“To eat one’s words”:

Language and Disjunction in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea

Abstract

Joseph O’Connor’s 2002 Star of the Sea represents a significant attempt to work through the lingering trauma of the Irish famine (1845-52) that has been held responsible for disabling accounts of the event. The disjunctions of the novel – its polyphonic presentation of different perspectives on the famine – embody the consternation occasioned by Ireland’s brutal encounter with modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, the shock of this engagement is inscribed in the attitudes to language in the text. This essay further suggests that the ruptures embodied in this novel raise questions about the ambit of neo-Victorian studies, which have generally focused on more continuous cultural traditions than those found in Ireland. Working to make these disjunctions understandable by, amongst other things, reframing them in terms of contemporary experiences of globalisation, it is argued that this novel gestures towards ways of coming to terms with the spectre of the famine.