A Wreath upon the Dead

Summarizing Briege Duffaud's A Wreath upon the Dead (1993) seems easy enough: in the 1840s, just before the Famine, the McLeods (a Scottish Protestant family in trade) inherit enough wealth to move from Edinburgh to the Irish village of Claghan.  Once there, however, they slowly realize that they have been tricked into purchasing the estate by the absentee landlord, whose agent, Dobson, had been murdered in retribution for his treatment of the peasants.  Marianne McLeod, their teenage daughter, is cause for an even more grievous disappointment: she falls in love with the Catholic Cormac O'Flaherty, a jockey--and Dobson's murderer.  Eventually, Marianne's parents are also mysteriously murdered, and both the disowned Marianne and Cormac die while emigrating to the United States; their two children, however, survive the trip.  Decades later, one of the (supposed) O'Flaherty grandchildren returns to Claghan to buy the McLeod estate; his wastrel son marries one of the servants, Lizzie (a prominent supporting character), and has two children.  The son dies as a child; the daughter, Kathleen, falls in love with Eric McLeod--a political activist and descendant of Marianne's brother--and has a daughter, Sarah, out of wedlock.  This second encounter between the O'Flahertys and the McLeods eventually proves as deadly as the first.  Finally, in the early 1980s, Kathleen's friend Maureen Murphy, a reasonably successful romance novelist, decides to write a "serious" novel about Cormac and Marianne, who by the twentieth century have become folk heroes.

This plot summary, however, is deeply deceptive, for it makes A Wreath upon the Dead appear to be a conventional family saga-cum-historical novel.  Far from it.  To begin with, there is no consistent narrative voice or register.  The novel consists of fragmentary texts, some of them pastiche, in a number of forms: Marianne's diary, newspaper reports, travel narratives, Marianne's fiction (including a chapter from her never-to-be-completed novel), a short play, letters, memoirs, local histories, publicity interviews, interior monologues, and "realistic" conversations.  Each form introduces its own mode of miscommunication, misrepresentation, or simple misremembering.  Well-meaning Protestant ministers inadvertently condescend to Irish peasants; the fragmentary diary leaves out "the good stuff," as it were; Lizzie's memories are accidentally destructive, touching off Sarah's simmering adolescent rage.   Pointedly, the novel grants us no unmediated access either to Cormac O'Flaherty himself--the chapter told in his voice is, in fact, Maureen's novel--or to the aftermath of his marriage to Marianne.  Even Marianne's diary, fetishized by the McLeods and decked in the aura of "authenticity," may be a fake (407).  The multiple voices do not produce a coherent whole--Northern Ireland miniaturized--especially since at least some of the voices are ventriloquized or problematic.  And the genres that aspire to objectivity, such as the newspaper reports and local history, here point up the inability of any form to adequately capture the nature of Protestant-Catholic conflicts.  Each genre fragment constitutes a particular POV, but the sum of the fragments does not equal a whole. 

The overall narrative, moreover, is non-linear, and in a way that forces the reader to ask what it means to begin.  Thus, the novel opens with a letter to Maureen, and a fragmentary letter, at that; the first words of the story proper are thus not the "first."  But this beginning is itself an illusion, because the letter is a response to Maureen's request for Marianne's diary--and that request appears near the end of the novel.  The beginning is not the beginning, after all.  This chronological disruption continues throughout the novel; for example, Lizzie experiences Sarah's death well before Sarah actually emerges as a character.  Duffaud is after bigger game, however: when does anything in the history of Northern Ireland actually begin? "I shall have to learn some history if we are going to live here; they talk of nothing else," Marianne notes in her diary (always presuming, of course, that the diary is real!), and the novel pinpoints this obsession with history as itself pathological (72).  Grievances exist on a time-scale of centuries, not decades or even years; no wound can ever be healed because the wound itself can never be located. 

The story of Cormac O'Flaherty and Marianne McLeod stands in for the process by which a romanticized, factionalized tradition eventually renders impossible any sort of disinterested historiography.  Their tale is not geographically restricted to Ireland, but instead follows the O'Flahertys to the United States before being reimported when Cormac's (probable) descendants return.  And while several characters imagine different ways of thinking about the past, each way inevitably becomes entangled with "use value," in a way that turns the past into something eternally, oppressively present.  Maureen complains about the French and "[t]heir eternal need to convert other people's history into pretty folklore!" (109) but, in fact, this aestheticizing impulse is the flip side of history's politicized functions.  While Kathleen's father bursts into rage at the thought of the Famine, and yearns to reclaim his ancestral home (by now transformed beyond recognition), Eric campaigns to save the Quarry Street homes where Cormac and Marianne were forced to take shelter.  But Eric's heritage work paradoxically illuminates the extent to which sacralizing the past renders it merely irrelevant, instead of safely patriotic.  Taken hostage in one of the homes by his daughter, Eric realizes that "[t]he one thing you achieved in forty-five years of life, the one project you took to heart and really worked on, your one big contribution to Claghan's history--and even the local vandals didn't think it worth desecrating!" (450)  In this novel, the aesthetics of heritage fall prey to the much more vital, but also much more threatening, power of the popular imagination, which automatically absorbs events into an ongoing narrative of oppression and revolt.  Sarah, an unhappy teenager, becomes "Sarah, direct descendant of Cormac O'Flaherty, striking a blow against the cynical McLeod who, years before, had her family evicted so that he could construct a monument to the glorious memory of Protestant landlordism" (463).  In this instance, an adolescent's furious strike against the father who never knew she existed becomes "typical," emptied of its immediate emotional significance and transformed into a political rehash of old class and religious conflicts.  And this transformation, the novel glumly suggests, is inevitable.  When Maureen points out that the story is false, her mother comfortably notes that "[w]ell, to be sure, they all know it's not true [. . .] but that won't stop them believing it" (463).

Sarah's rebirth into myth highlights the novel's play with a familiar theme: history as repetition.  In parallel-plot historical novels, characters in the present unwittingly reenact the traumas of the past; the modern plot's resolution may exorcise the demons of historical conflict, but it may also just propel them into a troubled future.  Similarly, in family sagas, the characters of one generation often live out and live over their ancestor's errors.  Duffaud makes a number of gestures in this convention's direction.  Sarah's adolescent ugliness mirrors Marianne's own lack of physical attractions (although, ironically, Marueen refuses to see any connection between the two [113]); Lizzie's unfortunate marriage to Pakky echoes Marianne's to Cormac, and both couples end up in Quarry Street (where Eric and Sarah eventually die); multiple characters become disillusioned with their utopian politics; nearly every character seeks to escape the past by emigrating from country to country; and, most seriously, both Kathleen and Sarah respond violently after a parent-figure rejects their advances--Kathleen by murdering her much-coddled younger brother, Sarah by killing Maureen's beloved cat.  These last acts of brutality raise uncomfortable questions about the unsolved murders of Marianne McLeod's parents: it's popularly assumed that Cormac must have murdered his wife's parents...but what about Marianne? When Sarah takes Eric hostage, does she act out Marianne's role--the daughter seeking revenge on the father? Or, since the genders are switched, does Sarah stand in for Cormac? And, within the world of this novel, are those questions too dangerous to ask?