Archives, Asylums, and Remembering Landscapes in Barry’s The Secret Scripture

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Notes

1. For more on the role of the archive as a political technology, see Patrick Joyce.

2. Thomas Osborne develops the concept of the archive as a center of interpretation.

3. My use of the term “trace” here and throughout refers to a trail of material evidence of history. However, it is also worth noting that the Derridean “trace,” referring to the binary nature of language which ensures that every sign also bears a trace of what it does not mean, resonates with The Secret Scripture’s presentation of archival materials that are remarkable as much for what is absent as what is available.

4. In addition to The Secret Scripture, the McNulty family novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1997), The Temporary Gentleman (2014), Days Without End (2016), and Barry’s most recent novel, A Thousand Moons (2020). His plays The Only True History of Lizzie Finn (1995) and Our Lady of Sligo (1998) fit loosely into this saga as well, though in the latter the family is fictionalized as the O’Haras. Early drafts of plays that later became The Secret Scripture, archived in The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, also use the name O’Hara for the characters who were later renamed McNulty.

5. Both John Wilson Foster and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, for example, identify Barry as revisionist, but Foster applauds that effort while Cullingford dismisses it.

6. The addition of the archival element appears to have come late in the process of developing this story. Early drafts of a play and a screenplay based on Roseanne’s story in the Harry Ransom Center develop a relatively simple narrative. The contemporary element and Dr Grene’s search for evidence of Roseanne’s past came later.

7. The final sentence in this quote suggests that the very project of building an imagined community is founded in the archive through documents that form “paper worlds.” That these worlds are comprised of “misapprehension and untruth” points toward not only the gaps in the archive but also the significance of those gaps in the construction of the national imaginary.

8. As Tara Harney-Mahajan notes, “Roseanne can serve to remind us that no matter what records may be released, innumerable stories of incarcerated women will remain lost” (62).

9. While Smith focuses primarily on Magdalene Laundries, he contextualizes such institutions as part of a larger network of containment. Additionally, in an early draft of the play that eventually developed into the novel, Roseanne’s mother-in-law attempts to send her to a Magdalene Laundry (The Metal Man’s Wife, box 16.6, p. 43).

10. Barry’s earlier, related novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, dramatizes the severe ostracization of Eneas, a former RIC policeman. It also hints at the forgetting archive, albeit much more subtly, through Eneas’s recurring feeling that he had been blotted out of the book of life, indicating Eneas’s exclusion from life in Ireland and from Irish history.

11. The Carrigan Report was created in response to a call for policy recommendations regarding amendments to laws related to juvenile sex crimes, which Smith identifies as “[t]he origins of Ireland’s containment culture” (5). While organizations like the Magdalene Laundries were more significantly affected by the Carrigan Report and subsequent legislation than mental hospitals, it indicates the moral climate in which Roseanne’s story takes place.

12. While mental health facilities are typically known for their proliferation of records, they are not always so meticulous. Kirsten Mulrennan explains, “Despite the various guidelines in place since the early nineteenth century, staff considered recordkeeping to be an individual preference rather than a legislative necessity” (125).

13. In 2018, Barry began a three-year term as Ireland’s Laureate for Irish Fiction, launching him as a figurehead of the nation. This appointment speaks not only to Barry’s achievements as a writer, but also to an appreciation for his efforts to reclaim lost histories.

14. Historian William J Turkel argues, “Every place is an archive, one that bears material traces of the past in the very substance of the place” (66). These place-archives, he argues, offer a broader perspective on history than paper documents alone.

15. Philosopher Edward S Casey writes, “Places gather. […] Minimally, places gather things in their midst – where ‘things’ connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts” (24–5). Places, then, are natural archives of both material and non-material, human and nonhuman elements.

16. The real Sligo Asylum, where Roseanne was initially committed in the novel, still stands today but has been turned into a luxury hotel, almost an irony given Roseanne’s statement that the asylum used to be known as “the Leitrim Hotel” (100). During a trip to Sligo in 2016, I visited the hotel and found that not so much as a plaque memorializes the building’s original function.

17. Connecting her story to the landscape carries with it a suggestion of the dinnseanchas tradition in Irish literature, a genre that recounts the origins of place names forming what Seamus Heaney refers to as “a mythical etymology” by “marrying the legendary and the local” (131). Roseanne’s story is a new legend that becomes married to the local.