‘Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World’ (Synge 2003, p. 77). These words, spoken at the end of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, serve as a beginning to this book, which sets out to study the nature of loss in Irish literature , a discourse which is filled with loss: from loss of language to personal loss, sovereign loss to economic loss. The impact of this loss spills from the pages, the stanzas, and the stage and offers us a perspective of a culture trying to come to terms with a perpetual deficit in nearly every facet of life. One thinks of Yeats ’s poems on death and the loss of Maud Gonne; of Heaney ’s poems lamenting the deaths of his father and mother ; of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy with polysemic senses of loss; of Portia Coughlan mourning the loss of her twin brother in Marina Carr ’s play of the same name; of dealing with the loss of country, identity and power in Tom Murphy ’s A Whistle in The Dark; of losing one’s sanity in Sebastian Barry ’s The Secret Scripture, and even of losing oneself to the bicycle in Flann O’Brien ’s The Third Policeman.
This deficit manifests itself in the language , or often the lack of it, and in literature , it remains a constant feature. Why is loss a characteristic of Irish writing ? Well that is what this collection aims to address and examine. The first of its kind to focus on the issue of loss in a contemporary Irish context, this study aims to offer a range of critical perspectives on loss in Irish literature and poetry , from the page to the stage to the verse, looking at what loss means, what it says about us as a nation and why we keep coming back to loss. Contributions have been sought from a range of researchers in Irish studies in order to achieve a wide response to the theme of loss and ensure a varied and contrasting study of the hegemonic discourse surrounding ideas of loss in Irish Literature.
Loss, psychoanalytic theory tells us, is at the core of human experience, and the point could be made that it structures our very human subjectivity. As Pamela Thurschwell puts it:
In the stories that psychoanalysis tells about sexual development, young children are always reacting to losses, real or imaginary: the loss of the illusion that your needs and wishes will be fulfilled as soon as you have them, the loss of the comforting maternal sense of security symbolised by the breast, the loss of the penis via the threat of castration, or the sense for the little girl that that loss has already taken place. (Thurschwell 2000, p. 89)
Hence, the notion of loss can be seen as a structuring principle of the human being’s entry into language , society and culture . This loss remains a constant feature throughout life, as we prepare for the ultimate loss, death . From our very birth, we are confronted with loss, which is intrinsic in defining who we are. This loss can be traumatic , and re-emerge in later life as we come to terms with the first loss.
For Sigmund Freud , the loss of the connection with the mother is a gap that we spend the rest of our life trying to fill. No other relationship will ever be as egocentric as that of the baby in the womb, whose every need is met before it even becomes a need. The physical separation from the mother, with the cutting of the umbilical cord, means that there is a sense of loss instituted from the very beginning of the life of the individual subject . Similarly, in the neo-natal stage, the child’s needs are met on demand, and this becomes a paradigm that the child longs to replicate for the rest of his or her life. Once language enters the picture, gratification becomes delayed, and so one could see the initial sense of loss as the engine that drives what Freud terms desire .
It is with the acquisition of language , with all of its societal constraints on desire , that the unconscious is formed. As Elizabeth Wright observes:
Society’s injunction that desire must wait, that it must formulate in the constricting word whatever demand it may speak, is what effects the split between conscious and unconscious , the repression that is the tax exacted by the use of language . (Wright 1984, p. 109)
In his essay ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the function of the “I” as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’, Lacan outlines what he terms the ‘méconnaissance’ (Lacan 1977, p. 6) of the individual self. He pictures a child becoming aware of its own image in a mirror , and of the child being fascinated by its specular image as it aspires to the totality of that image:
This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject . (Lacan 1977, p. 2)
In other words, after the loss of physical connection with the mother , issues of identity are complex, varied and always in flux. Thus, loss is a core driver of the construction of identity in human beings.
Lacan sees these Gestalten as having a dual function: they symbolise ‘the mental permanence of the I’, at the same time as indicating its ‘alienating destination’ (Lacan 1977, p. 2). The subject of the enounced desires to maintain an Imaginary identification with the familial tradition; however, this desire cannot be fully articulated in language , because of the intention/expression gap that is inherent in the Symbolic order. Language is linked with desire. It is through language that unconscious meanings are given voice. The voicing of these, in turn, deconstructs the desire to remain in the Imaginary. For Lacan, desire and language locate the subject as split and divided:
It is only through a speech that lifted the prohibition that the subject has brought to bear upon himself by his own words that he might obtain the absolution that would give him back his desire . But desire is simply the impossibility of such speech, which, in replying to the first can merely reduplicate its mark of prohibition by completing the split (Spaltung) which the subject undergoes by virtue of being a subject only in so far as he speaks. (Lacan 1977, p. 269)
In fact, in a Lacanian context, all subjectivity is defined in terms of what is called the Symbolic order, and this order is the structural matrix through which our grasp of the word is shaped and enunciated. For Lacan , the Symbolic order is what actually constitutes our subjectivity: ‘man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man’ (Lacan 1977, p. 72). Moreover, it is the loss of the physical connection at the beginning of life, which leads each of us to that symbolic order. Hence, loss and language are inextricably connected. It is the matrix of culture and the locus through which individual desire is expressed: ‘the moment in which the desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language’ (Lacan 1977, p. 113), and language, is ‘the pact which links…subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol’ (Lacan 1991, p. 230), a process wherein loss is seminal.
Similarly, when mourning the death of a loved one, the sense of loss can completely overtake our personality, leaving us grief-stricken with an empty hole at the centre of our being: ‘mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (Freud 1917, pp. 251–252). Freud describes dealing with this loss as a process which will eventually allow the grieving person to come to terms with this loss: ‘normally, respect for reality gains the day’ (Freud 1917, p. 253), a...