It was no accident that the Irish Famine coincided with a longstanding but increasingly vicious English assault on Irish character itself.
The British sustenance of an Downloaded from jcl. Far from interceding on their behalf, British administrators and the British media ratcheted up their condemnation of the impoverished Irish. Indians, too, were commonly depicted as lazy, coarse, and ungrateful.
In all such novels, order and disorder contend for centre- stage, with the outcome depending on specific contexts and motivations. The historical model for his setting, the besieged British government Residency in Lucknow, is indeed a key index of the conjunction of political and domestic governance in colonial India, with the titular Resident occupying the roles of regional governor, ambassadorial host and European gatekeeper all at once.
It was much the same in Ireland. As Neil Corcoran observes of twentieth-century Irish writing, the set-piece of the once great, now decaying Anglo-Irish estate symbolizes the painful move away from traditional customs to an uncertain future.
The motif of the overgrown, often bare manor also allows this set-piece to be emblematic of a complex relationship to the past — the sense that whereas a certain aesthetic refinement has been lost, the class inequities and public destitution on which this refinement depended have been exposed. Although Farrell follows in the tradition of manorial literature, he does so, therefore, with a significant twist. In turning the tables on his British protagonists by having them experience siege, hunger and other deprivations, Farrell forces his readers to re-imagine their received perceptions of colonial history, and their own relationship to national consciousness.
He upends the iconic potency of the Big House setting by having the British Residency crumble, both literally and figuratively. This narrative strategy is not as straightforward as it may initially seem.
The novel is not merely a stand-in for Irish consciousness, nor is it conversely fixated on the British treatment of India. Indeed, as noted below, Irish literary tropes frequently recurred in Irish novels set in India. His approach to historical narrative is, in short, grounded in a double consciousness that resonates richly in his choice of a watershed moment in British and Indian colonial history, namely, the Indian rebellion and the resulting shift from colonial to imperial governance.
Terry Eagleton once famously remarked on the absence of the Irish Famine in Irish literature, including Joyce. James F. The remembrance of the Famine is, in other words, at once an outward and an inward manifestation of national mourning. They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty.
Far from being mobile, noble and endearing, his characters, some based on actual historical personages, are self-centered, sententious and stuck. Notably, too, each character is, as John McLeod observes, painfully conscious of performing his or her pre- ordained social and ideologically charged role35 — the Romantic Traveller, the Dashing Officer, the Station Belle.
This is no accident. Farrell exploits here the trace of a classically gothic image, that of macabre figures who, like Count Dracula despoiling his own nobility, transgress European notions of civility. Rebels, in particular, usually appeared in colonialist discourse as insidious and, because uncivilized, shadow-loving reprobates. More importantly, the rhetorical conversion of rebels into robbers who inhabit Irish bogs or Indian brush allows counter-insurgent prose to ignore real complaints, such as hunger and violence, by invoking the associative, scarifying image of wild and deformed humanity.
From here he will see what appears to be a town in the heat-distorted distance. He will see the white glitter of walls and roofs and a handsome grove of trees, perhaps even the dome of what might be a temple. Round about there will be the unending plain. Compare this to the similar image of post Cawnpore in the popular Victorian young-adult author G. Only when the text leads us to the bungalows of the colonial military station, or cantonment, do we meet breathing characters.
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