l Performing the past: material culture and the dialogical museum

Performing the past: material culture and the dialogical museum

LUKE GIBBONS

1. This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, Museums &Memory: Challenging Histories on 22nd February 2014, Waterford 2. Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 92. 3 Bailyn, B. (1994) On the Teaching and Writing of History. University of New England, Hanover, 23.

Introduction1

“What we could call the psychoanalytic truth, or the truth of performance, cannot be captured in historical facts. More specifically, the truth of trauma … is lost even in the most astounding statistics.”

kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition2

When Bernard Bailyn, perhaps the most eminent American historian of his generation, was asked on one occasion about his ‘recommended reading’ in history, his choice may have come as a surprise to many: there is a book about Irish history that I have recommended to any number of students, a memoir by David Thomson called Woodbrook –which is the name of an estate in Ireland where he, as an Oxford history student, came to tutor a young girl and fell in love with both the girl and Ireland. It is a memoir of a love affair, but at the same time, because Thomson is a historian, a commentary on Irish history. I think it is a remarkable book, a romantic tale and historically imaginative and interesting. So, when I talk about the way in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish history telescopes into contemporary problems, I tell students to read Thomson’s Woodbrook. 3

It is interesting to note the terms of Bailyn’s recommendation of Thomson’s remarkable book: enthusiasm, personal involvement both intellectually and emotionally, and not least, the imaginative power to bring the past into dialogue with the present. yet Woodbrook is far from being a conventional historical text – some chapters have footnotes appropriate to social history, but the formal shifts in narrative bring it closer to a memoir, diary, or even the kind of fiction associated with Proust, joyce or (Thomson’s contemporary and neighbour), john McGahern. What comes across from Woodbrook is not just information, data, or facts, as positivist historical method would have it, but the lived textures of the past as it impinges upon the present (the book was written almost forty years after the events).

4. Russell, B. (1912) The Problems of Philosophy, Ch. 5. Oxford University Press. 5. For a concise introduction to theories of performativity, see Loxley, J. (2007) Performativity. Routledge, London. 6. Ginzburg, C. (1993) Microhistory: two of three things I know about it. Critical Inquiry, 20 (Autumn 1993): 1035.

The challenges of modern forms of remembrance

It is these forms of remembrance that pose a challenge for the modern museum, all the more so as in an age of new social media and digital technologies, the emphasis is increasingly on information, algorithms and impersonal connectivity. But evoking the ambience of a bygone era is not solely a matter of information: it is closer to knowledge of someone than knowledge about them – to what Bertrand Russell famously described as knowledge by acquaintance as against knowledge by description. 4 knowledge about, knowledge by description, is concerned with content, and can be enumerated, tabulated and quantified: it lends itself to empirical research and to the detachment of historical method or legal evidence. But knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge of, is bound up with questions of form: not only what is conveyed but how, and from whom and to whom. This carries information but also has the force of an utterance, a performative act involving context, situation, and material setting.5 It is here that the physical environment of the museum makes its presence felt, over and above the materiality of its exhibits or artifacts. Objects in a museum do not speak for themselves, despite all the facts that may be known about them: rather, by virtue of their context they speak to us, and through layout, design and architecture, to other objects in the museum. But this is not to say that the role of the individual artefact is simply to lend support to the macro-narrative of the museum – the story of the nation, the heroic past, the progress of mankind, or whatever. Rather objects can be seen as bearers of micro-histories in their own right, providing glimpses of obscured or alternative pasts that often throw into question the received narratives into which they are inserted.6

Looking back on a previous era, for example, the eighteenth century, it is tempting to wish for modes of access to private life that could circumvent the euphemisms and discretion that dominated the novel in that period, and to imagine an unsparing realism (as in james joyce) that revealed ‘what was really happening’ behind the scenes, free of all censoring impulses. What this search for facts fails to realize is that the narrative conventions of the novel were not just added on to sex and sensibility in that era, but were constitutive of the structures of feeling: there is no possibility of pushing the forms aside to gain unmediated access to the content. To understand private life in the eighteenth century is to gain access to the ‘forms of life’ that made it possible, and indeed it is often these forms that prove most elusive: we may have copious amounts of information but still miss the bigger picture, the

7. Adorno, T.W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 139-52. 8. O’Neill, T.P. (1956) The Organisation and Administration of Relief, 1845-52. In Dudley Edwards, R. and Williams, T.D. (eds), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52. Browne and Nolan, Dublin, 259. 9. Lyotard, J.F. (1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 57. framing perspectives to make sense of it all. This, however, is not all there is to form, for through hindsight, it is clear that it not only structures but also represses experience, screening off or ruling out possibilities in sexuality, marriage and relationships (which may no longer be taboo in contemporary lifestyles). It is for this reason, according to Theodor Adorno, that form, in a psychoanalytic sense, bears the traces of what is not said as well as what is said, testing the limits of representation in a given society. Challenging the unifying role of the aesthetic, Adorno argued that form is never in a one-to-one relationship with content, but at its most telling, is at odds with its subject-matter, opening up as well as ordering lived experience.7 It is precisely these fault-lines in dominant narratives that the micro-histories of objects prise open, improvising space for occluded or discarded versions of the past.

The Great Irish Famine

No more than facts, objects or events do not speak in one voice as is clear from the wide variation in approaches to commemorations of the Great Irish Famine. It is difficult to imagine a museum dedicated to the Irish Great Famine sealing off the past, and for the same reason, a historical record resting solely on facts and statistics (important as they are) is not the final word, as it would fail to do justice to the ethics of the disaster. As jean-Francois Lyotard notes, the facts by themselves do not add up to the enormity of a catastrophic event, if for no other reason that an event acquires definition through form: including, as Lyotard notes, the possibility that the event may shatter the available forms of intelligibility. A vast array of facts about the Great Famine, such as death rates, crime figures, poorhouse admissions, evictions, emigration and so on, were known to the British administration at the time – indeed, were collected by them. But this did not add up to ‘Famine’ in their eyes, or when it did, elicit the moral and political responses commensurate with such a crisis. As the historian T. P. O Neill observed, there was a marked reluctance to use the term ‘famine’ in official documents, resorting instead to euphemisms of ‘scarcity’ and ‘distress’ by way of damage limitation.8 Hundreds of thousands were dying, yet so far from the facts being self-evident, they were integrated into dominant narratives of providentialism, the market, and empire. For Lyotard, the forensic approach to historical enquiry that suspends questions of justice is no different in principle: ‘‘If history gave rise only to historical enquiry, they [historians] could not be accused of a denial of justice … But they are not worried by the scope of the very silence they use as an argument in its plea.’’9 All this is not to say that ‘famine’

10. The Observer (London) as early as October, 1845, employed the term, There is a certain irony that Charles Trevelyan, in The Irish Crisis (1847), was one of the first to use to the description ‘the great famine of 1847’ but as Leslie Williams notes, limiting the description to one year might be seen as an exercise in containment. Williams, L. (2003) Daniel O’Connell, the British Press, and the Irish Famine: Killing Remarks. Ashgate, London, p.260. 11. Crawford, M. (1994) The Great Irish Famine, 1845-9: Image Versus Reality. In Kennedy, B. and Gillespie, R. (eds) Ireland: Art into History Town House, Dublin, 88. 12. For recent research in Irish material culture, see Moran, A. and O’Brien, S. (2014) Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture. Bloomsbury Academic, London. was a retrospective categorization: its terror was all too evident to its victims, and those who spoke on their behalf.10 In her survey of contemporary representations of the Famine in the Illustrated London News, Margaret Crawford noted the ‘subjective’ element in illustrations, as against the kind of objectivity found in ‘a file of state papers, the contents of a Poor Law minute book, or a doctor’s case notes.’11 But of course there is a difference: the administrator and doctor could afford professional detachment, whereas the most resonant images sought to register the plight of the starving poor, but were no less ‘objectively realistic’ for that. No doubt many of these paintings and illustrations were constrained by Victorian pictorial conventions, but it is often, as we have noted, because of formal structures that discordant details (or micro-histories) evoke what is not shown, the submerged histories considered not fit for official purpose.

It is in this sense the museum relocates history in an expanded field, the materiality of form – of the archive as well as its objects – placing the textual record of an event in a wider experiential context.12 Often dismissed as popularization or cultural tourism, these modes address an ethics of memory, reminding us that the point of studying slavery, the Great Famine, The Easter Rising, The Great War, or the Holocaust is not only the pursuit of truth but the obligation to do justice to these events. This is to underline the normative nature of historical enquiry, professional history as well as popular memory, and it is for this reason that omniscient narration, as the ‘form’ of objectivity, needs to be called into question. The critical resonances of the museum are best realized by treating it as an echo chamber carrying multiple voices, not least distant voices muted in their own era that could not be heard until now. The backward look has thus a dual focus: at once directed towards a world that is past, yet also through hindsight aware of the outcome, a legacy unknown to participants in that past. That this is not always acknowledged does not make it any less compelling: the past is viewed not only for what it reveals but also for its blind spots, the erasures and gaps in memory.

Thus part of the power of the Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon is the presentation of events not only in terms of AngloIrish relations, emigration flows, and their immediate aftermath, but also setting this against the wider backdrop of globalization, world markets and contemporary famines. This allows for hindsight on the part of contemporary descendants of the Packenham-Mahon family who ran the Strokestown estate, and who rightly emphasize that their forbears

13. Binet, L. (2013) HHhH, trans. Sam Taylor. Vintage, London. Subsequent references in parentheses in text. acted out of what they considered just and ‘improving’ policies for the modernization of the estate. By the same token, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac university in the united States addresses not only representations of the Great Famine but also, through the inclusion of contemporary art, raises questions about representation itself, and the registers available at different times in responding to the calamity. The essentially contested nature of memory is no less pressing for being in the wings, but for an engagement with back-stage as well as front-stage in retrieving the past, we might turn to a recently-acclaimed – but also controversial – treatment of the Holocaust, or one key episode in the events that led to the death camps, Laurent Binet’s ‘novel’ on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, HHhH. 13

The actuality of events

Binet’s account is as much about the production of meaning, the performance of the past, as it is about the actuality of events. So far from ceding priority to fiction, however, the assembled narrative sticks closely to the facts, insofar as they can be ascertained, but it also highlights the imponderables and gaps in the historical record. A recurrent motif, for example, is the inability to settle definitively the colour of Heydrich’s open-decked Mercedes Benz that proved his undoing: whether it was black or dark green, since different sources fail to agree (HHhH 154-6). But this is only a symptom of more serious undecidable issues, such as who was ultimately responsible for the plan hatched in London to assassinate the ‘Blond Beast’. Binet’s approach differs from a conventional historical account in that it delineates how the record takes shape, the production of meaning and truth whereby narration crystallizes into facts. A professional historian might cite a source such as the autobiography of Heybrich’s wife, Lina Von Osten’s Life with a War Criminal, in a seemingly effortless fashion, but Binet notes ruefully that it remains untranslated into French or English, and is all but inaccessible: ‘‘I imagine it would be a mine of information, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on it. It is an extremely rare work and the price on the internet is generally between 350 and 700 euro” (HHhH 25). Professional historians do not, as a rule, provide insights into the material practices of their craft, but Binet provides the research equivalent of Francis Bacon’s studio, the messy processes that go into constructing what appears in the end to be a seamless work. Eventually, Binet has to buy Lina Von Osten’s book, and while this might seem as totally irrelevant to the main story, he surmises that its exorbitant price may have to do with the cult of Heydrich that survives into the present.

14. Newton, M. (2012) ‘What A Ghost wants,’ review of Laurent Binet HHhH, London Review of Books: 8 December, 2012. 15. Of course, Francis Bacon’s studio has now become a work of sorts, forming the main attraction of the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, where it is on permanent display. 16. Rée, J. (2014) ‘From Straight Talk to Speaking Well,’ review of Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 2014, 7. 17. Newton, M. (2012) ‘What A Ghost wants,’ review of Laurent Binet HHhH, London Review of Books: 8 December, 2012. As Michael Newton notes in his perceptive review of HHhH:

“[Binet’s] book soon turns out to be cleverer and more intricate than its opening sections suggest. The po-faced narrator grows more and more human, revealed as fallible, or even inept, as he changes his mind, rescinds information, revises the ‘facts.’ His story runs away from him; his findings are contradictory; he forgets to bring in a major character; trivial – or maybe crucial – details waylay him.”14

Though the recurrent reflexive turns may be seen as digressions, illuminating at most the genealogy of facts or the mechanics of research, they go beyond the display of Francis Bacon’s studio in that they are incorporated into the aesthetic form of the book.15 As Bruno Latour has shown in relation to scientific method, facts, no more than objects, do not lie around waiting to be discovered but are established by often tortuously established frameworks – narratives, if you like –that give them significance, and which, at any given time, far from exhaust their meaning: “without hard scientific labour . . . there would be no such thing as hard scientific facts.’’16

It is in this vein that Binet’s narrator notes at one point that if his work were a genuine historical novel, á la Victor Hugo, there should be pages of descriptive scene-setting, but he skips this: ‘‘I’ve decided not to over stylize my story. That suits me fine because for later episodes I’ll have to resist the temptation to flaunt my knowledge by writing too many details for this or that scene that I’ve researched too much” (HHhH 13). Scene setting takes on a decided impact, however, when he walks the streets of Prague, the city where the assassination took place, and visits the hidden vaults of the church in where Heydrich’s two enigmatic assassins, the Czech jan kubis and the Slovak josef Gabcik, met their tragic deaths. Binet attempts to fill in the inner lives of the two men, and what drove them to such extraordinary feats of courage, but all the time, it is a chronicle of deaths foretold: we know the outcome, whereas they did not (apart, perhaps, from the virtual certainty they would not survive). As Michael Newton again recounts in his review of HHhH:

‘‘Trapped in the church’s crypt, they fight back, yet the end must come. It was always already there, prefigured in the stated facts of the novel’s first few sections. In maintaining a sense that events might still turn out otherwise, Binet pulls off the most difficult trick of the novel of historical reconstruction: we know the end, but grasp that the actors themselves do not, are still there, living through the possibilities of events.”17

18. Marin, L. (1981) On the Theory of Written Enunciation: The Notion of Interruption–Resumption in Autobiography, Semiotica, supp., 103. Italics added. 19. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge, London, 104. 20. Townshend, C. (1971) The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence. Allen Lane, London, 4; Farrell, B. (1971) The Founding of Dáil Éireann: Parliament and Nation-Building, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 7. It is this notion of history as possibility as much as what actuality happened, outcomes that even the doomed resistance fighters could not have envisaged, that puts imagination back into history, all the more to draw it closer to the truth.

Exhibitions in the contemporary museum

Extended to the logic of display in the contemporary museum, Binet’s reflexive technique shows that while exhibits are often selected to validate certain interpretations, they may also attest to unspoken narratives, or possibilities occluded by the contingencies of history (including blindspots in the present). Rather than being reduced to a seamless spectacle or a closed system in which ‘events seem to narrate themselves,’ display is a process of enunciation in which ‘utterances’ – practices of design and exhibition – reveal that ‘the historical narrative … has been [narrated] by someone’: the key issue in challenging the semblance of objectivity, as Louis Marin states, is to undo ”the absence of the narrator in the narrated … the silence of the stating in the stated.“18 Conceived in performative terms, the museum functions as a dialogical rather than a monological or monumental space, suggesting multiple routes, and indeed roads not taken, rather than a single royal road to the present: if the space of the museum is to become more fully dialogic, and if such statements are not to be fully framed within – and so potentially, to be recuperated by – the official voice of the museum, the principle embodied in such experiments needs to be generalized, thereby, in allowing the museum to function as a site for the enunciation of plural and differentiated statements, enabling it to function as an instrument of public debate.19

In the case of major upheavals in history, moreover, it is not the role of the museum to present a unified narrative that seeks to explain (or explain away) a tumultuous event. In the coming decade of commemorations, there is already a tendency, exemplified by former Taoiseach john Bruton, to play down the 1916 Rising as a ‘crazy aberration’ (as Charles Townshend notes of contemporary responses), a verdict underscored by Brian Farrell’s reassurance in the 1970s that the Rising ‘‘did not seriously alter the mainstream of the Irish political tradition.’’20 As john M. Regan has observed of this myth of business as usual, in which narratives of the past are recreated in the constitutional image of the present:

‘‘This sketched the outline of a new organizing theme for the abridgement of Irish history, which over many centuries identified

21. Regan, J.M. (2013) Myth and the Irish State: Historical Problems and Other Essays. Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 3. 22. Thomson, D. (1974) Woodbrook. Barrie and Jenkins, London, 55. constitutionalism and parliamentarianism as the forces dominating Irish political culture. The revolutionism of Easter 1916, it was said, was an exceptional and perhaps even insignificant event.’’21

‘Exceptional’ it certainly was, but hardly insignificant. It is incumbent on the logics of display in the museum to address the force of the exception, as precisely the kind of disruptive event that cannot be inserted into gradually unfolding, incremental narratives. The turn towards everyday ‘small histories’ in recent local history, while welcome for empowering ordinary voices and marginal people, can be used to deflect attention from seismic events that shattered centres of power, but it can provide micro-histories, showing how tremors were felt even in remote districts. Notwithstanding the bitter-sweet nostalgia of Woodbrook, Thomson recounts how IRA members were working on the staff of the house during the Troubles, and that the after-shocks of the War of Independence and the Civil War were still felt in the community in the 1930s. The Civil War, wrote Thomson, ‘‘had split the people, not geographically, but piecemeal; counties, villages, families were broken apart ... the hatred engendered by the civil war survives to this day among old men and a few of the young. People hide it from strangers as much as they can, but Ivy [who married into Woodbrook in 1922] was aware of the undercurrents, and even twelve years later the emotional tension was evident to me.” 22

Conclusion

This points to the competing pressures on historical narratives: on the one hand, to tell the truth; on the other, to act as an emollient healing the wounds of the past. That truth may also have its own healing powers, however, came home to David Thomson when he was invited to open Strokestown House to the public in the late 1980s, and revisited the mansion for the first time in decades. Time has already taken its toll on the house but it is often in overlooked objects, out of place, that other inner histories break through. Over a mantelpiece in a bedroom, Thomson was taken aback to discover a picture of two horses painted by his beloved pupil, Phoebe kirkwood, over fifty years earlier. He not only remembered the time it was painted but also the names of the horses, a rare occasion in which lost moments of enunciation are restored to objects, and the past catches up with the present.

Luke Gibbons is Professor of Irish Literary and Cultural History at Maynooth University.