‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’

The final chapter is concerned with the enormous number of poets that have responded to Casement. Beginning with poetry written by Casement’s close friend and intellectual companion, Eva Gore-Booth, this chapter discusses a range of poetry from throughout the twentieth century. As the chapter illustrates, this poetry depicts Casement in various guises, from the tragic nationalist hero of 1916 in Gore-Booth; to a man wronged and shamed by the British in Yeats’ poems from the late 1930s; to a symbol critiquing regressive U.S. politics and troubled transatlantic relations in Paul Muldoon’s ‘A Clear Signal’. This chapter traces how, throughout the twentieth century, we see poets begin to view the nebulous nature of Casement’s multiple and shifting allegiances as enabling, rather than anxiety inducing, and poets like Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian mobilise Casement as a hopeful symbol of plurality.

The traitor and the hero

In the years immediately prior to, and of, the Second World War textual glimmers of an unnamed Roger Casement can be detected in a preoccupation with the ghostly return of Irish history. As Ireland grappled with what role she could or should play in the (impending) war, a role complicated immeasurably by the precarious border and new Northern statelet, numerous authors grappled with an Irish history compromised by unclear allegiances and betrayal. This chapter uses a collection of mid-twentieth century texts – James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ (1944) and Elizabeth Bowe’s The Heat of the Day (1948) – to map how the interlinking preoccupations of espionage, betrayal and, frequently, sexual intimacy, are deeply connected, implicitly or explicitly, to the haunting spectre of Casement.

The Black Diaries

The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.

‘who is to know the fate of his bones’

The monograph concludes with a coda exploring the multiple centenary events celebrating Roger Casement’s afterlives that took place in Ireland in 2016, as part of Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations. Rather than offer a conclusion that forecloses our understanding of Casement’s afterlives, this coda gestures towards his continued relevance to cultural memory, cosmopolitan consciousness and the rapidly changing political landscapes of the British and Irish isles. These performances and exhibitions shed fascinating light on the unfinished role that Casement plays within Irish culture and self-fashioning, capturing a range of artistic responses to his afterlives at a key moment in Irish history.

Saint Casement

This chapter explores Casement’s afterlives in drama, arguing that the intermedial recycling of various aspects of Casement’s life, legacy and politics continue to fascinate dramatists. The first play discussed is George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) and, reading Shaw’s play alongside copious archival sources, this chapter seeks to assess the extent of the relationship - political, historical and imaginative - between Shaw and Casement. David Rudkin’s radio play, Cries from Casement as His Bones are Brought to Dublin, uses the power of voice and accent to eruditely and creatively stage Casement’s contradictory and evolving sense of identity. Finally, this chapter explicates how Martin McDonagh’s use of Casement in The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) is glancing but powerful, testifying to the power that Irish history can continue to hold on contemporary politics, even if it is misunderstood and misplaced.

“He could tell you things! Things I’ve tried to forget; things I never did know”

The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s novella and archival trail. For Sebald, Casement galvanises a set of interlinked preoccupations: the catastrophes of modernity, state-sponsored violence, the fragility of memory and the unavoidable spectre of history. Tracing the dialogue between these two works - embodied by Casement’s ghost - enables us to read the metamodernist aesthetics of Sebald as a form of ghostly intertextual memory, indicative of the post-imperial debris that continues to haunt our contemporary moment. Reading Heart of Darkness through The Rings of Saturn opens up both texts in enabling, fruitful ways; just as reading Casement through Conrad’s archive provides us with novel ways of reading the two men and Conrad’s work.

Queer nationalism and colonial Ireland

This chapter turns to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) to examine their (meta)modernist engagements with Casement and Ireland’s queer (post)colonial politics. Casement is mentioned by name in both texts and is a figure that can be read, in many ways, as embodying Ireland’s own peculiar relationship to empire and anti-colonial nationalism. Both novels depict Irish nationalism as a curiously queer phenomenon and rereading Ulysses through Jamie O’Neill’s novel reveals a latent homoerotic energy in the Irish revolutionary generation and Irish nationalism more broadly.

Literary afterlives and Casement’s queer ghost

The introduction establishes the historical, cultural and theoretical contexts and frameworks that guide the monograph. While the aim of this study is to engage with and entertain the illuminating possibilities of Casement’s notoriously amorphous legacy, rather than attempt to assert any definitive biographical narrative, tracing the contours of Casement’s extraordinary life is necessary if we are to fully appreciate the complex contradictions that shaped Casement’s existence. To this end, a concise but thorough overview of Casement’s life is offered in the first part of the introduction in order to lay important foundations for the project’s literary discussion and analysis.