Learning to Live: Memory and the Celtic Tiger in Novels by Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, and Tana French

Despite the persistent claims of Ireland’s turbulent past, the recent “Celtic Tiger” period precipitated a shift in cultural focus away from a preoccupation with history and toward anticipation of a future newly imagined as full of possibility. During a time of rapid economic expansion, Nicholas Miller argues, a “history’s once blinding insistence in the present is dimmed by the floodlights of real economic power.” He goes on to say that “optimism about Ireland’s financial independence affirms disconnection from the past as both an instrument and, indeed, a desired outcome of Ireland’s contemporary autonomy.”¹ Memory studies have become increasingly significant to scholars working in the area of Irish Studies; perhaps the clearest expression of this new interest is the four-volume series Memory Ireland, edited by Oona Frawley. The essays in these collections document an increased focus, during the past two decades, on the intersection of cultural history and personal memory—a period that coincides closely with the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.²

If the imperative of competing in a newly kinetic and globalized economy led, as Miller argues, to individuals deliberately turning their backs on the past, it also appears to have contributed to the withering away of institutions that serve as traditional vehicles of collective memory. In 2012, President Michael D. Higgins lamented the diminishment of civil society in the wake of the economic boom:

Public participation is now falling in every institution of civil society. The norms of a shared life have little opportunity of being articulated. That is the inescapable other side of the coin of globalization, which is the unaccountable economy on a world scale.³

Absent the sense of “a shared life,” a society has little ability to come to a collective understanding of its past, and little trust in the various institutions—government, schools, the church, the media—that seek to shape cultural memory. Under these circumstances, fiction may play an especially important role in countering, or at least exposing, the disconnection from the past.

The novel—with its insistent focus on the particular—may seem less conducive to the shaping of a shared historical sense than more public loci of memory such as commemorative marches, memorial statues, or compilations of oral histories. But as Ravit Reichman has argued, when history is traumatic, “the public and private intersect at the site, state, or body of injury,” which she goes on to suggest, “can only be recognized in individual terms.”⁴ The individual, she argues, can disappear into “the terms assigned by collective trauma”—victims, survivors, and so forth—sacrificing the particularity that would make collective memory resonant. Literature, in Reichman’s account, can play a crucial role in restoring this necessary particularity.⁵ Indeed, “the remembering self,” according to Jan Assman, “is the locus in which society is inscribed,” and narrative fiction is a remarkably supple medium in which to represent the processes of individual memory.⁶ Jeanette Rodriguez and Ted Fortier argue that cultural memory is the ground from which quotidian experience becomes meaningful, because it provides a broader frame upon which to re-inscribe and re-interpret the everyday.⁷ A novel therefore becomes meaningful insofar as it depicts the particularity of individual experience in ways that resonate with as well as help to constitute shared cultural memory.

Paula Spencer (2006) is Roddy Doyle’s finest novel. Its aesthetic and critical success derives chiefly from the restraint that Doyle imposes on both his protagonist and himself, stripping bare his style with a discipline honed in the practices of recovery. The novel resurrects the protagonist of Doyle’s earlier novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), making it also an encounter with the author’s own literary history. Paula is an alcoholic and a battered wife; the earlier novel, told in the first person and the past tense, is a vivid engagement with Paula’s memory and idiosyncratic voice as she recounts her life story up to the death of her abusive husband. In contrast, Paula Spencer, which...