The plate lies empty except for a boiled potato, split in two, blackened at its rims. Damp steam curls from its halves. The hands that held it trembled with white knuckles, eyes half-lidded with hunger that has nothing to do with mere stomachache. It is a pastness lodged deep in the bones, in the cracked lips of a girl who has not eaten in days, in the well of memory that refuses to be sated.
The hollow taste of nothing, the strange mineral tang of soil when hunger drives one to chew on grass, the bitterness of nettles, the acrid smoke of meal doled out in rations. When the survivors looked upward, the sky pressed down on earth. Not in the passing season or a brief cruelty of weather, but as a long, oppressive permanence, a heavy atmosphere in which rain ceased to distinguish itself from grief.
To remember the famine, then, is to recall not an event neatly cordoned off in history, but a convergence of forces that inscribed themselves into the most intimate parts of existence: the land and the body. Hunger was not abstract; it was felt in the cavity of the mouth. Yet the body, subject to decay, could not hold the full weight of such retention. What slipped from flesh: the experiences extinguished with the dying, had to find another vessel. Literature becomes the means by which what the body could not carry might endure, transmuting hunger into metaphor. How does literature carry what the body could not?
If you have never read James Joyce’s Dubliners, it is in the final story, The Dead, that the memory of famine is most keenly experienced, not in the failure of the crop but in the cold that endures even though the table is laden with food. Joyce describes the spread with care, goose and jelly and pudding set out in abundance, but the effect is not one of satisfaction or ease; it is a feast for more. Gabriel Conroy, polite and observant, moves among them without ever finding true communion, and his detachment one senses an afterlife of famine, a hunger that shifted from the body to elsewhere. To read The Dead is to feel how prosperity and want coexist uneasily, how recollection unsettles the present. Literature becomes the vessel for what history pressed so deeply into the Irish body that it could no longer be carried in flesh alone.
In Seamus Heaney’s At a Potato Digging, found in his Death of a Naturalist, the famine is never buried deep enough to stay gone. The simple act of turning soil, the body stooping low over the furrow, the spade breaking the crust of earth. The poem begins in the rhythm of harvest, a contemporary scene of gathering. Heaney makes visible the double-edge, where the very crop that once fed a nation also carried the seeds of catastrophe. In abundance, the past asserts itself: the furrow that yields food also yields ghosts, and the potato lifted from the ground arrives shadowed by hunger. In this way, the poem insists that famine is not past but present.
If Heaney shows how land and retention coincide, John Banville’s The Sea assesses how absence is measured in time and tide. The novel drifts through the recollections of a man returning to a seaside town, tracing grief and loss as though they were tides washing over him, and in that motion, the continuity lies: the mind cannot disentangle nourishment from loss, and the calm of the shore is haunted by the knowledge of what has shaped generations. In Banville, absence is physical, a presence in its own right, because the famine has imprinted itself on culture. Here, deprivation is never shouted, never described in stark images of suffering, but it is there.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is also not set in the famine years, but in the shadow of the Magdalene laundries. The novella reminds us that deprivation is not only a matter of the body unfed, but also of voices unheard. The coal merchant Bill Furlong moves through an ordinary Irish town at Christmas, yet beneath the appearance of pleasantry lies a collusion in suffering that perpetuates the same refusals of compassion that allowed famine to devastate unchecked. Keegan’s spare prose insists that the past is never just past: the laundries are not famine, but they are born of the same structure that allowed such a catastrophe to take root.
Famine endures not only in the land or in the generations of those who lived through it, but in the way it shapes the present moment. It inhabits the tension between what is offered and what remains out of reach, settling into consciousness in ways that cannot be articulated through sensation alone. In literature, these imprints find a vessel, and through these vessels, they move through words as if through the soil itself, so that in reading, the observer becomes aware not only of the historical event but of its persistence in thought and habit.
