Prof Roy Foster’s Speech at the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2025 Award Ceremony, Kilkenny
“This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Hubert Butler’s first essay collection, Escape from the Anthill, which appeared in 1985- the author’s 86th year. It was also the first production from Antony Farrell’s Lilliput Press, started enterprisingly from his bedroom in Gigginstown, County Westmeath. Both author and publisher rapidly became part of Ireland’s literary history, and we should salute Antony’s devotion and industry in unearthing and publishing the extraordinary flood of essays which Hubert produced over his long life. The elegantly produced volumes that followed Escape from the Anthill- The Children of Drancy, Grandmother and Wolfe Tone, The Poet and the Appleman, In the Land of Nod- stand as a testament to Butler’s remarkable mind and unique voice. This will be reinforced by the anniversary reprint of Escape from the Anthill, shortly to appear from Lilliput Press.
“Butler’s mastery of the essay form, his scintillating style, his ability to cast out the widest of intellectual nets in the most deftly economical of gestures, gained him many admirers in Ireland and beyond- such as John Banville, Fintan O’Toole, Dervla Murphy, Joseph Brodsky, Neal Ascherson, Alfred Brendel and Isaiah Berlin. And he became and has remained a local hero. The centenary of his birth in 2000 was marked by a major symposium here in Kilkenny, the Hubert Butler Lecture is an intrinsic part of the marvellous Kilkenny Arts Festival, and the annual Hubert Butler Essay Prize, brainchild of Jeremy O’Sullivan, was founded seven years ago and has also -thanks to Olga and her team- become integral to the Festival. It is wonderful to be back in the Parade Tower to announce and celebrate the Prize once more and I’d like to thank Jeremy for inventing it, Olga for supporting it, and above all my fellow judges Catriona Crowe, Nicky Grene and Barbara Schwepcke, for their devoted and discriminating work in judging it.
“Hubert Butler’s achievement and lasting fame rests partly on his breathtaking style and lacerating insights, but also on the fact that the themes which recur in his work have become more urgently relevant with time. This is reflected in the subjects which we as judges have chosen over the past seven years; they have highlighted issues such as national identity, the nature and permeability of frontiers, the abuse of political power, the trustworthiness (or not) of science, the impact of pandemics, the tension between communal solidarity and individual freedom, and the competing claims of memory and history. This year we asked candidates to address the question of how far we can and should control our destinies over life, birth and death, instancing Edgar’s stoical admonition to his despairing father Gloucester in King Lear: ‘Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither.’
“There’s a very Butlerian implication here, provocatively raising issues of personal conscience, religious dictation, legal and political definition, and scientific innovation- and the way they interact and affect our lives. We received thirty-eight essays, two-thirds of them from Ireland, several from the UK, and others from Bulgaria, Greece, Germany and Slovakia. I should say that what we’re looking for in the essays submitted is not necessarily a specific invocation of Butler’s work- though that often is a component of the essays that come in. What’s more important to us is to recognise writing characterised by the elements that distinguish a Butlerian essay- style, substance, structure, economy and the occasional skewer-like thrust which takes the reader by surprise. There’s also the factor which Butler’s friend Elizabeth Bowen said distinguished a good short story- ‘the ability to open and close time like a fan’. But an essay isn’t a short story, nor is it a memoir. This raises the challenging question of how to employ a certain element of illustrative personal material without deflecting the main thrust of the argument. It’s fair to say that quite a few of the entries we read failed to strike this balance. But the three which we short -listed managed to accomplish this, and a good deal else, within the limit of three thousand words. I’ll briefly outline why, before handing over to Barbara to announce the winner and present the prize.
“The title, once again, was ‘”Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither” (King Lear). Have we no more active control over life, birth and death?’ Stephanie O’Connor’s essay went straight to the point of asking whether we were any the wiser for the increased options available in an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning. She concentrated on the legal and moral ethics of keeping a brain-dead woman on life-support for the sake of an unborn infant who will almost certainly not survive. She discusses with compassion and empathy the ‘uncanny ambiguity where the dead might remain legally ambiguous’, and incisively states the need for ‘a new ethical framework, shaped by legislation and public debate’: medical ethics being ‘the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian’. The clarity with which she addresses issues described rightly as intimate and harrowing is deeply impressive, and her definition of ‘dignity’ as a guiding principle strikes a powerful concluding note.
“Aoife Breathnach’s essay presents a bracing historical perspective, with fascinating material about the recent replacement of the 1832 Anatomy Act by the ‘Human Tissues Act’, and the implications for the legal definition of the lifeless body. She trenchantly surveys the way that the supposed implications of this change were taken up by far-right rhetoric, at the expense of rational and considered analysis. The essay goes on to place Irish medical-ethical issues in a wide European tradition, instancing the medical researches of the Victorian polymath Sir William Wilde, the distinctiveness of Irish approaches to funerary practice, and the popular addiction to medical crisis served up as TV drama. The controversies over dissection of dead bodies for purposes of medical research are vividly presented, with some ghoulish examples from ‘the anatomy trade’, past and present. Above all the argument highlights the vexed question of consent. The conclusion returns to the Human Tissues Act, and the principle of opting out of, rather than into, post-mortem experimentation- raising the question of the legal and cultural status of a dead body.
“Adam Charles Smith opens his essay by discussing the tech mogul Bryan Johnson’s baroquely narcissistic efforts to ensure his own bodily survival via a regime of blood transfusions and monitoring ‘metrics such as liver-fat percentage and “erection hardness score”’. There are unexpected but incisive parallels with Shakespeare’s play: ‘Lear shows us the danger of letting go too late, while Johnson may offer a cautionary tale in refusing to let go at all.’ The argument moves surprisingly but effectively from this ‘billionaire’s passion play’ to Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher of ‘anguish and absurdity’, and his conviction that humanity is trapped between inherent limitations and the ability to infer some kind of transcendence. King Lear remains a touchstone, as it apparently was for Kierkegaard himself. The essay presents a thoughtful meditation on the multiple forms of tragic irony about life and death raised by the play , and by the implications of Johnson’s experiment- concluding with a passionate invocation of Lear’s recognition of ‘ripeness’.
“Each of these essays follows through a topic which, as it happens, preoccupied Butler himself. In 1967 he wrote a powerful and meditative essay on euthanasia, religion and social practice, frankly admitting the enormous and insoluble ethical problems involved. Looking to the future, he wrote:
“‘The average man is unconcerned. Since death and decay await us all, he might take a remote interest in euthanasia for the old and sick but he will be more likely to dodge the law when his time comes than to try to change it in advance. I cannot see that even for the elderly or diseased who wish to die, there is any likelihood of a change in the legal or religious position… A reconsideration of this by Church or state might cause a revolution in the structure of society, as Christianity did in its first centuries. In the rebuilding of a new order, a man might recover the rights which he once abdicated to the state.
“Certainly the desire for a revolution, a rebirth, is there but no-one knows in which direction to look for it or how to prepare for its coming.’
“Later in the same essay he anticipates the legal problems over ‘the children of sperm-filled capsules and transplanted ovaries… Before there is any change we will have to live through this period of remote and impersonal control and, in the meantime, for the sake of future freedom, a greater burden than ever before will fall upon the man who refuses to conform. Politically, socially, domestically, the individual may have to make in solitude great and tragic decisions and carry them through in the teeth of a hostile and mechanical officialdom.’[1]
“Thus Hubert Butler characteristically pinpointed, nearly sixty years ago, the preoccupations explored in our three shortlisted essays: all credit to him, and to them, for their perceptiveness. This is why we continue to read him, and why he matters more and more.”
Prof. Roy Foster
Chair of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2025
[1] The Children of Drancy (1988), pp 265, 271