Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Front matter

NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction Silences that Speak

Edited by M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera José Carregal-Romero palgrave macmillan

Foreword

To provide the foreword, to announce publicly why a book matters, for a study of silences is not without its ironies. But it is a gesture entirely in keeping with logics of this indispensable volume, which gives voice to the conceptual complexity of silence. By exploring how silence works aesthetically, thematically, and theoretically across a provocative assortment of recent Irish fiction, these essays help us to understand how what goes unspoken can proclaim so much—that is, how silences can speak when we commit to paying close and considered attention to them.

Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak offers throughout original and acute readings of literature that consider the conspiracies of silence blighting modern and contemporary life. As we know, Irish history holds many cautionary tales about the real human cost of silences and silencing. This history has been, and continues to be, examined in a formidable corpus of creative and critical writing that recounts centuries of institutional abuse, structural oppression, and individual alienation. Such ills continue to infect society, but speaking about and against them might be considered one hallmark of contemporary Irish culture. This trait appears in the recent swell of Irish writing that breaks pernicious silences in order to make possible new modes of expression. Many of the fiction writers here make vividly public topics that once were regarded as strictly private, and they consider issues that once were dismissed or ignored for being too marginal or too transgressive. But they are not alone. In recent years, the essayists Kevin Breathnach, ix

X FOREWORD

Emma Dabiri, and Rosaleen McDonagh have shared vivid accounts of intimate personal experiences once relegated to silence; the playwrights Stacey Gregg, Mark O’Halloran, and Emilie Pine have depicted on stage previously taboo subjects; the poets Doireann Ni Ghriofa and Caitriona O’Reilly, among others, have unmuzzled the previously verboten in their verse. That such work across genres has been critically, and even commercially, successful suggests that contemporary readers welcome the emancipatory quality of these revelations—even as the authors insistently remind us that the cultural problems they announce linger, that merely naming and representing these problems does not make them go away.

Keeping its eye on contemporary Irish fiction, Narratives of the Unspoken engages an impressively diverse array of methodologies to interrogate the intricacies of silence. It also demonstrates the portability of these conceptualisations of silence to other times, other places, other traditions. This study, as you will see, often reaches to the past to understand the present, another tendency that suffuses contemporary Irish writing, in order to articulate that which was previously unspoken, unacknowledged, and unknown. The book’s attention to silence provides us a richer vocabulary for understanding what unfolds in the quiet interstices of Irish writing from recent decades. In doing so, it underscores silence’s traction, showing us how it is an ongoing and adaptive concern in writing and society more generally. This is an important lesson in the contemporary moment, when the past seems to recede more quickly, when each familiar problem seems somehow unique to our particular historical era.

This suggestive volume acknowledges Ireland’s history of damaging silences and considers its legacies, but it also underscores how silence can serve as a valuable, even productive, means of expression. Silence is, as the editors observe in their wise introduction, necessary for constructive dialogue. Someone must take the risk of speaking out, but someone must also heed and reflect on the message shared. And this pronouncement, that we need an ethics of listening as well as of speaking, demonstrates yet another vital contribution of this volume. It asks us to consider the important role of silence in an era filled with pings and alerts, chyrons and click-bait, fractious media debates and pop-up advertisements, among the many, many noisy calls for our attention.

These are pertinent messages in today’s classroom, a space that provides an indispensable opportunity to consider in practice the delicate balance between the spoken and unspoken. In the immediate wake of first reading this volume, I was teaching Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection

FOREWORD xi famously ridden with silences. More often than not, what is unspoken in these short narratives reminds readers, as well as the characters themselves, of the limits of human understanding. When read and analysed in retrospect, Dubliners underscores how formerly silenced or hidden aspects of experience can now be articulated. With Narratives of the Unspoken in hand, I was invited to think anew about Joyce’s stories, stories that I have read and taught hundreds of times, in light of the frameworks and vocabularies on offer in this study of contemporary writing. As I deployed these ideas in our discussions, I was struck most by how readily my students in the twenty-first century could identify, through our focus on the silences in these stories, their own experiences in the Dublin of a century ago. From the vantage of the present, “An Encounter” became a story about “grooming” because we now have a designation to identify and call out the predations of the “queer old josser”. We could think about how and why Corley in “Two Gallants” might be accused of “TMI”, of inappropriately divulging “too much information” about his sexual exploits. “The Boarding House” became a tale of the “open secret”, in which Mrs. Mooney keeps silent about an affair to secure her daughter’s marriage. Mrs. Kearney in “A Mother” was interpreted as a victim of “cancel culture” when she is silenced by more powerful men in part to maintain patriarchal, nationalist norms.

The application of these contemporary neologisms to the reading of a modernist classic is not a cheap party trick to keep our students entertained. Instead, in terms that are recognisable and relevant to their everyday experience, this tactic demonstrates the continuities, and discontinuities, that define how silences work in our culture. In the light of my anecdotal example, I would urge readers to consider how and where the terms of this study, so thoughtfully engaged across its pages, might become part of a larger conversation, one that takes place not only among scholars and writers, trained readers and critics. The volume’s focused attention to one span of history, one national literary tradition, one particular topic elicits a cacophony of insights that have obvious pertinence beyond the academy. The insights here invite all of us to probe more deeply how silence works across the broad sweep of history as well as in our local experiences in the present day. The contributors ask us to consider where silences come from, how they function now, what they might provoke in the future. These interrogations are crucial in a moment when the terms of silence are so complicated and contradictory thanks in part to the features of our digital era. New technologies on offer xii FOREWORD from multinational corporations surveil and monetise our words, but also they grant us access to a stunning array of valuable resources. Platforms like YouTube of TikTok incite unrealistic expectations that undermine mental and physical health, but they also provide a constructive platform for diverse voices. Twitter feeds neoliberalism’s thirst for competitive self-promotion, but it also allows marginalised voices to advocate for themselves, their communities, and their important causes, as witnessed in the digital activism of movements including #MeToo or #WakingThe- Feminists. By showing us through the close analysis of contemporary Irish fiction how better to attend to the unspoken, Narratives of the Unspoken presents us with an important blueprint for parsing complexities such as these in a historical moment when more and more voices are speaking up and being heard.

Paige Reynolds College of the Holy Cross Worcester, MA, USA

Paige Reynolds is Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She has published on the subjects of modernism, drama and performance, and modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge UP, 2007) and editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016), as well as editor (with Eric Falci) of The New Irish Studies and Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020, both published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. Her monograph Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors of the volume would like to acknowledge the support and the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. Research Project INTRUTHS “Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Fiction”. FFI2017-84619-P AEI, ERDF, EU); the European Regional Development Fund and the Spanish Research Agency http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 to publish this volume both in print form and in open access.

M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera wishes to express her gratitude to her hosts at the School of English, Drama and Film of UCD during a sabbatical stay (2018-2019) funded by a scholarship from the Spanish Salvador de Madariaga mobility programme. A special mention goes to Anne Fogarty and Margaret Keller for their generous hospitality, their inspiration, and their encouragement. Thanks also to Lucy Cogan and P.J. Mathews at UCD, to Maureen O’Connor, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Eibhear Walshe at UCC, and to Nessa Cronin and Seán Crosson at NUI Galway, for their invitations to share parts of the research at a number of seminars series. During the initial stages of the research about silence in the Irish context, Sinéad Gleeson, Lorna Shaughnessy, Keith Payne, and Mary O’Donnell kindly provided insightful comments. Special and heartfelt thanks are due to Evelyn Conlon for her thoroughly enjoyable conversations and her reassurance on so many occasions during the time spent in Dublin. The help and support of friends and colleagues Jorge Figueroa Dorrego and Araceli Gonzalez Crespan, at the University of xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Vigo and, very specially, Martin Urdiales Shaw, during the organisation of the 19th AEDEI Conference on “Silence and Inconvenient Truths in Irish Culture and Society” are also gratefully acknowledged. The enthusiasm and engaging feedback from IDAES-UVigo Ph.D. students Iria, Lydia, Mar, and Muriel has been extremely stimulating. The final thank you is to my late father who taught me the value of silence.

José Carregal-Romero is grateful to the following friends and colleagues from Huelva University and “Teoria y Estudios Culturales” research group for their support and feedback: Samuel Neftalí Fernandez Pichel, Beatriz Dominguez Garcia, Auxiliadora Pérez Vides, Rocio Carrasco Carrasco, Pilar Cuder Dominguez, and Mar Gallego Duran. A special thanks goes to co-editor M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera for having introduced me to the complex yet fascinating topic of silence in literature and cultural life in general.

Contents

Introduction: Silences that Speak M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera and José Carregal-Romero and Medicine in Emma Donoghue’s Historical Novels The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars

Marisol Morales-Ladrén

“To Pick Up the Unsaid, and Perhaps Unknown, Wishes”: Reimagining the “True Stories” of the Past in Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky

Index

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Vigo. She is the author of a monograph on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and has been a member of the Editorial Board of European Joyce Studies-Brill since 2010. She is the editor of Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing (Peter Lang, 2023) and the co-editor of Atlantic Communities: Translation, Mobility, Hospitality (Routledge, 2023). She coordinated the State and ERDF funded Research Project “INTRUTHS: Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Literature” and currently is the Principal Investigator of “INTRUTHS 2: Articulations of Individual and Communal Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Irish Writing” PID2020-114776GB-I00 MCIN/AEI.

José Carregal-Romero lectures at the University of Huelva, Spain. His research focuses on the intersections between gender, sexuality, and culture in contemporary Irish literature. He has published widely on the fiction of Colm Tóibín in journals, such as Irish University Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and Estudios Irlandeses. He is the co-editor of Revolutionary Ireland, 1916-2016: Historical Facts & Social Transformations Re-Assessed (2020), and the author of Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices of Irish Fiction (2021).

xvii xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sean Crosson is Associate Professor of Film in the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at University of Galway. His research focuses on Irish cinema and literature, and the relationship between film, the media, and sport. His publications include the monograph Gaelic Games On Film (Cork University Press, 2019), and the co-edited collections Towards 2016: 1916 and Irish Literature, Culture & Society (ISE, Vol. 7) (WVT, 2015), Contemporary Irish Film (Braumuller, 2011) and The Quiet Man .. and beyond (Liffey Press, 2009). He is a past President of EFACIS and current General Editor of Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE) journal.

Elke D’hoker is Professor of English literature at the University of Leuven and Director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies. Recent publications include Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Palgrave, 2016), The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture (edited with Chris Mourant; EUP, 2021), Ethel Colburn Mayne. Selected Stories (EER, 2021), and The Writer’s Torch. Reading Stories from the Bell (edited with Phyllis Boumans and Declan Meade, The Stinging Fly, 2023). She is a member of the editorial board of RISE. Review of Irish Studies and Vice-president of EFACIS.

Asier Altuna-Garcia de Salazar is Senior Lecturer in English and Irish Literatures at the University of Deusto. He was a former Chairperson of AEDEI (Spanish Association for Irish Studies) and a Basque Government postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Irish Studies NUI Galway. He is Managing Editor of Estudios Irlandeses and has been involved in several State funded projects on modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture. His publications focus on Spain and the Basque Country in nineteenth-century Irish writing, transcultural Ireland, Post-Celtic tiger fiction, migration, ageing, and the dysfunctional family. He is the editor of Ireland and Dysfunction: Critical Explorations in Literature and Film (2017).

Marisol Morales-Ladron is full Professor of English at the University of Alcalá. Her publications include the books Breve introducción a la literatura comparada (1999) and Las poéticas de James Joyce y Luis Martin-Santos (2005). She has edited the monographs Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies (2007), Family and Dysfunction in

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Xix

Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film (2016), and has co-edited four other books on feminist criticism and Ireland. Her most recent publication is Deirdre Madden: New Critical Perspectives, edited with Anne Fogarty (2022). She is currently General Editor of the journal Estudios Irlandeses and Head of the research Centre for Irish Studies Alka-Eire.

Thomas O’Grady is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. His writing on Irish literary and cultural matters has been published in numerous scholarly journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Éire-Ireland, Irish University Review, Etudes Irlandaises, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, New Hibernia Review, Joyce Studies Annual, and James Joyce Quarterly.

Eibhear Walshe lectures in the School of English at University College Cork and is Director of Creative Writing. He has published in the area of memoir, literary criticism, and biography, and his books include Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life, (2006), Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde and Ireland, (2012), and A Different Story: The Writings of Colm Toibin, (2013). His childhood memoir, Cissie’s Abattoir, (2009) was broadcast on RTE’s “Book on One”. His novel, The Diary of Mary Travers, (2014), was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award in 2015 and longlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. He was Associate Editor, with Catherine Marshall, of Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, (2016), edited by Fintan O’Toole and shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award. His other novels include The Trumpet Shall Sound (2019) and The Last Day at Bowen’s Court (2020), and he has just completed a biography of Jane Wilde.

Chapter 1

M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera and José Carregal-Romero

Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak studies the complex and multifaceted topic of silence by exploring how it is embedded in language, culture, society and institutions and providing a forum for the discussion of the uses (and abuses) of silence in the context of Irish fiction. The essays compiled here offer in-depth analyses of silence as an aesthetic practice, a key narrative element or a textual strategy which paradoxically speaks of the unspoken nature of many inconvenient hidden truths of Irish society in the work of contemporary fiction writers, such as Donal Ryan, Emma Donoghue, Colm Toibin, Evelyn Conlon, Kevin Barry, Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Claire Keegan, Maeve Kelly, Eibhear Walshe, Emer Martin and Sally Rooney. Among other issues, Narratives of the Unspoken addresses the

M. T. Caneda-Cabrera Faculty of Philology and Translation, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain e-mail: tcaneda@uvigo.es

J. Carregal-Romero (P4) Faculty of Humanities, University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain e-mail: jose.carregal@dfing.uhu.es

© The Author(s) 2023 1 M. T. Caneda-Cabrera and J. Carregal-Romero (eds.), Narratives recovery of silenced voices/stories of the past and their examination in the present; the conspiracies of silence in Catholic Ireland and the uncovering of institutional abuse; the silences surrounding structural oppression (on the basis of gender, class and race) in the Celtic Tiger period, as well as the social disaffection and silencing of vulnerability in today’s post-crash, neoliberal Ireland. The different chapters in this volume examine these multifaceted topics by focusing on the convergence between the poetics and politics of silence and trauma, history, gender, identity, community, migration, from a varied array of perspectives such as social theory, archival and biographical research, memory studies, feminism, gay studies, film studies, genre theory, mobility, translation studies and affect studies. In its treatment of silence in contemporary Irish fiction, Narratives of the Unspoken provides an engaging conversation between the different chapters which share critical frameworks and theoretical notions as they trace relevant continuities between the recent past and the present moment while, at the same time, uncover original topics and deliver new approaches.

For a long time now cultural critics and thinkers have explored the relevance of silence from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics and social and political theory. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflection on the limits of language has been famously summarised with the maxim “what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence” (1974, 74). George Steiner has referred to silence as an alternative form of expression and has claimed that, when words fail, “nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem” (1969, 76). Julia Kristeva has also theorised silence not as a symptom of passivity, but as a place for resistance and transformation through a mode of “silent production” that inhabits speech and has the potential to disrupt the symbolic order (Walker 1998, 76). Susan Sontag, for her part, explains that modern artists have long abandoned the myth of the absoluteness of language, and therefore turn to an aesthetics of silence in their “search to express the inexpressible” (2013, 19). What these thinkers have in common is an appreciation of silence not as a void or absence, but as an active agent in the construction of meaning, permeating speech rather than establishing an oppositional binary relationship with it. In his Tacit Dimension, first published in the 1960s, Michael Polanyi further argued that “we know more than we can tell” (2009, 4), and that is why silence becomes the vehicle for the communication of various forms of “tacit knowing” (9)—such as sensations and intuitions or the effects of taboos and prohibitions—which defy transparent articulation. As several of the essays consider, the notion of “tacit” and “complicit” silence is crucial for many contemporary Irish fiction writers, whose work ultimately denounces the existence of a normative silence deeply embedded in social, religious and cultural practices which have shaped individual behaviours and interpersonal relationships and are woven into the fabric of society and politics in contemporary Ireland.

In her “Cartographies of Silence”, the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote about “the technology of silence” and denounced that in a world where language and naming are equated with power, silence means oppression and violence, “a plan rigorously executed” (1978, 17). As repeatedly highlighted in Narratives of the Unspoken, silence can also be imposed and insidiously produced in order to alienate certain populations and enforce denial of their suffering, equal rights and humanity or, in the worst-case scenario, to annihilate their existence. To sustain the prevailing moral and political regime, public discourse may rely on injurious language, which can conceal, stigmatise and distort the experiences of marginalised groups, themselves deprived of a voice and, therefore, a means of expression and self-understanding. As Pierre Bourdieu (1990) has argued, through processes of selection and suppression of aspects of experience and reality, societies create their own “common-sense world” (51) for which silence becomes fundamental, since “the most successful ideological effects are the ones that have no need of words, but only of laissez-faire and complicitous silence” (133). The scenario described by Bourdieu provides an appropriate context of thought for this volume which consistently addresses how difference and disagreement become backgrounded, negated or vilified for the sake of social cohesion while individuals considered socially transgressive are cast aside and consigned to silence because of the dictates of moral assumptions, religious conventions and social norms. Likewise, several essays draw on Michel Foucault’s approach to silence as a key element that operates within the discourse of power relations. Foucault remarked that “silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions”; he added, though, that this same secrecy may unexpectedly “provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance” (1998, 101). Even when silence works in oppressive contexts, it still retains some subversive potential thanks to those “obscure areas” where discipline and authority can be evaded. Though not always empowering, withdrawal—the non-participation in the norms of the community, a lack of response to injurious language, separateness and avoidance, for example—may, paradoxically, lead to resistance through acts of silence.

In recent decades, cultural critics have transcended the traditional conflation between silence and powerlessness, and have therefore examined its various potentialities in social and political life. As has been remarked, silence has a cultural dimension of its own; we do not simply experience it as a lack of sound, words or voice. Its power resides in how we sense its presence within rituals and ceremonies, social interactions, relationship dynamics and through our communion with the outside world. Everyday metaphors like “soaking in the silence”, “deafening silence” or “deadly silent”, Kris Acheson indicates, demonstrate that “silence produces emotional and physical symptoms in our phenomenal bodies, both when we encounter it and when we ourselves produce it” (2008, 547). Like speech, silence is intersubjective and oftentimes directed towards others, and its functions and implications cannot be understood outside their referential context. As several chapters in Narratives of the Unspoken consider, when imposed on others, silence can be used to malign and subjugate; in other situations, it incites reflection and enables recognition—constructive dialogues, after all, require the silence of listening. Silence, too, may emerge as the most effective “sabotage” against normative discourses that constantly interpellate us and ask us to conform, functioning as “a strategic dismissal of the pressure for explanation” (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017, 369). Because it is hardly reducible to neatly defined categories, classifications and cultural affiliations, silence “can never be fully contained, represented, or comprehended” (Ferguson 2003, 63), and thus cannot be exploited or manipulated in the same way words can be. One aspect to which Narratives of the Unspoken constantly returns is the discussion of the ambiguities and subversiveness of silence and the exploration of how Irish authors articulate notions of the unsayable, the unknown and unknowable about themselves and others, through the exposure of indeterminacies and contradictions inherent in any essentialised constructions of self and society.

In numerous political and social movements, the speech that emerges out of silence has univocally been regarded as having an emancipatory function, as the necessary condition for identity formation, visibility and dissidence. While that is often the case, any type of discourse (political, religious, identitarian) runs the risk of establishing limits of perception, stressing “contrast where there is continuity, homogeneity where there is variation” (Achino-Loeb 2005, 43). Furthermore, in a world where words and images are exploited for profit, certain kinds of excessive speech present in new categories and orthodoxies (such as the insistence on self-assertion and disregard for ethical listening, for instance) consist of “verbal fillers” that operate as the “automatic, repetitive defence against the separation anxieties that silence can represent” (Fiumara 1990, 103). In situations where excessive speech masks emotional truths and/or annuls reciprocity, the desire for silence may offer the possibility to “recogn[ise] and toler[ate] the gap (distance or hiatus) between the self and the others, between language and reality” (Fiumara, 103). Iflanguage carries social values and creates mental structures, hearing is unavoidably affected by our shared codes of significance and relevance. Listening to others is not only fraught with what we fail to perceive or cannot fully understand, but also involves “silencing potential”, when we (intentionally or not) only hear “that which is in our communicative interest” (Achino-Loeb, 46). Like excessive speech, self-interested listening can easily become censorious and frustrate the other’s attempts at communication. As all the individual chapters in Narratives of the Unspoken expose from different perspectives, a more ethical form of listening is required, one that should be attentive to the implications of the silent gestures that accompany the other’s speech, in other words, to what is said and how. Thus, special attention is paid to the interplay between language, silence and listening (i.e. situations where there are sympathetic listeners or where, on the contrary, one’s voice falls on deaf ears) in order to consider how some types of indirection, understatement and reticence can be more eloquent than profuse speech. Ultimately, Narratives of the Unspoken reclaims an unprecedented attentiveness to silence with a view to open up new paths of interpretation.

In the specific context of literature, silence has been examined as both a creative medium and subject matter, an element that foregrounds “the failings of language and the existence of a realm of the unsayable that all of us must acknowledge” (Sim 2007, 134). Language fails and silence acts as “a moving force” (Kenny 2011, 87), for instance, when one confronts inexplicable events, emotional crises and traumas, the fallibility of memory, ambivalent feelings, paralysing fears or the mysteries of the unknown. Either in dialogue or pronounced by a narrator, words can certainly “say more than at first glance they seem to say” (Kenny, 88), when coloured by the silences of pauses and hesitations, reluctance and avoidance, or by the silencing enforced by others. As Thomas O’Grady discusses in his contribution, silence becomes an essential element for the sake of characterisation in Kevin Barry’s fiction. Barry’s protagonists, O’Grady argues, lead lives of “quiet desperation” and are forced to confront not only the limitations of language but also its inadequacy in articulating the emotional complexity of their private traumas. The essay explores how driven by its own narrative inner workings of character, setting and situation, Kevin Barry’s fiction speaks to issues involving Irish males that resonate beyond its pages. For O’Grady it is not accidental that Barry’s male characters are afflicted by silence—whether absolute or relative—and, thus, defined through experiences of loneliness, isolation, low self-esteem and, more importantly, the inability to articulate, either for themselves or for others. As the chapter discusses, Barry’s writing is grounded in the social landscapes of contemporary Ireland and constitutes a virtual catalogue of quiet afflictions suffered by Irish males also recurrent in the work of other contemporary writers.

Silence evokes the tensions between revelation and concealment, draws attention to the chasm between the characters’ private and social selves, and allows the scene to “speak” for itself through allusion and symbolism. Through narrative gaps and fragmentation, as well as variations in tone, distance and perspective, silence may also contribute to a controlled release of information for heightened expressive force. Therefore, whereas silence in fiction is a matter of form, style and content, it does usually serve as a “vehicle for ethical, political, metaphysical, religious or other sorts of views or ideas, states of being, or states of affairs” (Khatchadourian 2015, 88). Because it gains its significance from what surrounds it, Steven L. Bindeman calls silence an “indirect form of discourse” (2017, 3), and identifies two modalities: disruptive and healing silences. If disruptive silence “tears apart the linguistic fabric that unites self and world”, healing silence grows from this disruption in order to “restore this unity” (Bindeman, 4). This regained sense of unity can only become accomplished when subjects speak out from an experience of silence that has granted them access to new spheres of consciousness.

Narratives of the Unspoken examines the wide diversity of themes and the many functions of silence in contemporary Irish fiction, from the depiction of social and personal crises to the denunciation of taboos and injustice and from the envisaging of positive change to the imaginative construction of alternative visions of society, history and culture. To unpack the variety and complexity of themes is precisely the major concern of Elke D’hoker’s chapter on “The Irish Short Story and the

Aesthetics of Silence”. D’hoker, who warns against a tempting yet reductive identification between the issue of silence in contemporary Ireland and the formal characteristics of omission, compression and selection, typical of the short story, provides an exhaustive overview of thematic variations—trauma, tyranny, taboo, secret, respect and communion—and includes a broad selection of stories by Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, Claire Keegan and Maeve Kelly, as well as references to authors, such as John McGahern, Mary Dorcey, Anne Enright, Lucy Caldwell or Claire Louise Bennett among others. The chapter specifically explores renewed uses of silence beyond the notion of “breaking silence” as reflected in stories that typically articulate trauma and taboo or give voice to victims of tyranny. Thus, as D’hoker remarks, there is an increasing number of contemporary short stories in which silence speaks as a form respect, privacy and, in the context of a growing environmental awareness, a form of communion with the non-vocal natural world.