How ambiguous loss and postmemory affects the intergenerational memory of the lost men of the SS Isolda

Abstract

This thesis examines how creative practice contributes to a heightened portrayal of the emotional history of survivor and victim families, following the sinking of a Commissioners of the Irish Lights Tender, SS Isolda on 19th December 1940 by the Luftwaffe, off the coast of Wexford, Ireland. Six men died and their bodies were never found. Due to wartime censorship and Irish neutrality, the sinking was not reported in the media for five years. The emotional and practical impact of that silence and absence is examined, within a framework of faith, remembrance and grief. The thesis explains why not writing creatively to recreate the actual sinking is a more powerful way to show themes of absence and loss. Including factual reports, photographs, letters and newspaper articles, contributes to a polyphony of voices, intended to add veracity to the creative work. It explores the ethnographic, examining cultural tensions and class hierarchies of Emergency Ireland, the self-reflectiveness of metafiction and how the speculative combines to reanimate stories of the crew and their widows. There is a reflection on both ambiguous loss – the loss where there is no body and on postmemory, as drivers to explain why these stories remain important to families intergenerationally, even if the family stories can be unreliable. There is an examination of the liminality of faction/creative non-fiction and of a cumulative short story structure as an alternative to a linear novel.