Literary Analysis: The Speckled people

A child-narrator who sees and hears begins to show us the world we, readers, are going into. In Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People this narrator exposes his secrets, conflicts, histories and beliefs, growing up in narrative and in the (re)construction of Hugo Hamilton’s memories, making of the book a memoir. The narrative unavoidably resembles Joyce’s The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and considering this, that is what this short text will talk about – language, constitution of subject and nationality. Firstly, we could ask ourselves how could be Hamilton’s and Joyce’s narratives related. The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is filled up with epiphanies and streams of consciousness, while there is an articulation of an Irish-Catholic experience, while a mythical dimension is also emphasized. In the final pages of Portrait, Stephen as a young man, finds his voice and the narrative has a dramatic shift, from the third-person narrator to Stephen himself, in a first person narrative.  Hamilton’s narrative also brings narration from a child-narrator who sees and hears, and while growing up, tries to make sense out of what is happening. However, differently from Joyce, the matter is no more centered on one’s nationality, the constitution of the subject in opposition to the other, but these issues are all mingled, we have the dissolution of one fixed identity, making Hamilton’s work a transcultural narrative. Language is the central issue in the constitution of an identity, of family and in the way the world is seen. My father says your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag , points out the child-narrator. How can we constitute a single and regular home whereas in the middle of a different land, and different language, and in relation to the other, who speaks and sees the world differently? While in Joyce’s we see the struggle to the constitution of an identity, in Hamilton we see that identity in not one, but plural. The way he acts in Ireland and Germany, and the language change, showing the relation of the subject to the other, to the constitution of himself, of the otherness. If English is the language of imposition, of cultural domination, why haven’t Hamilton written in German? To put it crudely, the constitution of identity – as we could see in the constitution of a nation, what we think of it, an imagined nation – is plural : A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too .