Postmemory

This article investigates Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past through the lens of Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, focusing on the role of photographs in bridging gaps between generations and constructing narratives about traumatic events. Despite a societal inclination towards anti-nostalgia and a desire to forget past concerns in favor of newfound prosperity, the main characters deal with a past that intrudes into the present in a quasi-traumatic form. To assay such fractured identity formation in characters, characteristic of post Celtic Tiger Ireland, this article explores memories as one’s inseparable source of identity. As such, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of Postmemory will be used to understand the connection between traumatic memory-formation and identity formation shared among the survivors of catastrophic events. Such an abstract connection invites an examination of photography as a means to transfer meaning, memory, and identity from one generation to another, meditating the relationship between the past and the present. This article concludes by paying special attention to how postmemory works as a healthy means of grappling with unresolved traumas, leading the characters towards an ethical form of remembering the past.