Statement by Seamus Deane

 A description of Going to My Father's House by Seamus Deane

The book is set in the present of England and Ireland, but set so deeply that it would be simultaneously true to say it is set in the past.

Seamus Deane

As a contribution to the online book launch discussion the author proposes the following description of the book, for the reason that Seamus Deane in the author’s opinion has a particularly acute sense of what the book is about. For those who do not know of him the late Seamus Deane, poet and novelist, was the greatest Irish literary critic of his generation:

"This book is a meditation. Part of its subject is family... How family history can finally be seen as part of a wider communal history and that in turn of an even wider, national, political and economic history is central to the narrative. The book is set in the present of England and Ireland, but set so deeply that it would be simultaneously true to say it is set in the past. It is part history, part sociology, part philosophical reflection on the formation of what we might call communities. The experience and question of violence, endured or inflicted, forms one topic; its felt necessity, its appalling effects, the various forms of rationale for it, its formative pressure on the creation of communal feeling.

The unexpected dimension to the story is the salience within it of the objects of the material world, most especially of a world or worlds that have become historically defunct and survive only as debris, as memory, as heritage. Thus a road is itself a lieu de mémoire, each section of it laden with the weight of specific events and experiences, with the house and the graves of those who built the enormous overground and underground infrastructure of which it once played a part in the creation of our earliest technological modernity.

In one sense, we are reading here a threnody for a vanished world and, underlying that, a never-ceasing wonder that the work of human hands could create so much and yet be subject, despite technological advance, to the silent obliterations of time. The time-spans involved are not huge although the sense of distance travelled is enormous. A few generations from the Irish Famine exodus in the mid-nineteenth century to the world war of the mid twentieth-century witness the fall and passage of empires, the desolation of the European form of peasant existence, Asia and America looming over the whole globe that was once in a European shadow. In these huge processes, the human lives that began in houses, moved on roads, ended in graves, are particular in memory, that particularity always threatened by the oceanic scale of human disappearance, in war, accidents, in the general process of the passing generations. But there is indeed a counterpoint, one against the other, the specific against the generic, one street against a city, one face in a sea of faces, one moment in a flood of years.

The problem such a book poses concerns what we may call the survival and the structure of the trace. Is it to be found in objects, in statistics, in old photos, in devastation or in rebuilding? For it is not in this instance, as with old manuscripts, a deciphering of palimpsests, although there are multiple skills needed that must have been recorded and remembered and many skills have been lost even when it is known that they once existed. Here we are looking vertically down, horizontally across, we are even trying to free ourselves of the domination of the gaze as we seek a way of knowing the past that is not a distortion. It is historical inquiry, yes; but it is also an inquiry that is wider than that, the sort we find in writers like Beckett or Sebald, writers for whom muteness, the characteristic of animals or objects, of remains and relics, of the natural world and of the world of destruction, are a fascination, the territory history traverses but does not have the instruments to examine. How should the world of silence be explored?

I would be hard put to categorise the book, yet do not feel constrained to do so, partly because its mix of genres is so fluent that it would be coarse to select any one over the other. We have history, sociology, anecdote, various arts of memory and memorializing, feats of engineering, heroic anonymity, regional identity, local street community, poverty, immigration and emigration, bombing and urban planning, destruction and survival, Foucauldian forms of organization, systems of national administration.

Joyce has the great gift of easy and relaxed movement through spaces and times. His writing has a magnetic pull. His rationality and his empathy are always in synch. His gift of selection, out of so much material, reminds me of the stories of those south American tribal magicians who knew the climate of their region so well that they always performed their rain-inducing ceremonies at exactly the right time. They always brought rain. So does Joyce. Style like this is a triumph and it does have a transformative effect. Patrick Joyce is so gifted a writer that he enriches those topics that remain elusive while also being starkly present. This is a rare kind of writing. It is in effect a form of meditation on the societies that are forming and melting around us in the present. Only a voice such as this can alert us to these historical worlds."