HISTORY
(through the story)
The
story began during the 50’s in Dublin.
The
narrator, who was born
in 1953, i.e. just after the Second World war, was a little boy
raised in a german-irish family.
At
this time in history,
the Republic of Ireland wanted to prove its independence by a strong
nationalism (cf the narrator’s father in the story).
As
a result, being half
Irish but mainly half german was very difficult to endure for a
seven-year-old boy.
In
this book, Hugo Hamilton jungles in a disconcerting and at the same
time emotional way with the past in order to expose the story of his
childhood.
He
wonderfuly handles the art of flashbacks.
Indeed,
the way how he tells us the story of his grandparents is simply
amazing.
Félix, Jehan, Mylène & Vivien
THE CHARACTERS
The children: Hugo, Franz
and Maria.
The mother: Irmgard;
she grew up in Kempen. She was raped by her boss (Stigler) when she
was younger. She’s homesick because she’s German, so she’s
unhappy, but always lovely, nice.
The father: Jack;
he was a school teacher. He’s very nationalist, so strange and
violent. We know that he comes from Cork and works as an engineer in
Dublin and writes his name in Irish. When he was young, Ireland was
still under British ruling, his father’s family were all fishermen.
Grandmother (to
the mother): Berta Kaiser : opera singer.
Grandfather (to
the mother) : Franz Kaiser.
Grandfather (to
the father): John, a nationalist, sailor of the British Navy. He fell
on deck one day and lost his memory and died not long after that, in
a hospital, in Cork city.
Grandmother (for the
father): Mary Frances.
At the time of the
story, all grandparents are dead. But
there’s no photo of the grandparents on the side of the father.
Uncle Ted: He’s
the younger brother of the father. He gave
candies to the children each time he met them and he is a priest.
Uncle Gerd: He’s
the brother of the mother. He refused to be a nazi.
Aunt Marianne: She’s the
sister of the mother, and has a daughter called Christianne.
We can think that
the mother was fed up with the father and
that she wanted to go back to her country with her children. But the
father threatened her, so she obeyed.
We don’t know if
the narrator gets along well with his
sister and brother because we don’t know what he thinks about them.
Eve, Laura, Lisa & Tiphaine
Narrative
strategy
In
this book, which is an indirect autobiography, Hugo Hamilton -via his
narrator- tells us about the situation in Northern Ireland just after
the Second World War. Indeed, his mother is German and he was raised
as if he was responsible of what happened during the war. This story
of a multicultural childhood gives us a new vision of the situation
in Northern Ireland.
At
first, nothing shows that it is an autobiography; it's shaped like a
fiction about the situation in Ireland. The narrator gives a complete
description of every event, and also lets us feel what he feels at
every moment. Therefore, we can understand that this work is the
story of his life; however, Hugo Hamilton doesn’t let his adult
side be part of the story – or only very subtly –, he only writes
this book through the eyes of a child, the child that he was back. He
talks about all the problems and the difficulties naively; he doesn’t
know how serious the things are. The narrator gives the story as he
hears it from his father or his mother, what he hears and sees is
what he understands, what he remembers and also what he tells us.
Through
this narrative strategy, the reader gets really attached to this
innocent child who is living in this heated environment. Indeed, the
fact that he and his brothers are half German make them be mocked and
bullied by the other children as "Nazis.” Also, because
everyone speaks English outside, but their father had totally
forbidden the English language inside his home, they have to speak
Irish or German. They live in a constant conflict between two worlds;
the one their parents create at home, which is a multicultural where
they try to make their two cultures coexist: the children wear
Lederhosen and Aran sweaters; and the one outside, where everyone
speaks English and where they are seen as “different” and where
they are not accepted. They are also at the heart of a conflict
between their two parents over intolerance and violence, and the
vision they have of their “home”, they disagree on how to live.
These difficulties make this narrator be even more touching, because
everything he’s living doesn’t seem to shock him, or to ruin his
happiness full of simple things. As he starts to refuse his father's
language lessons, using whatever weapons a child can use - illness,
anger, silence, naughtiness - he loses that firm patriarchal sense of
direction, but finds that there might be advantages at being lost...
Klara
The
narrator/ narrative strategy
In
this book, what is striking is probably the narrative strategy.
Indeed, the book is not written in a normal way. The author chose to
write his book with a child's eye vision. The story is told with the
experience, the language, the point of view of a little boy. As he
said, « he was a child who knew nothing already». The
facts are related, with the tact, the innocence, the truthfulness,
and the judgement of a child. It may be the whole originality of the
book. Futhermore, the facts are related in such a way that we can't
really know if the novel is truly an autobiography, or if some facts
are a bit exaggerated, or simply made-up. Thus, we are on both sides,
in order to know if the novel is a kind of autobiography, fiction, or
also a mix of both.
In
the end, we can infer that the narrator's choice of adopting a child
eye's vision allows the reader to make his own judgement, his own
interpretation of the story, on how he understands it. The mix
between an autobiography and a fiction makes the story particulary
original.
Nathalie
The
narrator and
narrative strategy:
First,
we have to say that this novel is an autobiography written by Hugo
Hamilton. Even though, it is Hamilton, an adult, who wrote this book,
we read this book and discover Ireland throughout a child’s eyes.
It may be original to use that process. Indeed, thanks to his
strategy of narration, the character seems to be a candid, and an
innocent child. When you read this book, you, more or less, go back
to your childhood. Thus, you may change your world’s vision and
adopt his strategy. Hamilton used, of course, the first person.
Second,
in his book Hamilton uses
an internal point of view. Indeed he takes a child’s vision, his
eyes. The narrator gives us the impression that he knows nothing
about his destiny , in spite of the fact that he has already lived
it. This is a kind of return in the past, and even if doesn't
remember everything, he succeeds in imagining a realistic dialogue
which matches his story and so his life. So we can say that this book
is also a kind of fiction on the one hand and a realistic one on the
other hand. As we can read in the
Speckled People,
there is a mix of direct and indirect speech. We can suppose that he
used indirect speech when he perhaps forgot important details that
would give meaning to his questioning.
Then,
Hamilton uses another strategy. Indeed, it is hard to
know if he uses the process of convincing or that of persuading.
Throughout the book, you may see that Hugo Hamilton is playing on
feelings, impressions and it may catch you inside the story.
On
the one hand, the narrator tries to convince us with rational and
reasonable arguments. In his book, Hamilton speaks a lot about the
History of Germany. Indeed, he often makes a reference to the Second
World War, Nazism and the difficulties that his mother
faced/encountered. The mother has a past which may be hard to
understand for Irish people. It may not have been simple to include
her in their world. As a consequence, we could say that Hugo’s
mother is the symbol of the problems that German people have to live
with after the war. Of course, they were not all guilty, but to many
(and some Irish people included), only their nationality mattered.
So, we may say that Hugo Hamilton tries to convince us, alluding to
History, which is represented by his mother.
On
the other hand, we could feel
that Hamilton also tries to persuade us. Indeed, he is himself, the
stereotype of the bullying, the teasing, and the nastiness that
people between two cultures may be confronted to. Moreover, he is a
German person and the story happened some years after the end of WW2.
You will see that people are still aware of that thing and that
swastikas appeared on the narrator’s road. Thus, every day, he
suffered from those things and he may want to touch/affect us with
those feelings since they were the problems he was faced with:
calling on the reader’s pity for him and for the whole family.
To
conclude, we can say that Hamilton uses two strategies of
argumentation: convincing and persuading.
As
a consequence, after having studied Hugo Hamilton’s narrative
strategy, we can say that it is a little complex but that is also
part of what makes the reader feel part of the novel.
Quentin, Vahé & Valentin
Meaning
of home
In
his book Hugo Hamilton shares his childhood, between Germany and
Ireland. He is looking for his own identity, that's why the meaning
of home is very important there.
In
Hugo Hamilton’s work there is a sort of obsession with identity and
with what constitutes it : language, memory, the past, heritage and
nationhood are interlinked with home and displacement. His writing is
characterised by a continuous and pervasive exploration of both
personal and shared identity. In line with the Irish tradition,
personal identity is continuously related and tightly connected to
national identity. Personal identity is always at stake, and Hanno,
the young protagonist of
The Speckled People,
relates himself repeatedly to his father: “You always have to walk
like yourself, not like your father or the crabs, just like
yourself.”
In
the 20th
chapter, the family travels to Connemara and arrives during the
evening. There, the family finally fits in a community: the mother
gives German lessons while the father speaks Irish all the time,
without hearing any word in English. The child really enjoys
Connemara. Indeed, he describes it as “ the place where
we all wanted to be for the rest of our lives”. In
Connemara, they met unusual people who didn't speak English at all,
and who could “remember as far back as infinity”. The kid and his
family are also surprised by the beauty of everything they see : they
discover wonderful landscapes, which are simple. They describe them
as the most beautiful things they've ever seen. They describe the
area by telling that it is “rich with nothing”. One day, the
father tells during a speech in Connemara, that the Irish language is
still alive and that it is an important thing. Even after a small
incident, nobody makes fun of the father.
In
fact, meanings of home and idendity are different according to the
young protagonist and his family : they show us that it depends on
the place where you live, the people who surround you...
Hugo's
mother compensates her homesickness for Germany by dressing her sons
in lederhosen, maintaining German Christmas traditions, basically
creating a German domestic life for her family within the confines of
their home. Meanwhile, after spending many years in Ireland, she
doesn't recognize anything when she goes back there : “ she
was lost, she couldn't recognize anything.”
The
protagonist is continuously moving from Germany to Ireland ,
continuously displaced. When they were in Germany, all the family
felt better : "Nobody would ever call us Nazis. My father would
have lots more friends and my mother would have all her sisters to
talk to."
In
his work Hugo Hamilton tries to make us understand that it is
difficult to find our own identity when we are torn between two
different cultures. “We’re trying to go home now. We’re still
trying to find our way home, but sometimes it’s hard to know where
that is any more.”
Julie J, Marie, Mégane, Samantha & Sophie
Theme : Laguage and Secrets
The Speckled People
is a book published in 2003. The author, Hugo Hamilton, was born in
Dublin in 1953, he has published five novels and a collection of
short stories. He tells us in his original book his own story, his
childhood in Dublin torn apart between a sweet German mother and a
hard Irish nationalist father. But, further from the tale of his life
when he was a little boy, this book also reveals the story of his
battle for identity strongly linked to languages. Hugo Hamilton says
in his book : "We sleep in German and dream in Irish” : he
built himself around English which is the official language of
Ireland, German spoken by his mother and Irish made compulsory by his
father. Moreover, Hugo Hamilton's childhood is filled with secrets
and we learn all along the book clues to elucidate his mother and
father's secrets. We can focus on those themes : secrets and
languages in The Speckled people which are central to
understand the whole book and to understand what the childhood of the
author was.
Firstly, we can study
the language that the author uses to tell his story. Hugo Hamilton
uses different writing proses. With a child's words, he transports us
to a violent universe through the eyes of a little boy. The syntax is
very simple as we can notice, all along the book. For example the
first sentences are “When you’re small you know nothing. When I
was small I woke up in Germany. [...] Then I got up and looked out
the window and saw Ireland.” : these are simple, short sentences,
without ponctuation, as a child might say. Indeed, the entire
story is narrated from the point of view of a naïve but observing
child, with a specific and simple vocabulary.
He writes over the pen,
but he keeps a chronological sense, such as when he tells the history
of his mother. First in chapter 8 he talks about how her family flew
the crises to go to Brazil, then how she had to go back to Europe and
live with her Onkel Gerd, and the problems he had with the Nazi
party. In chapters 15, 17 or 22, he writes about wen his mother began
to work, what the Nazis did and what happened to her in Venlo. He
observes and registers many of these incidents as a child, without
knowing their significance. The reader, with a little knowledge of
the period, is able to draw the right conclusions, although as the
author matures, he begins to understand all the events he has
narrated.
Secondly,
we will focus on the role of the language within the plot and the
author’s chlildhood. When he was a child, Hamilton was obligated to
speak Irish with his father and German with his mother. However, he
lived in Ireland where the official language was English. Thus, he
had to speak English with his classmates or the grocer, for example.
It was really difficult for a young child and sometimes he met
difficulties about it. Besides, he created some specific “passwords”
with his brother, some English expressions that he used only with
him.
In addition, he was
persecuted because he spoke German with his brother. As a matter of
fact, the scene took place after the Second World War, and Nazism was
still anchored in people’s minds. So, he was sometimes given
nicknames such as “Hitler” or “a nazi”. Nevertheless, as he
was young and innocent, he didn't really suffer from it. His mother
told him to surrender, he wasn't culprit.
Furthermore, his mother
doesn't really talk all along the book, we don’t know exactly what
she feels. For example, in chapter 1, she is crying and laughing at
the same time during a family walk. But, even if she is very silent,
she always wants to relate her past which the narrator calls the
“film”. In fact, she is a caring mother, using hugs and making
cakes to give her children love.
We can notice that the
book is written in English. It may be a way to go back to this
problem or to “defy” his father because he hated this language,
as he was an Irish nationalist.
Indeed,
amongst the several languages mentioned in the book, one is
particularly important to the narrator’s father’s eyes: Irish.
Loving his country, Ireland, the most beautiful of all, he is
obviously a nationalist. But Ireland isn’t free, his loved country
is losing little by little his culture because it has been a British
colony for a long time. Therefore, the enemy is already designed :
England.
Hugo Hamilton draws for
us the image of a fanatic Irish nationalist who refuses every form of
British culture : he is leading a real struggle with his orator’s
qualities when he holds speeches. One day, he decides to encourage
Irish people, who are used to speaking English, to speak Gaelic which
is the traditional Irish language. He thinks that all the names of
the streets have been changed to English names, so he decides to
write the Gaelic names of the streets on the signs.
This fanaticism can also
be seen in the relations he has with his own family. He doesn’t
allow his children to speak the language of the enemy. They are only
allowed to communicate in Irish, or in German with their mother. He
uses his children as a weapon to restore the Irish language, as it is
said in chapter 15. And either they speak Irish, or get knackered if
they speak English.
All
this exacerbated nationalism fits the narrator’s goal of reporting
the awkward situation he lived with the different languages he knew
when he was young. This situation influenced his way to write The
Speckled People as well as the way he grew up.
The
notion of secrets is also very important in this work. The parents of
the narrator both have secrets that are more or less hidden.
To begin, the father has
several secrets. His personality is complicated to reach and to
grasp. At the beginning we just consider him as a hard father
strongly nationalist. But thanks to his secrets we understand better
who this main character is.
We learn about his
secrets right from chapter 2, with the plot of the wardrobe which is
recurrent. Indeed, the past of Jack (the narrator's father) is hidden
in that wardrobe. The narrator, one day disobeyed his father, and
with his brother and sister opened and entered it to find the picture
of a British sailor, who was Jack's father. We learn later, in
chapter 12, that the narrator's grandfather had fought with the
British during the First World War, before the independence of
Ireland. But after he fell down on a boat, he became insane and
didn't remember who he was. But the British marines didn't accept to
pay the regular rent to Jack's mother, who as a result became poor
and had to leave her house with her two sons : Jack and “Ted”.
It's one of the several reasons which lead Jack to force his children
to speak only Irish and not English, that he hates.
But it's not the only
secret of the narrator's father. We learn that Jack has been a
redactor in a nationalist newspaper: the Aiséiri. But we find
out thanks to Gearoid (a friend of Jack’s), in chapter 26, that he
wrote just before the Second World War an anti-Jewish article. And
the reader discovers that secret at the same time as the mother does.
That’s why she is very angry toward her husband : “ After that my
mother was very upset and she didn't even do the washing-up.” There
were secrets between both parents.
The reader also finds out
that Jack, who always said to his children that he was lame because
he had the polio when he was young, actually lied. It was just a
birth deformity.
So, the father's past
represents a huge secret which is amongst the governing principles of
that book.
Another
of the most striking secrets in The Speckled People is the
mother’s secret. It is suggested that she was raped by her employer
when she was nineteen. To tell this part of her life to her children,
the mother uses a metaphor and says she has lived a “bad film”
when she was in Germany. We learn the entire story as we go along the
book : at the beginning, she only tells a part of it : “She was in
a building where there was nobody else living. [...] She heard the
man coming and there was nothing she could do exept pray and hope
that it would be all over some day.” (chapter 3). Thus, we can’t
really know what happend to her, even if we can make hypotheses : we
are placed in the situation of the children, who are too young to
understand. It is only by reading the next chapters that the story is
told in its whole. And even though lots of details are given, the
rape is not totally explicit : for instance the word “rape” is
never mentionned. This obviously must be due to the childlike point
of view the narrator sets ; at this point the reader is like the
children who know from now on what happend to their mother, perhaps
without fully understanding it. But this device also insists on the
notions of secret and inuendos.
We learn that the mother
was forced to keep the rape she had lived a secret. Indeed, her
employer and agressor Herr Stiegler made her understand that she
should not tell anything to the authorities, for he had connexions in
the Gestapo, therefore they would never believe her : “It wasn’t
a good idea for her to contact them because he had too many friends
in the Gestapo. They would never believe her.” (chapter 19).
Besides, Frau Stiegler, her employer’s wife, refused to believe her
and threatened her to tell the police too if anybody learnt about
this story : “If you say a single word to me or to anyone about
this, [...] I will call the police insantly.” ( chapter 22)
We can say that this
story is a secret, but at the same time it is not : the mother can’t
talk about it but she doesn’t want it to remain unknown forever. So
she writes down those “things that you can’t say in a song, or a
story, only on the typewriter for people to read later” (chapter
17). She wants her children to know about it, but as they’re too
young to be told such a story, she wants them to read it when they
grow up. Therefore, one can infer that the narrator tells a story
that he has not heard yet as a child, since his mother has not told
it to him, and he has not read her writing yet. Consequently, it may
be the narrator as an adult who tells his mother’s secret, but
through the child’s eyes he uses throughout the book, almost as a
catharsis for the adult he has become.
The mother’s secret is
like something that’s haunting her all the time : “It was only
something that she could not put out of her head. [...] Sometimes it
was there on the back of her mind.” (chapter 17) and that she needs
to tell, so that this memory would finally go away : “She had
almost put [it] away by writing it down in a diary.” (chapter 19).
Any single thing that has, one way or another, a link with her
secret, makes her think about it, such as smoke ; any time she finds
herself alone, she thinks about it. That is why it has a big
influence on her life, her family’s life and their way to act.
All in all, those secrets
are very important elements in the book, because they have an
influence on the children, the way they see ther parents, the way
they grow up.
As a conclusion, we can
say that languages and secrets in The Speckled Pople are
linked to one another : the secrets create tensios around the
languages, and those tensions create even more secrets. Moreover,
they both have a huge importance within the history of the family :
they come to mean a lot of changes in the childhood of the characters
and their family life, but also the way the entire book was written.
Emma, Julie L, Julien & Zoé
