One of the most important strands in modern sovereignty theory is concerned with the notion of ‘the exception’ as the basis for the establishment of self-determination and the constitution of political agency. Especially due to its prominence in political theory debates in the last decades, this strand can be identified as delineated between two opposing poles. On the one hand, in the early twentieth century, conservative theorist Carl Schmitt conceived of the exception to describe the mechanism that legitimizes the ruling sovereign as the subject capable of making decisions as exceptions to the order of the law. The exception, in Schmitt’s formulation, is the mechanism that authorises the figure of the sovereign to dictate the terms according to which political life must function. As Schmitt puts it in the context of liberal constitutional governance, ‘Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, [the sovereign] nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety’ (Schmitt Reference Schmitt and Schwab1985, 7). On the other hand, Giorgio Agamben reprised Schmitt’s thesis in the late twentieth century to make an antithetical argument. Agamben’s notion of the exception describes not the exclusive locus of an all-powerful figure but the embodiment of a minimum empowerment, or what he calls ‘bare life’. Revealing the paradoxically disciplinary restrictions on life inherent to the basic functioning of autonomy, ‘the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power’ (Agamben Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998, 6). For Agamben, then, the exception designates a precarious sovereignty, an irreducible autonomy that reveals the enduring yet vulnerable position of those deprived of the most basic rights by the order of the law.
Albeit pursuing ideologically opposite ends, Schmitt and Agamben’s configurations of the exception denote a generative understanding of sovereignty. Sovereignty results in both cases in a form of subjectivation that binds the individual with the polity and establishes, either via an absolutist absorption of power or a minimal and liminal autonomy, a connection with the rest of the members of said polity. As a consequence, one key aspect that this line of thoughtFootnote 1 fails to account for is the way in which sovereignty, even when manifesting as exceptional, takes shape as a detachment of the individual from the polity. This form of sovereignty, which will be called here ‘negative sovereignty’, has in common with Agamben’s theorisation an investment in the political well-being of the most vulnerable, yet it differs from it in radical ways. Negative sovereignty, as this essay seeks to show, is a self-contradicting operation that can only be found in a political and historical no man’s land and leads to no positive outcome. This, however, must not be understood as political suicide; instead, negative sovereignty names a foreclosed potentiality that reveals the fault-lines of the constitution of autonomy as delineated by the tensions between affiliation, hegemony, and difference. This essay, thus, aims to explore the idea of sovereignty in its negative configuration – that is, against the grain – by casting it not as the ultimate locus of a generative kind of political agency but as a radical, self-effacing gesture.
One of the most prominent examples of negative sovereignty can be seen operating in the mesh of agonistic relationshipsFootnote 2 that drive forward national self-determination movements. National sovereignty manifests itself as an affirmation, yet its outcome is not attained via the exception to the hegemonic rule but through the development of an autonomy that emanates from the inside. This is indeed a key aspect of most modern anti-colonial independence movements. As theorist of the postcolonial nation Partha Chatterjee has argued, anti-colonial nationalism ‘creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its own political battle with the imperial power’ and it is therefore possible to claim that ‘the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power’ (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993, 6). A newly established sovereignty, thus, finds its roots in a disturbance of the hegemonic order within the colony that gains, in time, enough momentum to provoke the emancipation of its colonised people by effectively rejecting colonial rule. This is precisely what occurred across the territories formerly colonized by European powers, from the liberation of current-day Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama under the leadership of Simón Bolívar in the nineteenth century, to the independence of Algeria after the 1954–1962 war against the French.
While serving the cause of independence, such an emancipatory process is beset with a series of problems, two of which are critical for the purposes of the argument developed in this article. First, and as much anti- and postcolonial theory has contended, the new national sovereignty must be articulated critically and diligently so that it does not become a self-reproductive emulation of the colonial rule that it resists.Footnote 3 Certainly, the establishment of a new hegemony is in itself the only way in which self-governance can be substantiated. However, this presents important complications as the inclusion of the members of a community under the auspices of a common identity also means the unavoidable exclusion of those who do not, cannot, or will not belong. Second, while an inchoate, pre-independence sovereign ethos must be accounted for in the build-up to the eventual end of colonial rule, there is a risk in folding all pro-independence resisting stirrings, modes, and aspirations into a neat narrative that culminates with a declaration of emancipation. Implying a causal link between all the unconnected moments of resistance and eventual independence obscures the complexities of a process that is often more turbulent than the historical record will likely show in retrospect.
A novel such as Sebastian Barry’s 2005 A Long Long Way illustrates in vivid ways how the idea of negative sovereignty can be a useful theoretical lens to analyse the ramifications of these two major problems. The novel articulates the pitfalls of understanding sovereign self-determination teleologically and as reified exclusively by the eventual establishment of a new nation. It does so, as this article aims to prove, by imagining a form of political agency that gradually strays away from the centre of the historical narrative that describes the proclamation of the Republic of Ireland’s national independence a century ago. What follows, thus, will first discuss the implications of negative sovereignty in relation to Barry’s aesthetic and political intervention in the genre of historical fiction. Then, it will move on to consider the ways in which queer theory offers a productive theoretical approach to investigate Ireland’s sovereignty against its grain. Finally, it will show how the protagonist of A Long Long Way embodies negative sovereignty through the textual analysis of several passages from the novel.
Negative Sovereignty and the Para-Historical Novel
As has been mentioned, by analysing Barry’s novel, the current investigation is concerned with two overlapping issues. On the one hand it seeks to elucidate the work of negative sovereignty in connection with the Irish independence movement of the first half of the twentieth century. On the other, it aims to reflect on its investment in challenging the larger sovereign apparatus of the British Empire and its subtending English nationalist framework. Yet Barry’s novel is not primarily interested in the political process that culminated in the establishment of the Irish Republic in 1922, as traced by the official historical narrative, but with Ireland’s role in the First World War.
The novel follows the life of Willie Dunne, a young Dubliner born into a Catholic loyalist family who volunteers to join the British imperial army, documenting his coming of age as the war breaks out, his deployments to continental Europe and intervening furloughs in Dublin, and the circumstances surrounding the conflict, including the 1916 Easter Rising. The central narrative tension of the novel is Willie’s involvement in the war, which is delineated by his initial faith in Britain’s participation in the name of justice and his detachment from his homeland toward the end of the conflict, despite his newfound conviction that Ireland must seek independence from Britain. This trajectory is crucially doubled, as will be further shown, by Willie’s almost idyllic relationship with his father, a bond that is severely affected by their gradual estrangement as a result of their confronted national allegiances. This makes A Long Long Way a historical novel of a very particular order.Footnote 4
Critics have found fault with Barry’s treatment of Irish history, often classifying him as a revisionist author.Footnote 5 This may be the case if his writing is measured directly and strictly against Ireland’s official historical record, expecting a correlative fictional treatment that reflects the latter’s distribution of agents, causes, and effects. However, A Long Long Way suggests that Barry is not interested in this kind of approach. The clear politico-aesthetic merit of the novel lies in the ways it allows readers to imagine what the official historical narrative conceals and not what it exhibits prominently.Footnote 6 As Fintan O’Toole (Reference O’Toole and Barry1997, vii) has argued, Barry’s writing is concerned with ‘history’s leftovers, men and women discarded by their times […] misfits, anomalies, outlanders’. This is not to say that the political scope of Barry’s fiction is small or that it opens the floodgates for a relativistic rush that seeks to drown Ireland’s history as we know it with an array of alternative versions. Rather, Barry’s engagement with history is, to borrow Edward Said’s term, ‘contrapuntal’; that is, it is a kind of engagement that, with ‘a simultaneous awareness’, encompasses both the official history and ‘those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’ (Said Reference Said1993, 51). In this sense, the novel could be called a ‘para-historical’ reflection that can only occur on the obverse of the history that critics charge Barry with glossing over.Footnote 7 While framed within a decisive event that would define the course of Irish history,Footnote 8 it nonetheless foregrounds certain aspects that are overshadowed precisely by its historical prominence.
As a para-historical novel, then, A Long Long Way allegorises a sovereignty that exceeds the confines of national identity as it is ‘imagined’ in the context of Ireland’s anti-imperial struggle for independence in the first half of the twentieth century. As Benedict Anderson has persuasively shown, a nation’s self-identification as such is contingent on the ability of its inhabitants to imagine themselves and their fellow country people as members of the same homeland (Anderson Reference Anderson1983). By approaching the war from Willie’s point of view, then, Barry explores how the kind of sovereignty examined here is discarded as an unimaginable and fruitless political subjectivity. This is evinced in Willie’s trajectory throughout the novel. The more time he spends in the battlefield, the more disconnected he becomes from the ongoing disputes over whether Ireland must be an autonomous nation. As a result, Willie struggles to imagine himself as a member of the fatherland to which he once felt intimately attached. A passage in the middle of the novel that reflects Willie’s contemplation on the war and his participation in it reveals this very sentiment. As the narrator puts it: ‘the distance between the site of war and the site of home was a long one and widening. Not the ordinary pragmatic miles, but some other, more mysterious measure of distance’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 190). Sovereignty, thus, registers in the novel as something other than an incipient proto-nationalist sentiment. Instead, it operates as the equivalent of the mathematical value of a negative number: the expression of a value that, while amounting to something less than nothing, nonetheless has intrinsic and irrefutable meaning. It is this negative sovereign sum that Willie represents as a para-historical agent, and one that can be better understood by attending to the gender relations that animate the novel’s reflection of this moment in Ireland’s history.
Masculinity, Queerness and the Nation
The political investment of the novel and the locus for the articulation of negative sovereignty reside in the alternative masculinity enacted by Willie. Many critics have pointed out that the evolution of the idea of nationalism is intimately connected to the development of dominant discourses and practices of masculinity. As George L. Mosse (Reference Mosse1996, 6) has argued, ‘Nationalism, a movement which began and evolved parallel to modern masculinity, will play an important role as such an educator, for it adopted the masculine stereotype as one means of self-representation’. From a related perspective, Joane Nagel has suggested that
By definition, nationalism is political and closely linked to the state and its institutions. Like the military, most state institutions have been historically and remain dominated by men. It is therefore no surprise that the culture and ideology of hegemonic masculinity go hand in hand with the culture and ideology of hegemonic nationalism. (Nagel Reference Nagel1998, 248–249)
The foundational discourses of masculinity and nationalism must not, therefore, be understood as parallel as much as mutually constitutive. Indeed, the link between nationalism and masculinity has a long history and has been, as Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1983, 12–22) reminds us, essential for the understanding of the nation in dynastic terms. Reified by prevalent notions of patriotism and celebrations of the fatherland, the perpetuation of men as recipients of the power to govern (be it as kings, as fathers, or even as democratically elected leaders in the still gender-imbalanced political environment of our time) has secured their position at the top of the ruling hierarchy of many nations.Footnote 9
It is this connection that Barry’s novel upends. Willie interrupts the patriarchal and nationalist foundations of both the Englishness shoring up the imperial apparatus from which Ireland would eventually extricate itself and the future Irish nation that he does not live to see. A hasty analysis of A Long Long Way might locate this interruption in its protagonist’s protracted experiences on the battleground and the displacement of heteronormative sexuality that many critics have explored. As Paul Fussell has put it,
Given [the] association between war and sex, and given the deprivation and loneliness and alienation characteristic of the soldier’s experience – given, that is, his need for affection in a largely womanless world – we will not be surprised to find both the actuality and the recall of front-line experience replete with what we can call the homoerotic. (Fussell Reference Fussell1975, 272)
This is, indeed, one of the most common aspects in a great deal of literature about and emerging from the Great War, including the work of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon.Footnote 10
Yet more careful analysis reveals how Willie plays a more important role than personifying the experience of thousands of young soldiers or paying tribute to the explorations of masculinity in First World War literature.Footnote 11 While nodding to the deviations in the dominant heteronormative codes exhibited most notably by the war poets, Barry instils in Willie’s masculinity an important ‘queering’ power. This power is important because it interrupts what Bonnie Mann has called in another, also imperial context – i.e. American global exceptionalism in the twenty-first century – the operation of ‘sovereign masculinity’ (Mann Reference Mann2014). Willie is described here as a queering agent not because he comes out or engages in homosexual relations. In fact, Barry makes a particular effort to ensure that, for the entirety of the novel, he behaves according to the heterosexual expectations of the time. Willie predictably falls in love with Gretta, a young woman of conventional, angelic beauty, who promises to marry him after the war. He also engages in a sexual encounter with a prostitute during the war. His relationships with his fellow soldiers and commanding officers, furthermore, are never outside heteronormative protocol and are frequently symbolised via the rhetoric of the patriarchal family structure: officers are like fathers to him, and he and his fellow soldiers frequently regard one another as brothers. Not even the intimacy of the trenches, often identified as the locus of the homoerotic and homosexual tropes present in so much First World War literature, encourages expressions of homosexual desire, temporary as they might be. Willie’s queering power lies in his failure to fulfil the hetero-patriarchal expectations placed on him as a young soldier destined to fight the evils haunting Europe – while displaying hypermasculine variations of courage and fearlessness – and to become a literal founding father of Ireland’s national identity.
In this sense, Willie represents the kind of sovereign principle running at the centre of Lee Edelman’s (Reference Edelman2004) compelling study of queer politics, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman energetically mounts an onto-political theory that is governed by what he identifies as the non-reproductive, dissenting nature of queerness. He argues against the ‘reproductive futurism’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 2) incarnated by the heterosexual couple, which results in the veneration of the child as the embodiment of ‘the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 11). Queerness, Edelman maintains,
figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that follows from reading that figure literally […]. [Q]ueerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting in the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure. (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 3)
This theoretical deployment,Footnote 12 thus, illuminates in compelling ways Willie’s function in the national and gendered entanglements that give shape to the disputes over sovereignty at the centre of the novel. Willie’s queering potentiality can, indeed, be read as ‘figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming, in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles meaning with being in a fantasy of completion’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 114; emphasis in original). As will be shown through a closer textual analysis of the novel, Willie interrupts the self-reproductive, futurist principle undergirding national sovereignty as conceived by either side of the Anglo-Irish clash. As a result, the illegible negative sovereignty that he embodies is recast as a source of resistance that, in its self-discounting, takes count of those who do not play a (re)productive role. This occurs in the novel on a number of levels, although it is best observed through the prism of the relationship between Willie and his father. These two figures stand as Ireland’s alignment with the British Empire and a successive yet impossible future that emphatically does not herald the sovereignty of an independent nationhood.
Disrupting Patriarchy
Bearing these ideas in mind, Willie’s construction as a queering agent is evident from the beginning of his life. The novel’s opening sets the tone for such a reading: Willie ‘was born in the dying days’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 3). While he is like ‘a scrap of a song nonetheless, a point of light in the sleety darkness, a beginning’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 4), Willie soon contravenes the manly vitality implied in the kind of self-reproductive patriarchal sovereignty mentioned above. He ‘was a little baby and would be always a little boy […] like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot through him, provisional and bare’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 3). Willie can only aspire to be the harbinger of a new century in which he, like ‘all those million boys in all their humours’, are to be ‘milled by the mill-stones of a coming war’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 4). From the very beginning of the novel, then, Willie is conspicuous for being at odds with the foundational masculinity that is expected of the next generation of Irish men, who are meant to participate in bringing peace to the continent and even resolution to their homeland’s troubles.
It is in this context that the relationship between Willie and his father augurs the emergence of a negative sovereignty resulting from the clash between the virility and colonial legacy upon which the patriarchal national imagination rests and the birth of a new Irish national identity resulting from the imminent Irish independence. The chief of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Willie’s father is first introduced as the object of his son’s admiration and the epitome of a venerable patriarchal sovereignty, as a visit to the city from George V, ‘the King of Ireland’, reveals:
His father, though only an inspector, was put on a big white horse so that the King could see him all the better. His father on that horse looked much finer than any King, who after all had to stand on his polished shoes. Like God Himself, or the best man in God’s kingdom. (Barry Reference Barry2006, 4–5)
With this early description, the patriarchal terms on which the relationship between the two men will first thrive and then deteriorate are set. By placing the father heroically at the same level as the King and equating him to God in Willie’s eyes, Barry dramatizes the high expectations placed on Willie at a very early age while prefiguring the clash that results from his failure to meet them.
As Willie grows up, both men become united on more equal terms by a very strong familial bond in a household in which other women (Willie’s sisters) play only a secondary role. This relationship is marked by the first signs of a masculinity that runs against the grain of the heroic narrative which begets strong men capable of leading the nation. In one significant early instance, the narrative reveals Willie and his father’s habit ‘to read the paper together in the evening and comment on the various items, almost like a married couple’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 15). Filling the gap left by Willie’s mother, who dies giving birth to one of Willie’s sisters, Willie embodies the negation of nationalism’s reproductive futurism in this momentary re-assignation of roles. The symbolic weight of this rather ‘queer’ bond is doubled by the failing course of Willie’s heterosexual – although unconsummated – love affair with Gretta. Early on, Willie becomes infatuated with the young woman. After pursuing her for some time, she finally promises to marry him, although only after he comes back from the war. The prospect of a life together temporarily counteracts the violence that the conflict inflicts upon normal life by interpellating Willie as a potential patriarchal figure. However, after hearing about Willie’s sexual intercourse with a prostitute in the French town of Amiens, Gretta breaks off the engagement and later has a child with another man, further impeding Willie from fulfilling his function as future husband and father. Willie’s masculinity, as a result, continues to prove inadequate according to the model for a patriarchal formulation of Irish national sovereignty.
Nevertheless, if a gap begins to appear between a hopeful father and a son who fails to become the kind of man the former expects, the war seems to offer an opportunity to bridge it. Willie fails to follow his father’s footsteps as his short height prevents him from joining the police force. Thus, he finds in the royal army a response to measure up to his father’s high expectations. Initially, this gesture brings father and son closer together. Yet the narrator’s description of Willie’s war experiences gradually gives the lie to the supposed heroism inherent in joining up to defend Belgium’s national sovereignty while, simultaneously, rendering Willie’s identification with Ireland increasingly untenable. As a consequence, the war widens – instead of closing – the gap that keeps them apart. While in the army, Willie finds momentary solace for his masculine inadequacies. In his first letter to his father from the training grounds in England, for instance, he hopes that ‘we will be finished men by Christmas’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 16). On his way to France, further, he realises that ‘[h]e could think of only one word to describe everything, bloody manhood at last’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 21). And, in anticipation of the war, he senses the blood rushing through his veins with ‘a strange force’ that makes his muscles feel ‘like wraps of prime meat to make a butcher happy’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 23). These moments exemplify how the war appears to Willie as the perfect opportunity to adjust his masculinity according to the more traditional and ‘manly’ standards of the time and dispel at once his inadequacy, which he can attribute for now to his age and not an abnormal manifestation of his gendered self.
The realities of the war, though, inhibit this initial bravado and reinstall Willie’s status as a ‘queer’ figure. He is suddenly assailed by ‘a hand of fear dipp[ing] into his stomach’, while the first time in the trenches ‘he felt small enough’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 24). Later, a gas attack in Flanders leaves him ‘want[ing] his sergeant and his captain and his mates the way a baby wants its home’ (reducing the virile man to its infant, undeveloped form) before walking ‘[l]ike an old man’ – now turning the man into a decayed, obsolete version of himself – to ‘stand stupidly’ by his dead captain’s body (Barry Reference Barry2006, 49, 50). Simultaneously, Willie’s masculinity develops in the trenches along with a growing dissenting position in favour of the nationalist movement back home. The longer Willie experiences the war, thus, the clearer the paradox of having enlisted in Britain’s imperial army while fighting for Belgium’s freedom appears to him. This is described early in the novel. When he is on the battleground, the narrator depicts how ‘[h]e had hardly a true idea who he was […] what he was thinking, where he was, what nation he belonged to, what language he spoke’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 35). Therefore, while threatened by the ferocity of the war, Willie ironically becomes a man free from the pressures of the hegemonic masculine identity symbolised by his father. Only an intimate and existential attachment with fellow Irish soldiers, of whom there are fewer and fewer as the war grinds on, will allow him to remain linked to a recognizable national identity. This national affiliation, nevertheless, is markedly disconnected from the early pro-independence movement that begins to take place in Ireland, placing him in a political no man’s land. Soon, this ominous sense of detachment also drives a wedge into the bond between him and his progenitor.
The first time Willie is home on leave, both Willie and his father seek to reinforce their relationship, which has been weakened by their time apart. This effort culminates in the reluctant father’s ritualised acceptance of his son’s manhood – despite its limitations – while bathing him: ‘So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath, as indeed Willie’s mother had done a thousand times while Willie was a boy’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 74). After drying him, he makes Willie wear ‘a pair of long-johns of his father’s’ and
then, when he was all shipshape, his father put his big arms around him, and held him close to him for a few moments, like an actor on the stage.
It was not a thing you would see in real life anyway, and there was a faraway look on his father’s face, like it was all years ago and maybe they were still in Dalkey and he was a little lad. (Barry Reference Barry2006, 74)
This scene works as the last iteration of the patriarchal system that both father and son try to honour one more time: ‘he was a soldier now of some nineteen years and for all that he was glad of his father’s arms around him, strange as it was, strange and comforting as it was’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 75). More than a matter of age, Willie’s final re-enacting of his role as the old man’s son in this moment of respite before he returns to the war signals the advent of a sovereign masculinity destined to break away from the patriarchal nationalism that the father represents.
With his father’s approval, Willie goes back to the front to develop into a fully-grown man. At the same time, the European conflict begins to show signs of becoming a political battleground for Ireland’s dispute over its own sovereignty. Barry reflects this symbolically by throwing father and son head-first into one of the most volatile moments in the history of the Irish question, an experience that will cause an irreconcilable clash between them. Shortly after being deployed, Willie’s battalion is sent to Dublin to repel the historical 1916 Easter Rising, in which a number of pro-independence militants are executed by both the police led by his father and the British army. This episode exacerbates Willie’s doubts about Ireland’s place within the structures of the Empire and the implications of his role as a soldier in its army. At first, his national sympathies are not entirely aligned with the independence movement: ‘Willie thought of what those fucking men were doing in Dublin and he cursed back at them’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 110). Yet his return back to the front is marked by the recurring memory of a rebel who dies at his feet during the Rising. This causes Willie’s position to become increasingly at odds with the chief of police, who he nevertheless continues to praise both for his patriotism and his fatherly attributes. As he states in one of his letters: ‘There is not a man in Ireland that has served Ireland better than you. […] Mark my words, you have brought us through like a proper father’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 105). While Willie’s compliments might seem to denote his desire to measure up to his father’s achievements and stature as a notable Dublin man, the deference in his words combined with a celebration of the man’s past achievement as a parent underscore Willie’s later failure to embody the kind of masculinity that his father represents. At this point, the disconnection is irreparable.
Thus, as the war intensifies the soldier’s detachment from his homeland, Willie has no alternative but to ground himself in a fraternal bond with the men in his battalion. In one of his last letters to his father, he celebrates them by appealing to a common Irishness that supersedes the political turmoil his father is charged with containing: ‘Maybe at home some of the lads might be getting into trouble with you and your men! Here I have to say they make fine soldiers. Nothing is too hard for them […] They are wonderful lads’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 135). This praise upsets Willie’s father so much that he stops writing letters to his son. The rupture in their relationship is imminent, although Willie is not very clear about what exactly is causing his father’s silence. He continues to send letters, yet he cannot help worsening the friction between them by telling him, among other things, about the unfair treatment given to Jesse Kirwan, a soldier who ends up court-martialled and hanged due to his vocal sympathy with the Dublin rebels. Willie’s disquiet becomes more and more trying, especially because he cannot entirely tell where he stands regarding Ireland’s role in relation to the British Empire as he denounces the treatment given to his fellow soldier. One of the only few points of certainty, tellingly enough, is that it is compounding the clash with his father: ‘Even writing his last letter he had had a funny feeling in his water that he was getting at things he shouldn’t be trying to get at in the company of his father, as it were’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 190). Willie’s anxious anticipation of his father’s response is a reminder of both the parent’s authoritative presence and how the chasm created by the war highlights how his masculinity can no longer be formed along traditional patriarchal lines.
As the novel progresses towards its end with scenes dominated by Willie’s fear for his own life and the often-gruesome deaths of his friends, the war becomes for him a historico-political no-man’s land, leaving him ‘between [his] own countrymen deriding [him] for being in the army, and the army deriding [him] for [his] own slaughter’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 281). Willie’s disconnection from his country is mirrored by his estrangement from his father, who, during Willie’s second furlough home, shows a mixture of stoicism, reticence, and vulnerability in the presence of ‘a man of five foot six who had seen a thousand deaths’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 246). One last opportunity nonetheless presents itself for the soldier to salvage their bond. Upon return to the front for the last time, Willie is caught up in a German bomb attack and is sent to a hospital in England to be treated for severe shell shock, where he praises his father’s courage and strength as a single parent in his last letter:
I was lying there thinking how it might have been, two young girls and a boy and a baby girl into the bargain. So how did you manage all that? It was a wonderful thing to do, to hold us to you, and make all those teas, Papa, and find time to play with us, and when you did give out it was for a good reason. (Barry Reference Barry2006, 278)
During this traumatic period, thoughts about his father’s role as parent form the last thread that connects Willie to Ireland, given that ‘he knew that he had no country now’, while ‘all sorts of Irelands were no more, and he didn’t know what Ireland was behind him now, but they would not let him be a citizen’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 286). Both national and patriarchal connections are irretrievably lost. Politically, Willie can only be described as a figure isolated from any available discourse to articulate his identity both as an Irish citizen and as a man.
Willie’s loss of a concrete Irish identity that affiliates him in any real way to the current events at home is finally actualised by his death in the trenches. While ‘the Irish Convention […] had failed’ and Home Rule ‘was a dead duck’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 274), as an officer tells him, his uncertainty about where he belongs is poignantly counterbalanced by his certitude ‘that it was just that he was a man with bits of himself broken’ (Barry Reference Barry2006, 282). A broken masculinity with no ties to Ireland is what the war has left to annihilate, inaugurating a negative sovereignty that, to echo Edelman, operates as ‘a persistent negation that offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any promise of a future’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 48). As an emblem of a future Ireland destined to be absent from the history books, Willie’s death on the front counts for less than nothing. His father’s attempt to reinstate relations between them, in turn, is expressed only too late. In his first letter since their falling-out, which is returned to him with Willie’s few possessions, the father exhorts his son to
forgive an old man for being stuck in other days. How I love you, Willie, and what a good son you are. How did you go out to fight for Europe as you said, and how brave you are to be there. And if it was bad here these days how bad was it out in Belgium? No one knows but you, Willie. I had no right to be cross with you. Will you forgive me, Willie? I must always as far as lies in my power look after you all though you are in your prime now and maybe I am not the man I was in those old days. (Barry Reference Barry2006, 291)
The words of a hopeful father ready to give way to the next generation of men are left echoing into the unbridgeable gap that the war and Home Rule have opened between him and his son. Literally nothing remains as the old man’s legacy. A generation of men ‘in their prime’ meant to become the new fathers of the nation is erased and, with them, the patriarchal lineage that has sustained it. Willie’s father’s last attempt to rescue a futurism that pursues, to return to Edelman’s ideas, ‘generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness of turning back time to assure repetition’, fails to materialise, and so does a new Irish identity modelled after the reproductive sovereignty that he represents (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 60). Ultimately, this episode suggests that, whether as part of the Empire or independent from it, whatever future awaits Ireland cannot be prefigured in this generational relay.
Projections of Negative Sovereignty
As has been suggested in the opening of this article, Willie’s symbolic figure can only be understood outside of the historical narrative that connects Ireland’s colonial relationship with the British Empire and its subsequent independence. Even though the question of Irish self-determination would eventually be (at least partially) resolved with the establishment of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland years later, Willie’s misalignment with the confronted loyalist and Home Rule discourses deprives him of a place in that history. The value in Barry’s novel, thus, lies in its attempt to flesh out the intervention that this figure performs in the story of Ireland’s turbulent course to attain sovereignty. As Samuel Hynes (Reference Hynes1992) has argued, the Great War was an ‘imaginative event’ that ‘altered the ways in which men and women thought not only about the war but about the world, and about culture and its expressions’, while the change it caused in the status quo ‘was so vast and so abrupt as to make the years after the war seem discontinuous from the years before’. The war caused, Hynes concludes, a ‘radical discontinuity’ (Hynes Reference Hynes1992, xi–xii; emphasis in original). This article has thus sought to show how Willie, enacting a queering of the masculine dimensions attendant to the construction of Ireland’s national identity, illustrates such a discontinuity. Yet this disruption is not the kind of affair that pushes history forward. Willie’s failure to be the man that he is demanded to be – not least by his father – is, furthermore, not an unsuccessful attempt to stand for a coming Irish nationalism. Rather, it reveals the continuities between the dominant English imperial nationalism and a possible anti-colonial Irish sovereignty that operates in its stead. This is what renders Willie’s sovereignty a negative attribute that nevertheless holds crucial political value.
The reading of A Long Long Way proposed in this article has demonstrated two things. First, Willie Dunne’s journey through the Belgian and French trenches doubles as a nuanced account of the disasters of the Great War and a reflection on what remains in the margins of the historical narrative of the Irish question. Increasingly detached from his homeland, Willie allegorises, through his collision with his father’s national allegiance, the inevitable interruption of a patriarchal national and imperial discourse dominated by the figure of King George V. His mundane existence in the trenches during the last stages of the war, further, precludes a teleological interpretation that casts him as a martyr or even a harbinger of a new Irish nationalist discourse, operating against the grain of Ireland’s historical narrative of emancipation. The second point is concerned with the novel’s larger political preoccupations. Willie’s negative sovereignty throws light onto the constitution of certain forms of political agency that do not register historically. Beyond its primary engagement with the early difficult stages of Ireland’s eventual self-governance, A Long Long Way is also a call for the continuous reassessment of extant understandings of political sovereignty. Looking at the obverse of history – that is, at the kinds of para-historical moments that the novel imagines – allows us to expose the blind spots in the purview of that which we call ‘politics’. If playing a meaningful political role is, among other things, to be counted, reading Barry may help us discern the insufficiencies that assail current efforts to re-energise democratic representation.
In memorialising those who fall off the edge of history, A Long Long Way reveals a fundamental difference in understanding sovereignty as the legitimating site for the thriving of the nation and its conception as an attempt to establish a political autonomy that is productive even when it is expressed through a self-negation. In deploying Edelman’s critique of ‘reproductive futurism’, thus, this article has provided an analysis aiming to investigate ‘the “other” side of politics: the “side” where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the “side” outside of all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurism’s good’ (Edelman Reference Edelman2004, 7). In other words, in illustrating the idea of what has been called here ‘negative sovereignty’, the novel gives a name to those whose relevance is shrouded – and therefore blotted out – by the narrative cloak of history. Complicating the dictum that history is written by the victors, it gives a name to the losers among the victors in the story of Ireland’s independence. While aligned with the latter, Willie’s political position is nonetheless developed on that other side where the official historical narrative cannot reach. Ultimately, Willie’s queering of the hegemonic masculine tenets at the core of Ireland’s national sovereignty provides an important critique that exposes the crucial political interstices in disputes such as his homeland’s struggle for self-governance, while demonstrating their operation as paradoxical yet historically logical phenomena.
About the Author
Juan Meneses is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte – where he teaches courses on Anglophone and global literature, as well as visual studies – and a translator. He has published work in periodicals such as Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and translations in The Massachusetts Review of Books and West Branch. He is the author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent (2019).
