“In an essay entitled ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’, Paul Ricoeur (1996) outlines a hermeneutic model of narrative hospitality. This involves, he says, ‘taking responsibility in imagination and in sympathy for the story of the other, through the life narratives which concern the other’ (1996: 7). In the context of a historically divided Europe, scarred by wars of religion, ethnicity and empire, this takes the form of an exchange between différent people’s histoires (in the sense of both histories and stories). It calls for an art of transference and translation which allows us to welcome the story of the other, the stranger, the victim, the forgotten one. At the level of cultural and literary exchanges one might cite here (though Ricoeur does not) the way in which Irish writers of opposite sides used poetic imagination to empathize with the adversary – John Montague (Catholic nationalist) and John Hewitt (Protestant unionist) swapping stories of ‘Planter and Gael’, Frank McGuinness imagining the ‘sons of Ulster’ in the British-German battle of Verdun, or Brendan Kennelly getting into the mind of the national arch-enemy, Oliver Cromwell. At a political level, one tibinks of how Irish Presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, participated in war memorials and inter-denominational religious ceremonies which con-celebrated communion with what was traditionally considered the ‘other community’. And these postnationalist gestures were reciprocated in kind from the British side.

Ricoeur shows how acts of narrative hospitality call in turn for an ethic of nanative flexibility. Memorials face the challenge of resisting the reification of an historical event into a fixed dogma by showing how each event may be told in different ways by different generations and by different narrators. Not that everything becomes relative and arbitrary. On the contrary, acts of trauma and suffering call out for justice, and the best way of achieving this is often to invite empathy with strangers and adversaries by allowing for a plurality of narrative perspectives. The resulting overlap may thus lead to what Hans Georg Gadamer (1975) calls a ‘fusion of horizons’ where diverse horizons of consciousness may at last find some common ground; a reciprocal transfer between opposite minds. ‘The identity of a group, culture, people or nation, is not that of an immutable substance’, writes Ricoeur, ‘nor that of a fixed structure, but that, rather, of a recounted story’ (1996: 7). A hermeneutic exchange of stories effectively resists an arrogant or rigid conception of cultural identity which prevents us from perceiving the radical implications of the principle of narrativity – namely, ‘the possibilities of revising every story which has been handed down and of carving out a place for several stories directed towards the same past’ (1996: 7). The way in which numerous contentious events in Irish history – Battle of the Boyne, Battle of Wexford, Bloody Sunday, the Civil War – have been re-narrated by historians, writers, film makers and politicians to allow for a healthy rethinking of the origins and implications of these ‘foundational events’ is a case in point. Good examples of this are to be found in the New British History (and New Irish History) proposed by thinkers like Linda Colley, Benedict Anderson, Tom Nairn, IGA Poccok or Roy Foster, a more pluri-dimensional approach to historiography which widens the narrowly nationalist lens of British-Irish enmity to include regional and transnational horizons” (Kearney 2010:42-43).

Kearney, R.. (2010). RENARRATING IRISH POLITICS IN A EUROPEAN CONTEXT. European Studies,(28), 41-57,9. Retrieved March 2, 2011, from Research Library. (Document ID: 2154251321).

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