Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870 by Marguérite Corporaal (review)

Though the Famine has long been a seminal topic of Irish Studies, a vexing misconception persists that Irish literature written during and immediately after the Famine dared not mention the cataclysmic event. The notion that survivors found the Famine too existentially traumatic an episode to recount even in fiction is an understandable, if false, assumption. In Relocated Memories, Marguérite Corporaal not only sets the record straight on this matter, but recontextualizes midcentury famine fiction as a transnational exercise for Irish writers and readers to memorialize and cope with the tragedy.

Drawing on an impressively broad collection of novels and stories written in Ireland, Britain, and North America, Corporaal demonstrates the extent to which Irish writers embraced the Famine as a subject of Irish storytelling and identity. Indeed, famine fiction became a site of collective memory where Irish writers who experienced the event could employ “specific narrative and generic techniques to circumvent certain agonizing details” and thus mediate and reconfigure its trauma for readers. For example, the survivor and writer Mary Ann Hoare often wrote tangentially of emotionally painful episodes in her 1851 collection of stories Shamrock Leaves. Rather than make her main protagonists describe the death of an infant or a family’s slow starvation through first-person descriptions, Hoare instead opts for her narration to make vague, passing mentions of these events in order to displace and assuage the visceral memories of characters in the broader narrative. By decentering the experientiality of particularly gruesome and emotionally taxing moments in her story, Hoare attempts to temper literary accounts of famine suffering for her Irish audience. Other authors used similar narrative methods to accomplish the same goal. The narrator of a story published in 1847 laments that the protagonist’s sufferings are “the most painful part of my sad narrative and I must hasten over it.” This is not to say that fiction writers completely avoided exposition of the Famine’s human toll. Rather, Corporaal locates in the stylistic choices of Irish authors a desire to practice emotional triage through their works, demonstrating the fluidity of famine memory and how it is expressed in fragmented ways.

Corporaal argues that although trauma plays a crucial role in shaping these narratives of famine memory, it also speaks to broader notions of how the Irish made sense of postfamine politics, identity, and of their tenuous place in the Atlantic world. Borrowing Alison Landsberg’s notion of “prosthetic memory,” she examines how Irish writers who did not directly experience the Famine used mediated memories to construct their own narratives and make sense of the event from a geographic or temporal distance. This is especially evident with texts written in British Canada and the United States at the time. Corporaal notes that American Irish writers tended to use different narrative techniques, descriptions, or themes than authors in Ireland. For instance, when using the Famine as a setting or a plot device American Irish authors would omit descriptions of their characters’ emaciated bodies. In contrast, stories written in Ireland often dwelt heavily on the physical aspects of starvation to reflect the experientiality of the author’s recollections. North American writers also portrayed Irish pastoral settings in romanticized, Edenic terms that diverged from the desolated landscapes emphasized by writers in Ireland. The cumulative effect of these differences is a distinctly “diasporic memory” produced by texts that enshrines a softer, more hopeful, and nostalgic image of Ireland that informed New World recollections of the Famine years.

This would seem to be Corporaal’s most prominent contribution: to understand how famine memory was produced and experienced by the Irish diaspora, it must be examined in a transnational context. The rough and irregular shape of famine memory stems from its bifurcated roots on both sides of the Atlantic. As such, it is a product of two mutually informed, but characteristically distinct, worlds. To reinforce this point...