The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus (review)

Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus’s The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable performs at least two essential, timely, and intimately dependent acts for literary criticism by testifying to literature’s ability to confront sexual trauma and offering such conclusions as the results of communal and collaborative work. Through intricate and rigorous close readings of literature, ranging from James Joyce to Anne Enright, and nuanced applications of psychoanalytic theory, Valente and Backus outline the way that Irish literature engages modern social and cultural discourse, as well as silence and abstraction, to identify sexual trauma in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. Just as they consistently suggest that intracommunity recognition of child sex scandal in Ireland is essential to recovering the social repression of trauma, they also offer academics a reminder of how we might save the Humanities from dissolution and despair: write, think, and witness together.

Reinforcing their urgent call to face the consequences of years of sex scandal in Ireland and their clear commitment to collaborative writing, Valente and Backus join forces with another important voice critical of the Irish State’s approach to years of national violence, Fintan O’Toole. In giving O’Toole the opening pages for a thought-provoking foreword, Valente and Backus connect their work to current political writing outside the literary canon and underscore the social urgency of their project. After summarizing a brief history of scandal in Ireland following Irish independence, O’Toole points out a paradox underlying the state’s attention to sexual violence from the 1990s on: “the exposure of child abuse was at once profoundly political and largely depoliticized” (xii). O’Toole’s foreword is a cross-disciplinary call to arms, asking that critics and thinkers address the heart of scandal that lies in the isolated nationalism that developed in Ireland from “the tight intertwining of the Catholic Church with both the institutions of government after Irish independence in 1922 and the moral and ideological underpinnings of independence itself” (xi). This is perhaps one reason why Valente and Backus’s text resonates in many ways outside of the disciplines of literature and literary criticism: the application of their work is internationally significant as we face another climax of global capitalism with a pandemic wreaking havoc on the most destitute and vulnerable members of our communities and immigration reform driving the platforms of most conservative politicians. Our ability to emerge from the trauma of loss and disenfranchisement caused by COVID-19, and experienced by refugees decades prior during mass migrations, will depend on our willingness to accept that its effects are wide ranging and prolific, not marginal or misrepresented. For Valente and Backus, this is how we must approach trauma stemming from institutional abuse and the rhetoric of citizenship, through recognition that it is a substantial component of modern life for many and not an anomalous state of existence for only a handful of survivors.

In the United States in the 1980s, diagnoses of misremembered childhood trauma, or False Memory Syndrome, dangerously affected the way we understood the cultural and sociological representations of trauma that we used in our daily lives. One of the most dramatic and harmful effects of those discussions emerged in the way we understood trauma to be rare or inconsistent and, therefore, uniquely positioned to “other” those who underwent traumatic experiences, often marginalizing them as outsiders to normative culture. When discussing the impetus of the book, Backus occasionally tells the story of Jennifer Freyd, who began remembering sexual abuse by her father as an adult, and Freyd’s parents, who denied her claims by forming

an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Through the nonprofit’s work, they popularized a term—false memory—that became one of the most effective tools to instill doubt not only about allegations of child sex abuse but in all forms of sexual violence...