False recognition : pseudo-history and collective memory in Alvis Hermanis’ "The Sound of silence"

Abstract

Fergus Kilpatrick, conspirator and hero of Irish independence, dies murdered in a theatre on 6 August 1824, on the eve of a decisive battle. The circumstances of the crime were never clarified, but English police were widely suspected of being the instigators. On investigating the events, Ryan, Kilpatrick’s great-grandson, finds that the oldest of the hero’s companions, James Alexander Nolan, had been a theatre scholar, a translator of Shakespeare into Gaelic, and an expert on the Swiss festspiele, those hugely popular representations which reenacted historical events in the places in which they had once taken place. In Hermanis’ work, myth does not suppress history; it only impoverishes it. It puts it at a distance and makes it usable. If one believes that history is going to die, it is a death with reprieve; history loses its value, but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will draw its nourishment. The mythic form is not a symbol. The photographer of Blow Up is not the symbol of 1968; he has too much presence – he appears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable character in the here and now of the scene. But at the same time this presence is tamed, put at a distance, and made almost transparent; it recedes a little, and it becomes fake. The dialectical relation between performing history and performing myth is essentially a relation of deformation. But this distortion is not an obliteration: 1968 remains here half-amputated, and deprived of reality, but not of memory. In the kind of anagnorisis which The Sound of Silence stimulates, the spectator suddenly tastes something of the work of the historiographer, if we accept the definition of Joseph Mali, who proposes an historiography that recognises myth for what it is: a story that has passed into and become history. “The critical task of this historiography, or mythistory, is to reappraise these stories as inevitable, and ultimately valuable, histories of personal and communal identity”. In this account, The Sound of Silence re-activates one of the essential tasks of Tragedy – the composition of a community, which here is instantaneous and disinterested: a community that shares nothing but some sort of loss – the loss of something that has never happened but that everybody knows and remembers – in a word, a community of mythistorians.