The Objects of Return: Architectonics of Postmemory in Anne Enright's The Gathering

This part is to investigate Anne Enright's novel The Gathering in the light of postmemory. I argue that The Gathering is a post-mnemonic text in which not only postmemory is used by the narrator to preserve the past but also to reveal the post-mnemonic truth or untruth and this apocalyptic revelation is also a way of coming to terms or reconciling with one's past and finally the acceptance of death as an omnipresent fact. To analyze the text, Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory is used to shed light on the mechanism and strategies that postmemory applies in the many different generations in a family and the beyond, that is, to develop familial and affiliative connections among generations. Thus postmemory in the familial level is the Hagarty family and its three generations, and in the affiliative level postmemory can include the Irish society in general in the Celtic Tiger era and the subsequent post-Celtic era which reveals the truths and untruths about the optimism of the Celtic Tiger economic boom and its underlying corruption and sex scandal of the Catholic Church and the very gendered society of which the main character in order to cope with it has recourse to not only drinking alcohol but also to the post-mnemonic narrative to reconcile with the past, the present and the forthcoming future for the next generations.