Estudios Irlandeses (Mar 2009)
Excavating Ireland’s Contemporary Heritage in Eilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Bray House
Abstract
Eilís Ní Dhuibhne’s first novel, The Bray House (1990), is a futuristic, dystopian fantasy that envisions Ireland, Great Britain and most of Western Europe — except for the northern territories — as already laid waste by nuclear disaster in an unspecified near future. In this paper, my intention is to consider how the narrative, like other futuristic and science-fiction stories, displaces the present onto an apocalyptic future so as to bring out and criticise present-day social, cultural and political trends, particularly, the institutional tendency in Ireland to package and market History as Heritage. Some of the issues raised by the novel which will be addressed here are: For what purposes and from what perspective and attitude is the past interpreted and translated? What happens when it is precisely our treasured lifestyles that we see dissected, interpreted and analysed as if they already formed part of an arcane past? How can we feel the sense of nostalgia that heritage-based analyses imply if we are asked to mourn what we have not yet lost?
