Remembering and Forgetting: William Trevor's Ethics of Memory

In the late 1960s, after he had spent much of his adult life in England writing fiction that was set there and populated with English characters, William Trevor turned his best creative attention to Ireland, the site of his own past. By that time, Northern Ireland's late twentieth-century Troubles were rekindling the flames of Ireland's early twentieth-century revolutionary zeal. In a 1989 interview, Trevor explained his sense of time as a force that "both heals and destroys, depending on the nature of the wound."¹ His attentiveness to the Janus-like nature of memory is especially clear in his Irish fiction, which, as Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt notes, can be read as "a sustained lesson on the dual dangers of repeating or forgetting the past."² Given his concern with the past, it is no surprise that Trevor should attract critical attention for the roles history plays in his Irish fiction.³ Time and again, his work dramatizes the pull of obligations to remember the past against temptations to let it go—a dilemma that brings to mind Edna Longley's often-quoted suggestion during the twenty-sixth anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Derry, "We should build a monument to Amnesia and forget where we put it."⁴

A concern with memory and history is virtually ubiquitous in Irish literary culture, of course, and there is a long list of fine post-Independence writers who have powerfully rendered the turmoil of the Troubles.⁵ What makes Trevor's fiction an especially interesting site for considering how Irish memory works, however, is the frequency with which he returns to this theme by depicting characters who have lived through both the Anglo-Irish War and the late twentieth-century Troubles, who therefore have personal memories of both. Attention simply to the veracity of Trevor's historical settings, then, will not do justice to his abiding concerns.

Recent discourses on the nature of memory can help us better understand how Trevor's fiction has grappled with remembering and forgetting. In particular, the ongoing philosophical examination of the ethics of memory promises a sharper understanding of Trevor's concern with the past.⁶ Trevor's depictions of the burden of the past are centered on a serious ethical problem: how to square the imperative to remember with the need to move forward. When Paul Ricoeur suggests that "forgiveness gives memory a future," he certainly does not mean that forgetting is a precondition of forgiving, but rather, that forgiveness sends us forward with the past in mind.⁷

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To remember the injuries suffered by others is to affirm their dignity and rescue the facts of their ill-treatment from the crevices of history into which those facts might otherwise fall. In The Politics of Irish Memory (2011), Emilie Pine considers just this matter in a brief commentary on Riceour. "By remembering the victims, as well as the victors, of history," she says, "memory becomes future-oriented, as it aims for justice for the victims, and further, as it regulates against the repetition of victimisation."⁸ "Beyond the Pale" and "Autumn Sunshine," both set near the onset of the Troubles, dramatize ethically charged impulses to remember past injuries. Although neither story carries the remembrance of injuries into a state of reconciliation, both show us why remembering past injuries might be worth the effort.

In "Beyond the Pale" the crucial injury is suffered by a young man and woman who grew up near Glencorn Lodge, a seaside resort in County Antrim, owned by English immigrants and populated by English tourists; Fitzgerald-Hoyt describes the lodge as "a colony in miniature," and "a microcosm of Irish history."⁹ What is at stake in the story is a conflict between the colonizers' impulse to forget past injuries, on one hand, and a subversive, disruptive appreciation for those who were injured in the aftermath of colonial incursion. The young Irish couple's injuries, which the English owners and guests of Glencorn Lodge would prefer to forget, originate in a back story. After their lives had been twisted by...