Out of History: from The Steward of Christendom to Annie Dunne

Nicholas Grene

For the reader who comes to Annie Dunne (2002) already familiar with The Steward of Christendom (1995), the relationship between the two texts is something of a puzzle. The novel cannot be accounted a sequel to the play, even though it allows us to catch up on the later lives of Annie Dunne and Matthew Kirwin, both of whom figure in The Steward. Annie Dunne does not require knowledge of the earlier text; indeed it re-cycles key materials from the play. Annie tells to her young great-nephew at length and in detail the story of the sheep-killing sheepdog (AD, p.16-8) that is the dramatic concluding monologue of The Steward (SC, p.64-6).⁶⁹ The incident of the boy Thomas Dunne finding his Christmas present prematurely and the angry confrontation with his mother that follows (SC, p.47) is re-deployed but to very different purpose in the climactic concluding chapters of Annie Dunne. Annie in the novel broods repeatedly on the circumstances of her father’s life, his career as an officer in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, his sad end in Baltinglass County home – the very stuff of which The Steward is made. Landscape, local references, glancing allusions, all cross over from one text to the other. The strange Siamese twinning of play and novel seems to involve a re-imagination of the same Dunne family situation from a different time and vantage-point. In this, however, the style and form of the novel, and the all but explicitly autobiographical presence of the author as the unnamed four-year-old ‘boy’, introduce a new dimension. The two works, taken together, encourage us to re-think the nature of Barry’s enterprise in writing The Steward, and his ‘family’ plays and fictions more generally.

Roy Foster voices a widespread view of Barry’s plays in his Introduction to Our Lady of Sligo: ‘Barry writes history plays in a special sense… His project is one of recovery – stitching back into the torn fabric of Irish history the anomalous figures from an extended Irish family’.⁷⁰ Scott T. Cummings speaks of Barry appending his characters’ stories to the received historical record as an imaginative and subtly revisionist addendum.’⁷¹ The figures around whom he builds his plays are members of his own family but not, for the most part, members of the family about whom there are public records. He has sought out the black sheep and dark horses of his family’s legends rather than any one whose life can be charted through definite dates, facts and documentary knowledge. These ancestors had been forgotten but also in some measure suppressed from family memory. To recall them, or rather to re-imagine them, was also to re-imagine the larger history of the nation and the parts of that narrative that have tended to be forgotten or suppressed.

The Irish of the diaspora, proud of their origins, aware of the colonial circumstances that had forced them to emigrate, would probably prefer not to think that they, like Trooper O’Hara in White Woman Street, (Barry’s great-grand-uncle on his mother’s side) had taken part in another colonial project, the mass-slaughter of Native Americans on their own continent. ‘Soldiers are we,’ we sing in our national anthem, ‘whose lives are pledged to Ireland. Some have come from a land beyond the wave.’ We think perhaps of Eamon de Valera, born in New York, when we intone the phrase about those coming from ‘a land beyond the wave’. We do not normally think of an extreme English Protestant community living on an island off the coast of Cork, like the one Fanny Hawke leaves in Prayers of Sherkin to marry Barry’s great-grandfather; yet these too are a part of the history of Ireland and what it is to be Irish. Are we all soldiers with lives pledged to Ireland? Some of us in the past, certainly, were soldiers in the British Army, like Jack O’Hara in Our Lady of Sligo, Barry’s maternal grandfather, who served in World War II in the Royal Engineers, or his great-uncle, imagined in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty as a Sergeant-Major at Dunkirk. Barry, in retrieving these lost souls of his own family, is also writing back into the story of Ireland those parts of it which our nationalist master-narrative has most signally left out, the pieces of our past that do not fit with the way we want to imagine our history.

Most in need of rehabilitation was Barry’s great-grandfather, Chief Superintendent Dunne of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the man who led the baton-charge on Jim Larkin’s locked-out workers in 1913 when four men were killed. This, as Barry admitted in his introductory essay to the play ‘Following the Steward’, was someone he himself initially wanted to keep dark: ‘I was in fear of it being discovered that I had such a relative, hiding you might say in my very blood. I was eager to conceal him, indeed to keep him concealed, to seal him in, where he lay unnamed and unmentioned in official history’ (SC, p.vii). Connected as he was with public events, Dunne’s situation made The Steward a more explicitly historical play than Barry’s others. Audiences, and subsequently readers, were encouraged to view it in this light by the programme materials published with the play’s first edition: the famous image of the defiant Larkin, arms aloft, addressing the crowd from the balcony of the Imperial Hotel in 1913; a photograph of Victoria’s royal visit to Ireland in 1900; notes on Michael Collins and Robert Emmet. In his erratic memories, Dunne recalls the key events of the period, the 1913 Lockout, the Easter Rising – “that rebellion at Easter time, that they make so much of now” (SC, p11) – the handover of Dublin Castle to Collins in 1922, and the Civil War that followed. In her acute analysis, Claire Gleitman pairs The Steward with Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme as comparable reconstructions of history.⁷² Barry’s achievement in the play was to restore to our sense of Irish history the empathetic imagination of that most erased of figures, the Catholic loyalist.

Annie Dunne is set in a very specific time, the summer of 1959, but with almost no sense of the historical implications of that time. Again and again, Annie remembers back to her father’s glory days in the DMP, ‘as chief superintendent, the highest rank a Catholic could hold’ (AD, p.181). She thinks back further again to the reign of White Meg, last steward of Humewood, the stern father to Thomas Dunne in The Steward, grown in folkloric memory into impossible majesty: ‘Oh, never a word did he speak as he came up the village road, so people say, like it was a song, nor looked right nor left, nor greeted nor offended anybody, but fetched himself in the gates of the estate as if a sort of solitary God.’ (AD, p.97). But these past dignities are only there to enforce the sense for Annie of how time “has knocked us off our perches” (AD, p.98). She is conscious of the loss of class status in Kiltegan consequent on the change of regime, but conscious of it along with other more personal griefs and injuries: her bowed back due to childhood polio, the resultant mockery of the other schoolgirls in her Leeson St convent, her unmarried, unwanted status that leaves her dependent on the charity of relations, grateful for the haven of her cousin’s small farm in Kelsha. In Annie Dunne Barry leaves behind the macro-narrative of Irish history, to which the drama of The Steward was connected, for the micro-narratives of lives that fall outside the scope of history altogether.

1959 was the year when Eamon de Valera’s long reign as Taoiseach came to an end; 1958 was the year of T.K. Whitaker’s landmark report that laid the groundwork for the government’s Programme for Economic Expansion. None of this is reflected in Annie Dunne. The book is set in a basic rural present outside the periodisation of history. Annie and Sarah live according to the rhythms of the day, rising at first light to start the chores of house and farm, of the week that brings round washing day, of the seasons, as spring leads on to high summer. Annie Dunne is dated so specifically in 1959 not because any given public event took place in that year, or because Barry wants to convey the atmosphere of Ireland in the 1950s, a decade that continues to preoccupy, even obsess, so many Irish writers. The year of the action is chosen because that was the summer Sebastian Barry and his sister Siobhan, like the novel’s unnamed ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, spent in the care of the real-life Annie Dunne and Sarah Cullen.⁷³

In terms of the date of composition The Steward came before Annie Dunne and it is concerned with the experiences of an older generation, so it is natural to think of the novel as following on from the play. But the materials of Annie Dunne in fact provided the imaginative starting-point for the earlier work. ‘All the country stuff in the play was my own country stuff you might say from childhood, when I was four or so and staying with Annie and Sara.⁷⁴ I gave it to Thomas as the only gift I had for him.’ (SC, p.ix). In Annie Dunne Barry is working with the original sources back-projected into historical time in The Steward. We can see that in the way in which incidents from the play are used more integrally in the substance of the novel. In Act II of The Steward, there is a scene dramatising the paranoid delusions of Dunne in his last years of country retirement and Annie’s efforts to dispel them:

Thomas: … what about that filthy mass of men that came up the yard last week and rattled our latch, and shouted in at me, while you were at the well?

Annie: It was only a crowd of tinkers, Papa, that thought you were a woman alone, and wanted to frighten you. (SC, p.62)

In the novel this is dramatised as the climactic event of Chapter Six, the terrifying onslaught of the tinkers, Sarah, and then Annie with her, trying desperately to hold down the latch being rattled from outside by the unseen assailants, the small children behind them, ‘two old women and two scraplings’ (AD, p.69). This is based closely on an actual event, as Barry remembers it, as though in a perpetually stopped present. In the book, though, it functions to enforce the sense of the special vulnerability of the ageing, unmarried women living alone. The latch just barely held down by the women against the tinkers is a telling image of potential male violation.

‘There was an old woman that lived in the wood, willa, willa, wallya,’ sings Thomas near the opening of The Steward (SC, p.6). It is apparently just one of the random shards of memory that make up the mosaic of his ramblings, like the snatches of song in the mad scenes of King Lear. But it too had an identifiable origin the significance of which emerges in Annie Dunne. The ballad about the old woman who kills the baby was a special song of the real-life Annie, and sufficiently close to the imaginative matrix of the novel that ‘Weile, weile, wáile’ was one of Barry’s initial, preferred titles for the book. He remembers hearing it with the literalism of the four-year-old as though it were an actual series of events, sung as it was with a whole series of verses detailing the trial and execution of the murderous old woman. In the novel it is trailed first in the voice of Jack Furlong, the strange, solitary rabbit man:

His little song drifts down over the spent heathers,

There was an ould woman and she lived in the woods,

Weile, weile, wáile,

There was an ould woman and she lived in the woods,

Down by the river Sáile. (AD, p.58)

We are thus prepared for the climax of Annie’s violent anger against the boy over the ruined birthday present, culminating in a verse from the song cited without introduction or comment in a section all to itself:

She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart,

Weile, weile, wáile,

She stuck the penknife in the baby’s heart,

Down by the river Sáile. (AD, p.177)

The toy fire engine that appears in both texts – in Annie Dunne it is a ‘fierce green,’ red in The Steward – was in fact a birthday present purchased by Annie as in the novel, not the Christmas gift it becomes in the play. The details in both, however, are as Barry remembers them: the toy hidden away, discovered by the child before the day itself, wrecked by skating up and down on it, provoking the fierce anger of the great-aunt/mother who buries it in the dungheap. In this case, however, the text of the play is truer to the actual revenge taken by the young Barry: ‘I sought out her favourite laying hen and put a yard-bucket over it, and it wasn’t found for a week, by which time the Christmas was over and the poor hen’s wits had gone astray from hunger and darkness and inertia.’ (SC, p.47). In the novel the boy is exculpated from this crime; it is Billy Kerr who imprisons the hen in the bucket, the falsely accused boy runs away and his ultimate reunion with Annie brings about the reconciliation that is the book’s concluding note. A similar emotional resolution is achieved at the close of The Steward, with the unexpected forgiveness by his father of the child Thomas who has hidden away with the sheepdog under sentence of death. ‘And I would call that the mercy of fathers, when the love that lies in them deeply like the glittering face of a well is betrayed by an emergency, and the child sees at last that he is loved, loved and needed and not to be lived without, and greatly.’ (SC, p.66). The tale of the dog had no identifiable source, was written for The Steward, and reappears in Annie Dunne as a secondary re-telling.⁷⁵ But in both texts the fierce intimate emotions of childhood are primary: love, hatred, fear, humiliation, the terrors of separation and the release of reunion.

Barry resisted telling the story of Annie Dunne, the memories of his own childhood, from the viewpoint of the child. He had used this narrative perspective in his first short story ‘The Beast’ drawing on the Kelsha experience, in which virtually all the materials of the later book are present: the visit to the Dunnes of Feddin – in the story referred to as the sisters of ‘Aunt Anne’ – the purse dropped in the mud, the runaway pony, the feared workman who wants to marry Sarah, the attack by the travellers, the misused fire-engine buried in the dungheap, the boy’s revenge.⁷⁶ But for the novel he felt that this conventional child’s eye view would be too limiting. In Annie Dunne we are never given access to the boy’s thoughts and feelings; he is unnamed, rather as the boy Michael in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa is invisible on stage.⁷⁷ However, Friel takes over a standard convention of autobiographical fiction by refracting the child’s remembered life through the voice of the adult narrator. The mature Michael stands in relation to his seven-year-old alter ego, present but unseen, as the grown-up Pip or David Copperfield do to the suffering younger selves they recollect. This too was a road not taken by Barry. Instead we get the occasional glimpse of the boy in Annie Dunne as a portrait of the artist as a young child. Annie watches him watching her pluck a hen she has just killed, and he reminds her of his grandfather:

The little boy hangs a side of his rump on the chopping block, with its thousand stripes of the axe, and never offers a word, his face unchanging, like, it occurs to me, Matt when he is painting. I have watched Matt working the odd time secretly, noting how he does not move his face except to lick his lips, his left foot forward of his right as he stands at his easel in a summer meadow as may be, capturing some instance of beauty he has found in our Wicklow. (AD, p.111-12)

There is a complex process of representation going on here: the writer re-creating in imagined fictional form a sense of his own childhood being, as observed by his much loved great-aunt.

At one early stage in the composition of The Steward, Barry experimented with using Annie as a surviving narrator recollecting the past life of her father, like Pyper in Observe the Sons of Ulster, but he soon abandoned the attempt. It may be that there was a similar problem to that which prevented Barry writing The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty as a play:

Eneas McNulty has a sort of silence and confusion at the heart of him. As I usually write plays in long speeches, this was awkward, because Eneas did not want to speak in that way. The interior world of the novel, the descriptive and psychological world, was more suitable for the painting, you might say, of Eneas McNulty.⁷⁸

Annie Dunne is not as silent a figure as Eneas McNulty, but certainly the endlessly active, irritable and obsessive character of Annie rendered in The Steward would not have been convincingly capable of the richly reflective periods given to the elderly, semi-senile Thomas. Annie needed the expansive, interiorised mode of the novel to be allowed full expression.

In both fiction and drama, a highly wrought poetic prose has been the hallmark of Sebastian Barry’s writing. He takes the licence of earlier Irish dramatists to give to his dramatic characters an eloquence and articulacy beyond the ordinary. However, in his best plays, as Ger Fitzgibbon argues, “the language itself carries the stamp of the truly accomplished dramatist: the rhythm, syntax, sound and texture of his writing resonates with the particularity of a specific character in a specific moment; it demands, provokes and rewards performance.”⁷⁹ By contrast with this the discursiveness of fiction allows a principle of compensation for speech deficit. The inner world of an Annie Dunne is rendered with a rich specificity she could never manage to voice herself. ‘Perhaps,’ she senses about the ‘girl’, ‘she does not have words for what she wants to say.’ (AD, p.13). The same could be said of Annie herself; the words are the imaginative gift to her of the writer.

Conventionally the post-Romantic author recalls the sights and sounds and textures of childhood as the vivid stuff of memory, the Wordsworthian first things of the world. Barry shifts this perspective in Annie Dunne, reconstituting what is for him memory as the immediate sensations of his great-aunt. There is a double recuperation involved here; he restores his own lost sense of things – he is only four at the time of the novel’s action in 1959, ‘too young to know his writing,’ yet already with the aspiration to write ‘every day’ (AD, p.3). The four-year-old could not plausibly remember with the novel’s fullness of detail the cottage of his relatives in Kelsha. Barry therefore imaginatively delegates those memories to Annie. But for her too this represents a restoration of a luminous and comprehensive grasp of things she can never have had. The point of view hovers between the child and the protective old woman, both endowed with the vocabulary of the mature writer.

The style of Annie Dunne is fully literary; Barry does not attempt to restrict himself to a vocabulary or manner credibly mimicking that of an ageing Irish country woman of limited education, even if her better-read father is occasionally credited as the source of a literary allusion – ‘this side idolatry, as Ben Jonson says of William Shakespeare, according to my father.’ (AD, p.131). The subject of the book brings the novel at times close to Synge, the Synge of the Wicklow essays who depicted the oppression of the hills, the fears and horrors of madness and the workhouse. ‘The county home is a fearful place. That is where the homeless and the country destitute go, the withered girls and the old bachelors finally maddened by the rain … The Wicklow rain has madness in it like an illness, an ague.’ (AD, p.26). There is a muted Lawrentianism in the treatment of sexuality, the uncontrollable force of the pony Billy only mastered by his namesake the intrusive Billy Kerr; the rhythms of natural life, its seasonal changes, are rendered with Lawrence’s sort of hyper-reality. In terms of literary precursors, the writing in the book is perhaps closest to Virginia Woolf. In a famous formulation, Woolf stated the principles of modern fiction such as hers:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of atoms.⁸⁰

Barry’s objective like Woolf’s is to catch the effect of this ‘shower of atoms’ in a pointillist, lyric style expressive of the very texture of experience and sensation. The similarity is the more startling because in Annie Dunne we are far from the middle-class, aesthetic sensibilities of Bloomsbury. Yet the hard labouring and inarticulate Annie Dunne is to be denied nothing accorded to the consciousness of a Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay.

At times the metaphors and similes used by Annie are ones that might well suggest themselves to a country person; but they are turned with a literary leap of the imagination, not according to the norms of orality where even the most vivid phrases tend to be traditional, inherited, employed generically. So, for example, there is the description of the children’s shyness and embarrassment on arrival: ‘For a moment they are stuck, like beasts in the gap between two fields.’ (AD, p.4). The idea of social paralysis, yoked to the image of cattle floundering in the churned-up mud of a gateway, has the new-minted originality of writing, not the familiar piquancy of speech. The happiness of Annie and Sarah at having the children with them is characterised with a homely domestic image: ‘A glee suffuses us, like beaten egg whites folded into sugar.’ (AD 7). The word ‘suffuses’ stands out from its linguistic company. Barry enacts the feelings of Annie Dunne in language that is often obviously not her language:

Towards the end of the day these times I go slower and slower, like a bad clock. My movements lessen and I reach across gaps with parsimonious expense of energy. Even my words stretch longer. I feel a sudden fear that we are too old to guard these little ones. A hundred tasks and now, two creatures as vigorous as steam engines. (AD, p.5)

This renders effectively the waning strength of the hard-pressed elderly woman faced by the new burden of looking after the young children with their irrepressible vitality. But the words do indeed stretch longer, beyond the scale of any an Annie Dunne might credibly have in her active vocabulary: ‘My movements lessen and I reach across gaps with parsimonious expense of energy.’ The sentence is crafted with an undisguised writerly control of syntax and a writer’s fullness of phrasing.

Annie Dunne needs fullness of expression to compensate for a fullness of being that life has denied her. In Steward Barry concentrated on Thomas Dunne, a figure written out of Irish history. But someone like Annie Dunne was never in public history to be written out. She has gone from looking after her father to looking after her brother-in-law Matt and his children, a marginal, supporting character throughout. With the death of her sister Maud and Matt’s second marriage, she is left dependent on the charity of relatives, and after the humiliation of one rejection, is deeply grateful to her cousin Sarah Cullen for taking her in. Always there is the fact of her childhood polio that has left her back bent, depriving her of the possibility of a husband and family of her own. It is this thwarted story that makes her so hungry for the caring, maternal role she finds unexpectedly in looking after her nephew’s children for the summer. It is this same story that creates her paranoid fear of Billy Kerr and the possibility of his marrying Sarah, taking from her once again the fragile security she has found in the cottage in Kelsha and her loving relationship with her cousin.

Annie is given an inner expressiveness in the novel that makes painfully clear her inability to speak those emotions she feels. We see her, for instance, in the sweetshop of Mrs Nicodemus, convinced that the shopkeeper dislikes her, swayed by her own conflicting feelings, unable to voice any of them in the most commonplace of words, and driven back into a passion of self-execration:

Of course this is why she dislikes me. I have no grace, no truth, no womanly understanding. I am not a mother. I am a humpbacked woman that might make a humpbacked child. I am not like her, or any other human person. Moreover, I do not really feel sympathy for her, I feel it for myself. I am a charlatan, and in my emotions maybe almost a cretin. It is a terrible thing, to be there in the shop like a cretin. Will the Lord not save me? (AD, p.104)

Behind this there are echoes of another hunchback, Richard of Gloucester:

I had no father, I am like no father;

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me: I am myself alone.⁸¹

But where Shakespeare makes of Richard a loveless monster, autistically incapable of fellow-feeling, Annie Dunne constantly belies her own self-description as a cretin of the emotions because we have access to those emotions she cannot speak.

Barry charts in Annie Dunne the microclimates of the inner life. By contrast with The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, the picaresque novel that immediately preceded it, Annie Dunne is minimalist in scope and action: one summer of one woman’s life in which nothing very significant seems to have happened. In the book’s own scale of significance, however, Annie lives in an alternating systole/diastole state of peace and agitation, contentment and disturbance, joy and suffering. So, for example, in Chapter Six, it is into a scene of perfect repose within the farmhouse that the sound of the approaching tinkers comes:

It is a simple moment, all labour done, the natural anxieties of being alive all stilled and soothed. The turf fire mutters in the murky hearth. The clock seems less anxious to seek the future, its tick more content, slower. All is in the balance of a kind, the weight and the butter in the scales in sufficient harmony. Then we begin to hear them. (AD, p.67)

At the end of Chapter Fourteen, after the visit to Matt in the hospital that had been the Baltinglass County Home, the resolution of Annie’s feelings about Matt and the exorcism of the ghost of her father brings a sense of blessedness that is the exact opposite of the alienation experienced in Mrs Nicodemus’s shop:

I am buoyant, almost, I am thinking, graceful, or at least, full of a kind of grace, bestowed upon me. High clouds rage in the upper sky, they rage with sunlight pouring down through them in yellow torrents. There may be a change in the weather coming. I know what I look like to the passing cars, an old countrywoman without trap or newfangled vehicle to her name, but I do not care. I know my worth. (AD, p.196)

Such an assurance of grace, however, cannot be sustained and the next chapter brings Annie’s most anguished ordeal with the disappearance of the boy.

The fact of love between Annie and the children is the central donné of the book; the novel is written, as it were, as a tribute of love by its author to the great-aunt who nurtured him. But that feeling itself is not unproblematic. A moment of closeness to the boy provokes in Annie a reflection of its uncommonness: ‘I stroke the black hair of his head, thinking of all past times, and present times, the river of time upon which we are merely carried, small boys and girls, loves expressed but rarely, loves confounded in the main.’ (AD, p.120). This is borne out not only by the set-piece scenes of anger and antagonism between child and woman, the incident where he deliberately drops her purse into the drain, her revenge upon him for the destruction of his birthday present. Love has to reach out over a basic gap of mutual incomprehension. The novel itself may be a retrospective effort of the imagination to understand the elderly relative whom a four-year-old can only have dimly apprehended as a separate person. What it dramatises is the reverse process, the efforts of Annie Dunne to grasp the mysterious being of the children. And in this nothing is more shocking than her glimpse of their sex-play and the suggestion it raises of incest and child abuse, little as Annie may know of such things. Suddenly she, supposedly the adult protector of the young, is more innocent than they, at a complete loss as to what to do. She can only pray:

What sloughs of despond, what pits of darkness have they seen? God enfold them, embrace them, retrieve them, perfect them, restore them. I cannot. All I have is the made-up love of a woman with a hump on her back like half the moon. (AD, p.93)

That love, we are made to feel, does much for the children in the novel, but she can only guess at what it does.

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.⁸²

For Barry, as for Wordsworth, the experience of the child is primary, formative, fundamental. Barry, though, raises the possibility that the world of the child may be a dark place of knowledge as well as of wholesome beauty and fear. Annie senses in the boy at one point a ‘stain of desperation’:

It makes me wonder about him, if he hasn’t something unusual within, some quaint understanding beyond his years, or despite them. He is what they used to call sean-aimseartha, an old-fashioned child. (AD, p.119)

It is as though encoded into the being of the young boy is not only all that he will be – ‘the child is father to the man’ – but also all the lives that have gone before. Barry has said that his experiences of Kelsha ‘seeped into me as a child, and showed themselves in all their aspects to me in what would amount now to visions, the ancient cinema of childhood.’⁸³ Equally, however, it is as if, like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, the stories of all his family have ‘leaked into’ him as well. The memory of the child is not just his personal memory; it is the inheritance of sorrow and loss, pain and destruction that comes down to him from all the others who have gone before. The imagination of the writer goes out to the otherness of those others, but it is an otherness that he intuits within himself. In that sense, Annie Dunne is the geno-text for the family plays and fiction that preceded it.

One sentence is close to the thematic heart of the novel, as Annie reflects, sleepless and silent, outdoors in the dark night: ‘Under the starlight I stand, ruminating, like a creature myself, an extra thing in the plenitude of the world. I know I am nothing.’ (AD, p.43) To conjure up the life of an Annie Dunne is to give her back a share in that ‘plenitude of the world’, a share she may never have had in life. This, as much as the rehabilitation of figures from history, seems the underlying project of Barry’s work as it appears in Annie Dunne. Imagining the lost lives of the past, lives that led down to his own, leaked into him, is a kind of benediction or making whole. The lost lives are irrecoverably lost, not just because they are dead, forgotten, not known. They probably had no words to render what they were even when they lived. And their lives were things of pain, of deprivation and deformation anyway, of the ordinary cruelties of lovelessness, hatred and oppression, manifest in them as the mere detritus of history. Making them over in play or novel is conceived as a kind of grace for lost souls. ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’: there may be nothing much to forgive in the life of Annie Dunne, as there certainly is with other characters of Barry. Still, the effort to understand her wholly is felt as both a memorial and an absolution. Annie Dunne gives us visions from Barry’s own ‘ancient cinema of childhood’; at the same time it fulfils that aspiration expressed by Jack at the end of Our Lady of Sligo that ‘our children’s children might look at our photographs and have some pride in us simply as people that had lived a life on this earth and were to be honoured at least for that.’⁸⁴

Extract From: Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry, edited by Christina Hunt Mahony (2006)

Cross Reference: Previous Essay

See Also: Note Emphasis on history and memory in Irish Theatre.