"The Scale of Horror Has no Shape": Representing War in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme debuted in 1985 to widespread acclaim. From one perspective, its positive reception is not surprising—Observe the Sons of Ulster is a beautifully written and technically innovative piece of theater. Nevertheless, the production was a remarkable risk, and its success something of a marvel. A depiction of Ulster nationalists written by an Irish republican could easily have met with a harsh reception in the polarized political atmosphere of 1980s Ireland. Republicans might have taken offense at the production's sympathetic depiction of Unionists, and Unionists themselves might have sensed, and resented, the skepticism regarding their ideology and traditions that comes across in the play. But in most cases, the reverse proved true. In spite of its perilous political context, the play was lauded by northern and southern audiences alike; as Declan Kiberd notes, "The drama was an immense success not only in Dublin but also in Belfast."¹

Much has been written on Observe the Sons of Ulster's remarkable reception and its ambiguous political positions. Scholars have differed widely over exactly how much criticism of Unionism the play, in fact, delivers.² And yet, such inquiries seem bent on determining how audiences should have responded, rather than on understanding why they responded as they did. Considering the literary context in which Observe the Sons of Ulster appeared provides a fresh perspective on the play's reception. McGuinness's best-known play is a peculiar piece of writing—war literature composed after decades of scholarship on the Great War, in a period when scholars intensely scrutinized literary depictions of violence. McGuinness's problem was not only to present political opponents in a compelling way, but also to represent and commemorate war appropriately.

Two critical debates that emerged in the 1970s provide helpful contexts for assessing the popular and critical responses to Observe the Sons of Ulster. One was the rejection of any attempt to understand World War I through a particular ideology or ritual in Paul Fussell's 1975 monograph The Great War and Modern Memory. The second was the critical backlash in response to Seamus Heaney's representation of violence in North, also published in 1975. Heaney's critics and Fussell share the same three concerns: that a literary depiction of horror inevitably risks normalizing its horror; that the historical contextualization of war can minimize or appear to justify it; and that the turn to ritual, when processing the experience of wartime violence, tends to falsify traumatic experiences. Their arguments illuminate McGuinness's nuanced commemoration of the war, which simultaneously both critiques and performs the impulse to remember and ritualize. This contradiction gives priority to the play's human connections, valorizing understanding and affection over ideology, and making a powerful appeal to republican and Unionist audiences alike.

The Great War and Modern Memory has become foundational to subsequent considerations of World War I literature. Fussell, a literary and cultural historian, brings together the reflections of English combatants to explore the cultural changes resulting from the conflict. He argues that the World War I marked a fundamental shift in the modern understanding of history and memory. In his reading, the war constitutes an ontic trauma, one that is catastrophic and unrepresentable. Its horror pushed those who experienced it from an attitude of innocent historical optimism and meliorism to a fragmented, pessimistic, and ironic vision of life, reflected in the subsequent writings of the Modernists. These qualities have continued to shape English literature ever since. The war, in Fussell's view, made us modern.

The Great War and Modern Memory builds its historical narrative on the experience of individual soldiers, but consistently describes that experience as one of rupture, incompatible with the grand scheme of a continuous history. In the first chapter, "A Satire of Circumstance," he considers the war in terms of a traumatic move from optimism to irony, going so far as to state, "The innocent army fully attained the knowledge of good and evil at the Somme on...