Introduction: Critiquing crisis and commemoration

Irish culture is obsessed with the past. From the commemoration of historic events to the memoirs of childhood, we cannot escape the remembrance of things past in newspapers and books, on stages, on screens, in museums and on the streets of major cities, and in the spaces of public galleries. While representations of the past have always been an integral element of Irish culture, they are now one of its most compelling subjects. And the tone that characterises this subject is trauma.¹

In his defining essay on “les lieux de memoire,” Pierre Nora baldly states that at the core of history is a critical discourse that “is antithetical to spontaneous memory,” whose “mission is to suppress and destroy it:” “History’s procurement, in the last century, of scientific methodology has only intensified the effort to establish critically a ‘true’ memory.”² Nora’s characterisation of such a zero-sum-game within historiography was a feature of Irish historiographical debates during the period in which the essay was published. However, on foot of developments within women’s histories, postcolonial studies, and memory studies, the politics of Irish historical studies have become less bifurcated in recent years. Nevertheless, Nora’s conclusion is germane to our discussion, as it alights upon on-going matters that are central to Ireland’s current decade of centenaries. Specifically, Nora’s attentiveness to the inescapability of some degree of diversity and contradiction within processes of remembrance and recollection begs the questions about who is commemoration for, and what are the relative power dynamics of processes of commemoration? At broader levels, we are reminded that we must remain alert to further questions such as: is there a fundamentally ethical need to remember in a certain way? What are the consequences of not remembering? What are the differences between memory and history? For what reasons do we trust history but not memory? Is this really an unbreachable binary?

At its root, the act of commemoration is a process of addressing the events of the past and then adjudicating what, who and how to remember. As historian James Young has perceptively noted, remembered objects and events are used to “naturalise particular versions of the past;” the arrangements of items that are deemed worthy of commemoration, or of being stored in a museum as signifiers of a particular event, a flag, a weapon, a piece of uniform, are only part of a “figurative reconstruction of the past, not its literal replication.”³ Given these basic mechanics, commemoration inevitably eclipses and foregrounds memories giving rise to contestation and contradiction. Commemoration is thus, confirmatory, self-perpetuating, and, potentially incendiary, all at the same time: “commemorations are literally instances of intensified remembering.”⁴ Moreover, part of the forcefulness of such celebratory, yet divisive, acts, lies in the plain fact that commemoration is more often than not an explicitly public and visible series of acts. Commemoration transcends the limits of its own temporal context, consecrating past events and personalities in the present but always with an eye on the future; in the latter respect, the commemorative act is a fraction of the future-oriented iteration of a shared identity, be that communal or national. In addition, herein lies the inherent politicised nature of commemorative processes, which will be touched upon in this issue. Commemorative speeches “are normally delivered on public days of remembrance, which are usually associated with the ‘magic of numbers’,”⁵ these numbers being dates which have become resonant symbols of political ideologies, for example 1690 in the case of Unionism, or 1798 and 1916 in the case of Republicanism. The irony here is that these numbers have become “magic” through the very process of their iterative commemorations, as these ritual rememberings make the dates powerful public signifiers. This is achieved, not just through recording the dates and retelling the history, but through performativity, as “periodic celebrations serve as focal points in the drama of re-enacted citizen participation,”⁶ which enculturate participants into the political ideology in question.

Thus in laying bare the politics of commemoration, we must recognise the necessity of adopting intersectional and transversal methodologies in order to do due justice to the events that inform any communal and/or national past. Finally, any critical engagement with commemoration must analyse and/or acknowledge the narrative, often fictive, contours of commemoration. A survey of commemoration in Ireland, and beyond, will expose how commemorative narratives and performances are readily open to the fomentation of discord, as well as being potential instruments for conflict resolution. As Ricoeur puts it “a formidable pact is concluded in this way between remembrance, memorisation, and commemoration,”⁷ and it is the workings and effect of this pact that will be our object of study.

In this, the decade of commemorations, one of the core tropes of Irish thinking in the socio-political and cultural spheres is coming to the fore. In some ways, Irish history can be seen as a dialectical process of crises and then commemoration of those crises. Moreover, as the ensuing collection of diverse interventions attest it is timely and enlightening to dwell upon the continuum of Irish historical commemorations and crises as part of an exercise in meta-historical self-reflection. The aggregated foci of this volume, then, interrogate our notions of “commemoration,” “crisis,” and “criticism,” as well as addressing the epistemology of commemoration through literary, historiographical, sociological and cultural critique. Contributors are also mindful of the adjacency of crisis and commemoration in the Irish context is the continuity of performativity in the form and content of both. The plethora of commemorations at a broad cultural level will become clear in all of the events that will have taken place from 2013 through 2022, but even at a smaller level, we have numerous Bloody Sundays and Bloody Fridays, as well as anniversaries of explosions, hunger strikes, gun battles and deaths. The pattern is not confined to violent events, however, as the recent financial crash has also spawned a number of anniversaries of different key points and issues, and has resulted in a series of commemorations, tribunals, and reports, all of which commemorate, and very few of which critique, events of the past. In a sense, what we witness, and what conjoins crisis and commemoration in this context, is the consistency of the performative in Irish political and social history. Indeed, the performative is not only confined to the public sphere of historical commemoration or to the perfunctory public performances evidenced in recent tribunals, inquiries and reports. The economic “boom” preceding the crisis facilitated and was characterised by the performance of new iterations of consumerist-contoured Irish identities.

When casting one’s thoughts over the separate but interlocking notions of crisis and commemoration, we must remain cognisant of “scale.” While the national has been the dominant scale on which commemorative politics have been imagined, contested and performed, and the same scale has been the conduit through which the economic crisis and period of austerity has been narrated, these are not the only relevant scales to which attention might be given. It is worth considering the continuities and discontinuities between experiences of and responses to crisis at different scales across Ireland – local, communal, or regional. Such considerations raise pointed questions such as: How do these “scale.” conceive of the national and global “scale.” that occasioned the recent period of “boom and bust” economics? Where does affiliation begin and end in terms of the politics of commemoration? Are there what we might call “horizons of commemoration and crisis”? How do we relativise experiences of crisis between and across localities and region within one national boundary? Such questions will significantly enhance understanding of, and respect for, significant events by drawing attention to the historical and contemporary experiences of the wider population. Indeed, it is also worth situating the decade of centenaries in its historical and critical context, that of socio-economic crisis. The two have not been adequately read in terms of each other in academic or non-academic discussions, and bearing in mind such adjacency might well facilitate a “deeper” historical context in which to read the current “crisis.” The “decade” remembers a period of social and political revolution and change, reading it in light of our recent and ongoing crisis can problematise any sense of these radical events having been rendered static monuments.

From our perspective, there is a further matter to consider in this general context, and that is the nature of the relationship between our overarching theme, and the content and parameters of contemporary Irish cultural criticism. The problem with the crisis and commemoration cycle is that it becomes repetitive – if we as a culture keep progressing from crisis to commemoration, then where is the place for a form of critique, which may interrogate, and possibly deconstruct, this closed cycle. We have seen in terms of the two signal commemorative processes: those of 1916, and what might be termed the Irish Revolution, and those of the credit crash and bank bailout, that there is a repetitive process at work, and that the same old positions are rehashed in different fora. This is because of the contradictory position, of being part of a culture while at the same time attempting to offer a critique of the ideology of that culture. This collective of essays furnishes a critical, yet in some ways complementary, set of perspectives on the ongoing programme of commemorations in Ireland by providing an opportunity to reflect upon the process of commemoration itself, and what forms and contents it has taken in the Irish context. As the Advisory Group on Centenary Celebrations make clear “Commemoration should not ignore differences and divisions,”⁸ and, in the current volume, such stated intentions are reflected upon at meta-historical and meta-critical levels. It is vital to spotlight how such differences can be elided, and the reasons why such choices are made. The work to hand here draws attention to the fact the current decade of centenaries takes place in the context of the most urgent economic crisis in the State’s history, and, as such, seeks to contextualise the “decade” in terms of this crisis. We believe that such a strategy is a vital part of the reflexiveness accented by the Advisory Group. Commemoration and Crisis cannot be disaggregated entirely, as we, of necessity, “commemorate” periods of crisis repeatedly, and the current period is no exception.

Drawing “crisis” into the orbit of the “decade of centenaries” will add complexity to the ongoing programme of events. Many of the events during the “decade” foreground the importance of remembrance, and are founded upon archival and personal memory, but it is just as important to focus on the ways in which commemorations draws upon memory but also “shapes” memories and processes of remembrance. Cultural memory “revolves around the mourning work that gives rise to mnemotechnology – whether as rhetorical ars memoriae and its architectural metaphors, or as mourning the dead and commemorating them with monuments.”⁹ Equally, the volume seeks to investigate the ways in which the proximity of Crisis and Commemoration feeds into the circuitry of memory-formation and the broader politics of remembrance. These latter two concerns will significantly complement ongoing events by furnishing a necessary self-reflexive forum on these contentious but urgent issues.

Not to understand the past is to be condemned to repeat it, and such repetition, which Sigmund Freud has termed a “repetition compulsion” (Wiederholungszwang), is seen as an innate part of our unconscious. According to Freud, in “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” in the case of a severe trauma, a patient often does not remember “anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”¹⁰ One could see the patterns of crisis and commemoration as a socio-cultural extension of this process, as a culture strives to act out the crisis as a way of acknowledging the crisis, which avoids the hard work of critiquing the causes of the crisis in the first place. To call a day Bloody Sunday or Bloody Friday, to have a parade to commemorate that day, or as we have noted, those days as there have been a number of them, is to act without attempting to understand. It is to allow that which has been repressed about the original act to return in a performative but attenuated manner, which avoids having to face the initial trauma again.

However, without such critique, the repressed is doomed to an endless cycle of return. We return to this ability to take life as a sanctioning of some form of community, when we look at an event nearer to us in time – namely the death in Belfast of Robert McCartney. On 30 January 2005, Robert McCartney was murdered outside Magennis’s Bar on May Street in the Short Strand area of Belfast. Reputedly, the murderers were members of Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA and, in the aftermath of the murder, the pub was cleaned of fingerprints, CCTV evidence was removed and threats were issued to the witnesses of the act as to the consequences of reporting any of this to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

The sisters of Robert McCartney – Catherine, Paula, Claire, Donna and Gemma – and his partner Bridgeen, spoke out in a campaign to seek justice for their murdered brother. It was a campaign that has had a deconstructive effect on Sinn Féin and the IRA, who have always used the dead as potent symbols of oppression, and who have made commemoration of their own dead key staging points for political and military rebirths. Even more ironically, the members of Sinn Féin and the IRA who killed him were returning from a commemoration of the Bloody Sunday, an event when members of the British Paratroop regiment killed thirteen protest marchers in Derry in 1972. They were commemorating the ghosts of their own past struggle even as they created another one. Such commemorations have been “woven into the fabric of daily life, establishing their significance within routine social interactions … and elevated through ritual practices.”¹¹ Perhaps the re-enactment of such violence provides a bonding between past and present through performative parading and speeches. In this case, the bonding seemed to authorise a murder in a non-political context and the commemoration of a previous Bloody Sunday, something of a ritual within the republican and nationalist communities, was the catalyst for the creation of another Bloody Sunday on May Street in 2005 – a time when the peace process was well in train. Ironically, it was this latter Bloody Sunday that caused a crisis in Sinn Féin, especially in terms of the perception of the party in the United States.

On Saint Patrick’s Day of that year, traditionally a time when post-peace-process Sinn Fein has been feted by Irish America, the McCartney family travelled to the United States, where they were met by President George W. Bush, who expressed support in their campaign. They also met a group of Senators, including Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Interestingly, Gerry Adams was not invited to the White House in 2005, and a pre-scheduled meeting with the doyen of Irish American political royalty, Senator Edward Kennedy, was cancelled. It was a more modern instance of the crisis, followed by commemoration of that crisis, followed by another crisis trope. This crisis became an opportunity for offering the actions of Sinn Fein to a more rigorous critique than heretofore, and aspects of the connections between Sinn Fein, violence and criminality have come under heightened scrutiny since that case.

Hence, commemoration can be a cause of violence in the present; conversely, it can allow for a pluralist peace, as both sides in a conflict are allowed to enunciate their own traditions peacefully through commemorative rituals. In this case, repetition of the original traumatic act can repress the violent impulses through the re-enactment of aspects of the act in question. However, to bring a process of critique to bear on commemoration as a discourse is to attempt to return to the original action and to understand it and its meaning. It is fair to say that “nothing is more characteristic in psychoanalysis than the retrospective search for shock and hurt and confusion”¹²; and critiques of social and commemorative acts through psychoanalysic methods allows for a different way of reading the connections between crisis and commemoration: before we can critique we must have some notion of the epistemological structure of commemoration, we need a “main thread [Leitfaden]”¹³ which we can follow to understand the points at issue.

Looking at the term original meanings of the term, Edward Casey makes the following point that:

that in its most ancient acceptation “commemoration” “means an intensified remembering. Further, two of its oldest meanings are the deliverance of a formal eulogy and participation in a liturgical service (wherein a ‘lesser feast ‘is observed by being included, in parts, in a “greater feast”).” Taken together, these early senses of the word imply that in acts of commemoration remembering is intensified by taking place through the interposed agency of a text (the eulogy, the liturgy proper) and in the setting of a social ritual (delivering the eulogy, participating in the service).¹⁴

The intensity of the process is both communal and ritualistic. Commemorations, while of course they have private and personal dimensions, are necessarily public in their mode of being. Texts, by definition, are meant to be read and heard, and the social ritual around this is at the centre of notions of communal memory. Once again, Casey has some telling comments on this aspect of the epistemology of commemoration:

A crucial component of the answer to this question has to do with the role of others-my companions in commemoration. If I am remembering at all on such an occasion, I am remembering with them, and they with me. It is a matter of something thoroughly communal. Indeed, it is almost as if the absence of recollection on my part – and doubtless that of other individuals – was somehow being compensated for by an activity that occurred at the level of the group. We have certainly come a long way from Descartes’s stove and Proust’s study! Suddenly we are thrust headlong into a crowd of co-rememberers into what Nietzsche might call disdainfully a “herd” or Heidegger “das man.”¹⁵

In essence, for Casey, this sense of the communal is a part of that main thread which we are tracing. In terms of performativity and connections with the past, the social connections in the present of the commemorative activity are just as important as the connections with the magic numbers of specific dates or a remembrance of the originary act. The affect of the commemoration is in the present as opposed to the past, and the meaning of the event is operative in the present, and this is another strand of that Leitfaden of which we have been speaking.

Presentism is a theoretical concept that began in Shakespeare studies, and two of its originators were Terence Hawkes and Hugh Grady. This perspective looks at the meaning of past events in the present, fully aware that such meanings may well be very different from each other and from meanings that accrued over time as well as the meanings of texts when they were written. In essence it looks at how Hamlet or Macbeth signify in our present culture as opposed to a New Historicist lens which looks at the meanings in the original cultural context. It deliberately begins with the material present and lets that set the interrogative agenda. It also suggests that an objective, transparent past that is open to us without the need for mediation or interpretation is a fallacy. Instead, it seeks “out salient aspects of the present as a crucial trigger for its investigations,” suggesting that meaning can first be found in the readerly present as opposed to attempting to reconstruct the conditions of the past. In this sense, and contra new historicism, “it deliberately begins with the material present and allows that to set its interrogative agenda.”¹⁶ Hugh Grady developed this further, noting that he and Hawkes had meant the term to signify a “broad tent” wherein agreed assumptions about the value of the critic’s own situation “in our cultural present is a resource for, rather than an impediment to, a productive and insightful reading of Shakespeare” or indeed of any texts “in and out of the critical “canon”.’¹⁷

Hence, while commemorations are usually about events in the past, typically involving a crisis of some kind, the meaning is in the performative present and not in the past, as it is those in the present who, as Young has noted, decide what version of the past is to be commemorated. It is fair to say that commemoration has an umbilical relationship with death: “objects, images and practices, as well as places and spaces, call to mind or are made to remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality.”¹⁸ The core of the various Bloody Fridays and Bloody Sundays is that on these dates, and in these places, people died; by extension, looking at the Celtic Tiger commemorations, it is the death of a dream of prosperity and of an enriched society that is being recalled. It is also fair to say that commemoration, by its nature, is communal and ritualistic: events are remembrerd through the enactment of some form of public ritual – parade, speeches, re-enactment, reading of a pertinent text or manifesto – and this rutual has a vital connection to a place. In a way, they enact Emily Dickenson’s resonant line from “At Half Past Three:”

And Place was where the Presence was

Circumference between.¹⁹

The commemoration is the circumference which connects the original act to its ongoing repetition in the public sphere. In commemorations, “body and place memory conspire with co-participating others in ritualised scenes of co-remembering.”²⁰ Of course some form of mediation and selection is at work in commemoration: not every aspect of the original act is going to be recalled. Violent acts which initiate state or nationhood are remembered and re-enacted in a very sanitised fashion. Military action is symbolised by parades and flypasts, while the body count of such an originary act of violence are never part of the ceremony. There is a ritualistic element to this form of remembering: there may have been blood spilled in the act being commemorated: there will be no blood in the commemoration.

Commemoration is a form of communal memory, motived by a desire to connect chosen aspects of the past to the present. Emilie Pine, cited at the beginning of this introduction, has examined how commemorations are very often performative in nature across a range of media discourses and practices; this performativity is normally underscored by a desire to stress some aspects of the past from the perspective of the present. Paul Connerton makes the point that Napoleon saw that “if the present was to be glorified the past must be commemorated” so he made sure that Parisian Street names would reflect the names of his officers and battles: “Rues d’Austerlitz, d’Iena, d’Ulm.”²¹ It is this link with the present, and often with a particular ideology that has become, or is in the process of becoming hegemionic in that present, that is central to understanding of commemoration through the lens of academic critique: “intellectuals have embraced memory as the concept capable of doing what history can no longer do: build links between past and present.”²²

These links are repetitive, ritualistic, communal – commemorative memory is a societal activity, and the performatives involved are both somatic and intellectual: we watch bodies commemorating events even as we bring our own bodies from the private sphere to the public sphere to be part of the act of remembrance. In attending such ceremonies of remembrance, “individual and collective memory and material culture are seamlessly interwoven,” and remembering has moved from an individual and largely intellectual process, to “an activity which encompasses not only individual minds and bodies but also the minds and bodies of others.”²³

Hence, commemorations could be seen as a social enactment of the repetition compulsion of which we spoke earlier; through performativity and ritual, the original act is re-enacted in a changed and less threatening manner through commemoration. As well as binding past and present, and the individual and the community, such rituals have another function:

For commemorative ceremonies also are preserved only through their performance; and, because of their performativity and their formalisation, they too are not easily susceptible to critical scrutiny and evaluation by those habituated to their performance. Both commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices therefore contain a measure of insurance against the process of cumulative questioning entailed in all discursive practices.²⁴

In the following pieces, this insurance policy will need to be cashed-in, as commemorations of all types will be placed under the lens of critical thinking and inquiry. In the opening essay, Eoin Flannery addresses one of Eugene McCabe’s lesser-known works, the drama, Pull Down a Horseman, which was first performed in 1966 as part of the cultural wing of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The play is based on a secret three-day meeting held by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in the lead-up to the April rebellion, and it captures some of the intractable divisions that obtained between the political visions of the two revolutionary leaders. The essay focuses on the distinctive dramaturgical strategies employed by McCabe in his highly effective evocation of such apparently irreconcilable ideological divergences. Equally, McCabe’s play is an implicit critique of the extant political and social conditions of his contemporary Ireland, half a century after the 1916 Rising. In laying bare the competing utopian visions of both Pearse and Connolly, Pull Down a Horseman gestures to the impoverished nature of the Irish political imagination at this moment of commemoration in 1966. While McCabe is more widely feted as a chronicler of the tolls of human suffering in relation to the Great Irish Famine, the Irish Land War and the Northern Irish “Troubles,” Pull Down a Horseman is diagnostic of the disparities between the skein of ideals that energised the Irish revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth-century and the grim realities of the nation-state at this mid-century juncture.

The next essay, by Elizabeth Crooke, looks at the place of material culture in terms of commemoration. This discussion uses the newly discovered Irish Citizen Army flag and the Chinese braid to comment on commemorative practices and discourse in Ireland during the Decade of Centenaries. As identified by the editors of this issue, the twentieth century can be read as moving between crisis, in the form of conflict, and the commemoration of those events. The periods in between, rather than being absent from conflict are times when traumatic pasts are negotiated. This may be through processes of what appears to be forgetting, or it might be a consequence of denial or deliberate silences. Difficult pasts may also be negotiated through active practices of reconstruction and reapplication of historical memory through historical writing, cultural events, or heritage activity.

Eugene O’Brien looks at the programmatic poem by Yeats “Easter 1916,” and deconstructs both the poem and its reception as a form of vatic endorsement of the 1916 Rising. The essay focuses on the four core questions towards the end of the poem. The original open grammatical structure of the questions, as indicated by the four question marks, has been closed off by the context, and the questions have become rhetorical. This discussion will revisit this poem and look at these questions as real questions; it will then suggest how the rhetorical strategies used by Yeats in the poem have served as exempla for significant attitudes of mind in the new state, attitudes that still resonate in the Ireland of today. It will suggest that Yeats’s poem, far from being a verbal or aesthetic commemoration of the 1916 Rising, in fact offers a form of critique, one which has long-term resonances in the Irish public sphere. Looking at the rhetorical trope of aposiopesis, a breaking off or away from providing an answer to a question, as the defining trope of the poem, it will argue that this trope has become a defining way of remembering the rising and of dealing with its presentist consequences and ramifications in the social and political realm.

Anne Fogarty looks at contemporary Irish historical fictions that have enjoyed unusual prominence in recent decades. That said, historical fiction remains a problematic category. Books on the Easter Rising, including Lia Mills’ Fallen (2015), Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2016) and Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020), engage with and refract the historiography of these signal events and produce differentiated views of them by concentrating on subaltern figures and refusing to settle for fixed or epistemologically stable views. It will ultimately be argued that cumulatively contemporary Irish historical novels, while paying obeisance to the clarifying veracity of historical records, also question and challenge their truth-making functions by concentrating on the gaps that they contain and can never make good.

Willy Maley and Kirsty Lusk make the point that in Irish dramatic history the theatre of remembrance is complicated by the inevitable tendency to engage with past occasions of national crisis, and with the close ties between the Irish theatre and politics, in which the events of the stage spill onto the streets, and vice versa. Earlier events offer a model and a means to understand episodes that are more recent. They can provide an aspect of distance for clearer perspective, but they can also encourage the sense of “nothing but the same old story.” In the case of Irish literature, there is a long tradition of setting the historical scene at a moment of danger that resonates, however obliquely or allegorically, with other crisis-points. The essay looks at two relatively neglected Irish plays staged twenty years apart which were produced at key moments of crisis and reflection, and which concentrate on female agency, the cyclical Irish curse of betrayal, anxieties of masculinity and the clash of morality and law. James Connolly’s Under Which Flag (1916) and Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose (1936) are exemplary dramas of crisis and commemoration. In each case, by returning respectively to the Fenian Rising of 1867 and the Treaty of Limerick of 1691, Connolly and Deevy are able to argue for the continuity of crisis in ways that avoid the fatalism that characterises less nuanced forms of dwelling on and in the past.

In the final essay, Róisín Ní Gháirbhí addresses the funeral of the aged Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, which took place in Glasnevin cemetery on 1^st August 1915 over a month after the death of the aged Fenian, and which is known mostly for the graveside oration given by Patrick Pearse. This discussion will argue that the exceptional nature of the O’Donovan Rossa funeral (and of Pearse’s speech) are overstated and that they form part of a continuum in Irish cultural practice and political discourse. Furthermore, a close textual reading of the oration in this broader context brings insights into the influence of particular texts on Pearse’s thinking and writing. A close examination of Pearse’s Rossa oration shows that far from being a breakthrough or watershed speech for Pearse or his audience, both speech and funeral echoed themes and diction long present in Irish culture. The O’Donovan Rossa speech in both its Irish language and English language components reveal multiple echoes from the diction and themes of seventeenth century political poems. These intertextual echoes can be found most particularly in a series of politically themed poems which Pearse had previously collected, translated and annotated. Pearse’s intertextual conversation with Gaelic poetry and its influence on his themes and thinking is evident from the opening words of his speech, where the main English language body is preceded by an address in Irish.

One of the core aims of this special issue is to offer questions and critiques to notions of commemoration, and in this respect, the collation of interventions is setting up a type of counter-commemorative epistemology, one which looks at how difficult and problematic it is to access the past, and to probe the ethical issues connected with this act – another skein in that main thread of which we have been speaking. It will offer a critique that can intervene in the commemoration-crisis repetition compulsion, and will do so as a way of using critique to help us to understand and perhaps contextualise the commemorative process. Some forms of commemoration have inbuilt such a counter-commemorative aspect into their own performance.

Writing in Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory, Nicholas Miller speaks about notions of counter memory, looking specifically at the work of a German conceptual artist German-Jewish Holocaust memorialist Jochen Gerz, and his piece in the town square of Saarbrücken, 2146 Stones – Monument against Racism. This 3-year project was a collective production with art students from the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Saar (Saar College of Visual Art) in Saarbrucken in the square in front of a historic castle in the city. Saarbrücker Schloss was a Gestapo headquarters during the war and is now a government building and a museum, the Regionalgeschichtliches Museum Saarbrücken. In this museum, “in a space directly below the square itself, curators have preserved a tiny room, six metres square, which served during the war as a detention cell for prisoners.”²⁵ In this cell, where up to sixteen prisoners were kept at a time, the walls are covered with graffiti as prisoners had recorded “their names, places and dates of birth, and dates of incarceration.” This was the stimulus for the 2146 Stones project. Gerz worked with a number of Jewish groups to find out “the forgotten names of German Jewish cemeteries in use during the war,” and he went on to make an exhaustive list of these locations.²⁶ Working under cover of night, Gerz and his students “borrowed” sixteen cobblestones, replacing them with dummy stones:

As the borrowed cobblestones arrived in the studio, each was to receive a name from the list, along with the date of transmission, carved into its surface. Once inscribed, the stones would be restored, once again under cover of night, to their respective positions in the square. Carved into the surface of the square’s cobblestones, the names would serve to remind the citizens of Saarbrücken – and visitors in general – of the city’s wartime past; eternally insistent, the memorial would impress upon a forgetful present the urgent necessity of memory.²⁷

Hence the symmetry of the public memorial over the hidden one underneath in the basement is interesting, and the fact of people walking over the names of the graves would seem to be another of those performatives that are at the heart of the commemorative experience: but there is one significant difference:

Through an extraordinary and paradoxical detail of the memorial’s design, the artists effectively guaranteed their work’s indefinite resistance to all recognition, official or otherwise: in restoring the inscribed stones to their places in the square, Gerz and his students deliberately replaced them name-side-down.²⁸

Here we have a more nuanced and deconstructive mode of commemoration, one located in the nodes between public space, material culture and memorial writing and inscription. Its purpose is to be found, less in the performance of commemoration, and more in the interrogation and critique of commemoration while at the same time marking and remembering what has taken place. It is a form of deconstructive presentism, and one which is a physical representation of the complicating and problematising of commemoration that the following essays will contain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory, 3.

2. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 9.

3. Young, The Texture of Memory, 147.

4. Casey, Remembering, 217.

5. Wodak, The Discursive Construction of National Identity, 170.

6. Halbwachs and Coser, On Collective Memory, 23–24.

7. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 85.

8. Decade of centenaries Website, https://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/expert-advisory-group/ [accessed August 23, 2022].

9. Krapp, Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory, xv.

10. Freud, The Case of Schreber, 150.

11. Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture, 8.

12. White, Freud’s Memory, 146.

13. Derrida, Theory and Practice, 25.

14. Casey, Remembering, 217–218.

15. Ibid., 216–217.

16. Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, 22.

17. Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 236.

18. Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture, 2.

19. Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 491.

20. Casey, Remembering, xi.

21. Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 12.

22. Santos, “Memory and Narrative in Social Theory,” 163.

23. Jones, Memory and Material Culture, 44.

24. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 102.

25. Miller, Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory, 21.

26. Ibid., 22.

27. Ibid., 22.

28. Ibid., 24.