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How does a nation decide what it is? Is it the laws that govern the people, the people and their culture, is it the nation’s history, the wars it’s fought, the causes it’s bared, or is it something else?
China, a country that has lasted in some form well into prehistory, tells of its formation through a series of wars between three kingdoms, perhaps being some of the bloodiest wars in the entirety of human history (Center). The United States of America gained its statehood through bloody revolution and conflict, colonialism, and though it is often painted over in its national mythos, a genocidal slaughter of an indigenous population. Ancient Rome tells of two brothers raised by wolves, Romulus and Remus, who by the will of the gods were allowed to live and formed the city of Rome. Throughout human history, people have set down on a plot of land to call their own, and as a way of forming a glue between the disparate people upon that land, formed a myth to bind them together; a myth that quite often makes others of those outside said land, and whether it is true or not, they decide that it is theirs. As I read Colm Tóibín’s House of Names, I couldn’t help but think about the land that Tóibín called home: Ireland. James Joyce, perhaps Ireland’s greatest writer once wrote about it, saying: "Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” The short story that was taken from, from Joyce’s collection of short stories The Dubliners, is about a man wrestling with the divided politics of his own country (Joyce 225). And as I read of Orestes’ kidnapping, and the death of his own older sister Iphigenia at the hands of his father in House of Names, I couldn’t help but think of the short story “The Sniper,” by Irish author Liam O’Flaherty; in which two snipers shoot at each other from atop roofs on opposite sides of a street, the winner eventually finding out that he’d shot his own brother (O'Flaherty). In House of Names, the familicide happens beat after beat by people trying their best to do what they feel is right for themselves, their families, and their nation. From Agamemnon’s murder of his daughter to appease the gods and allow for the winds that would set his army on their path to victory, to Electra, Orestes, and Clytemnestra, all trying, all failing in some way or another. To the ancient Greeks, Homer’s stories in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the other significant early Greek plays these stories were, in many ways, not just a history of their connected states and their symbiotic relationship to each other, but they also served as moral lessons and symbols of Greek culture. They were, in many ways, a sort of nation-building myth, like Paul Revere warning of the British coming, or King Arthur driving back the Anglo-Saxons of early Briton. What Tóibín writes strips the pomp and pageantry away, shreds the poetry of myth, and delivers a story that is, to put it plainly, well, more likely than the myth that’s been told, devoid of intervention from the gods. Much like the reality behind the myth of Thanksgiving, which tells of an unnamed indigenous tribe that shares a meal with the pilgrims, but leaves out the deterioration of this alliance and the ensuing war, King Philips War to be exact, which kickstarted the slow holocaust of North America’s native people, House of Names tells a myth, too far in the past to be accurately depicted, stripped and served as the sad tale it truly was; one that rather than teaching moral lessons, instead teaches lessons on tragedy and short-sightedness in a time of desperation and war. Works Cited -Center, China Education. "History of the Three Kingdoms." University of Nottingham 2004. https://www.chinaeducenter.com/en/whychina/threekingdoms.php. -Joyce, James. The Dubliners. London: Penguin Books, 1914. -O'Flaherty, Liam. "The Sniper." Classic Short Stories (1923). https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/sniper.html.
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November 2021
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