European Review, page 1 of 16

© 2020 Academia Europaea

doi:10.1017/S106279872000068X

Queering the Nation: Hegemonic
Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and
the Great War in Sebastian Barry’s
A Long Long Way
JUAN MENESES
Department of English, Fretwell 275, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, 9201
University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223, USA. Email: juan.meneses@uncc.edu
This article examines how Sebastian Barry’s 2005 novel A Long Long Way explores
the impact of the First World War in the construction of a sovereignty that is, against
the grain of a teleological understanding of history, not incorporated in the official
chronicle of the Irish independence from the British Empire. Through the lens of
what I call ‘negative sovereignty’, which describes a form of agency that amounts
to something less than nothing and is located in the obverse of the official historical
record, I argue that the novel thematises the disruption caused by the war as a crisis
in the hegemonic masculinity at the core of the national imagination. This article,
thus, reads the novel’s protagonist, Willie Dunne, as a ‘queering’ subjectivity that
embodies this kind of sovereignty, provoking a suspension in the patriarchal
foundation of nation-building as symbolised by the severance of his relationship with
his father.

One of the most important strands in modern sovereignty theory is concerned with
the notion of ‘the exception’ as the basis for the establishment of self-determination
and the constitution of political agency. Especially due to its prominence in political
theory debates in the last decades, this strand can be identified as delineated between
two opposing poles. On the one hand, in the early twentieth century, conservative
theorist Carl Schmitt conceived of the exception to describe the mechanism that
legitimizes the ruling sovereign as the subject capable of making decisions as
exceptions to the order of the law. The exception, in Schmitt’s formulation, is the
mechanism that authorises the figure of the sovereign to dictate the terms according
to which political life must function. As Schmitt puts it in the context of liberal
constitutional governance, ‘Although he stands outside the normally valid legal
system, [the sovereign] nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether

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the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety’ (Schmitt 1985, 7). On the other
hand, Giorgio Agamben reprised Schmitt’s thesis in the late twentieth century to
make an antithetical argument. Agamben’s notion of the exception describes not
the exclusive locus of an all-powerful figure but the embodiment of a minimum
empowerment, or what he calls ‘bare life’. Revealing the paradoxically disciplinary
restrictions on life inherent to the basic functioning of autonomy, ‘the inclusion of
bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of
sovereign power’ (Agamben 1998, 6). For Agamben, then, the exception designates
a precarious sovereignty, an irreducible autonomy that reveals the enduring yet
vulnerable position of those deprived of the most basic rights by the order of the law.
Albeit pursuing ideologically opposite ends, Schmitt and Agamben’s configurations of the exception denote a generative understanding of sovereignty. Sovereignty
results in both cases in a form of subjectivation that binds the individual with the
polity and establishes, either via an absolutist absorption of power or a minimal
and liminal autonomy, a connection with the rest of the members of said polity.
As a consequence, one key aspect that this line of thought1 fails to account for is
the way in which sovereignty, even when manifesting as exceptional, takes shape
as a detachment of the individual from the polity. This form of sovereignty, which
will be called here ‘negative sovereignty’, has in common with Agamben’s theorisation an investment in the political well-being of the most vulnerable, yet it differs
from it in radical ways. Negative sovereignty, as this essay seeks to show, is a
self-contradicting operation that can only be found in a political and historical no
man’s land and leads to no positive outcome. This, however, must not be understood
as political suicide; instead, negative sovereignty names a foreclosed potentiality that
reveals the fault-lines of the constitution of autonomy as delineated by the tensions
between affiliation, hegemony, and difference. This essay, thus, aims to explore the
idea of sovereignty in its negative configuration – that is, against the grain – by
casting it not as the ultimate locus of a generative kind of political agency but as
a radical, self-effacing gesture.
One of the most prominent examples of negative sovereignty can be seen
operating in the mesh of agonistic relationships2 that drive forward national selfdetermination movements. National sovereignty manifests itself as an affirmation,
yet its outcome is not attained via the exception to the hegemonic rule but through
the development of an autonomy that emanates from the inside. This is indeed a key
aspect of most modern anti-colonial independence movements. As theorist of the
postcolonial nation Partha Chatterjee has argued, anti-colonial nationalism ‘creates
1. Of course, the tracing of the exception between these two poles is only one of many other possible
articulations of the idea of sovereignty. A number of influential theorists of politics can indeed be
invoked to form different constellations of exceptional sovereignty, especially as grounded in or
in response to Schmitt’s work, among whom are Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Jacques
Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, or Antonio Negri.
2. For an exploration of the nature of the agonistic relationship as ‘less of a face-to-face confrontation
that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation’ (Foucault 2000, 342), see Michel Foucault’s
(2000) essay ‘The subject and power’.

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Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and the Great War in A Long Long Way

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its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its own
political battle with the imperial power’ and it is therefore possible to claim that ‘the
nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the hands of the colonial power’
(Chatterjee 1993, 6). A newly established sovereignty, thus, finds its roots in a
disturbance of the hegemonic order within the colony that gains, in time, enough
momentum to provoke the emancipation of its colonised people by effectively
rejecting colonial rule. This is precisely what occurred across the territories formerly
colonized by European powers, from the liberation of current-day Venezuela,
Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama under the leadership of
Simón Bolívar in the nineteenth century, to the independence of Algeria after the
1954–1962 war against the French.
While serving the cause of independence, such an emancipatory process is beset
with a series of problems, two of which are critical for the purposes of the argument
developed in this article. First, and as much anti- and postcolonial theory has
contended, the new national sovereignty must be articulated critically and diligently
so that it does not become a self-reproductive emulation of the colonial rule that it
resists.3 Certainly, the establishment of a new hegemony is in itself the only way in
which self-governance can be substantiated. However, this presents important
complications as the inclusion of the members of a community under the auspices
of a common identity also means the unavoidable exclusion of those who do not,
cannot, or will not belong. Second, while an inchoate, pre-independence sovereign
ethos must be accounted for in the build-up to the eventual end of colonial rule, there
is a risk in folding all pro-independence resisting stirrings, modes, and aspirations
into a neat narrative that culminates with a declaration of emancipation.
Implying a causal link between all the unconnected moments of resistance and
eventual independence obscures the complexities of a process that is often more
turbulent than the historical record will likely show in retrospect.
A novel such as Sebastian Barry’s 2005 A Long Long Way illustrates in vivid ways
how the idea of negative sovereignty can be a useful theoretical lens to analyse the
ramifications of these two major problems. The novel articulates the pitfalls of understanding sovereign self-determination teleologically and as reified exclusively by
the eventual establishment of a new nation. It does so, as this article aims to prove, by
imagining a form of political agency that gradually strays away from the centre of the
historical narrative that describes the proclamation of the Republic of Ireland’s national independence a century ago. What follows, thus, will first discuss the
implications of negative sovereignty in relation to Barry’s aesthetic and political
intervention in the genre of historical fiction. Then, it will move on to consider
the ways in which queer theory offers a productive theoretical approach to investigate Ireland’s sovereignty against its grain. Finally, it will show how the protagonist
of A Long Long Way embodies negative sovereignty through the textual analysis of
several passages from the novel.

3. For two classical examples of this kind of argument, see Fanon (2004) and Cabral (1972).

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Negative Sovereignty and the Para-Historical Novel
As has been mentioned, by analysing Barry’s novel, the current investigation is
concerned with two overlapping issues. On the one hand it seeks to elucidate the
work of negative sovereignty in connection with the Irish independence movement
of the first half of the twentieth century. On the other, it aims to reflect on its
investment in challenging the larger sovereign apparatus of the British Empire
and its subtending English nationalist framework. Yet Barry’s novel is not primarily
interested in the political process that culminated in the establishment of the Irish
Republic in 1922, as traced by the official historical narrative, but with Ireland’s role
in the First World War.
The novel follows the life of Willie Dunne, a young Dubliner born into a Catholic
loyalist family who volunteers to join the British imperial army, documenting his
coming of age as the war breaks out, his deployments to continental Europe and
intervening furloughs in Dublin, and the circumstances surrounding the conflict,
including the 1916 Easter Rising. The central narrative tension of the novel is
Willie’s involvement in the war, which is delineated by his initial faith in Britain’s
participation in the name of justice and his detachment from his homeland toward
the end of the conflict, despite his newfound conviction that Ireland must seek
independence from Britain. This trajectory is crucially doubled, as will be further
shown, by Willie’s almost idyllic relationship with his father, a bond that is severely
affected by their gradual estrangement as a result of their confronted national
allegiances. This makes A Long Long Way a historical novel of a very particular
order.4
Critics have found fault with Barry’s treatment of Irish history, often classifying
him as a revisionist author.5 This may be the case if his writing is measured directly
and strictly against Ireland’s official historical record, expecting a correlative
fictional treatment that reflects the latter’s distribution of agents, causes, and effects.
However, A Long Long Way suggests that Barry is not interested in this kind of
approach. The clear politico-aesthetic merit of the novel lies in the ways it allows
readers to imagine what the official historical narrative conceals and not what it
exhibits prominently.6 As Fintan O’Toole (1997, vii) has argued, Barry’s writing
is concerned with ‘history’s leftovers, men and women discarded by their times
[ : : : ] misfits, anomalies, outlanders’. This is not to say that the political scope of
4. The historical novel, as Georg Lukács (1983, 42) has famously put it, re-enacts ‘the social and
human motives which led men to think, feel, and act just as they did in historical reality’. Yet
Barry’s narrative has a different representational objective. As Liam Harte (2015) has contended,
A Long Long Way is closer to the nineteenth-century tradition than to what is known as postmodern
metafiction. For the original theorisation of the notion of postmodern metafiction see Hutcheon
(1988), and for an elaboration of this thesis see Hutcheon (1989). The point here, however, is
concerned with something else, namely what is forced out by the coherent and teleological proclivities
of history.
5. Elizabeth Cullingford (2004), for instance, has argued that other texts by Barry inaccurately represent
the historical developments leading to Irish nationalism.
6. For a study of a different historico-narrative reflection that nonetheless reveals similar political
ramifications, see Meneses (2017).

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Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and the Great War in A Long Long Way

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Barry’s fiction is small or that it opens the floodgates for a relativistic rush that
seeks to drown Ireland’s history as we know it with an array of alternative
versions. Rather, Barry’s engagement with history is, to borrow Edward Said’s term,
‘contrapuntal’; that is, it is a kind of engagement that, with ‘a simultaneous
awareness’, encompasses both the official history and ‘those other histories against
which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’ (Said 1993, 51). In
this sense, the novel could be called a ‘para-historical’ reflection that can only occur
on the obverse of the history that critics charge Barry with glossing over.7 While
framed within a decisive event that would define the course of Irish history,8 it
nonetheless foregrounds certain aspects that are overshadowed precisely by its
historical prominence.
As a para-historical novel, then, A Long Long Way allegorises a sovereignty that
exceeds the confines of national identity as it is ‘imagined’ in the context of Ireland’s
anti-imperial struggle for independence in the first half of the twentieth century. As
Benedict Anderson has persuasively shown, a nation’s self-identification as such is
contingent on the ability of its inhabitants to imagine themselves and their fellow
country people as members of the same homeland (Anderson 1983). By approaching
the war from Willie’s point of view, then, Barry explores how the kind of sovereignty
examined here is discarded as an unimaginable and fruitless political subjectivity.
This is evinced in Willie’s trajectory throughout the novel. The more time he spends
in the battlefield, the more disconnected he becomes from the ongoing disputes
over whether Ireland must be an autonomous nation. As a result, Willie struggles
to imagine himself as a member of the fatherland to which he once felt intimately
attached. A passage in the middle of the novel that reflects Willie’s contemplation
on the war and his participation in it reveals this very sentiment. As the narrator
puts it: ‘the distance between the site of war and the site of home was a long one
and widening. Not the ordinary pragmatic miles, but some other, more mysterious
measure of distance’ (Barry 2006, 190). Sovereignty, thus, registers in the novel as
something other than an incipient proto-nationalist sentiment. Instead, it operates
as the equivalent of the mathematical value of a negative number: the expression
of a value that, while amounting to something less than nothing, nonetheless has
intrinsic and irrefutable meaning. It is this negative sovereign sum that Willie
represents as a para-historical agent, and one that can be better understood by
7. The term ‘para-historical novel’ has been used in other critical contexts. Kathleen Singles (2013),
who in turn refers to the work of Jörg Helbig (1988), employs it to describe what she calls fictional
‘alternate histories’. My use of the term differs from theirs in that, instead of exploring possible
alternatives to documented history, it is intended to elucidate how certain events, people, and circumstances become absorbed and, ultimately, erased by the narratives that constitute that history.
8. As Thomas Hennessey has argued, if in ‘1914, the majority of Irish Nationalists accepted that Irish
self-government would be within the United Kingdom’, and while ‘by the end of the war the majority
of Nationalists apparently supported the establishment of an Irish Republic outside of the British
Empire’ (although with varied degrees of commitment to the several possible options available),
‘[t]he significance of the war was that it catapulted Irish republicanism from an obscure, minority
obsession into a potential form of government for a self-governing Ireland’ (Hennessey 1998, 236;
emphasis in original).

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attending to the gender relations that animate the novel’s reflection of this moment in
Ireland’s history.
Masculinity, Queerness and the Nation
The political investment of the novel and the locus for the articulation of negative
sovereignty reside in the alternative masculinity enacted by Willie. Many critics have
pointed out that the evolution of the idea of nationalism is intimately connected to
the development of dominant discourses and practices of masculinity. As George L.
Mosse (1996, 6) has argued, ‘Nationalism, a movement which began and evolved
parallel to modern masculinity, will play an important role as such an educator,
for it adopted the masculine stereotype as one means of self-representation’.
From a related perspective, Joane Nagel has suggested that
By definition, nationalism is political and closely linked to the state and its
institutions. Like the military, most state institutions have been historically and
remain dominated by men. It is therefore no surprise that the culture and ideology
of hegemonic masculinity go hand in hand with the culture and ideology of
hegemonic nationalism. (Nagel 1998, 248–249)

The foundational discourses of masculinity and nationalism must not, therefore, be
understood as parallel as much as mutually constitutive. Indeed, the link between
nationalism and masculinity has a long history and has been, as Benedict
Anderson (1983, 12–22) reminds us, essential for the understanding of the nation
in dynastic terms. Reified by prevalent notions of patriotism and celebrations
of the fatherland, the perpetuation of men as recipients of the power to govern
(be it as kings, as fathers, or even as democratically elected leaders in the still
gender-imbalanced political environment of our time) has secured their position
at the top of the ruling hierarchy of many nations.9
It is this connection that Barry’s novel upends. Willie interrupts the patriarchal
and nationalist foundations of both the Englishness shoring up the imperial apparatus from which Ireland would eventually extricate itself and the future Irish nation
that he does not live to see. A hasty analysis of A Long Long Way might locate this
interruption in its protagonist’s protracted experiences on the battleground and the
displacement of heteronormative sexuality that many critics have explored. As Paul
Fussell has put it,
Given [the] association between war and sex, and given the deprivation and
loneliness and alienation characteristic of the soldier’s experience – given, that is,
his need for affection in a largely womanless world – we will not be surprised to find
both the actuality and the recall of front-line experience replete with what we can call
the homoerotic. (Fussell 1975, 272)
9. A partial if critical response to this kind of thinking can be found in the writings of John Locke (1994),
whose first of the Two Treatises on Government explicitly challenges the legitimacy of male royal
succession and its assumption as framework for the construction of the sovereignty of the nation.
Yet, as Lisa Lowe (2015) has dexterously demonstrated, one must be cautious in taking classic liberal
discourses (including Locke’s) at face value without contextualising them and excavating their
connections with the anti-liberal underpinnings of imperialism and other forms of oppression.

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This is, indeed, one of the most common aspects in a great deal of literature about
and emerging from the Great War, including the work of such poets as Wilfred
Owen, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon.10
Yet more careful analysis reveals how Willie plays a more important role than
personifying the experience of thousands of young soldiers or paying tribute to
the explorations of masculinity in First World War literature.11 While nodding to
the deviations in the dominant heteronormative codes exhibited most notably by
the war poets, Barry instils in Willie’s masculinity an important ‘queering’ power.
This power is important because it interrupts what Bonnie Mann has called in
another, also imperial context – i.e. American global exceptionalism in the twentyfirst century – the operation of ‘sovereign masculinity’ (Mann 2014). Willie is
described here as a queering agent not because he comes out or engages in homosexual relations. In fact, Barry makes a particular effort to ensure that, for the entirety of
the novel, he behaves according to the heterosexual expectations of the time. Willie
predictably falls in love with Gretta, a young woman of conventional, angelic
beauty, who promises to marry him after the war. He also engages in a sexual encounter with a prostitute during the war. His relationships with his fellow soldiers
and commanding officers, furthermore, are never outside heteronormative protocol
and are frequently symbolised via the rhetoric of the patriarchal family structure:
officers are like fathers to him, and he and his fellow soldiers frequently regard
one another as brothers. Not even the intimacy of the trenches, often identified as
the locus of the homoerotic and homosexual tropes present in so much First
World War literature, encourages expressions of homosexual desire, temporary as
they might be. Willie’s queering power lies in his failure to fulfil the hetero-patriarchal expectations placed on him as a young soldier destined to fight the evils haunting Europe – while displaying hypermasculine variations of courage and fearlessness
– and to become a literal founding father of Ireland’s national identity.
In this sense, Willie represents the kind of sovereign principle running at the
centre of Lee Edelman’s (2004) compelling study of queer politics, No Future:
Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman energetically mounts an onto-political
theory that is governed by what he identifies as the non-reproductive, dissenting
nature of queerness. He argues against the ‘reproductive futurism’ (Edelman
2004, 2) incarnated by the heterosexual couple, which results in the veneration of
the child as the embodiment of ‘the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights

10. Notable poems that explore this sensibility include Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, ‘Arms and the
Boy’ and ‘Disabled’, Brooke’s ‘1914: The Soldier’ and ‘1914: The Dead’, and Sassoon’s ‘They’
and ‘Repression of War Experience’. For a compilation of First World War poetry that includes these
and other related poems, see Walter (2006).
11. Studies abound that substantially explore the impact of the war on British masculinity and its link to
national identity. For a representative sample, see Caesar (1993), Bourke (1996), Roper (2005) and
Meyer (2008). The impact of the war on Irish national identity and its masculinity has not received the
same amount of attention. Joseph Valente’s (2011) work stands out as an important exception. As this
article is trying to argue, Barry’s novel warrants urgent critical attention to the multiple dimensions of
this issue.

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to its future share in the nation’s good’ (Edelman 2004, 11). Queerness, Edelman
maintains,
figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s
death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal,
that follows from reading that figure literally [ : : : ]. [Q]ueerness attains its ethical
value precisely insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as
resistance to the viability of the social while insisting in the inextricability of such
resistance from every social structure. (Edelman 2004, 3)

This theoretical deployment,12 thus, illuminates in compelling ways Willie’s function
in the national and gendered entanglements that give shape to the disputes over
sovereignty at the centre of the novel. Willie’s queering potentiality can, indeed,
be read as ‘figuring a threat to meaning, which depends on the promise of coming,
in a future continuously deferred, into the presence that reconciles meaning with
being in a fantasy of completion’ (Edelman 2004, 114; emphasis in original). As
will be shown through a closer textual analysis of the novel, Willie interrupts the
self-reproductive, futurist principle undergirding national sovereignty as conceived
by either side of the Anglo-Irish clash. As a result, the illegible negative sovereignty
that he embodies is recast as a source of resistance that, in its self-discounting, takes
count of those who do not play a (re)productive role. This occurs in the novel on a
number of levels, although it is best observed through the prism of the relationship
between Willie and his father. These two figures stand as Ireland’s alignment with the
British Empire and a successive yet impossible future that emphatically does not
herald the sovereignty of an independent nationhood.

Disrupting Patriarchy
Bearing these ideas in mind, Willie’s construction as a queering agent is evident
from the beginning of his life. The novel’s opening sets the tone for such a reading:
Willie ‘was born in the dying days’ (Barry 2006, 3). While he is like ‘a scrap of a song
nonetheless, a point of light in the sleety darkness, a beginning’ (Barry 2006, 4),
Willie soon contravenes the manly vitality implied in the kind of self-reproductive
patriarchal sovereignty mentioned above. He ‘was a little baby and would be always
a little boy [ : : : ] like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot
through him, provisional and bare’ (Barry 2006, 3). Willie can only aspire to be the
harbinger of a new century in which he, like ‘all those million boys in all their
humours’, are to be ‘milled by the mill-stones of a coming war’ (Barry 2006, 4).
From the very beginning of the novel, then, Willie is conspicuous for being at odds
with the foundational masculinity that is expected of the next generation of Irish
men, who are meant to participate in bringing peace to the continent and even
resolution to their homeland’s troubles.
12. Edelman’s formulation of the politics of queerness stands in stark contrast to other understandings of
queerness as a positive political discourse. Mark Rifkin (2012, 2018), for instance, deploys it as a
historical and political empowerment of Native American sovereignty.

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It is in this context that the relationship between Willie and his father augurs the
emergence of a negative sovereignty resulting from the clash between the virility and
colonial legacy upon which the patriarchal national imagination rests and the birth
of a new Irish national identity resulting from the imminent Irish independence. The
chief of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Willie’s father is first introduced as the
object of his son’s admiration and the epitome of a venerable patriarchal sovereignty,
as a visit to the city from George V, ‘the King of Ireland’, reveals:
His father, though only an inspector, was put on a big white horse so that the King
could see him all the better. His father on that horse looked much finer than any
King, who after all had to stand on his polished shoes. Like God Himself, or the
best man in God’s kingdom. (Barry 2006, 4–5)

With this early description, the patriarchal terms on which the relationship
between the two men will first thrive and then deteriorate are set. By placing the
father heroically at the same level as the King and equating him to God in
Willie’s eyes, Barry dramatizes the high expectations placed on Willie at a very early
age while prefiguring the clash that results from his failure to meet them.
As Willie grows up, both men become united on more equal terms by a very
strong familial bond in a household in which other women (Willie’s sisters) play only
a secondary role. This relationship is marked by the first signs of a masculinity that
runs against the grain of the heroic narrative which begets strong men capable of
leading the nation. In one significant early instance, the narrative reveals Willie
and his father’s habit ‘to read the paper together in the evening and comment on
the various items, almost like a married couple’ (Barry 2006, 15). Filling the gap left
by Willie’s mother, who dies giving birth to one of Willie’s sisters, Willie embodies
the negation of nationalism’s reproductive futurism in this momentary re-assignation
of roles. The symbolic weight of this rather ‘queer’ bond is doubled by the failing
course of Willie’s heterosexual – although unconsummated – love affair with
Gretta. Early on, Willie becomes infatuated with the young woman. After pursuing
her for some time, she finally promises to marry him, although only after he comes
back from the war. The prospect of a life together temporarily counteracts the
violence that the conflict inflicts upon normal life by interpellating Willie as a
potential patriarchal figure. However, after hearing about Willie’s sexual intercourse
with a prostitute in the French town of Amiens, Gretta breaks off the engagement
and later has a child with another man, further impeding Willie from fulfilling his
function as future husband and father. Willie’s masculinity, as a result, continues
to prove inadequate according to the model for a patriarchal formulation of Irish
national sovereignty.
Nevertheless, if a gap begins to appear between a hopeful father and a son
who fails to become the kind of man the former expects, the war seems to offer
an opportunity to bridge it. Willie fails to follow his father’s footsteps as his short
height prevents him from joining the police force. Thus, he finds in the royal army
a response to measure up to his father’s high expectations. Initially, this gesture
brings father and son closer together. Yet the narrator’s description of Willie’s

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war experiences gradually gives the lie to the supposed heroism inherent in joining
up to defend Belgium’s national sovereignty while, simultaneously, rendering
Willie’s identification with Ireland increasingly untenable. As a consequence, the
war widens – instead of closing – the gap that keeps them apart. While in the army,
Willie finds momentary solace for his masculine inadequacies. In his first letter to his
father from the training grounds in England, for instance, he hopes that ‘we will be
finished men by Christmas’ (Barry 2006, 16). On his way to France, further, he
realises that ‘[h]e could think of only one word to describe everything, bloody
manhood at last’ (Barry 2006, 21). And, in anticipation of the war, he senses the
blood rushing through his veins with ‘a strange force’ that makes his muscles feel
‘like wraps of prime meat to make a butcher happy’ (Barry 2006, 23). These moments
exemplify how the war appears to Willie as the perfect opportunity to adjust his
masculinity according to the more traditional and ‘manly’ standards of the time
and dispel at once his inadequacy, which he can attribute for now to his age and
not an abnormal manifestation of his gendered self.
The realities of the war, though, inhibit this initial bravado and reinstall Willie’s
status as a ‘queer’ figure. He is suddenly assailed by ‘a hand of fear dipp[ing] into his
stomach’, while the first time in the trenches ‘he felt small enough’ (Barry 2006, 24).
Later, a gas attack in Flanders leaves him ‘want[ing] his sergeant and his captain and
his mates the way a baby wants its home’ (reducing the virile man to its infant,
undeveloped form) before walking ‘[l]ike an old man’ – now turning the man into
a decayed, obsolete version of himself – to ‘stand stupidly’ by his dead captain’s body
(Barry 2006, 49, 50). Simultaneously, Willie’s masculinity develops in the trenches
along with a growing dissenting position in favour of the nationalist movement back
home. The longer Willie experiences the war, thus, the clearer the paradox of having
enlisted in Britain’s imperial army while fighting for Belgium’s freedom appears to
him. This is described early in the novel. When he is on the battleground, the narrator
depicts how ‘[h]e had hardly a true idea who he was [ : : : ] what he was thinking,
where he was, what nation he belonged to, what language he spoke’ (Barry 2006, 35).
Therefore, while threatened by the ferocity of the war, Willie ironically becomes
a man free from the pressures of the hegemonic masculine identity symbolised by
his father. Only an intimate and existential attachment with fellow Irish soldiers,
of whom there are fewer and fewer as the war grinds on, will allow him to remain
linked to a recognizable national identity. This national affiliation, nevertheless, is
markedly disconnected from the early pro-independence movement that begins to
take place in Ireland, placing him in a political no man’s land. Soon, this ominous
sense of detachment also drives a wedge into the bond between him and his
progenitor.
The first time Willie is home on leave, both Willie and his father seek to reinforce
their relationship, which has been weakened by their time apart. This effort culminates in the reluctant father’s ritualised acceptance of his son’s manhood – despite its
limitations – while bathing him: ‘So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his
son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath, as indeed Willie’s

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Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and the Great War in A Long Long Way

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mother had done a thousand times while Willie was a boy’ (Barry 2006, 74). After
drying him, he makes Willie wear ‘a pair of long-johns of his father’s’ and
then, when he was all shipshape, his father put his big arms around him, and held him
close to him for a few moments, like an actor on the stage.
It was not a thing you would see in real life anyway, and there was a faraway
look on his father’s face, like it was all years ago and maybe they were still in
Dalkey and he was a little lad. (Barry 2006, 74)

This scene works as the last iteration of the patriarchal system that both father and
son try to honour one more time: ‘he was a soldier now of some nineteen years
and for all that he was glad of his father’s arms around him, strange as it was, strange
and comforting as it was’ (Barry 2006, 75). More than a matter of age, Willie’s final
re-enacting of his role as the old man’s son in this moment of respite before he returns
to the war signals the advent of a sovereign masculinity destined to break away from
the patriarchal nationalism that the father represents.
With his father’s approval, Willie goes back to the front to develop into a
fully-grown man. At the same time, the European conflict begins to show signs of
becoming a political battleground for Ireland’s dispute over its own sovereignty.
Barry reflects this symbolically by throwing father and son head-first into one of
the most volatile moments in the history of the Irish question, an experience that will
cause an irreconcilable clash between them. Shortly after being deployed, Willie’s
battalion is sent to Dublin to repel the historical 1916 Easter Rising, in which a
number of pro-independence militants are executed by both the police led by his
father and the British army. This episode exacerbates Willie’s doubts about
Ireland’s place within the structures of the Empire and the implications of his role
as a soldier in its army. At first, his national sympathies are not entirely aligned with
the independence movement: ‘Willie thought of what those fucking men were doing
in Dublin and he cursed back at them’ (Barry 2006, 110). Yet his return back to the
front is marked by the recurring memory of a rebel who dies at his feet during the
Rising. This causes Willie’s position to become increasingly at odds with the chief of
police, who he nevertheless continues to praise both for his patriotism and his
fatherly attributes. As he states in one of his letters: ‘There is not a man in
Ireland that has served Ireland better than you. [ : : : ] Mark my words, you have
brought us through like a proper father’ (Barry 2006, 105). While Willie’s compliments might seem to denote his desire to measure up to his father’s achievements
and stature as a notable Dublin man, the deference in his words combined with a
celebration of the man’s past achievement as a parent underscore Willie’s later failure
to embody the kind of masculinity that his father represents. At this point, the
disconnection is irreparable.
Thus, as the war intensifies the soldier’s detachment from his homeland,
Willie has no alternative but to ground himself in a fraternal bond with the men
in his battalion. In one of his last letters to his father, he celebrates them by appealing
to a common Irishness that supersedes the political turmoil his father is charged with
containing: ‘Maybe at home some of the lads might be getting into trouble with you

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and your men! Here I have to say they make fine soldiers. Nothing is too hard for
them [ : : : ] They are wonderful lads’ (Barry 2006, 135). This praise upsets Willie’s
father so much that he stops writing letters to his son. The rupture in their relationship is imminent, although Willie is not very clear about what exactly is causing his
father’s silence. He continues to send letters, yet he cannot help worsening the friction
between them by telling him, among other things, about the unfair treatment given to
Jesse Kirwan, a soldier who ends up court-martialled and hanged due to his vocal
sympathy with the Dublin rebels. Willie’s disquiet becomes more and more trying,
especially because he cannot entirely tell where he stands regarding Ireland’s role in
relation to the British Empire as he denounces the treatment given to his fellow
soldier. One of the only few points of certainty, tellingly enough, is that it is compounding the clash with his father: ‘Even writing his last letter he had had a funny
feeling in his water that he was getting at things he shouldn’t be trying to get at in the
company of his father, as it were’ (Barry 2006, 190). Willie’s anxious anticipation of
his father’s response is a reminder of both the parent’s authoritative presence and
how the chasm created by the war highlights how his masculinity can no longer
be formed along traditional patriarchal lines.
As the novel progresses towards its end with scenes dominated by Willie’s fear
for his own life and the often-gruesome deaths of his friends, the war becomes for
him a historico-political no-man’s land, leaving him ‘between [his] own countrymen
deriding [him] for being in the army, and the army deriding [him] for [his] own
slaughter’ (Barry 2006, 281). Willie’s disconnection from his country is mirrored
by his estrangement from his father, who, during Willie’s second furlough home,
shows a mixture of stoicism, reticence, and vulnerability in the presence of ‘a
man of five foot six who had seen a thousand deaths’ (Barry 2006, 246). One last
opportunity nonetheless presents itself for the soldier to salvage their bond. Upon
return to the front for the last time, Willie is caught up in a German bomb attack
and is sent to a hospital in England to be treated for severe shell shock, where he
praises his father’s courage and strength as a single parent in his last letter:
I was lying there thinking how it might have been, two young girls and a boy and a
baby girl into the bargain. So how did you manage all that? It was a wonderful thing
to do, to hold us to you, and make all those teas, Papa, and find time to play with us,
and when you did give out it was for a good reason. (Barry 2006, 278)

During this traumatic period, thoughts about his father’s role as parent form the last
thread that connects Willie to Ireland, given that ‘he knew that he had no country
now’, while ‘all sorts of Irelands were no more, and he didn’t know what Ireland was
behind him now, but they would not let him be a citizen’ (Barry 2006, 286). Both
national and patriarchal connections are irretrievably lost. Politically, Willie can
only be described as a figure isolated from any available discourse to articulate
his identity both as an Irish citizen and as a man.
Willie’s loss of a concrete Irish identity that affiliates him in any real way to
the current events at home is finally actualised by his death in the trenches.
While ‘the Irish Convention [ : : : ] had failed’ and Home Rule ‘was a dead duck’

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(Barry 2006, 274), as an officer tells him, his uncertainty about where he belongs is
poignantly counterbalanced by his certitude ‘that it was just that he was a man with
bits of himself broken’ (Barry 2006, 282). A broken masculinity with no ties to
Ireland is what the war has left to annihilate, inaugurating a negative sovereignty
that, to echo Edelman, operates as ‘a persistent negation that offers assurance of
nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any promise of a future’
(Edelman 2004, 48). As an emblem of a future Ireland destined to be absent from
the history books, Willie’s death on the front counts for less than nothing. His
father’s attempt to reinstate relations between them, in turn, is expressed only too
late. In his first letter since their falling-out, which is returned to him with
Willie’s few possessions, the father exhorts his son to
forgive an old man for being stuck in other days. How I love you, Willie, and what a
good son you are. How did you go out to fight for Europe as you said, and how brave
you are to be there. And if it was bad here these days how bad was it out in Belgium?
No one knows but you, Willie. I had no right to be cross with you. Will you forgive
me, Willie? I must always as far as lies in my power look after you all though you are
in your prime now and maybe I am not the man I was in those old days. (Barry
2006, 291)

The words of a hopeful father ready to give way to the next generation of men are left
echoing into the unbridgeable gap that the war and Home Rule have opened between
him and his son. Literally nothing remains as the old man’s legacy. A generation of
men ‘in their prime’ meant to become the new fathers of the nation is erased and,
with them, the patriarchal lineage that has sustained it. Willie’s father’s last attempt
to rescue a futurism that pursues, to return to Edelman’s ideas, ‘generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence not toward the end of enabling change,
but, instead, of perpetuating sameness of turning back time to assure repetition’, fails
to materialise, and so does a new Irish identity modelled after the reproductive
sovereignty that he represents (Edelman 2004, 60). Ultimately, this episode suggests
that, whether as part of the Empire or independent from it, whatever future awaits
Ireland cannot be prefigured in this generational relay.

Projections of Negative Sovereignty
As has been suggested in the opening of this article, Willie’s symbolic figure can
only be understood outside of the historical narrative that connects Ireland’s colonial
relationship with the British Empire and its subsequent independence. Even though
the question of Irish self-determination would eventually be (at least partially)
resolved with the establishment of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland years
later, Willie’s misalignment with the confronted loyalist and Home Rule discourses
deprives him of a place in that history. The value in Barry’s novel, thus, lies in its
attempt to flesh out the intervention that this figure performs in the story of
Ireland’s turbulent course to attain sovereignty. As Samuel Hynes (1992) has argued,
the Great War was an ‘imaginative event’ that ‘altered the ways in which men and

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Juan Meneses

women thought not only about the war but about the world, and about culture and
its expressions’, while the change it caused in the status quo ‘was so vast and so
abrupt as to make the years after the war seem discontinuous from the years before’.
The war caused, Hynes concludes, a ‘radical discontinuity’ (Hynes 1992, xi–xii;
emphasis in original). This article has thus sought to show how Willie, enacting a
queering of the masculine dimensions attendant to the construction of Ireland’s
national identity, illustrates such a discontinuity. Yet this disruption is not the kind
of affair that pushes history forward. Willie’s failure to be the man that he is
demanded to be – not least by his father – is, furthermore, not an unsuccessful
attempt to stand for a coming Irish nationalism. Rather, it reveals the continuities
between the dominant English imperial nationalism and a possible anti-colonial
Irish sovereignty that operates in its stead. This is what renders Willie’s sovereignty
a negative attribute that nevertheless holds crucial political value.
The reading of A Long Long Way proposed in this article has demonstrated
two things. First, Willie Dunne’s journey through the Belgian and French trenches
doubles as a nuanced account of the disasters of the Great War and a reflection on
what remains in the margins of the historical narrative of the Irish question.
Increasingly detached from his homeland, Willie allegorises, through his collision
with his father’s national allegiance, the inevitable interruption of a patriarchal
national and imperial discourse dominated by the figure of King George V. His
mundane existence in the trenches during the last stages of the war, further, precludes
a teleological interpretation that casts him as a martyr or even a harbinger of a new
Irish nationalist discourse, operating against the grain of Ireland’s historical narrative of emancipation. The second point is concerned with the novel’s larger political
preoccupations. Willie’s negative sovereignty throws light onto the constitution of
certain forms of political agency that do not register historically. Beyond its primary
engagement with the early difficult stages of Ireland’s eventual self-governance,
A Long Long Way is also a call for the continuous reassessment of extant
understandings of political sovereignty. Looking at the obverse of history – that
is, at the kinds of para-historical moments that the novel imagines – allows us to
expose the blind spots in the purview of that which we call ‘politics’. If playing a
meaningful political role is, among other things, to be counted, reading Barry
may help us discern the insufficiencies that assail current efforts to re-energise
democratic representation.
In memorialising those who fall off the edge of history, A Long Long Way reveals
a fundamental difference in understanding sovereignty as the legitimating site for the
thriving of the nation and its conception as an attempt to establish a political
autonomy that is productive even when it is expressed through a self-negation. In
deploying Edelman’s critique of ‘reproductive futurism’, thus, this article has
provided an analysis aiming to investigate ‘the “other” side of politics: the “side”
where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the “side” outside of all political sides,
committed as they are, on every side, to futurism’s good’ (Edelman 2004, 7). In other
words, in illustrating the idea of what has been called here ‘negative sovereignty’, the

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Masculinity, Negative Sovereignty and the Great War in A Long Long Way

15

novel gives a name to those whose relevance is shrouded – and therefore blotted
out – by the narrative cloak of history. Complicating the dictum that history is
written by the victors, it gives a name to the losers among the victors in the story
of Ireland’s independence. While aligned with the latter, Willie’s political position
is nonetheless developed on that other side where the official historical narrative
cannot reach. Ultimately, Willie’s queering of the hegemonic masculine tenets at
the core of Ireland’s national sovereignty provides an important critique that exposes
the crucial political interstices in disputes such as his homeland’s struggle for
self-governance, while demonstrating their operation as paradoxical yet historically
logical phenomena.

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About the Author
Juan Meneses is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte – where he teaches courses on
Anglophone and global literature, as well as visual studies – and a translator. He
has published work in periodicals such as Journal of Modern Literature, Modern
Fiction Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and translations in
The Massachusetts Review of Books and West Branch. He is the author of
Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent (2019).

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