluded to should already have taken place. If the numinous geography evoked in the guise of popular belief offers a vision of the natural world as suffused both with a variety of nonhuman agencies and with numerous reminders of a premodern and pre-Christian past, the imputed passing of such a condition has, arguably, been a prerequisite for the construal of the 1840s in Ireland as an episode with a specifiable historical, sociological, and human significance, to which a variety of names have been retrospectively appended: the Great Famine, the Great Starvation, An Droch-Shaoghal (the Bad Times), An Gorta Mr (the Great Hunger). It is precisely the marking of such a boundary between past and present that makes it possible both to proclaim the advent of a new, "modern" historical dispensation and to construct the premodern past as an object of historical knowledge. In thus positioning itself in the wake of an epochal social transformation, Wilde's account can be seen to prepare the way for a range of contemporary and later interpretations. For Assistant Chief Secretary to the Treasury Charles Edward Trevelyan, the civil servant in principal charge of the administration of relief under Russell's government, writing in 1848, the demographic disaster of the famine was an inevitable consequence of Ireland's presumed economic backwardness and overpopulation, resulting in a fatal imbalance of people and resources. For the Irish nationalist John Mitchel, writing from American exile in 1861 (following his involvement with the revolutionary Young Ireland movement of the 1840s), the famine was to be viewed rather as an artificially created event, brought about not by an absolute shortage of food, but rather by the inadequate responses of successive British governments: "the Almighty sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine." The famine thus becomes explicable, on the one hand, as a parable of forced economic modernization, or, on the other, as an episode in the larger story of Ireland's mistreatment at the hands of its then-powerful neighbor and (for Mitchel in particular) as a crucible of future resistance to foreign rule.

Subsequent famine historiography has sought, variously, to negotiate between these competing views. The first book-length study to emerge from the decades following Ireland's independence was the anthology The Great Famine, edited by Robert Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams of the Department of History, University College, Dublin. Conceived, initially, to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the potato blight's first appearance, it was published, after a series of delays, in 1956. The volume brought together contributions from a number of scholars, many of them trained at English universities, to offer an overview of the famine in its various aspects-administration of relief, emigration, medical history, agriculture, folklore. What would later be termed its "revisionism," consisting in a deliberate eschewal of explicitly partisan stance of nineteenth-century nationalist histories like Mitchel's, has found support among a number of more recent historians who have sought to reassess the famine's significance as a social-historical watershed, along with the extent of English governmental culpability. At the same time, its "value-free" approach has met with harsh criticism for its alleged sanitizing the Irish past and its unwillingness to acknowledge the continuing effects of conquest and colonization. More recently, the famine's hundred and fiftieth anniversary (1995-1997) provided the occasion for a wave of new scholarly publications, many of them stressing once again the insufficiency of government relief measures, along with the famine's enduring economic, social, and cultural impact on Irish life. These were accompanied by a series of commemorative events, including a lecture series cosponsored by Radio Telefs ireann (the Irish national broadcasting network), conference proceedings, and the opening in 1994 of a Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE EVENT AND ITS TERRORSby Stuart McLean Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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