Deirdre Madden: New critical perspectives 9781526118936

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Deirdre Madden

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Deirdre Madden New critical perspectives Edited by Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www​.man​ches​teru​nive​rsit​ypress​.co​.uk Cover credit: Anne Yeats, Autumnal Fruits (1968), Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery (Reg. No. 1184); © Estate of Anne Yeats, DACS London/IVARO Dublin, 2022 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 1892 9 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of contributors page vii Preface: Deirdre Madden: a jagged symmetry xiii Frank McGuinness Acknowledgements xv Introduction 1 Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón Part I  Memory, trauma, and the Troubles 1 ‘Images … at the absolute edge of memory’: memory and temporality in Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Time Present and Time Past 17 Stefanie Lehner 2 ‘The horror of little details’: remembering the Troubles in Hidden Symptoms and One by One 32 in the Darkness Elizabeth Chase 3 Journeying through loss: transcendence and healing in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms 50 Catriona Clutterbuck 4 Class and multiplicity in One by One in the Darkness 66 Brian Cliff

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Contents

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Part II  Art and objects 5 Objects in Deirdre Madden’s artist novels 83 Sylvie Mikowski 6 Ageing and identity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity 102 Heather Ingman 7 Sensing one’s way forward: psychological aspects of creativity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity 116 Hedwig Schwall 8 ‘What can we do, what does art do?’: ethics and aesthetics in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Molly Fox’s Birthday 131 Teresa Casal 9 Looking at animals and objects in Deirdre Madden’s children’s books and some adult fiction 147 Julie Anne Stevens Part III  Home and place 10 Nothing is Black: the early Celtic Tiger and Europe 165 Jerry White 11 Imaginaries of home in Deirdre Madden’s fiction 180 Elke D’hoker 12 The architectural uncanny: family secrets and the Gothic in The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone 199 Anne Fogarty 13 Living lives: Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, Time Present and Time Past, and the 215 Irish Celtic Tiger novel Derek Hand 14 In conversation with Deirdre Madden 231 Marisol Morales-Ladrón Bibliography 244 Index 258

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Contributors

Teresa Casal is Assistant Professor in English at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a researcher in Irish Studies and Health Humanities at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). Her research interests include contemporary Irish fiction and memoir, as well as illness and grief narratives and their uses in the training of healthcare professionals. She has published articles in both fields and co-edited Beyond Diagnosis: Relating Person to Patient, Patient to Person (Interdisciplinary Press, 2014), the bilingual volume Revisitar o Mito/ Myths Revisited (Húmus, 2015), and the literary anthology on illness and healthcare, Contar (com) a Medicina (Caleidoscópio, 2016). Elizabeth Chase is Senior Associate Director, Academic Assessment, at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Emerson, she served as Assistant Dean of General Education and Assistant Professor of English at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, where she taught courses on commemoration in contemporary Irish literature and on the writings of post-Celtic Tiger immigrants into Ireland. She was also previously the Program Director for Irish Studies and Head of Collections, Assessment, and User Engagement in the MacPhaidin Library, also at Stonehill College. She has published in both library science and literary journals, including works on teaching with archival materials and Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy. Brian Cliff is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he was a Lecturer and Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2019. His publications include the Edgar Award-nominated Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2020), co-edited with

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Elizabeth Mannion; Irish Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2018); Synge and Edwardian Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-edited with Nicholas Grene; and a reprint of Emma Donoghue’s Hood (HarperPerennial, 2011), co-edited with Emilie Pine. His most recent article, ‘At Home in Irish Crime Fiction’, appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, 39.1 (2021), a special issue devoted to domestic noir. He co-organised ‘Irish Crime Fiction: A Festival’ in November 2013, and is currently working on a monograph about community and contemporary Irish writing. Catriona Clutterbuck lectures in the School of English, Drama, Film, and Creative Writing at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, specialising in Irish literature. Her research is focused on contemporary Irish poetry, with broader interests in gender, creativity, faith concepts, the poetics of mourning, and Irish critical cultures. Recent essays include work on Catholicism in modern Irish women’s poetry (in A History of Irish Women’s Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2021) and on Heaney and MacNeice (in Seamus Heaney in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her first poetry collection, The Magpie and the Child, was published by Wake Forest University Press in 2021. Elke D’hoker is Professor of English Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she is also director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies. She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary British and Irish fiction, with special emphasis on the short story, women’s writing, and narrative theory. Her most recent publications are Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Palgrave, 2016) and Ethel Colburn Mayne: Selected Stories (Edward Everett Root, 2021). She is also co-editor of several essay collections, including Mary Lavin (Irish Academic Press, 2013), The Irish Short Story (Peter Lang, 2015), The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Sarah Hall: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2021). D’hoker is Vice-President of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) and a member of the editorial board of Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE). Anne Fogarty is Professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland, and co-editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal. She is co-editor with Timothy Martin of Joyce on the Threshold (University Press of Florida, 2005), with Morris Beja of

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Bloomsday 100: Essays on ‘Ulysses’ (University Press of Florida, 2009), with Éilís Ni Dhuibhne and Éibhear Walshe of Imagination in the Classroom: Teaching and Learning Creative Writing in Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2013), and with Fran O’Rourke of Voices on Joyce (University College Dublin Press, 2015). She has published widely on aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish writing with a particular focus on women authors. Her edition of Dubliners for Penguin is forthcoming in 2022. Derek Hand is a Professor and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Dublin City University, Ireland. The Liffey Press published his book John Banville: Exploring Fictions in 2002. He edited a special edition of the Irish University Review on John Banville in 2006. He has lectured on Irish writing in the United States, Portugal, Norway, Singapore, Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Malaysia, and France. He was awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Government of Ireland Research Fellowship for 2008–9. His A History of the Irish Novel: 1665 to the Present was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011 and is now available in paperback. He is also the coeditor of a collection of essays on John McGahern, entitled Essays on John McGahern: Assessing a Literary Legacy, published by Cork University Press in 2019. Heather Ingman is Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her most recent publications include Elizabeth Bowen (Edward Everett Root, 2021), Strangers to Themselves: Ageing in Irish Writing (Palgrave, 2018), Irish Women’s Fiction from Edgeworth to Enright (Irish Academic Press, 2013), A History of the Irish Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender (Ashgate, 2007). She is co-editor, with Clíona Ó Gallchoir, of A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Stefanie Lehner is Senior Lecturer in Irish Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice (QUB). Her research interests are in contemporary Irish and Scottish literature as well as post-conflict cultures. Her current research explores the role of the arts, specifically performance, in conflict transformation processes, with a focus on the Northern Irish

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context. She is author of Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and her work has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Irish Review, Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, and Nordic Irish Studies. She is working on the Partnership for Conflict, Crime, and Security Research/Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation’. Frank McGuinness was born in Buncrana, County Donegal, Ireland. A renowned playwright, he has written numerous celebrated plays, including The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Dolly West’s Kitchen, and The Hanging Gardens. He has also translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen, Lorca, and Strindberg to critical acclaim. His awards include the London Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright for Observe the Sons of Ulster in 1985, and a Tony Award for his 1997 adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. He has published four volumes of poetry, two novels, Arimathea (Brandon, 2013) and The Woodcutter and His Family (Brandon, 2017), and a collection of short stories, Paprika (Brandon, 2018). He wrote the screenplay for Pat O’Connor’s 1998 film version of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. He held the first professorship of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. A recent play, The Visiting Hour, was livestreamed from the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 2021. Sylvie Mikowski is a Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France. Her main fields of interest are Irish fiction and popular culture. She has published Le Roman irlandais contemporain (Presses universitaires de Caen, 2004), edited Aspects of the Irish Book from the 17th Century to Today (Revue Lisa, III.1, 2005), History and Memory in France and Ireland (Editions et presses universitaires de Reims, 2010), and Ireland and Popular Culture (Peter Lang, 2014), and co-edited Ireland: Zones and Margins (Études Irlandaises, 2004), The Book in Ireland (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), Écrivaines Irlandaises:Irish Women Writers, The Circulation of Popular Culture between Ireland and the United States (Presses universitaires de Caen, 2016), and Ireland: Spectres and Chimeras (Imaginaires 23, 2021). She has also published papers and book chapters on various contemporary Irish writers, especially on John McGahern, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry. She served as editor of the

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literary section of Études Irlandaises, is now on the editorial board of Review of Irish Studies in Europe, and is the current chair of SOFEIR, the French Society of Irish Studies. Marisol Morales-Ladrón is Full Professor of English and Irish Literature at the University of Alcalá, Spain. She holds degrees in English, Spanish, and Psychology, and her research focuses on contemporary Irish literature, gender studies, and cultural memory. Her publications include the books Breve introducción a la literatura comparada (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 1999) and Las poéticas de James Joyce y Luis MartínSantos (Peter Lang, 2005). She has edited the books Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies (Netbiblo, 2007) and Family and Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film (Peter Lang, 2016), and has co-edited Glocal Ireland: Current Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), as well as two other studies on feminist criticism. She has published articles on a variety of English and Irish authors, which have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. At present, she is the General Editor of the journal Estudios Irlandeses and serves her university as Vice-President for Quality Management. Previously she was Vice-President for Academic and Student Affairs, Head of Department, Director of Academic Affairs, Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI), and executive member of the boards of several national and international associations, including the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL). Hedwig Schwall is Project Director of EFACIS and was Director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (2010–21). She has co-edited Psychology and the Classics: A Dialogue of Disciplines (de Gruyter, 2018) and edited Boundaries, Passages, Transitions (Irish Studies in Europe), the special issue of Review of Irish Studies in Europe on ‘Irish Textiles: (t)issues in communities and their representation in art and literature’. In 2019 she edited The Danger and the Glory (Arlen House, 2019), an anthology of sixty contributions by Irish fiction writers about the art of writing (partly available on https:// kaleidoscope​ .efacis​ .eu/), followed by a second instalment About Europe in Ireland | Kaleidoscope II (efacis​.​eu); in 2020 she coedited a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies on John Banville (www​.revistas​.usp​.br​/abei​/issue​/view​/11819). After having headed literary translation projects on Yeats and Banville,

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she is currently completing one (2021–22) on Anne Enright (https:// enright​.efacis​.eu/). In her research, she focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to literature and art in Europe, using psychoanalytic methods. She is now preparing a book on mother figures in contemporary Irish fiction. Julie Anne Stevens is Assistant Professor in the School of English, Dublin City University, Ireland. She served as the university’s Director for the Centre for Children’s Literature and Culture from 2009 to 2017. She currently is a team member of the Irish Women’s Writing (1880–1920) Network and one of the editors for English Studies’ double issue on Irish Women’s Networks and Collaborations (1880–1940), to be published in 2022 and 2023. She co-edited with Helen Conrad O’Brian The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Four Courts, 2010). Her two monographs on Somerville and Ross, The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross (Irish Academic Press, 2007) and Two Irish Girls in Bohemia: The Drawings and Writings of E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross (Somerville Press, 2017), have established her as an important contributor on late nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing. Jerry White is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and the former Editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. He is the author of The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009; paperback, 2018), around half of which is about the Gaeltacht. He is also the author of Revisioning Europe: The Films of John Berger and Alain Tanner (University of Calgary Press, 2011), Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), and Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock: 1980–1990 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018). He has also edited two anthologies on Canadian cinema. Recent articles have appeared in Aboriginal Policy Studies, the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and New Hibernia Review.

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Preface Deirdre Madden: a jagged symmetry Frank McGuinness She knows her stuff, Deirdre Madden. What magnificent, intricate stuff her novels consist of, strong fabrics she cuts into unique shape, leaving a marked imprint on the style of the times. From her first novel, Hidden Symptoms, Madden sounded an original voice in contemporary Irish fiction. The streets of uncivil war Belfast were paved with secrets, dire and devastating, where the dead constantly threaten to rise and confound the living, heads and hearts breaking under the weight of lies told and love abandoned. Robert, Kelly, and Theresa – Madden’s perfect configuration is so often the triangle – cross each other’s paths and collide precisely, the wreckage left behind is all that needs to be known to identify exactly who they are; what, in their intimacy, they were; and what they will eventually measure up to becoming. That control of her art persists in Nothing is Black. The Northern setting remains: the backdrop is the wilds of Donegal, where three women seek shelter. They find their habitat in that loneliest of counties, each separately in pursuit of what might aid and abet them in the perilous business of making sense of their lives. More than capable professionally, a success indeed at their different careers, they summon the strength to make ruthless decisions that will allow them to dictate how they permit life to shape their destinies. Some strange, scrupulous sympathy unites them. They realise they are alone and that they are all the stronger for being so. Here are the makings of a new woman, Irish, European, surviving trauma, surviving all – surviving, surviving. Authenticity is one of the mighty books of the last twenty years in the English language. Madden’s connections with Virginia Woolf

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and Jean Rhys are, rightly or wrongly, often stressed, but the closest contact operating here is Jane Austen, especially Emma, Madden’s creative model surely, from whom she learns how to intensify passion through the vigorous concentration on the telling detail that links every individual with the whole of society. The sheer scale of the writing illuminates as it enlarges our familiarity with the meticulously delineated characters, their obsessions and sorrows, their ambiguities and their ambitions. Steeped in art history, a learning carried lightly throughout her work, generous with relevant information though when necessary and using it to comically caustic ends, Deirdre Madden’s knowledge of her subject frees her to engage in the most complex games of shifting time and place. She plays with plot as adroitly as if it were a colour at the command of fingers and thumb, knowing how to coax it to where she wants it to land, taking the breath out of you, dazzling you with her effects. Gaze on the following image of a brooch, a birthday present from a lover: It was a striking and unusual combination of materials – slate, ­copper, mother-of-pearl – that worked together particularly well. The iridescence of the fragment of shell, its rainbow colours like oil on water, was enhanced by the slate, blue-grey and dull, like a winter sky. (Madden 2002: 220–1)

In its jagged symmetry, this passage works as a metaphor for Madden’s art itself. Remember, too, what links all of Madden’s fiction: her understanding of human failure, the recognition of how near, how far away happiness resides, how we break as we make promises, how we touch and are taken away by – what? Who can say? Deirdre Madden can. I spoke of the fabric that makes up her novels. Magnificent, intricate stuff, certainly, but look closely, look at the tears and the things that are torn and know, as she knows, that some things can never be repaired. There are many reasons to revere and love her work. That is the greatest one.

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Acknowledgements

In the long process of preparing this book, many people have assisted us. Anne Fogarty would like to thank her colleagues at University College Dublin, John Brannigan, Emilie Pine, Danielle Clarke, James Ryan, Catriona Clutterbuck, Lucy Collins, Anthony Roche, Luca Crispi, Eamonn Jordan, Fionnuala Dillane, Jane Grogan, Katherine Fama, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, Maria Stuart, Naomi McAreavey, Cormac O’Brien, P. J. Mathews, Paul Perry, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, and Margaret Kelleher, for their sustaining friendship and advice, and Marisol Morales-Ladrón would like to acknowledge the support and friendship of her colleagues at the University of Alcalá, AEDEI and ABEI, Fernando Galván, Alberto Lázaro, Pilar Villar, Asier Altuna, Auxiliadora Pérez, Teresa Caneda, José Carregal, Luz Mar González, Mariana Bolfarine, Munira Mutran, Laura Izarra, and Juan F. Elices. Our heartfelt gratitude to our contributors for their enthusiasm, critical insights, hard work, and unflagging patience and to Deirdre Madden for her support and wise counsel over many years. We are grateful to the Anne Yeats Estate and the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane for the permission to reproduce Anne Yeats’s Autumnal Fruits (1968). Special thanks to Matthew Frost and to Paul Clarke at Manchester University Press for their work in bringing this volume to fruition and Lillian Woodall and Jen Mellor for their professional oversight of the production of the collection.

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Introduction Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Deirdre Madden is one of the most distinguished and sophisticated novelists of her generation. Since she published her first novel, Hidden Symptoms, in 1986, her work has consistently been held in high esteem by critics and fellow artists alike, gained her a loyal and discerning readership, and garnered many prizes. Madden was born in 1960, in Toomebridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, studied English at Trinity College Dublin, and subsequently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She spent many years living in various European countries, including France, Italy, and Switzerland, and has since 1994 been a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, where she was made Fellow in 2021. She made a precocious debut, publishing her first short story, ‘God and Mammon’, in the influential ‘New Irish Writing’ pages curated by David Marcus in the Irish Press on 23 June 1979.1 Peculiarly, as Irish writers often diversify across several genres, she has devoted herself solely to the practice of the novel. The eight novels – Hidden Symptoms, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness, Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past – that she has published with Faber & Faber collectively constitute a multi-layered, resonant, and probing body of work. Hidden Symptoms won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1987, Remembering Light and Stone won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1989, and One by One and Molly Fox’s Birthday were both shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize for Fiction) in 1997 and 2009, respectively.

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Madden’s novels explicitly engage with the problems of existence in the contemporary world and consistently raise pressing and exacting philosophical questions about the meaning of life during the Troubles and peace process in Northern Ireland and in the recent decades of social change and upheaval in the South. Yet her works are never merely realist or topical. Far rather, they worry at the limits of representation, the contours of selfhood, and the nature of being. Additionally, the three children’s novels that she has composed, Snakes’ Elbows, Thanks for Telling Me, Emily, and Jasper and the Green Marvel, reveal her talent for creating playful and anarchic counter-worlds in which animals and humans swap places. Taken up with aftermaths and transitions, her novels examine the effects of living with terrorist violence and sectarian division in Northern Ireland and the transformation from an insular, nationalist society to a more open, international, Europe-oriented – albeit materialist – culture in the South. They consistently render complex states of mind and give prominence to the torn inner conditions of her protagonists. Composed in a spare, precise style, her economic texts pointedly cross-pollinate aspects of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel with strategies that characterise the modernist novel. They carry forward the interest of novelists such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot in material milieus and objects, the family, linearity, the links between character and fate, class conflict, and life-defining narrative arcs. But they also rework the concerns of modernist authors, such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, with states of consciousness, the body, moments of being, the nature of perception, fragmentation, unfinished trajectories, the problem of time, and self-reflexive musings on the meaning of art. Frequently, too, Madden adds to the tonal and intellectual complexity of her work by intertwining the political novel, the novel of ideas, existential fictions, and the Künstlerroman, or artist novel. Even though her texts delve into the plights of male figures as much as those of female ones, they regularly concentrate on pivotal women protagonists who are outsiders and contrarians and, in espousing bohemian rather than bourgeois values, are at odds with their families and communities. The absence of women from the Irish literary canon and public discourse generally has proven a peculiarly stubborn reality. It

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remains a seemingly intractable phenomenon, despite the concerted efforts of feminist criticism over several decades to achieve recognition and equal status for women writers. Time and again, in recent years, it has been proven that patriarchy has a peculiar stranglehold on literary institutions in the country. The omission of women in key anthologies and studies has been persistently denounced by critics. The paucity of women in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, edited by Thomas Kinsella, published in 1985, and in the initial three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, published in 1991, fomented much angry debate and inspired many initiatives to recover the work of female artists, including the publication of Volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing in 2002. However, the fact that The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, edited by Gerald Dawe, published in 2017, still accorded minimal space to female practitioners shows that the project of lastingly bringing about gender balance in the cultural sphere in Ireland remains unrealised. In 2017, the #WakingtheFeminists movement highlighted the degree to which female practitioners and performers were under-employed and sidelined in Irish theatre.2 In the same year, Anne Enright, in a lecture given in her role as the first laureate of fiction, drew attention to gender bias in the reviewing culture of the country and demonstrated that many of the main newspapers, including the Irish Times, devoted more space to male-authored texts and preponderantly drew on male reviewers who were rarely tasked with commenting on works by women (Enright, 2019: 71–88). Despite the significance of her work and the purchase of its thematic concerns, Deirdre Madden’s novels have suffered in this cultural climate that obdurately promotes male artists and grants only tokenistic space to female ones. Moreover, the international reputation of her novels, especially in Europe and the United States, outstrips their standing in her home country. Additionally, it may be mooted that the longevity of her career has led to the eclipsing of her work and to its slipping in and out of the critical spotlight. The ‘cycles of forgetting’ that beset women’s writing generally impact particularly heavily on those who are mid-career.3 Madden’s fiction was regularly excerpted in several key anthologies in the 1990s, including Ireland’s Women: Writing Past and Present, edited by Katie Donovan, A. Norman Jeffares, and Brendan Kennelly; The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, edited by Dermot

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Bolger; and The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, edited by Colm Tóibín.4 Her work also featured in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing, Volume VI. Recent celebrated collections of women’s writing, however, have concentrated solely on the short story, thereby necessarily bypassing Madden who, although she has evinced her continuing interest in the mode in recently editing All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories, has exclusively published novels. Hence, she is perforce omitted from Sinéad Gleeson’s The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, which has been hailed as a landmark publication rescuing women writers in Northern Ireland from decades of neglect. Notably, however, Linda Anderson and Dawn Miranda SherrattBado, the editors of the 2017 volume Female Lines: New Writing from Northern Ireland, broke with their own criteria for inclusion by featuring an excerpt from Time Present and Time Past, thereby underscoring Madden’s importance and the esteem in which her work is held. Yet although the visibility of Madden’s oeuvre has increased in recent years, her work is still far from attaining the place it deserves given the consistent distinction of her output, the intricacy and subtlety of her novels and the searching philosophical inquiries that they instigate, and the steady and widespread critical attention accorded to her texts, which have been translated into many different languages and are regularly taught in universities around the world. One reason why Madden’s writing has been overlooked is that it resists easy categorisation; she herself is wary of designations that she finds inadequate or lazily imprecise. It is difficult to align her within either an Irish or a female literary tradition, albeit compelling cross-connections with Jane Austen, John McGahern, Gustave Flaubert, John Banville, and Elizabeth Bowen are mooted in several of the essays gathered here, and reviewers have periodically suggested other kindred authors – Linda Grant, for example, positing links with Jean Rhys, and Eileen Battersby with Anita Brookner. While the social and psychological traumas caused by the Troubles in the North have consistently been the subject matter of her novels, even if sometimes only tangentially, the redemptive power of art and its central role in making sense of human experience are overriding concerns of her texts, set in diverse locations ranging from Dublin and Belfast to Donegal and from Umbria and the United

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States to Paris. The sculpted quality of her prose and the controlled introspection of her plots have at times gone unappreciated by a readership that demanded more innovative techniques and falsely equated Madden’s apparent attachment to what Geraldine Higgins dubbed a ‘naturalistic realism’ with a lack of formal experimentation (Higgins, 1999: 145). Distinctively, Madden’s novels combine a meticulous attention to historical chronology, geographical setting, domestic interiors, and psychological verisimilitude with a quest for hard-won universal insights and states of transcendence that dissolve time and space and intricate existential reckonings with the nature of being. Her novels, moreover, move fluidly between past and present, Ireland and Europe. They eschew purely Irish settings and navigate the questions they pose about identity and the purpose of art through transnational frameworks. If, as Madden has memorably declared, the Troubles are almost always present in her writings, they are also regularly cross-connected with scenes set elsewhere, usually in Italy and France (Patterson, 2013). Her dislocated characters are suspended between home and abroad and examine the political and existential baggage of Irishness in the light of the alternatives suggested by other sites of cultural interaction. Above all, Madden’s resistance to experimentation is more assumed than actual, as several critics have underlined, including most notably Michael Parker and Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, who laud her sophistication and her recourse to metafictional strategies and postmodernist perspectives and techniques (Parker, 2000: 83; Kennedy-Andrews, 2003: 146). Unsurprisingly, Madden’s novels that overtly deal with the Northern Irish Troubles, Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past, have attracted more critical attention than the rest of her work. Yet her depiction of the conflict in the North is always oblique and at the service of what Michael Parker calls the ‘myths of individuation’ that give sense to her fiction (Parker, 2007: 66). Moreover, Madden has resolutely refused to be classified as a Northern Irish writer: ‘I would always call myself an “Irish writer” and I would be quite resistant to the definition of “Northern Irish writer” because, I suppose, I don’t like or respect the concept of Northern Ireland’ (Morales-Ladrón, 2011: 245).

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Some skewed analysis of her fictionalisation of the Troubles bears out her wariness about the limitations of being viewed through a Northern Irish lens. Patricia Craig, for example, accused Madden in a review of Hidden Symptoms of being too vague about the mechanics of the actual conflict since her interest seemed to reside in ‘the small-scale and the quotidian’, and Eileen Battersby similarly, in a review of One by One, objected to the wilful repression of political themes, while Gerry Smyth criticised her fiction for being ‘essentially apolitical and ahistorical’ because the Troubles appear ‘as the occasion rather than the theme’ (Craig, 1996: 26; Battersby, 1996; Smyth, 1997: 119). By contrast, Marisol Morales-Ladrón argues that indirection is precisely the point: it is through the use of sub-plots that Madden’s novels delve, overtly or in more hidden ways, into the emotional responses to the Northern conflict of her characters, individually and collectively, and concurrently examine the recurrent presence of death, a persistent leitmotif uniting all her work (Morales-Ladrón, 2016: 73–88). In like vein, it has been contended that Hidden Symptoms unites political with philosophical designs. It both deftly exposes the binary divisions that dominated Northern Irish politics in the early decades of the conflict, according to Tamara Benito, and also devotes attention, as Maeve Davey contends, to the body as a liminal symbol, thus linking it with the work of other Northern Irish writers such as Mary Beckett and Sharon Owens. One by One in the Darkness has widely been celebrated as the most important and accomplished of Madden’s works, uniting as it does a searchingly variegated retrospective on the Troubles with a sage and prescient account of the beginnings of the peace process following the halting of violence by the Irish Republican Army in 1994 and the subsequent search for reconciliation in the North. As a result, it has attracted much attention and has been examined from a wide variety of perspectives. Like many others, Liam Harte and Michael Parker viewed it as a post-ceasefire narrative that captured the political changes taking place in Northern Ireland while self-consciously linking ‘textuality and time’ (Harte and Parker, 2000: 233). Jennifer Jeffers, by contrast, examined its exploration of female agency in the context of Northern Ireland in the 1990s and emphasised the ‘matriarchal universe’ of the novel (Jeffers, 2002: 71). In related studies, Anne Fogarty noted how personal and political traumas in the text

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interconnect with the loss of the father and the search for an alternative symbolic order, while Heather Ingman likewise focused on the semiotic and symbolic dimensions of the novel. Ryszard Bartnik, in examining the interplay between past and present in the novel, considered how it contrasts the political changes of the 1990s with the violence and sectarianism of the past in Northern Ireland. Neal Alexander scrutinised the healing processes posited in One by One and claimed that Cate’s memorial building might act as a reparative mode of remembrance; similarly, Geraldine Higgins explored the function of anger and grief in uncovering and coming to grips with trauma in both Hidden Symptoms and One by One. Taking a different interpretive approach, Richard Rankin Russell homed in on Madden’s suggestive poetics and uncovered how in One by One she deployed the competing and subtly shifting symbols of the egg and the sky in order to parse the interconnections and gaps between memory and trauma. Instructively, Travis Snyder teased out the ambiguities of this text in an alternative manner, again by concentrating on its ethical dimensions and weighing up the varying and often aborted acts of forgiveness given prominence in the plot. He held that One by One eschews facile presumptions about reconciliation and does not attempt any kind of moral or narrative closure; instead, it immerses us in the specificities of a family lastingly mired in grief. Birte Heidemann put forward an analogous argument in an exploration of the differences between Northern Irish fiction published after the ceasefire in 1994 and after the Belfast Agreement in 1998. She concluded that Madden uses temporal suspension to forestall any easy optimism about the future that awaits her bereaved and still-mourning subjects. Instead, the very lack of resolution in One by One invites readers to dwell on the ongoing impact and affective traces of recent violence and endows the novel, which appeared in 1996, with a premonitory force in that it already anticipates and comments upon the gaps and failings of the peace process in the future. Stefanie Lehner augmented this multi-faceted debate about memory and accountability in Madden’s fiction in arguing that her most recent novel, Time Present and Time Past, does allow for some form of political progress. She contended that acceptance of the pastness of the past in this novel opens the present to the future, thus resolving in part the issues dominating the knotted ending of One by One (Lehner, 2020: 146). Eoin Flannery,

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by contrast, viewed Time Present and Time Past as predominantly a Celtic Tiger rather than a post-Troubles novel (Flannery, 2020: 305–22) and held that the peculiar concern with contingency in this text is a recognition of the self-destructive riskiness inherent in debt economies and neo-liberal capitalism. Madden’s pronounced emphasis on the optative imagination (Flannery, 2020: 319) and alternative futures in the delineation of the key figures in this fiction, he contended, is an attempt to win back control of contingency from the catastrophic economic forces that reigned supreme in the Celtic Tiger period and to endow it with more humane, philosophical, albeit still ominous aspects. Because they fall outside the parameters of Northern Irish Troubles fiction, Madden’s early novels, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone, and Nothing is Black, have received scant attention. However, in her study of twentieth-century fiction by Irish women writers, Heather Ingman devotes a section to Remembering Light and Stone and draws on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the foreigner to dissect the protagonist’s obscured sense of trauma, her self-imposed exile, and her possible journey towards recovery (Ingman, 2007: 101–4). Louise Sheridan in a related analysis uncovers how memory serves in Nothing is Black to construct a female identity outside the constraints of a patriarchal order. Wide-ranging philosophical themes with universal import have been identified as overarching concerns of all of Madden’s work. Its interrogation of identity and gender politics has been fastened on by feminist critics such as Christine St Peter, Heather Ingman, and Sylvie Mikowski, while others such as Eamonn Hughes have noted a preoccupation with ideas of home and states of dislocation. Jerry White, in particular, argued that Madden’s works treat the transformations Ireland has undergone since the 1970s as it transitions from a rural economy to a nation tussling with its dual status as member of the capitalist schemes of the European Union but still beset by the legacy of a colonial past. Above all, the pervasive and searching meditations on the role of art and the artist in a globalised world that seam Madden’s work have been picked up on by several critics, including Britta Olinder and Margarita Estevéz-Saá. In tandem with such concerns, the philosophical subtexts of Madden’s novels have frequently been observed. Fintan O’Toole, for example, in a commentary on Molly Fox’s Birthday for a collection on a

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hundred representative twentieth-century Irish artworks, noted the self-reflexive nature of her narratives and contended that ‘art often functions in Madden’s work as the focus for a yearning to transcend the pain of life and history’. He persuasively concluded that the power of her novels ‘lies not in the emotion they express but in the control and transformation of powerful feeling into carefully achieved and understated art’ (O’Toole, 2016: 279). These feelings ultimately have a political dimension for Marilynn Richtarik, who argued in an essay marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of One by One in 2021 (Richtarik, 2020: 304–18) that it not only unfurls a multi-faceted emotional history of the Troubles from the Catholic, nationalist point of view, but that it also anticipates the ongoing impact of traumatic experience that will continue to dog and undermine the peace process into the future. No collection of essays had yet been devoted to Deirdre Madden’s work, and to the best of our knowledge only one doctoral dissertation by Carly J. Dunn, has centred on her texts. It is the intention of the present volume to make good this gap. The considerable existing criticism of Madden continues to resonate as the citations in the essays gathered here bear out but it is piecemeal and sporadic and, as a result, it does not allow a comprehensive engagement with her work overall. Moreover, in cleaving to categories such as Troubles fiction or the feminist novel, however apt, it often obscures or fails to apprehend significant aspects of her work. It has been observed by many that new generations of Northern Irish women artists have resoundingly come to the fore in recent years. Anna Burns’s Milkman, Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home, Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters, Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes and Intimacies, Lisa McGee’s TV series, Derry Girls, the poetry of Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Colette Bryce, the plays of Stacey Gregg, and the journalism of Lyra McKee, amongst many other works, have been celebrated as evidence of new departures and perspectives and directed critical attention once again to the woman artist. However, a dearth of in-depth engagement with a figure such as Deirdre Madden – an influential and pioneering precursor, who has since 1985 composed reflective, troubling, and finely modulated novels of lasting value that engage with, dissect, and contest notions of Northern identity, Irishness, contemporary life, and being in the world – is a decided gap in our knowledge of the creative achievements of a woman

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writer of consequential standing.5 Feminism and the advocacy of women’s rights have acquired a new urgency in contemporary Ireland as elsewhere. In step with the current demand in Ireland to take stock of female creativity with renewed purpose, this collection seeks to explore in depth the ongoing and multi-faceted legacy of Deirdre Madden as a signal author whose work has always been esteemed but often considered partially or simply taken too readily for granted. To this end, the essays in this collection were commissioned with the aim of allowing our contributors to revisit Madden’s texts; to pick up on, extend, and query critical trends and approaches that were congenial to them, and to articulate afresh the key traits of Madden’s highly distinctive aesthetic. Building on Frank McGuinness’s intuition that Madden is an author concerned with materiality and the fabric of existence, the initial essays in the volume explore the various approaches to memory and trauma depicted in her novels. Stefanie Lehner highlights the importance of visual images and photographs in Madden’s various depictions of the Troubles and contends that they contradictorily preserve time but also gesture towards the unrepresentable gaps created by trauma. The suggestive images that strew Madden’s work, Lehner proposes, are open and dynamic, hovering between the past which they evoke and the future which they also portend. Similarly, Elizabeth Chase and Catriona Clutterbuck describe the collaborative ethics of memory and of mourning underlying Madden’s novels with their focus on processes of involvement and modes of grieving that lead away from introspection to self-empathy and re-engagement with the world. Reflections and mirror images in Madden’s imaginary function always as synonyms for works of art, as Clutterbuck nicely observes; the distance they facilitate is counter-balanced by a return to the social world from which they spring. Brian Cliff, in picking up on Madden’s differentiated evocation of class tensions in One by One, notes how she avoids the clichés of Troubles fiction and any premature reaching for closure. Far rather, this novel plays with temporal dimensions; by pitting various moments in time against each other, it eschews linearity and reaches instead for a salving but bracing uncertainty. Madden’s concern with the material is the focus of the second section of essays in this collection. Sylvie Mikowski teases out the

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multiple roles of objects in Madden’s fiction, arguing that they serve in their very superfluity to reinforce a sense of reality but that contrarily they are also associated with the metaphysical and with aesthetic debates. As Claire in Nothing is Black makes clear, the work of the artist is to communicate ways of seeing things and to draw out the complexity of both light and darkness. In a related fashion, Julia’s installations in Authenticity assemble lost objects that are expressive of lack, on the one hand, and of desire, on the other. Heather Ingman uncovers further philosophical dimensions of this latter novel in exposing how it multiply reflects on ageing and the passage of time. The characters who fight against materialism and most stay attuned to the transience of life, such as Dan, Julia’s father, exhibit the greatest authenticity and ability to reconcile themselves with age. Hedwig Schwall’s intricate psychoanalytic reading of Authenticity further underscores the virtuosity of this novel as it raises some of the quintessential questions pondered by Madden about the meaning of art and how best to live in the world. Schwall contends that the objects in Julia’s carefully wrought installations and the graphically visual memories that preoccupy Denis and William all form part of a life-giving aesthetics which they mutually formulate. Purposefully, in this compelling Künstlerroman Madden envisages and evocatively tracks the generative powers of the imagination through her contrasting and carefully orchestrated cast of figures. Teresa Casal, likewise, uncovers the philosophical underpinnings of Madden’s Troubles fictions. She holds that Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Molly Fox’s Birthday confront the reader with ethical questions about the nature of being suggesting that aesthetic experience may act as a route to empathetic communion and reparative remembering. Memories and echoes also characterise Madden’s children’s books, as Julie Anne Stevens notes. She draws out the commonalities between Madden’s children’s fiction and that of Elizabeth Bowen and Edith Somerville and tracks the playful crossovers of animals between Madden’s adult and children’s fiction. She concludes that in thus ransacking her adult work, Madden enjoys the greater freedom afforded by her narratives for children in which the animal characters, even if at the mercy of predatory humans, enjoy ascendancy and control and have moral superiority.

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A further animating set of concepts and tropes in Madden’s aesthetic is inspected in the final section of this volume: home and place. Jerry White proposes that Nothing is Black takes stock of the modernising ethos in Ireland in the early 1990s with its new materialist middle class cut adrift from erstwhile country roots. In particular, the changes wrought by membership of the European Union are weighed up and measured, traditional, bohemian, and cosmopolitan values are pitted against each other, and the damage done by the loss of older and more sustaining ways of seeing the world is assessed. By contrast, Elke D’hoker argues that the notion of home is the fundamental problematic in Madden’s novels, not that of the foreign. She contends persuasively that the multifarious iterations of this affective and socio-economic space in Madden’s texts consistently reveal it to be the locus of unresolved tensions between identity and belonging. In a cognate exploration, the house, whether in the form of the farmhouse, the cottage, or the apartment, is shown to be the site of the architectural uncanny in Anne Fogarty’s exploration of The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone. In Madden’s subtle appropriation and retooling of Gothic conventions, the house becomes at once the site of the heroine’s anxieties and fears and the place in which she reconstrues her identity, re-establishes bonds with sibling selves or doubles, and confronts encrypted family secrets. Derek Hand advances a different generic category through which to view Madden’s recent work, that of the Celtic Tiger novel. He holds that a tendency to fetishise the new has been a characteristic of recent Irish culture and that by contrast Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past ponder the issue of the life well lived and reveal that art, whether painting, acting, or photography, is a necessary and indissoluble facet of existence because it allows us to disengage from the world, reflect on aspects of the human condition, and reconnect with the everyday and the familiar. Collectively, these essays demonstrate the suggestiveness and multifariousness of Madden’s writing. They bring home that she is Ireland’s primary novelist of ideas and creator of Künstlerromane weighing up the import of art and the artistic vocation. In addition, she is an acute and searching commentator on the social and psychic impact of the Northern Troubles and on the existential crises posed by modern life. Her fictions richly engage with the contemporary

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and the quotidian, moving constantly between the material and the metaphysical, reality and art, the local and the cosmopolitan. Above all, in tracing the quandaries faced by her characters, who often feel split and stand apart from the world, she shows us how art at its best, her own fiction included, captivates us because it lays bare what Roderic in Authenticity describes as ‘the wholeness and perfection of moments’ while also discerning timeless social, historical, and natural rhythms (Madden, 2002: 216).

Notes 1 Madden won the Limerick Leader’s under-twenty-one short story competition in July 1980 and published poems and short stories in the Wednesday ‘Young Irish Writing’ feature page in the Irish Press from 1976. 2 See https://wft​.ie. Accessed April 2020. 3 Bracken and Harney-Mahajan (2017: 3) attribute the phrase ‘cycles of forgetting’ to Clair Wills. 4 An excerpt from The Birds of the Innocent Wood is included in Donovan, Jeffares, and Kennelly (eds) (1994: 481–3), and an excerpt from Remembering Light and Stone is featured in both Bolger (ed.) (1993: 425–31) and Tóibín (ed.) (1999: 1010–16). 5 Caroline Magennis acknowledges her in passing as an important predecessor because of her concentration on relationships and domestic configurations for the current generation of writers who foreground diverse takes on intimacy. See Magennis (2021: 3).

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Part I

Memory, trauma, and the Troubles

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1 ‘Images … at the absolute edge of memory’: memory and temporality in Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Time Present and Time Past Stefanie Lehner As Helen Dunmore astutely observes in her review of Time Present and Time Past (2013), Deirdre Madden’s works ‘have long been saturated with ideas of memory’s relationship to time’ (Dunmore, 2013). Akin to T. S. Eliot, in the fragment from ‘Burnt Norton’ that Madden uses as the epigraph to this novel, her fiction offers ‘a world of speculation’ to explore memory’s relationship to the past and the present as well as the future: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. (Eliot, 1979: 13)

Her exploration of the impact of the past on the present is exemplified in her two ‘Troubles’ novels – Hidden Symptoms (1986) and One by One in the Darkness (1996) – both of which explore the haunting legacies of the Northern Irish political conflict on families and individuals and may be considered trauma narratives (KennedyAndrews, 2003: 145–61; Dawson, 2012: 139–58). However, memory and temporality are also major concerns of her last work, set at the height of the Celtic Tiger’s economic success, which is likewise imbued with a strong sense of the future. In all three novels, characters are faced with a past which intrudes into the present in quasitraumatic form and has notable visual qualities. At the same time, the narrator drives these narratives forward and, especially in Time Present, towards the future. An apt correlative for the way in which

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the dialectic between the form and subject matter of these novels is captured by Madden in visual images is Walter Benjamin’s thoughtimage of the ‘Angel of History’, whose ‘face is turned towards the past’, while a storm ‘irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned’. For Benjamin, ‘[t]his storm is what we call progress’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 249). Benjamin’s image constructs a notion of history ‘that looks backwards, rather than forward’, Susan Buck-Morss notes, which ‘provides dialectical contrast to the futurist myth of historical progress (which can be only sustained by forgetting what has happened)’ (Buck-Morss, 1989: 95). Benjamin’s concern with the past is echoed in the focus on past memories in Madden’s work, which can be understood as part of a wider shift in the structure of Western understandings of temporality (see Huyssen, 2000: 21–38). Aleida Assmann suggests that this turn towards the past should be seen as a reaction to the modern ‘idea of irreversible progress and future-oriented action’ (Assmann, 2013: 43–4). In this regard, it is significant that the recent historical developments in both parts of Ireland, with which these three novels are concerned, have been repeatedly characterised as progress narratives: the Republic’s economic boom has been credited with ‘re-inventing’ the twenty-six counties, changing the country from an economic casualty to ‘a shining light and beacon to the world’ (Kirby et al., 2002; MacSharry and White, 2000: 360), whereas the Northern Irish Peace Process, in particular the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, was seen to herald ‘the end of a long, dark period in Irish history, and the beginning of something completely new’ (Ruane, 1999: 146). I want to suggest that there is thus a specific ethical impulse behind Madden’s exploration of temporalities and memory: the novels under consideration here create memory images that challenge or arrest the irreversible ‘storm of progress’, and thereby also the conventional narrative structure of chronological development, in a manner comparable to Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical image’, ‘wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 463). When confronted with the notion of ‘inexorable time’, the protagonist of Hidden Symptoms queries, ‘But what can we do?’ (Madden, 1986: 19). I propose that the memory images in Madden’s work stand as memorials against the act of forgetting and serve to reconcile the past with the present and future. Therein, they can be

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related to what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, that are characterised by ‘a will to remember’ (Nora, 1989: 19). In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch relates the way in which Nora’s concept maps the spatiality of memory on to temporality, combining visual and verbal dimensions, to W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of the ‘imagetext, a double-coded system of mental storage and retrieval’ (Hirsch, 1997: 22).1 I argue that Madden’s three novels stylistically compose such imagetexts, attesting to Benjamin’s notion that ‘history decays into images, not into stories’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 476). In these works, memories are embodied in physical spaces, especially domestic interiors, but most notably crystallise in images, in particular photographs, that are translated into ‘prose pictures’, above all in Time Present. Capturing the dialectic between presence and absence, photographs, as Hirsch suggests with reference to Roland Barthes’s theories, ‘affirm the past’s existence and, in their flat two-dimensionality, they signal its unbridgeable distance’ (Hirsch, 1997: 23). In her lecture ‘Looking for Home’, Madden deploys spatial metaphors to describe her writing as an uncovering of images that are poised at the edge between memory and forgetting through an attentive process of listening and interpretation: For me, writing is a way not just of getting at something, but of getting back to something. It is like images that play at the absolute edge of memory. It is like hearing someone speaking on the other side of a wall and listening carefully, trying to make out what is being said. (Madden, 2001: 30)

Madden admits the influence on her work of Marcel Proust, whom she calls ‘that great artist of time and memory’ (Madden, 2001: 32). Like Proust, she is aware that she cannot restore the past through what he calls intellect, but only glimpse it through instinct and imagination, which are often imbued with nostalgia and mourning. According to Svetlana Boym, nostalgia is not so much a longing for a past home, real or imaginary, but ‘actually a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’ (Boym, 2007: 7–8). For Aleida Assmann, nostalgia and trauma are two antithetical but related reasons ‘for the recent interest in the past and the

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various attempts to reinsert it into the present’ (Assmann, 2013: 53). Despite their differences, trauma and nostalgia are linked in representing problematic engagements with the past (Legg, 2004: 103), and, in their refusal to let the past be completely past, they combat the narrative of irreversible time and progress. This reading suggests that the memory images in Madden’s three works oscillate between the traumatic and the nostalgic, yet ultimately help to reconcile the past and the present. Hidden Symptoms, like One by One, opens with memory images that are pervaded with a sense of ‘absolute loneliness’ (Madden, 1986: 33). Both works are concerned with how to cope with the haunting legacy of the recent loss of a close family member two years prior to the setting of the narrative; in Hidden Symptoms the trauma concerns the brutal sectarian murder of Theresa’s twin brother, Francis, while the latter deals with the assassination of the father of the Quinn siblings. Hidden Symptoms opens with Theresa’s childhood memory of ‘a Bavarian barometer’: ‘It was so sad that always when Hans was out Heidi was in and vice versa: never together, always alone, so near, so far, so lonely’ (Madden, 1986: 9). This image of isolation and loneliness comes to represent an ‘undeniable truth’ for her, cross-connecting her past, present, and future in anticipating her condition after her brother’s death (Madden, 1986: 10). The novel centres on Theresa, who is currently studying English at Queen’s University, Belfast, and parallels her attempts to come to terms with her loss with those of her recent acquaintance, Robert, an English graduate and aspiring writer. Theresa and Robert lost their fathers when they were very young. While Robert has only very ‘faint’ memories of his, Theresa has recourse to ‘an eclectic array of photographs of her father’ (Madden, 1986: 38, 68). ‘A black-and-white photograph of her parents’ wedding’ only stresses for Theresa ‘how far in the past the event had been’, offering her ‘no satisfactory substitute for experience’ (Madden, 1986: 67, 68). This image of her parents’ past happiness does not allow her access to the past but, instead, affirms its irreversible pastness, as Barthes suggests: ‘Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory … but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory’ (Barthes, 2000: 91). But while photographs emphasise the irretrievability of the past, they also challenge that temporality by their capacity to ‘bring the past back in form of a ghostly revenant’, and

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to reaffirm the presence of what is now absent (Hirsch, 1997: 20). Her favourite picture of her father shows him ‘so young and happy, as unaware of death as he was of the eye of the camera’ (Madden, 1986: 68). Contemplating it, Theresa notices a cigarette between his fingers; moments later he would have extinguished it … moving away from the moment of the photograph and towards his own death. … She would have given a year of her life to know the day and hour at which that photograph had been taken. She felt such knowledge would have given her the power to pluck and save her father from the flux of time. (Madden, 1986: 69)

The cigarette in the picture becomes a Barthesian punctum.2 What ‘pricks’ Theresa’s interest, in Barthes’s words, is not a mere affective detail of the photograph but time itself (Barthes, 2000: 96). Barthes’s experience of observing in a photograph of a young man, about to be hanged, ‘death in the future’ is echoed in Theresa’s reaction. Theresa’s desire ‘to pluck and save her father from the flux of time’ seeks to affirm the significance of this punctum, which, in combining the past and the future, challenges and, in a way, dialectically arrests the inexorable narrative of death. Invested with a ‘symbolic aura’, the photograph of her father becomes a lieu de mémoire, which functions for her as a means of blocking ‘the work of forgetting’ (Nora, 1989: 19). Theresa recognises that this desire to preserve memory against forgetting and annihilation also underpins her mother’s tendency to romanticise the past in her recollections of her honeymoon in Clifden (Madden, 1986: 70). This nostalgic yearning for a different era is, as Boym argues, also a refusal ‘to surrender to the irreversibility of time’ (Boym, 2007: 8) and the inexorable reality of death. In the novel, Theresa is time and again both haunted and somewhat consoled by memories of her twin, Francis, in particular their trip to Italy two summers earlier. These recollections are often triggered by sensory stimuli, such as ‘the smell of sandalwood’ (Madden, 1986: 83), and take the form of quasi-Proustian mémoires involontaires. The immediacy and authenticity of these past memories are at one point expressed through the sudden switch to the present tense and a shift in narrative perspective to an omniscient, distant narrative voice notably different to the usual focalisation from the point of view of the main characters:

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As one walks across St Peter’s Square in Rome, the four rows of Doric pillars which form Bernini’s Colonnade merge and shift so that they seem to increase then decrease in number and their colour changes from golden-grey to deepest black. There are, however, two small stones in the vast, cobbled square … and, when one stands upon these stones, all four rows fall into order, so that one sees only a row of pillars. (Madden, 1986: 52–3; my emphasis)

While this experience triggered theological reflections for Francis and Theresa, the description may also be read as a commentary on memory. As Theresa has experienced several times, there is a certain instability and indeterminacy about memories, which can change over time; for instance, when she recovered her ugly, old doll that she remembered as beautiful (Madden, 1986: 10), or when she realises that she has forgotten what her old school had really looked like (Madden, 1986: 23). However, from a certain (nostalgic) perspective, the different versions of the past may often merge into one overarching image, which, as Theresa knows from her mother’s nostalgic reconstructions, only offer a ‘partial’ truth (Madden, 1986: 70).3 Nonetheless, some of her other memory images are able to fuse ‘the past and the present’ and make them into ‘a timeless perfection’, in a manner that seems to provide an auratic experience of time itself. This is the case when Theresa remembers her experience of St Mark’s Square in Venice, where she was to meet Francis (Madden, 1986: 85). Theresa’s recollection fuses the more distant and the recent past, zooming in on Francis’s face. Her experience evokes Benjamin’s notion of the aura as ‘a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of a distance, no matter how close it may be’ (Benjamin, 2005: 518). For Benjamin, the human face in photographs is the last residuum of the aura. As Kathrin Yacavone notes, it is through his emphasis on ‘the viewer’s relation to the … referent’ that the aura becomes bound to what Benjamin describes as the ‘cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones’ (Yacavone, 2012: 67; Benjamin, 2003: 258). Similar to the conjuring up of the barometer at the beginning of the novel, Theresa’s memory image fuses different emotions about time, merging past(s) with the present as well as anticipating her condition, when she is confronted with the loss of her brother, in the future perfect:

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As she watched him move across the damp marble towards her, she felt a sweep of love which was the sole complement to the loneliness she would feel before the statue in Rome, and this loneliness and love would be fused together in the black moment of grief when she learnt he was dead. (Madden, 1986: 85)

These memories stand as memorials to Francis and allow Theresa to challenge the irreversible, inexorable passage of time imposed by the narrative that, despite these recurrent flashbacks, propels itself forward in time: in a way, her memories ‘do’ something, namely they preserve the love she feels for him, protecting it from danger and her own ‘capacity for forgetfulness’ (Madden, 1986: 50). While Theresa describes her own feelings about his death at one stage as ‘a wall, a pit, a hole’ (Madden, 1986: 49), the auratic experience of his face in the memory image restores and recalls her real emotions for Francis. The inability to come to terms with traumatic reality is symbolised by the novel’s recurring use of images of ‘reflection’ (KennedyAndrews, 2003: 150). For instance, in the section following Theresa’s memories of Italy, the other protagonist, Robert, contemplates the reflection of the ‘perfect image’ of his room and himself in the window at night, finding the absence of feelings and emotions in this shadowy image ‘liberating’ (Madden, 1986: 88). His desire to ‘be dissolved into nothingness’ stands in contrast to Theresa’s embrace of her feelings for her brother. It also denotes a nostalgic view that is immune to the vicissitudes of time. Significantly, at the end of the novel, Theresa wonders ‘How long would it be … until she could go beyond reflections?’ (Madden, 1986: 141). Turning ‘her back upon the mirror’, she decides to face the cold world of reality, and symbolically starts to ‘rekindle the dying fire’ (Madden, 1986: 142), suggesting her reconciliation with immutable, irreversible time and her acceptance of the present. Similar to Hidden Symptoms, One by One opens with a memory image pervaded by solitude: ‘Home was a huge sky; it was flat fields of poor land fringed with hawthorn and alder. It was birds in flight; it was columns of midges like smoke in a summer dusk. It was grey water; it was a mad wind; it was a solid stone house where the silence was uncanny’ (Madden, 1996: 1). The vast loneliness of the countryside evoked in this passage crystallises in the alliterative ‘solid stone house’ that is home and yet unhomely, saturated with

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an isolating silence that reverberates in the novel’s ending, which furnishes its title: ‘In the solid stone house, the silence was uncanny. One by one in the darkness, the sisters slept’ (Madden, 1996: 181). The circularity that is suggested in this repetition contrasts with the temporal progression of the novel that chronicles one week in the lives of the three sisters and their mother, shortly before the declaration of the 1994 ceasefires, two years after their father’s murder. Yet this apparent linearity is, at the same time, undercut by alternating chapters that offer memories of the sisters’ past in the 1960s and 1970s. The novel begins with Cate’s return home to announce the news of her pregnancy to her family. The idea of homecoming in the novel must be partly understood as an expression of nostalgia: ‘for a lost home, a lost past, a lost childhood’ (Kennedy-Andrews, 2003: 156). In contrast to the uncanny home of the opening, the childhood abode that is evoked in these retrospective chapters is a place of safety and security that is associated with a different temporality and rhythm: For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons. The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts: Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep, unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for its habitat. (Madden, 1996: 74–5)

Space and time collapse here as childhood time becomes almost indistinguishable from an idea of home marked by the circular regularity of seasons, customs, communal forms of commemoration, and knowledgeable communities, encapsulating what Pierre Nora terms a ‘milieu de mémoire’. Yet, as Kennedy-Andrews argues, this sense of timeless nostalgia can only be preserved by ignoring the sectarian-political reality that encroaches on the lives of the three sisters and the personal, domestic space of ‘home’, culminating in the Loyalist shooting of their father, Charlie, that took place in the kitchen of their Uncle Brian, who lived next door. While the kitchen in their own house is preserved as a shrine to their father’s memory, the one in Brian’s abode has been completely modernised in an attempt to eradicate the horror that

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took place there. Nonetheless, both kitchen spaces work as lieux de mémoire for the family members and consistently remind them of Charlie’s absence and brutal murder: while one is imbued with a melancholic attachment to a timeless memory of a happier past, the other is marked by loss and trauma. The attempted erasure of the horrific event gestures towards the family’s actual inability to come to terms with what happened there. The eldest sister, Helen, is most strongly affected by her father’s death and remains ultimately dissociated from the lost world of her childhood (Madden, 1996: 21–2). Akin to Theresa, Helen’s main access to memories of her father is through photographs. For both, these function as much more than memento mori, reminders of his death and absence: the direct connection with the material presence of these photographed bodies works to certify the presence of fathers and authenticates their existence. As Barthes suggests, ‘Every photograph is a certificate of presence’, which confronts us with ‘reality in a past state: at once the past and the real’ (Barthes, 2000: 87, 82). In Camera Lucida, Barthes searches through family pictures after the death of his mother, ‘looking for the truth of the face [he] had loved’; he finds it in a photograph of his mother as a five-year-old girl standing in a winter garden (Barthes, 2000: 67). As he describes it, this image ‘gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced it one day’ (Barthes, 2000: 70). In a comparable manner, the ‘snapshot’ of her father that Helen finds in her mother’s house ‘captured his kindliness’ and triggers involuntary memories of exactly that characteristic when he helped her with her car the last time she saw him before he was killed. It also reminds her of ‘a photograph of herself and her father’ (Madden, 1996: 26) at her graduation, which Cate later finds in Helen’s living room; this image captures ‘the affection between them’ and makes Cate remember the impact his death had on Helen, leaving her, in the words of her cousin, in ‘pieces’ (Madden, 1996: 87). These photographs of Charlie affirm a past reality – his kindness, the love and affection between his daughter(s) and himself, as well as the family’s general sense of happiness, harmony, and security – that Helen is no longer able to access in her memories or imagination. She is haunted by the traumatic event of her father’s assassination; when she tries to sleep, ‘a different image unrolled inexorably in her mind, repeated constantly, like a loop of film but sharper than that,

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more vivid, and running at just a fraction of a second slower than normal time, which gave it the heavy feel of a nightmare’ (Madden, 1996: 180). At the close of the novel, Helen is still completely subsumed by ‘her grief, a grief she could scarcely bear’ (Madden, 1996: 181), unable to recover from the traumatic event. However, while the novel – in structure and content – resolutely, like Benjamin’s angel, faces the past, it also tries to offer some redemptive glimpses of the future. It is particularly Cate’s pregnancy that offers hope as the baby may fill the gaping absence that Charlie left behind: it becomes a symbol of a new beginning and life. Initially, Time Present offers a notable contrast to Hidden Symptoms and One by One in its examination of the visible and hidden layers of family life in 2006 Dublin. Even more than the two previous novels, it provides a series of images with which to meditate on the interplay between time and memory, nostalgia and trauma. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne observed in her review that ‘the novel doesn’t so much tell a story as provide a snapshot of the extended Buckley family at an interesting juncture in Ireland’s history, the final year of the boom’ (Ní Dhuibhne, 2013). Like Benjamin’s angel, its protagonist, the middle-aged financial advisor, Fintan, feels caught up in a storm of progress: ‘Sometimes he feels he can almost hear time rushing past him; it is like a kind of unholy wind.’ One day, after dinner, Fintan asks his family for a moment’s silence as a means of ‘stopping time, of working against just this rush of life that he finds so disturbing. He had wanted to keep the moment, to preserve it … to make of it something that they might all remember’ (Madden, 2013: 67). Given its late twentieth-century setting, it is notable that the novel is filled with lieux de mémoire that serve to ‘stop time, to block the work of forgetting’ (Nora, 1989: 19). For instance, the home of Christy, the deceased husband of Fintan’s Aunt Beth, which is now the abode of his wife and Fintan’s sister, Martina, functions as a repository for the past. While the house has changed with its new inhabitants, it has ‘still that same air of the past that Fintan remembers from his first visits here, of the quality of time itself seeming different in these rooms’ (Madden, 2013: 51). His wife, Colette, recalls her first visit to Christy’s house as akin to ‘going back in time, like stumbling into the pages of a story book’ (Madden, 2013: 45). Refusing ‘to surrender to the irreversibility of time’, Christy’s house is expressive of a nostalgic longing for a

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different era, what Svetlana Boym calls a ‘time out of time’ (Boym, 2007: 7–8). This nostalgic impulse is also evident in Fintan’s growing obsession with early colour photography, especially autochromes, which derives from their seeming ability to ‘stop time’ (Madden, 2013: 78): ‘They offer him a weird portal back into the past, into another world’ (Madden, 2013: 110). His son Niall, who supplies him with books on the subject, exposes his nostalgic tendencies to romanticise the past, in a similar way to Theresa’s mother in Hidden Symptoms: he quotes the lines of François Villon, ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan, eh Dad?’ (Madden, 2013: 85).4 Explaining to his father that photographs offer ‘just a construct … an idea of reality, not “reality” itself’ (Madden, 2013: 78), Niall becomes one of the commentators with whom Barthes argues in Camera Lucida: ‘the Photograph, they say, is not an analogon of the world; what it represents is fabricated, because the photographic optic is subject to Albertian perspective (entirely historical)’ (original emphasis). As Barthes suggests, ‘this argument is futile’; for what critics, like Niall, do not recognise is the photograph’s magic quality: ‘The realists, of whom I am one … do not take the photograph for a “copy” of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art’ (Barthes, 2000: 88, original emphasis). Triggered by his intense contemplation of old photographs, Fintan himself realises this ‘magic’, as it were, in the form of visual and auditory ‘hallucinations and strange shifts of perception’ (Madden, 2013: 193), which begin to affect his experience of time. As he starts to perceive reality like a photograph – ‘The sky today is an eighteenth-century sky’ (Madden, 2013: 194) – he comes to experience the ‘defeat of Time’ that Barthes describes as a characteristic of historical images, the almost hallucinatory experience of a future anterior ‘of which death is the stake’ that Theresa sensed as well (Barthes, 2000: 96). During a conversation with his boss, Fintan suddenly ‘feels that he is looking at the scene from another dimension, from a point beyond time itself. He realises that he is dead … indeed every creature now alive in the world, is dead. The civilisation, for want of a better word, in which he lives is over’ (Madden, 2013: 195). His apprehension of ‘immortality’ gives him a ‘cosmic gratitude’ for ‘the life he has been given!’ (Madden, 2013: 196) – it is a reminder of his present happiness.

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However, these auratic experiences of a ‘strange weave of space and time’ also work to confront him with a forgotten reality in his past, namely when Fintan contemplates an autochrome of ‘a red apple sitting on a mirror’ (Madden, 2013: 115), an image which is reproduced on the cover of the published novel. The picture triggers involuntary memories of ‘his childhood in the North, where his granny had a little orchard’, which literally bring him back to the past: to a traumatic event in his childhood when the moving apple trees transmuted into soldiers on foot patrol ‘in camouflage fatigues’, indicated by the use of the present tense: ‘They are moving closer, still somehow fitting in with the trees, in harmony with them, and yet also distinct now, as soldiers, as people. They are advancing inexorably towards the house. … Fintan is afraid’ (Madden, 2013: 117). This memory of the soldiers intruding into the safe space of his grandmother’s home resonates with one of the memorial scenes in One by One, when British soldiers come to gather information in the Quinns’ family home (Madden, 1996: 96–7). In Time Present, this literal flashback, triggered by the apple autochrome, is related to another image, which plays a key role in the novel’s plot development and which Fintan comes across in Beth’s house, while searching through old family photos with his sister: ‘It is a black-and-white photograph … [which] shows a farmyard with stables. … There is a group of people gathered around … Everyone in the picture is laughing, laughing wholeheartedly’ (Madden, 2013: 58). This picture of ‘Granny Buckley’ and cousin Edward embodies for Fintan the happy summers they spent with his father’s family in the North when he was a child, which ended when the Northern Irish conflict became more intense. While this image denotes, on the one hand, nostalgia, it is also related to the trauma of the Troubles, which severed family ties. The way in which Time Present relates trauma to the Troubles affiliates it with the two previously discussed novels, which are more directly concerned with this subject matter. Where the picture of Granny Buckley stands as a reminder of broken family relations that Fintan and Martina try to repair at the close of the novel, another photograph, found in the same pile of family mementoes, works in a way to restore this lineage: a studio portrait of a young woman from the early years of the twentieth century or the end of the nineteenth. … She is clearly

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fully conscious of her own extraordinary beauty and the power that gives her. But what gives Fintan pause is that she looks exactly like Martina, so much that one might almost persuade oneself that it actually is Martina, tricked out in the clothes and accoutrements of another era. … Even Martina herself, when Fintan hands the photograph back to her, admits that the resemblance they bear to each other is quite uncanny. (Madden, 2013: 56–7)

Martina’s uncanny double reveals ‘the truth of lineage’ that Barthes perceives in photographs (Barthes, 2000: 103). Like her ancestor (who, as we later learn from the omniscient narrator, was called Agnes O’Donovan), Martina used to be secure in the power of her beauty – that is, until she was brutally date-raped by an acquaintance in London. Whereas Fintan is eager ‘to find a way back into the past’, Martina keeps that traumatic event locked in ‘a room in her mind’, buried in silence (she has not told anyone about it) and attempted oblivion (Madden, 2013: 198, 179). Yet, once more triggered by the contemplation of photographs, Martina revisits the event one night, which caused her return to Dublin to seek refuge in the house of Christy and Beth. The novel ends with Fintan and Martina visiting their estranged cousin, Edward, and his family. As much as this encounter allows them to reconnect with memories, evoked through the photograph at the farm, and with reality, it also works to reconcile the past (in its nostalgic and traumatic aspects) with the present. Madden here again uses domestic space to symbolise the simultaneous presence of different temporalities. For Fintan, Edward’s new house seems to contain ‘another house’ within its shell: ‘a dream-house, eternal, where the three of them are still children and Granny Buckley is still alive and always will be’ (Madden, 2013: 214). Looking through the kitchen window, he notices ‘the old orchard of the home-place, looking exactly as he remembered it, as if at any moment soldiers might materialise out of the trees, moving towards the house’ (Madden, 2013: 217). This temporal union is also a family reunion, and ‘they all feel that solid bonds of friendship and family have been established amongst them, bonds they are keen to maintain’ (Madden, 2013: 218). If this attests to the fact that one can repair past breaks – thereby evoking the notion of reversible time – at the close of the book, Fintan and Martina find themselves somewhat reconciled to the notion of irreversible time: the visit to those past places makes

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Martina aware of ‘how completely over [the past] is: you can’t really get at it again’. Fintan replies: ‘And it can’t get at you either’ (Madden, 2013: 222), emphasising the safety and security that distance from the past can bring. Accepting the pastness of the past opens the present to the future – and this is what this novel does through its strong omniscient narrator who predicts not only the Republic’s traumatic economic crash but also the future of Fintan’s family. Interestingly, it is a photograph once again that links the future to the past: the picture of the Buckley ancestor, which bears such a resemblance to Martina and ‘which reconciled the past and the present’ for Fintan (Madden, 2013: 12), is used by the narrator to bring the focus back to the past and then forward to the present. In Hidden Symptoms, a drunken Theresa discusses the limitations of art after Auschwitz with Robert, suggesting that ‘just as all the paintings and music and books in the world were unable to prevent those things happening, afterwards the artists found that they could not produce books or paintings or music which could express that horror’. Nonetheless, she argues, more and more artworks ‘have been produced since that time than ever before. Because people … need stories to distract them from the passage of time’ (Madden, 1986: 104). While the subject matter of Madden’s work is certainly in no way comparable to the Holocaust, the memorial images and imagetexts created by her fiction examined here, especially what Éilís Ní Dhuibhne (2013) calls the ‘anti-narrative’ qualities of her latest work, seem, by contrast, to make us aware of time itself. They confront us with the painful but also restorative powers of the past, and overall strive to reconcile the past with the present in order to open it to the future: for reconciliation and healing. This has specific resonance for Northern Ireland. While her last works are certainly not overtly concerned with this context, Madden admits in an interview that ‘the Troubles are almost always in [my work] in some way, at some level’ (Patterson, 2013). The Northern Irish conflict constitutes a traumatic kernel to which she keeps returning in her fiction. Her memorial images, then, in a way, seek to make peace with the past, suggesting the need for memorials to mourn the dead. Due to the lack of consensus over the legacies of Northern Ireland’s past, there is no overarching memorial for all the Troubles’ dead. In One by One, Madden envisions such a lieu de mémoire through Cate Quinn:

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She imagined a room, a perfectly square room. Three of its walls, unbroken by windows, would be covered by neat rows of names, over three thousand of them; and the fourth wall would be nothing but window. The whole structure would be built where the horizon was low, and the sky huge. It would be a place which afforded dignity to memory, where you could bring your anger, as well as your grief. (Madden, 1996: 149)

This imagined memorial combines the function of remembrance and healing: it provides a space for mourning and thus closure – for the working through of anger, pain, and grief, rather than their repression or deferral. Importantly, while its three walls preserve the memory of the dead through the inscription of names, the fourth wall is symbolically open to the future. In this way, Madden’s vision of a memorial recognises the Janus-facedness of memorialisation, which is as much dedicated to the past as it is to the future.

Notes 1 Hirsch is citing W. J. T. Mitchell (1994: 192). 2 In Camera Lucida, Barthes differentiates between the studium of a photograph, that is ‘a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment … but without special acuity’, and its punctum (that is, wound, prick, mark): the element which breaks (or punctuates) the studium as it ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [the observer]’. For Barthes, ‘a photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (Barthes, 2000: 26–7). 3 This reading takes inspiration from Michael Parker’s thoughtful analysis of the scene (Parker, 2000: 89). 4 This is a line from a sixteenth-century poem by François Villon, which translates as: ‘Where are the snows of bygone years?’.

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2 ‘The horror of little details’: remembering the Troubles in Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness Elizabeth Chase Each of Deirdre Madden’s novels sets out to illuminate the significance of identity and remembrance, revealing their effect on her wide range of characters. Although her works are at times devastatingly straightforward, they frequently force the reader, like the figures she constructs, to work painstakingly towards a moment of lucidity. We see this most explicitly in Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness; in these novels, Madden explores instances of fraught and failed connection, thereby depicting the Troubles in an ethically charged manner. She counteracts previous misrepresentations of the North by grounding her explorations of traumatic experience in philosophies of ethics and remembrance; the novels’ political themes are thus examined in their full complexity and not cast simply as an appalling, atavistic status quo. Her characters, in responding to each other’s memories and experiences, map out the difficulties they face in attempting to truly understand and empathise with lives outside their own. What is most significant about these sensitively crafted, minute exchanges, is that they enable Madden to rewrite what it means to remember and publicly commemorate the Troubles. In Madden’s novels, readers find that the ability to remember ethically is embedded in an obligation to care for others, transforming them from a potential threat into individuals with whom one empathises. In The Ethics of Memory, Avishai Margalit points out that ‘memory is partly constitutive of the notion of care. If I care for someone or something, and then I forget that person … this means I have stopped caring’ (Margalit, 2002: 28).1 Such a relationship to the Other is difficult to maintain, particularly for those who have experienced violence. Yet Madden’s texts reveal that caring is the

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necessary precursor to an ethically centred practice of commemoration. Furthermore, indifference to the particularity of individual suffering is, as Madden shows, what allows victims to be subsumed into distorting official narratives of history. Madden writes against this misuse of the past and of remembrance; her work rethinks what it means to remember Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence and creates new stories that challenge dominant ideologies. In examining Madden’s texts, this chapter demonstrates how two of her novels about the Troubles, Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness, seek to create commemorative practices focused on domestic items and the visceral reality of human bodies, rejecting overarching narratives of sacrifice, martyrdom, or mythic heroism.2 I use Emmanuel Levinas’s writings on ethics in order to explore Madden’s continuing attempts to understand, interpret, and remember the Troubles through the lens of women’s daily lives, and to illuminate what separates women’s experience of trauma and of healing from state-sponsored, official, and male approaches to remembering the past. As Brian Conway writes, ‘at a basic level … commemoration is work’ (Conway, 2010: 5). This work of remembering the past may become a path that will carry forward a vision for the present. As such, commemorative acts can be ethically charged attempts to recognise past failings or, conversely, they may be endeavours that subsume individual losses into a grand narrative to which the dead may or may not have ascribed. In order to better understand what is at stake in Madden’s Troubles novels, it is useful first to briefly examine a text that occupies similar territory. Madden’s focus on victims’ representations of violence links her with other Northern Irish novelists who eschew the genre of the Troubles thriller; yet her treatment of the Troubles distinguishes her from a peer such as Bernard MacLaverty, whose work at times elides the ethical obligations that are central to her texts. It becomes clear, in reading MacLaverty’s 1983 novel Cal, that religion still determines identity in the communities portrayed. The danger such a view poses is that ‘moral outrage’ or ‘stoical resignation’ become the only possible responses to violence (Hart, 1989: 388). The issue is one of scale: rather than focus on the individual, lived humanity of the victims of the Troubles, MacLaverty turns to the language of religious sacrifice. His main protagonist, Cal McCloskey, a Catholic, was forced by his friend Crilly to be the

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driver of the getaway car following the sectarian shooting of Robert Morton, a Protestant. For Cal, the only way to understand his guilt, Ireland’s history, and his own role in that history is through religious notions of sacrifice and martyrdom. He seeks blindly to atone for his crime and gravitates towards the household of the dead man. Tragically, he falls in love with Marcella Morton, the widow of the man with whose murder he has been complicit, when he goes to work on the Morton family farm. MacLaverty explicitly likens Cal to Christ; he is discovered squatting in an abandoned cottage on the farm by the Mortons, who permit him to live there. Cal moves in and ‘[carries] the mesh frame of the bed to the cottage on his bowed back’; Marcella ominously describes their work as ‘Operation Stable. There being no room at the inn’ (MacLaverty, 1983: 156, 157). This portrayal of Cal is echoed and reversed in his later description of Grünewald’s painting of the crucifixion: ‘The weight of the Christ figure bent the cross down like a bow’ (MacLaverty, 1983: 245). Because Cal understands himself in religious terms, when he is finally arrested by the police at the end of the novel, he is ‘grateful at last that someone was going to beat him to within an inch of his life’ (MacLaverty, 1983: 246). In this moment, Cal pictures himself as a sacrificial victim, while the other characters condemn him as a traitor. MacLaverty’s ending ultimately leaves Cal’s narrative open to inclusion in the national story of martyrdom and sacrifice. The reader is left to wonder whether Cal will continue to be branded a traitor, or have his history rewritten to make him a nationalist martyr to the republican cause. What we do know is that these are the only two options MacLaverty constructs. In Cal, we are given to understand that there is no escape from the religious divisions of Northern Irish society. In the novel’s bestknown lines, Cal describes Ireland thus: To suffer for something which didn’t exist, that was like Ireland. People were dying every day, men and women were being turned into vegetables in the name of Ireland. An Ireland which never was and never would be. It was the people of Ulster who were heroic, caught between the jaws of two opposing ideals trying to grind each other out of existence. (MacLaverty, 1983: 129)

In this understanding of Ireland, Cal and Robert Morton are no different from each other: both suffer because of the inevitability of

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violence; their individuality and their own acts are irrelevant. Cal fails, as Peter Mahon contends, to ‘suggest that there is a common underlying humanity that is shared by the forces of paramilitarism and the forces of the law’ (Mahon, 2010: 79). By effacing their differences, Cal sets up a parallelism, Mahon holds, in which ‘Cal and Robert blur … precisely because their desire is violently mimetic’ (Mahon, 2010: 79). This strategy denies the ethical call to singularity articulated by William Watkin, the need to count ‘the dead as one, and then count them as one again’.3 In the ‘tragically deadlocked reciprocity’ of Ireland’s violence (Mahon, 2010: 81), it becomes impossible to remember or commemorate the dead without turning to polarised narratives of understanding. While the language of determinism and sacrifice strives to be universal, it cannot also be particular or ethical. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates that for Madden, the ways in which Ireland’s dead have been understood, represented, and memorialised fall short. In response, Hidden Symptoms and One by One offer new feminine forms of remembrance that insert the experiences of women and the lived lives of the victims into Ireland’s commemorative practices. Early critics of Hidden Symptoms often oversimplified its protagonist, Theresa, and failed to recognise that the paralysis that defines her is not due to hatred or bigotry, but to a refusal to be inscribed into existing definitions of what it means to bear witness to and commemorate victims of the Troubles. Tamara Benito de la Iglesia argues that the novel is marred because ‘the hidden symptoms the title refers to, the character’s personal condition and the hatred towards the other community, persist in being the foremost factor of the Northern Irish people’s suffering and of the city’s memory’ (Benito de la Iglesia, 2002: 47). Her summation is representative of a number of critical responses to novels about the Troubles, such as that offered by Eve Patten; Patten includes Madden amongst those whose works tend ‘to universalise rather than particularise’ (Patten, 1995: 132). However, such readings miss the central insight that Theresa’s paralysis serves a distinct purpose within Hidden Symptoms, allowing Madden to explore the ramifications of sectarian violence. Theresa embodies what happens when no alternatives to public, official narratives of history are available: she cuts herself off from her surroundings and

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is unable to see any place for her own memories in existing forms of commemoration. Hidden Symptoms begins with the memory of a brief moment in Theresa’s childhood, when ‘she thought that the saddest thing she had ever seen was a Bavarian barometer with a little weather man and a little weather woman’. Her sadness stems from the simple fact that ‘always when Hans was out Heidi was in and vice versa: never together, always alone, so near, so far, so lonely’ (Madden, 1986: 9). This small, domestic object serves as a premonition of the effects of violence on Theresa and, more broadly, on Belfast as a whole. In fact, the hidden symptoms to which the novel’s title alludes encompass, amongst other things, the veneer of normal human relations that hides an inability to establish meaningful, ethical connections between individuals. The loneliness Theresa experiences also serves to introduce Madden’s abiding focus on the unseen anguish that lends credibility to individual experience: ‘when something happened which was truly dreadful it was the little peripheral pains which made the central agony so inescapable and so intense’ (Madden, 1986: 10). Through Theresa, Madden creates a new image of traumatic experience, one in which trauma can only be truly felt through small, domestic objects and everyday pain because it is the focus on ‘little’ things that allows her to reveal a broader truth about the human experience of loss. The empathy Theresa experiences as a child is the origin of an ability to connect to others that she comes to mistrust after the killing of Francis, her brother. For Madden, it is via the connection to others and daily experiences that meaning is established and communicated. Early in the novel, Theresa reads an article that describes a ‘Belfast, bombed, blitzed, beaten and bankrupt’, yet still ‘undergoing some sort of literary renaissance … becoming a type of cultural omphalos’ (Madden, 1986: 11–12). Following on from Joyce’s use of this concept in Ulysses, the idea of home as an omphalos is eloquently explored by Seamus Heaney in his essay ‘Mossbawn’. For Heaney, the omphalos is a ‘first place’, out of which the world widens to encompass not only the origin of one’s childhood but also the comprehension of the adult (Heaney, 2002: 3). But Belfast cannot be for Theresa the corollary of Heaney’s Mossbawn, because the city is permanently marked by

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the violence of her brother’s death. For her, the idea of Belfast as a new ‘cultural omphalos’, a rival to Dublin during the Literary Revival, is nothing more than ‘a nonsense’ (Madden, 1986: 12). Heaney also features in One by One, and it is useful to contrast that appearance with this one. In Madden’s later novel, Helen is taken to hear the poet read his work in Magherafelt; symbolically, her father purchases a copy of North (Madden, 1996: 27). It is significant that, in the midst of a novel about the impact of sectarian violence on the lives of the Quinn family, Madden cites the volume of Heaney’s poetry that was both applauded and critiqued for its explicit response to the violence in Northern Ireland. The inclusion of North in Madden’s narrative serves further to link her work to other literary responses to the Troubles, and encourages the reader to consider each novel’s relationship to its Northern Irish context. We see in Theresa’s view of Belfast a city dominated by sickness and ugliness:4 ‘Ulster before 1969 had been sick but with hidden symptoms’, an articulate man in a dark, neat suit whose conversation charms and entertains; and whose insanity is apparent only when he says calmly, incidentally, that he will club his children to death and eat their entrails with a golden fork because God has told him to do so, and then offers you more tea. (Madden, 1986: 13–14)

But now, ‘Belfast was … like a madman who tears his flesh, puts straw in his hair and screams gibberish’ (Madden, 1986: 14). Theresa perceives Belfast as a living person; her bond with the city is akin to a relationship with an individual whose moods and actions must be evaluated and understood. However, that relationship is extremely fraught and, like the little weather-man and weatherwoman, broken. While she holds Belfast partially responsible for Francis’s death and uses the metaphor of the city as a madman to explain it to herself, she is unable to convey this sense to others. Therefore, she cannot bear witness to Francis’s story in order to overcome the rupture caused by his murder. The reasoning behind Theresa’s choice becomes clearer when we examine what is at stake for her in the remembrance of Francis’s death. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, writing about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, explain that

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To bear witness is to take responsibility for truth … To testify … before the court of history and of the future; to testify, likewise, before an audience of readers or spectators … To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative to others. (Felman and Laub, 1992: 204)

Felman and Laub focus on literature with a similar ability to testify. They write that theirs is a book about ‘how art inscribes ([or] artistically bears witness to) what we do not yet know of our lived historical relation to events of our time’ (Felman and Laub, 1992: xx; my emphasis). In this sense, literature bears witness to the present crisis of history – that is, how to make sense of it, how to create stories that do justice to the present, while at the same time remaining aware that this shapes what will be remembered of the past. Witnessing is itself, then, a narrative form of commemoration. To speak of Francis’s death is to create a history and to attempt to articulate a truth. Yet the common modes for speaking of and understanding the deaths of Troubles victims do not fit Theresa’s personal circumstances, blocked as she is by her experience of trauma. While her mother clings to the idea that ‘“[o]ur Francis was a martyr, wasn’t he?”’, understanding and commemorating her son’s death in nationalist, politicised terms, Theresa hesitates to agree. She replies, ‘“but he had no choice, had he? … I mean, martyrs usually have a choice”’ (Madden, 1986: 42). Her mother is disturbed by this line of reasoning, which would leave her without the comfort of a familiar means for commemorating and comprehending her son’s death, and so Theresa acquiesces. She is unable to defend her own truth. As a result, instead of speaking out, she begins mutely to revile the attention paid to her mother and herself by those who know the circumstances of Francis’s death. She refuses to propagate the story of her brother’s martyrdom because it eclipses his individual experience of violence, incorporating it into a nationalist worldview in which all victims of sectarian violence are remembered as martyrs to a cause; this narrative is, for Theresa, a failure of ethical remembrance that denies both the particulars of her brother’s death and her experience of grief. Theresa’s refusal to bear witness is first symbolised by the insurmountable breach between her mind and her experience of her own corporeality. Early in the novel, she dreams of the school Francis

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and she attended as children: ‘she had been puzzled … Everything was confused … And never again could she ask Francis for confirmation or clarification’ (Madden, 1986: 32–3). The recognition of her solitude sparks a moment of uncontrollable grief: ‘while the body cried (the eyes wept, the mouth wailed and the fists tried to wipe away the tears), her mind seemed independent of this spontaneous grief’ (Madden, 1986: 33). Theresa is unable to find any link that will allow her to fully inhabit her own body and, without this foundational tie, cannot connect to others as themselves embodied individuals whose shared humanity demands ethical treatment. The disassociation between her mind and body provides her with a defence against the agony of Francis’s murder, but leaves her adrift: she cannot assent to Francis’s martyrdom, but has no alternative means of commemoration free from the trammels of martyrdom or mythic heroism. Theresa’s inability to testify means that she is unable to bear witness to the truth of her brother’s death, but it also – a facet of things that is significant for our understanding of what Madden seeks to impart – renders her unable to form connections with those she meets after his murder. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that ‘the epiphany [of the] face [determines] a relationship different from that which characterises all our sensible experiences’ (Levinas, 1969: 187).5 As Geoffrey Harpham argues, ‘for Levinas, the ethical imperative issues from the human other’ (Harpham, 1992: 56). Levinas expands on this central truth in stating that the Other ‘is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is, primordially, sense … only through him can a phenomenon such as signification introduce itself … into being’ (Levinas, 2003: 30, original emphasis). The face-to-face, or gaze-to-gaze, encounter instantiates an ethical obligation that compels acknowledgement of another’s individual, inviolable existence. Yet it is that obligation which Theresa cannot acknowledge, because to do so for one person would require that she does so for all, including Francis’s unknown murderer. She finds that her brother’s death has left her incapable of conceiving ‘of Francis’s killer as an individual … but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met’ (Madden, 1986: 44). Her belief in this ‘great darkness’ strips her of the ability to forge an ethical link with anyone she meets. In fact, when Kathy’s boyfriend, Robert McConville, looks

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at her, he is ‘taken aback by the large, brown eyes, which had a pronounced cast, so that even while she looked at him she seemed to be looking elsewhere’ (Madden, 1986: 12). Her diverted gaze serves as a symbolic marker; she is both literally and figuratively unable to look directly at others, thereby evading the ethical obligation such a moment would require. Through Theresa, Madden introduces the idea that Belfast suffers because of its inhabitants’ inability to form ethical ties to one another. Their failed connections lead to a concomitant failure of witnessing and of remembrance. While on the surface, Madden’s characters appear to be commonplace individuals, in reality they are not embodied in Levinas’s terms, because they cannot respond to a vulnerability that would allow them to understand the pain of others. For Levinas, the Other presents himself or herself as a face, but more than this, as an invitation to speech: ‘Face and discourse are tied’; ‘the face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse … it is discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility which is [the] authentic relationship [with the Other]’ (Levinas, 1985: 87–8). For such a discourse to occur, each individual must face the discrete experience of others, embracing the vulnerability of such encounters. Richard Cohen notes that Levinas takes the key to embodiment to lie in its vulnerability … ‘The humanity of man, subjectivity, is a responsibility for others, an extreme vulnerability.’ One is moved to alleviate the pain of others because … [the self] is happy through them, and is thereby also able to appreciate viscerally the pain of [Others]. (Cohen, ‘Introduction’, Levinas, 2003: xxxiii)

This is precisely what Theresa is not capable of embracing. Therefore, the ethical event fails; the face-to-face encounter with the Other and the discourse and subsequent vulnerability it entails are rejected, and meaning, signification, cannot be produced. The reader sees this failure in Belfast’s city of ‘madmen’ most explicitly in Robert. He, like Theresa, refuses the ethical connection that is a prerequisite for moving out of Theresa’s ‘deep, dark pit’ of emotion towards new forms of remembrance and commemoration. Robert lies awake next to his girlfriend, Kathy, trying to understand ‘what Theresa had been getting at when she

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spoke of subjectivity’, but he ‘could think only of evil and violence’ (Madden, 1986: 29). He ruminates on his uninvolved reaction to scenes of violence: Every day he could take huge mysterious lumps of evil into his consciousness and the only worrying result was that he did not worry. That very day he had been upstairs in a bus which had been overtaken by a lorry carrying meat from the knacker’s yard. For well over two miles he had looked down into the tipper, which was full of skinned limbs … It had been a horrendous sight, but he had not averted his eyes … He had accepted that lorry. He had accepted too much. … He remembered television news reports, where the casual camera showed bits of human flesh hanging from barbed wire after a bombing. … And he could look at such things and be shocked and eat his tea and go out to the theatre and forget about it. … Now he found himself wondering how he would feel if it was Kathy whose flesh was hanging from barbed wire in thin, irregular strips and shifting in the window like surreal party streamers. … and his own lack of empathy saddened him. (Madden, 1986: 29–31)

Here, Madden extends the ethical obligation contained in the recognition of another’s face to the entire body. The trauma of the violence enacted on bodies in the Troubles makes it imperative that individuals recognise the whole, embodied nature of the Other as a living, breathing entity capable of being violated. Robert attempts to make this leap, yet is unable to connect Kathy’s bodily form with any feeling of obligation or morality; instead, he simply feels fear, and displaced fear at that. Cowardly, he imagines her body being violently destroyed because he cannot bear to imagine this happening to himself. Richard Cohen writes that for Levinas, ‘To be human is to care for the other above oneself, to overcome the natural indifference and countercurrent of being in nonindifference and compassion towards the other’ (Cohen, ‘Introduction’, Levinas, 2003: xxxiv). Robert is wholly unable to overcome his own indifference, instead he protects himself by visiting imaginary violence on Kathy’s image. While for Theresa, it is the trauma of violence that prevents connection, for Robert, it is simply fear and apathy; trapped as they are within themselves, neither is capable of moving forward towards a new means of remembrance which, as Madden shows, must have its foundation in an ethical connection.

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Only one character in Hidden Symptoms is wholly willing, and in fact desires, to embrace the ethical obligation inherent in those he meets. While Theresa and Robert are the key protagonists of Hidden Symptoms and reveal Madden’s primary concerns, it is Francis who occupies the novel’s symbolic and thematic centre, even in his absence. During a joint visit to Italy, Francis tells Theresa, ‘I see God in everything, but God also sees everything in me. There are eyes everywhere … but worst of all are the eyes of people. God looks straight out at me through the eye of every human being.’ To Theresa this sounds ‘terrible’, and she ‘can imagine few things worse’; but for Francis, the ‘infinitely worse’ option is ‘not being looked at at all’ (Madden, 1986: 53). Their conversation is vital to an understanding of what Madden seeks to convey in this early novel. From Francis, Theresa learns the true significance inherent in looking at another: to do so, Francis teaches her, is also to approach God. The ‘best and most dreadful truth’ Francis understands is akin to the one embedded at the centre of Levinas’s Ethics and Infinity (Madden, 1986: 54). Levinas explains that ‘To my mind the Infinite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The face signifies the Infinite’ (Levinas, 1985: 105, original emphasis). For Levinas, and for Francis, the ethical obligation originates in the Other, in whose face we see his or her ethical demand, but also the trace of God. It is Levinas’s trace of the infinite, then, that Francis discerns in all who look upon him, and thus it is he who is most able to enunciate the ethical obligation inherent in their gaze. He can think of nothing worse than not to be looked at. From him, Theresa learns that the desire to be looked at is akin to a scene in Crime and Punishment where Dostoyevsky describes Sonia Marmeladova looking with ‘insatiable compassion’ at Raskolnikov in his despair. Levinas notes that he does not say ‘inexhaustible compassion. … As if the compassion that goes from Sonia to Raskolnikov were a hunger that Raskolnikov’s presence nourished beyond all saturation, by increasing that hunger, infinitely’ (Levinas, 2003: 30). Francis embodies the ‘insatiable compassion’ of the humanist subject; while he seeks to impart this knowledge to his sister, after his murder, the gaze of the Other and the ethical connection it embodies become for Theresa a painful memory rather than a moment of communion.

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Throughout Hidden Symptoms, Theresa struggles to accept a humanistic worldview such as that of Levinas; for her, Francis’s violent death represents an annihilation. That someone could fail to recognise Francis as a subject and honour the ethical obligation he embodies, when he himself so fully believed in and understood the meaning of being seen, destroys her faith in the individual. Madden represents this both through Theresa’s loss of faith in Catholicism and through her inability to testify to the story of her brother’s death. She sees no way to tell her story without making her brother part of an official, nationalist narrative, casting him either as a victim or a hero. Yet Madden’s novel contains a glimmer of possibility: Theresa’s recollection of their trip to Italy concludes in Lugano, Switzerland, with a final image of ‘a little Lugano fountain … People had dropped coins into the water for wishes and good luck … A stream of bright, fresh water spurted to the sky through a thin bronze pipe.’ Thinking back to this scene, Theresa again tries to ‘visualize the distant Heaven where Francis [is]’ but ‘her imagination balk[s] and she [can] think only: perhaps a well of light; perhaps a stream of bright water ascending to the sun, spurting upwards and away from a small, blue, painted, tainted bowl’ (Madden, 1986: 87). What Madden shows via this ordinary object is that Francis cannot be properly remembered on a grand scale; historical practices of commemoration fail, or they conflate Francis with images of martyrdom and hero-worship that Theresa struggles against. Instead, through Theresa, Madden gestures at a more everyday, more individualised idea of commemoration, setting the image of a small, blue fountain against standard notions of the memorial. The Lugano fountain is marked by the passage of individuals who have dropped coins into its basin, and, as its water circulates, it ‘[catches] and warp[s] the sunlight’ (Madden, 1986: 87). This memorial is dynamic and mutable, encapsulating what Patricia Craig sees as the most amenable aspect of Madden’s novels: ‘What … makes her novels likeable, despite their refusal of qualities such as charm, high spirits, robustness, and aplomb, is a formidable descriptive gift which is harnessed to the small-scale and quotidian’ (Craig, 1996: 26). Madden brings the same sense of quiet and fastidiousness to her exploration of what it means to remember the dead and how those individuals should be commemorated. Although Theresa cannot see a clear way out of her own pain, her vision of the Lugano

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fountain does offer a small consolation. It is by no means wholly optimistic, nor does it redeem her from her paralysis; yet this image provides readers with a touchstone to return to in contemplating what is at stake both in Hidden Symptoms and in One by One. In One by One, Madden revisits the topic of trauma in order to further parse the boundaries of memory and remembrance. The novel is set shortly before the start of the 1994 ceasefire and intercut with the memories of the Quinn sisters – Helen, Cate,6 and Sally – of their childhood in rural Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s. Interestingly, the novel’s three sisters are matched in their father’s generation by three brothers: Brian, Peter, and Charlie. Like the sisters, they incorporate three different responses to the trauma. Over the course of the novel, each of the sisters must map the geography of her relationship to Northern Ireland. In a pivotal scene in One by One, Sally describes being in Italy and hearing about a car bomb in Belfast; it is this event that links this novel to Hidden Symptoms, and reveals Madden’s purpose to her readers. Sally tells Cate, ‘“I wanted to be there. I felt guilty for not being at home”’ (Madden, 1996: 140). Cate replies, ‘“Don’t worry … I know what you mean”’, and proceeds to think of ‘many such [similar] moments’, though ‘one in particular … [remains] vivid in her mind’: It had been an evening in winter, and she had been working in the kitchen, slicing up beef in thin strips to make a stir-fry. The news was on the radio, and she’d only been half-listening to it, until they started to report on a man who had been found shot in South Armagh the previous night. … Cate stopped chopping and put the knife down, as she listened to the soft, hesitant voice … his sorrow [was] compulsive and terrible. It entered Cate’s mind like some gentle, awful thing from a dream, seeping from the radio into the bright, warm kitchen where she stood, looking now in revulsion at the cut, heaped meat on the bloodstained wooden board. She didn’t know why, but she wanted then to be home. (Madden, 1986: 140–1)

Cate’s response is markedly different from Robert’s reaction to seeing the meat lorry in Hidden Symptoms. The language Madden uses for this later image also differs significantly. Here, there are no ‘surreal party streamers’, and Cate does not distance herself as Robert does; instead, she allows the words and images to suffuse her thoughts (Madden, 1986: 30).

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For Cate, the news invades the domestic space of her home, and her reaction becomes a bodily one. The scene demonstrates Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’s observation that Madden refuses to indulge in sensationalist depictions of violence: ‘Madden’s interest is not in the act of violence itself but in the psychological effects of violence. More specifically, she is interested in the ways in which traumatised characters represent violence to themselves’ (Kennedy-Andrews, 2003: 153). For Cate, the atrocity in Northern Ireland becomes part of the domestic space of her London kitchen, bringing with it an image of a literally destroyed life that is figuratively mirrored in the meat on the ‘bloodstained wooden board’ (Madden, 1996: 141). Like the meat lorry in Hidden Symptoms, the image forces Cate to think about the bodies of those killed in Northern Ireland. Again, Madden urges readers to recognise that it is not only the face of the Other that instantiates an ethical obligation, but also his or her body. The scenes in Cate’s kitchen and Robert’s memory create moments in which the two characters conflate what they are seeing with the bodies of victims of the Troubles. While Robert fails to bridge the gap between image and reality and to imagine a connection between himself and the violence, Cate immediately wants ‘to be home’ (Madden, 1996: 141). Her reaction confirms Levinas’s assertion that ‘Humanism, after all, is not merely the affirmation of the dignity of one person, of each individual alone; it is also an affirmation of the dignity of all humanity, the affirmation of an interhuman morality, community, and social justice’ (Levinas, 2003: xviii). For Cate, there is an obligation to bear witness to the violence visited on the body of another that is inextricably linked to her own dignity and her own sense of self. In this scene, Madden closes the gap between history and the individual. By emphasising the individual’s active role as witness, Madden resists not only the voyeuristic or sensationalist relationship to violence seen in novels such as Cal, but also the idea that such violence is an inextricable part of Northern Irish society. Others may truly believe that ‘there’s nothing to get gung-ho about in a body being found in a wet lane somewhere in, say, Tyrone, on a cold, bad night’ (Madden, 1996: 50), but this is exactly the nonchalant relationship to violence that Madden resists. For her, and for her characters, there is something to get ‘gung-ho’ about in a body, any body, who falls victim to violence. The Quinn sisters’

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personal experience of violence has caused undeniable trauma, yet that trauma has also instilled in them a strong empathy and a belief in the ethical demands placed upon the individual by both the faceto-face encounter with the Other and also the very fact of his or her bodily existence. Throughout One by One, Madden translates the embodied, ethical relationship between individuals, and between the living and their memories of the dead, into an exploration of new modes for commemorating the past. During their childhood, the sisters accompany their father and grandmother on a trip to see a woman in Ardboe who can supposedly cure Sally’s nosebleeds. On the way home, they stop at the Old Cross at Ardboe, where Helen realises that ‘it [is] enough in itself that the cross [is] there; to think of it having stood there for all those hundreds of years’ (Madden, 1996: 63). Juxtaposed with this historical relic, which strikes the reader as a traditional marker of the relationship between the present and the past, is the tree: ‘From a distance it looked quite ordinary … but when you got closer you could see that its trunk was almost more metal than wood, for people had hammered coins, pins and nails into it’ (Madden, 1996: 64). The tree serves as an unofficial, domestic monument, a figure embedded with the wishes of a long line of individuals. The meaning of the site is different for each person who visits it, yet all have shared access to the tree as a symbol of power and belief. Furthermore, the tree is associated with ordinariness, communal practice, and pilgrimage, all features that Cate seeks to capture in the memorial to Troubles’ victims she outlines to Sally as an adult in 1994. Her description returns the reader to the text’s first line: ‘Home was a huge sky’ (Madden, 1996: 1); her ideal memorial seeks to capture something of the hugeness of that sky and the wildness of the surroundings alluded to in the novel’s opening. Cate travels with Sally to visit her old primary school and finds herself gazing out the window at that sky, with its ‘watery lemon light splitting heavy, dark clouds’, as she attempts to define a way to commemorate the victims of the Troubles (Madden, 1996: 149). The memorial Cate envisions is one that melds more traditional ideas of the memorial with a greater openness and connection to its surroundings: She imagined a room, a perfectly square room. Three of its walls, unbroken by windows, would be covered by neat rows of names,

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over three thousand of them; and the fourth wall would be nothing but window. The whole structure would be built where the horizon was low, and the sky huge. It would be a place which afforded dignity to memory, where you could bring your anger, as well as your grief. (Madden, 1996: 149)

Cate’s memorial still reflects the early twentieth-century focus on naming the dead; however, she simultaneously attempts to move away from the grandeur of World War I memorials to achieve something lighter and freer, a memorial that allows the dignity of remembrance to be mixed with the more visceral human emotions of anger and grief. Madden’s interest is in an ethics that does justice to the varied nature of what is remembered, rather than in the singular ‘truth’ of what is preserved as history. Cate seeks to achieve a space linked to but not literally itself a place of violence. Her memorial highlights the need for venues in which one can bear witness in a way that cannot be achieved in those places where violence has actually occurred. Both the structure and plot of One by One highlight the fact that the traumatic experience of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland requires new modes of commemoration. By the novel’s close, the reader recognises that each member of the Quinn family is working to free herself from the trauma of Charlie’s death; while the novel’s titular darkness is not wholly the positive, warm darkness Helen dreamed of in her childhood, neither is it entirely the place of nightmare that she finds as an adult. Instead, Madden seeks to offer her readers a more tentative median ground, reminding us of the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the remembrance of the past; thus, the ‘darkness’ of Madden’s final line encompasses both the nightmare of Helen’s traumatic dream and the ‘heat’ of a ‘tiny space barely bigger than yourself’, out of which a reinvention, a new beginning, is in fact possible (Madden, 1996: 19). In his introduction to Levinas’s Humanism of the Other, Richard Cohen writes that ‘because of the scale of its inhumanity, the twentieth century, perhaps more than any other, provoked a particularly thorough and painstaking reexamination of the nature and worth of the human’ (Cohen, ‘Introduction’, Levinas, 1985: xvi). In such a context, the remembrance and commemoration of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland must be released from the constraints of

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traditional memorials. Madden’s novels argue instead for memorials and modes of remembrance that pay homage to the individual experience of violence through their focus on small, often commonplace signs. From Madden’s characters the reader learns that the ethical obligation instantiated in the face-to-face encounter with another human being, when it is recognised and honoured, is, as Stanley Cavell avers, ‘a way of encompassing conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationships against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding … a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self (Stanley Cavell quoted in Harpham, 1992: 28). As a result, these two novels about the Troubles ask readers to contemplate how identity is utilised and propagated by traditional modes of commemoration. Against such traditional modes, Madden pits the everyday as locus of the authentic. In attempting to understand Theresa’s small blue fountain or Cate’s domesticated reinterpretation of the Vietnam wall in Washington DC, Madden asks us to bear witness to and reconsider how we commemorate the Troubles. Her novels seek to ‘in effect transform history by bearing literary witness’ (Felman and Laub, 1992: 95; emphasis in original). By undertaking to transform commemorative practices, Madden’s characters discover the primary importance of the ethical ties between individuals. This relationship, in its best form, governs and shapes both the personal past and public history. As readers, we are meant to ask of ourselves, of our own memories and memorials, the questions that underlie Madden’s fictions. At stake in our answers is the definition of a new, ethically charged mode of commemorating the past that pays homage to ‘the horror of little details’ and enables new, generative discussions of history and remembrance to emerge.

Notes 1 Margalit goes on to clarify that not necessarily everyone we remember is someone we care for; ‘sometimes we remember people and events … we hate’. What Margalit strives to make clear is that ‘a conditional sense of memory is necessary for caring: If I both care for and remember Mira, then my remembering Mira is inherent in my caring for her. I cannot stop remembering Mira and yet continue to care for her’ (Margalit, 2002: 30).

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2 As Geraldine Higgins notes, the novels themselves become ‘narrative structures in which to contain and interpret’ such events, thereby ‘complicat[ing] both the location and locution of violence’ (Higgins, 1999: 152). 3 William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Culture, quoted in Sloan (2000: 53). 4 Theresa is twenty-two at the time of the book’s narration. If we assume that the novel is set in the present, that is, close to the year 1986 when it was published, then Theresa was born in approximately 1964, and was still a young child when the Troubles began. 5 Levinas constructs his philosophy of the Other and the ethical demand s/he embodies in both Totality and Infinity (1969) and Humanism of the Other (2003). 6 In those portions of the novel that recall her childhood, Cate is referred to as ‘Kate’; she later changed the spelling of her name after her move to London as an adult. For reading ease, except in those quoted passages that refer to her as ‘Kate’, I use ‘Cate’ throughout.

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3 Journeying through loss: transcendence and healing in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms Catriona Clutterbuck Death of a close family member is a frequent basis for Deirdre Madden’s broader exploration of loss resulting from personal and political mischance, betrayal, and failure. Her debut novel, Hidden Symptoms (1986), which was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1987, presents a narrative of a young woman’s difficult and never-complete journey towards healing following the random and brutal sectarian murder of her beloved twin brother. Set during the second summer of Theresa’s bereavement, critics have long recognised that this text is ‘Peopled by bewildered, bereft and broken individuals’ and is ‘haunted by a profound sense of the impermanence and the fragility of things’ (Parker, 2000: 85). Although negative conclusions on its characters’ fates have been reached by White (1999: 452), Parker (2000: 85, 95), and Mikowski (2011: 247), the present chapter argues that this Bildungsroman, or novel of development, inaugurates Madden’s career-long exploration of how such injury may also channel deeper signs of grace. Specifically, Madden’s first novel illuminates Thomas Attig’s contention that although grief commands feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, anguish, estrangement, alienation, meaninglessness, fear, and spiritual pain, nevertheless, in grieving we also ‘relearn the worlds of our experience… [we] relearn our very selves… we relearn our relationships with those who died … We build new connections to larger wholes in our families, communities and within the greater scheme of things’ (Attig, 2001: 36–8, 40, 43). This text therefore initiates a significant pattern in Madden’s output whereby characters recognise that a transformative possibility is embedded within the darkness of their own states of loss. That recognition, as we will see, is often mediated through their evolving understanding of art’s imperfect relationship to reality.

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Madden’s fiction frequently attends to the extreme isolation and anger that characterise orphanhood, understood as the condition of being abandoned by either a primary care-giver or a care-receiver who is perceived as a mirror image of the self.1 The loss of God, parents, siblings, or lovers triggers the protagonists’ disavowal of hope in the face of such deprivation, yet also instigates their ongoing struggle with the need for such trust. They find eventually that hope can only be cultivated by means of active and meaningful relationships with others, through (re)generating bonds which are also flexible enough to allow their own worlds of fallen experience to remain distinct. This imperative to direct themselves simultaneously outwards and inwards is both occasioned by and focused through these characters’ multi-layered experiences of loss. Such a dual impulse towards commonality and uniqueness of self-identification constitutes a movement towards openness through respect for difference, which carries with its significant implications for the larger tribally divided communities of interest in Ireland, North and South, from which Madden’s characters are drawn. Although these implications of hope would not enter the public lexicon until the period of the peace process (from the 1990s onwards), it is no accident that Theresa, the main protagonist of Hidden Symptoms, negotiates her personal struggles with identity against the backdrop of war-torn 1980s Belfast, as a city not just of violent political extremes but one which also hosts traditional, active religious faith practice and a confidently lively arts scene. In this novel, the multifaceted city acts as a key context for Theresa’s attempt to work out a viable set of practical, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual values, whereby she can accept that ugliness and evil are a given – ‘how things were’ in this life (Madden, 1986: 30) – yet at the same time validly refuse to accept their dark reality as final. Madden here attends to this definitive Northern Irish dilemma through exploring complicated sibling grief, in the context of a community of young people going through a demanding process of personal, cultural, and spiritual coming of age. For Theresa when first we meet her, loss has involved an experience of acute existential disorientation. In a reaction also found in several later Madden novels, her experience of psychic disarray initially has prompted her to disavow her embeddedness in ordinary material existence as she nurtures compensatory abstract ideals of

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right, purity, justice, and beauty. In the end, however, the power of these same ideals will be revealed to her as rooted in, rather than transcendent of, the reality of her own human suffering. This realisation forces Theresa to abandon her protective armour of self-sufficiency: a painful process by which the self begins to open itself to others in service, solidarity, and helplessness in the face of dissolution. Only through this move can Theresa finally turn in compassion towards herself. Madden’s first novel thus launches a paradigm for her larger work’s treatment of group and individual experiences of significant loss: human connection, truth, and beauty regenerate as living forces in a spiral process involving non-linear movement from painful breakdown to an organic reconstitution of personal and political sovereignty. Her texts are built upon the powerful imperative to advance this process of healing as one whose stages are often stalled and untidily overlapping within the life of a protagonist and across the complexly interacting communities of family, locality, vocation, and socio-political affiliation, of which they are a member. Theresa’s sense of self has already been fractured when we first meet her. She is in a state of such radical isolation in the wake of Francis’s death that her loneliness is signalled directly by her body: ‘She looked incomplete and shockingly different; even her hair and clothes seemed bereaved.’ Her condition of sorrow sparks ‘intense pity and fear’ in others (Madden, 1986: 64), reinforcing an isolation that seems to her to be insurmountable in the face of her helpless openness to the pain of deep grief: ‘When Francis died, she felt that she had fallen into a deep, dark pit, with cold smooth sides, out of which it was impossible to climb’ (Madden, 1986: 49). At the same time, she fears that escaping this pit would mean falling much further into darkness: rightly apprehensive that following upon Francis’s death, retributive hatred could take root in her own, loss-condemned, ‘cold, black, hidden heart’ (Madden, 1986: 118), she deliberately allows pain to ‘wander through her soul’ (Madden, 1986: 49). However, the potentially positive fruits of this melancholic, fullscale exposure of herself to the desolation of the loss she has suffered are blighted because of the exclusiveness of the privacy with which she conducts herself in that grief. For example, she asserts extreme social control of her world by withholding basic information on

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the existence and death of her beloved twin, not only from other characters but, as Geraldine Higgins notes, from us the readers for much of the novel (Higgins, 1999: 152). Theresa does not see her own solitariness as an inevitable and unwanted outcome of her terrible circumstance of loss, but rather mistakes it for the necessary condition of her integrity as mourner. The narrative explores how this has allowed her to sidestep her freedom and responsibility as an evolving subject in her own life-world, and eventually brings her to a point of crisis when she begins to re-engage with herself and others in a more fluid and open way. Trapped as she is within the constraints of grief’s privacy, from the outset Theresa’s energy is directed at once towards offsetting and safeguarding her state of sorrow. She does this by reaching for an ideal of wholeness and self-presence which she defines overexclusively in terms of the self-determinable life. To this end, she demands of herself and others high standards of artistic, intellectual, and moral integrity, these to be exercised through qualities including a strong work ethic, clear religious faith, and stringent aesthetic judgement. As such, Theresa casts herself as a hero-quester enacting transcendence of her current reality of sorrowful immurement, confusion, and fear. But she can only be faithful to her own uncompromising ideals of social, spiritual, aesthetic, sexual, and domestic beauty and order, insofar as these principles remain sealed from the messy reality of her own and others’ proclivities to failure and exposure to fate, against which complex human condition (rather than in relation to which) she defines these same values. Yet as the novel demonstrates, an adherence to ideals understood in such black-and-white terms can only be self-defeating. Theresa’s various exercises of control over herself and others, along with her assertions of definitive aesthetic and ethical standards, foreclose upon the possibility of remedy rather than protecting her from further harm. As Jerry White notes of this novel, such an ‘appearance of stability… does not lead people towards clarity… but instead assures… their terminal alienation’ (White, 1999: 452). This is because such control denies the life force which can be activated only from within the compromises and sorrows of one’s immediate fallen circumstance of vulnerability. This conundrum is explored by Madden through presenting a main character who takes pride in detecting the political and ethical

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falsehood of ‘spineless liberal[s]’, yet whose critique is without productive direction or outcome (Madden, 1986: 106). An easy target for Theresa’s condemnation is the upwardly mobile, materialistic, yet insecure Robert – her best friend Cathy’s lover and the novel’s other main protagonist. Although the novel initially supports Theresa’s instinct to hold to sharp account the superficiality, weakness, and insincerity of this young man, who refuses his unsophisticated sister’s unconditional offer of familial inclusiveness (Madden, 1986: 15–18), the text in the end does not affirm her in her dismissal of him. Robert emerges as a more complex character than she gives him credit for, operating as a mirror in which Theresa fails to read herself. Theresa condemns other people (but not herself) who invoke immobile zones of perfection in order to avoid their own exposure to suffering – for example, she criticises her mother’s secrecy about her father’s faults as denying his daughter an authentic, positive relationship with his memory (Madden, 1986: 70). Yet like Robert and her mother, Theresa idealises an alternative family arrangement (that of Robert’s sister) while keeping secret her own formative exposure to love and loss. By means of these ironic parallels, Madden suggests that over-strict standards of freedom from illusion can lead one right back into illusion, undercutting that freedom for self-empowerment, goodness, and meaningful connection with reality, which is the mourner’s greater need. Theresa painfully begins to sense this truth as she recognises that her own beloved twin brother succumbed to a similar temptation towards static (and in his case directly death-oriented) zones of perfection. Francis before he died had become unable to incorporate his increasingly fervent, near-mystical religious faith into any practical way of life: ‘he gave up, and waited for that one big thing … he was … trying to hoard life itself – for that one instant of action, union and justification’ (Madden, 1986: 71–2). However, the novel promulgates the contrary principle that life on this earth cannot be ‘fearfully conserved’ (Madden, 1986: 72) but must instead be spent in the living. Theresa experiences a crucial moment of understanding of this truth when she realises that the calling to live life here and now applies as much to herself in her relationship with Francis after his death, as it did to Francis himself before his death. This insight comes about at the moment when she sees that she can only sustain an active relationship with her beloved dead brother from

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now on, if she both acknowledges and accepts his faults: ‘Even if she thought that he had been foolish or that he had shirked life, her love would have to accommodate these things because they were a part of him’ (Madden, 1986: 72). Recognising this imperative prompts Theresa to begin to relinquish her over-extended reliance on privacy and control as ‘hidden symptoms’ of what has become, in her, a destructive response to major loss – one which may also be indexed to Ulster’s pre-Troubles invisible malaise of forced normality (Madden, 1986: 13). By the end of the novel, when Robert’s unwitting invasion of her privacy triggers an expression of her own uncontainable sorrow at a level which breaches all her defences, Theresa understands that her grief from now on must at least partly be held by others. Robert, her friend Cathy, and even her own final grief-stricken image in her living-room mirror are called to this task – inadequate for the challenge of holding her in compassion though these figures may be. As unremitting psychological pain finally forces Theresa to recognise her own utter neediness, an alternative movement in her life – towards openness rather than enclosure – is instigated, and she reaches out from within her ivory tower of grief to acknowledge the empathy, co-experience, and impulse to service that is stimulated on her behalf (however imperfectly) in others, as well as in herself for others. Theresa’s progress from evasion of grief to the beginnings of an authentic coming to terms with loss through the release of sorrow is mediated through her many encounters with mirror images of the self, which in turn is resonant of the many debates on art in this text. Therefore, a consideration of the status and operation of mirroring in Hidden Symptoms is crucial if we are to understand this novel’s representation of loss and healing. The motif of mirroring recurs both directly, in the form of looking glasses and window panes reflecting Theresa, Robert, and Cathy at certain key points in their stories (Madden, 1986: 18, 53, 68, 87–8, 124, 134–5, and 141–2), and indirectly in the form of twinned versions of the self: Francis is Theresa’s birth-twin, but arguably, Robert is Francis’s oppositional doppelgänger who enters Theresa’s life to challenge the terms of her over-investment in Francis as her lost ‘other half’ (as noted by Higgins, 1999: 152–3); she even inadvertently calls Robert by Francis’s name when her guard is down (Madden, 1986: 108).

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Equivalently, Cathy and Theresa function for Robert as the light and dark sides of womanhood, though unsurprisingly, he confuses them in these roles (Madden, 1986: 27). Such encounters with mirror images have the potential to be both disabling and enabling. On the one hand, the novel explores the dangers of projecting one’s multidimensional lived reality onto the singular plane of a mirror – a mere glassy reflection or inversion of the self, whether the resultant image be embraced or disavowed by the characters involved. Robert articulates a realisation Theresa will later come to when he glumly stares at his reflection in his un-curtained, night-time window (Madden, 1986: 87–9). The ‘dark doppelgänger’ he sees there seems to suggest that his life is ‘a trick of glass, air and light’, which can be ‘refined to perfection’, unable to ‘feel pain’. He flippantly proposes that this may be the solution to the Northern Irish conflict: ‘Let these dark illusions live our lives for us: they will do it much better than we can’ (Madden, 1986: 88). Yet he realises that such a mono-plane surface cannot sustain one’s actual life in all its depth-reality of sorrow, compromise, and possibility, but can only ever be a cut-off, carefully bounded version of a human being’s experience. Geraldine Higgins suggests that these delimited mirror images signal human damage, noting of this novel that those glass surfaces dividing inside from outside which operate as accidental mirrors, such as the glass of the hearse carrying Francis’s coffin, ‘drain[] life’ from the living who are reflected in them, ‘casting on them the “ghostly and bloodless” pallor of photographic negatives’ (Higgins, 1999: 154). Nevertheless, on the other hand the novel also proposes that a singular reflected version of the self can be very enabling. A mirror image can operate as a transitional object which, in its monodimensional modus operandi, is equivalent to the relationship between the weather man and weather woman in the Bavarian barometer considered in this novel’s opening scene (Madden, 1986: 9): one form of the self is always hidden while the other is shown; one remains private while the other becomes public. Even though the weather man and woman can be clearly distinguished from each other (occupying different physical and cultural spaces), it would otherwise be difficult to decide which is which, as one figure always, sooner or later, calls forth the other within this mechanism. So too for the relationship between the fictional ideal self and the ‘real’ self

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in this novel: Hidden Symptoms proposes a creative interchange in difference between the idealised mirror image of our lives and its original in our own suffering, lived experience. This interchange alone can facilitate understanding of and hope in our own larger situation, warts and all. Such enabling mirror images conduct rather than disable the truth, when the persons who are either generating or consuming that mirror image recognise its limitation in representing their own and others’ life-worlds. Under the terms of this definitional self-reflexivity, mirrors stand as synonyms for authentic artworks in Deirdre Madden’s conception. For her, an artwork (including any one of her own novels) is a consciously created version of an actual life that interconnects rather than divides inside and outside, reflection and reality, by virtue of that artwork’s capacity to maintain the barriers dividing these zones while also facilitating passage between them. (The relative authority of the many artworks debated in Madden’s 2002 novel Authenticity, for example, can be assessed under these criteria.) Hidden Symptoms abounds in references to artworks, including paintings, novels, plays, music, and objects of beauty or intense emotion (including china eggs and shoes). This novel anticipates Madden’s later work as it explores how such art objects endure and outlive the inevitable clashes involved in their own time-andplace-based situation and are at least partly generated through these clashes. Art’s conjoined survival and honouring of its own occasion commensurately suggest that individual human meaning can best pull through in a situation of large-scale loss through honouring the myriad specific aspects of grief. We see this principle strongly invoked in Hidden Symptoms. Instead of succumbing to ‘the temptation to make one’s response as big as the disaster’, and in order to resist her depressed sense that Francis’s death and indeed her own possible future fate are meaningless (‘So little mattered’), Theresa recognises she can only ‘in truth … collapse down to the horror of little details and keep living’ (Madden, 1986: 19). Art is her instructor here: in their considerations of key artworks throughout this novel, including Michelangelo’s The Pietà and Bernini’s statue of St Theresa of Avila in Ecstasy (Madden, 1986: 55–6), the novels’ protagonists imply that art’s monumental role must be collapsed before it can be reconvened in living relation to the things that happen. Equivalently,

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Theresa knows she must keep alive the small details of Francis’s life and death rather than maintain her current searing sense of the enormity of his murder. This low-key approach, privileging minutiae, is what can secure both him and the injustice of his passing against being forgotten within the broader sweep of ‘[i]nexorable time’ (Madden, 1986: 19), within which flux he and she – separated as they are by death – are now more than ever caught. For the same reason, Theresa wants to ‘pluck and save her [long-dead] father from the flux of time’ through learning ‘the day and the hour’ at which a random street photograph had been taken of him as a young man (Madden, 1986: 69). Only such acts of securing the place of those she has loved and lost in their and her own personal history, as set in relation to the larger public record of time, can allow her to ‘keep living’ in the face of their loss (Madden, 1986: 19). This is the case, even though to remember their irreducible individuality in this way, must also greatly increase the felt pain of grief. At first, Theresa entirely misses the point of art’s potential to model self-enablement in contexts of grief in this manner. Thus, her wholesale dismissal of post-Holocaust art as hiding the horror of the concentration camps through its provision of ‘agreeable noises to flood [the] ears’ as distraction from grief (Madden, 1986: 104) fails to allow for the subversively interactive possibilities of this ‘safe’ art, when re-read in the precise context of its own exclusions. Pointing towards this possibility is the Israeli Holocaust museum exhibit of a single ‘tiny broken shoe upon a pedestal’ (Madden, 1986: 19), which Theresa rightly recognises has an inverse power to suggest the vast proportions of loss experienced by the Jewish people. The shoe – representing the valid hopes of a normal life for the dead child who once wore it – suggests that the subjectivity of an individual sufferer can row back against the obliterating weight of mass suffering, as the seemingly all-encompassing force of history’s dark reality is both offset and set off by the ideal of an unconstrained individual life, here symbolised by a tiny damaged piece of footwear. Thus this exhibit, operating as artwork, suggests that the human longing for the ideal of fullness of life can best be sustained within rather than without the difficult context of that ideal’s utter betrayal.

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The scene in which Robert’s sister’s baby is baptised is set in striking contradistinction to the horror of this representative Holocaust child’s death. Here, Madden tentatively suggests that the ideal of new life which baptism symbolises can be sustained, notwithstanding the larger dark shadows that surround and indeed are a condition and offshoot of its fragility: down at the back, where the font stood, there was little light save from a single candle which Tom’s brother was holding in his capacity as godfather. Its flame cast ghastly and sinister shadows upon the faces of those gathered around, and as the bright baptismal water sparkled across the baby’s forehead it caught the light of the candle. The child did not cry, but Robert could see its little feet working frantically beneath the shawl. (Madden, 1986: 125)

Masterly use of light imagery in this passage brings our fallen worlds of loss and our ideal worlds of hope into tense but workable alignment. The single light of the baptismal candle, representative of subjective faith in human beings’ capacity for familial communion with God (into which covenant the child is being welcomed through this sacrament), also casts monstrous shadows: the surrounding darkness of the objective knowledge of human corruption seems only augmented by the candle’s presence. Yet, this candlelight is additionally caught by, and itself makes bright, the waters of baptism representing the child’s symbolic death and rebirth into limitless new life. The child at this moment is in no apparent distress, even though her ‘little feet working frantically’ during the ceremony suggest she is already actively engaged in life’s struggles. Her body is both relaxed and alert as her pumping legs draw renewed attention to the huge pathos of the single tiny, unmoving shoe in the Holocaust museum, signifying the vast injustice of genocide. Such intricate resonance in the small details of a secondary scene and seemingly chance thought processes prepare us to understand the conditions required for significant growth in Madden’s main characters. Theresa’s psychological, ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic struggle with grief involves her in a quest simultaneously to admit and overcome the ‘inarticulation’ which follows upon ‘life pushing you into a state where everything is melting until you’re left with the absolute and you can find neither the words nor the images to express it’ (Madden, 1986: 28). Although the struggle both to

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accept and defeat such silence can never be resolved, the redemption of mourning can come about through facilitating the griever’s noncondemnatory but critical self-reflexivity in the process of attempting this impossibly contradictory task. Robert is a medium of this unexpected insight into how to come through loss, on the occasion of his difficult visit to Theresa’s home after she has caught him out in the act of (unwittingly) invading her grief by reading newspaper reports on her brother’s torture and death (her friend Cathy – Robert’s lover – had covertly directed him to find this material, thus betraying Theresa’s carefully maintained secrecy in regards to her brother’s death). Robert initially wants to objectify and simplify Theresa at this moment of crisis in their relationship. Such desire for control links in his mind to the personal power he associates with the production of famous art: ‘Robert could see himself in the mirror as if he were the artist who had created all before him, both the room and the room reflected’ (Madden, 1986: 135). However, the artwork to which he here defensively relates his present position in Theresa’s home – Jan van Eyck’s painting, The Arnolfini Marriage – challenges such a narrow understanding of its own exemplary meaning, especially in this context: the mirror in the painting, which reflects the artist himself at work, suggests less his omniscience than his humanly and historically bounded situation and point of view. Appropriately, in the novel’s pivotal scene, Robert’s self-righteous desire to manipulate the outcome of his meeting with Theresa to his own advantage is checked by his recognition that that outcome must remain entirely subject to the unpredictability of how he himself will appear in the mirror of Theresa’s eyes: there can be no guarantee she will ever believe he was not acting in bad faith by reading the newspaper reports of Francis’s murder (even though in this instance, he is actually innocent). This uneasy conjoining of the objective truth of what happened, and these two characters’ unavoidably differing understandings of and responses to it, leads Robert fully to recognise the difficulty of doing the good he genuinely wishes to do, for perhaps the first time since his mother’s death – that is, to comfort someone who is in the throes of pain. This sobering realisation of his own failure nevertheless suggests Robert may be at the beginning of his own journey of redemption, one which will bring him into much more genuine communion with others in the future.

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The main protagonists’ reflections on art prepare them to understand the conditions for the healing of the wounds of loss they have experienced. Theresa, in particular, slowly begins to turn outwards towards the social domain while starting to comprehend that she has been judging herself as monstrous in the isolation and bitterness of her grief: She wondered if people in general shared her iceberg mentality: was it common to feel that only a tiny facet of one’s self was exposed and communicable to others, with the rest locked in ice, vast, submerged and impossible? She caught Robert’s glance … and she surprised him with a tiny, timid smile. (Madden, 1986: 81–2)

Theresa begins to understand the urgency of compassion for herself as someone who was ‘being quietly ground down by constant nagging, absolute distress’ (Madden, 1986: 82). One major source of this distress, she realises, is that Francis’s death has made her see ‘how deeply and hopelessly she had been steeped in love, in utter passion for him since the day of their birth’, but now ‘this love was exclusively of the family; worse, of the grave’ (Madden, 1986: 82). She here diagnoses her own pathological inability to love beyond her own mirror image: ‘She thought that love should not make her feel so trapped, but it did’ (Madden, 1986: 83). However, acknowledging such entrapment becomes the first step towards being able to break out of this enclosed sense of self and actually love another – a new love which will be enabled alongside (not instead of) her re-configured love for Francis. In the terms of the familia intacta recognised by Robert in the persons of his own sister, her husband, their child, and their expected new baby (Madden, 1986: 90), Theresa begins to recognise that love is stronger than its own breaking. It is interesting that it is Robert who again speaks for Theresa’s shifting interior understanding in this regard: ‘He thought of the other families he knew, broken or decimated, and remembered reading somewhere that the family was the only social unit which could survive beyond the grave’ (Madden, 1986: 90). After all, bodies and families are broken in birth as well as in death – no less being acknowledged by Robert’s shocked brother-in-law after attending his wife’s difficult labour (Madden, 1986: 112). This is because both death and birth involve transitions to new life for all who are significantly involved, whether one understands that life in

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biological, social, or spiritual terms. As Theresa begins to perceive this truth, she starts to let go of her determination to safeguard the privacy of her loss, beginning to see that the psychic pain of major bereavement is unending but – crucially – not unchanging. Theresa ‘struggle[s] in the right direction’ (Madden, 1986: 129) towards grief’s alleviation through allowing a larger family of human connection to begin to be reconstituted as the other side of her own pain. Motherhood is important to this process: the more Theresa directly interacts with her own mother as well as Robert’s sister Rosie, whom she meets as an expectant then recently delivered mother, and with Rosie’s newborn daughter (Madden, 1986: 24, 36, 117), the more her defences weaken. This interaction allows her to enter at last that full-blown crisis of faith through which, in the final scenes of the novel, her anger at last will be turned cathartically on herself. Theresa’s climactic crisis of faith does not entail, as one might expect, disbelief in God – an option which had been discarded by her as early as Francis’s funeral when she realised that ‘anger against the God who could have prevented this but who had permitted it to happen’ could not logically lead to disbelief in God but only to hatred of Him (Madden, 1986: 51). Such hatred may be disguised as disbelief, but must obliterate by extension any possibility of Francis’s present, ongoing life with God, thus allowing his killers truly to triumph. Because that conventional road of disbelief in God was closed to her, Theresa had long realised that ‘she would have to learn to love Him again, although there was resentment and little understanding in her heart’ (Madden, 1986: 52). Therefore, her crisis arises now in relation to the terms upon which she can finally opt to love God once more. Her major difficulty here is in accepting that God holds her in His sight, not in Francis’s sense of being under the ‘continual surveillance’ (Parker, 2000: 90) of a divine patriarch, but instead in her own emerging sense of being held in the light of infinite mercy associated with a feminine-identified God. In other words, she cannot yet credit the redemptive capacity of God’s love for her in her present limited and suffering state. In this regard, Theresa’s acute sense of personal integrity continues to hold her own human weakness to over-intransigent account: in this final major scene of the novel, she declares that she can ‘never be good enough’ to measure up to God’s death on the cross for her,

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by virtue of the sin of her resistance to her own present suffering (Madden, 1986: 138). The implication of this is that she should accept all the possible suffering entailed in grief, so as to prove herself worthy of God’s love. The arrogance as well as the futility of such masochism is as yet lost to Theresa, as she needlessly compounds her suffering by what Robert rightly recognises as her ‘refusal to be comforted’ in her struggle with faith – a struggle naturally consequent upon grief (Madden, 1986: 138–9). Robert longs to teach Theresa a lesson of primary empathy but does not dare to do so: at this very moment he has a strong impulse to ‘take her in his arms and weep, too’, prompted by his memory of his own mother ‘making much of God’s mercy and grace’. This generous impulse is blocked by Robert’s characteristic fear of succumbing to a crisis of self-belief and security through any such gesture of solidarity with another – to ‘suffer there with her’ (Madden, 1986: 139). Nevertheless, the wholeness of mercy which Robert imagines on her behalf is still a lesson that Theresa vitally needs. It is one which she herself stumbles towards after he leaves, as she at last collapses, ‘crying with a total lack of restraint until she was spent and could cry no more’. Afterwards, she finds a means of artificial yet authentic comfort – the feel of her slipper’s synthetic fur against her face (another key footwear image) – while she allows herself to go blank: ‘She thought of nothing’ (Madden, 1986: 139). The power of this full admittance of her own vulnerability is proven in the final scene of the novel when Theresa faces her own reflected image of paralysing sorrow, looking at herself in the mirror at last in true self-empathy rather than self-critique: ‘She could scarcely believe how intimately she must know the sad hinterland of the red-eyed girl’s life, and she approached the mirror timidly, watching with fascination the way in which the image grew. Stopping before it, she was filled with a desire to touch the glass’ (Madden, 1986: 141). Theresa here glimpses herself from the outside in, through the eyes of the ideal of God’s mercy – that same unconditional mercy towards which Robert had floundered to direct her. Yet when she actually does touch the mirror, she realises that this reflected image of herself must remain inadequate to her own complex human reality, because of the mirror’s necessary terms of operation – her mirror image is inevitably ‘cold and smooth’, unlike her own warm and grief-ravaged flesh (Madden, 1986: 141).

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The adjectives ‘cold and smooth’ loop us back to Theresa’s similar tactile experience with the perfect china egg she had held at the start of the novel (Madden, 1986: 10), the contrast between her own flesh and that smooth surface at last coming into focus as similarly accounting for that object’s value for her. Paradoxically, it is only by engaging with mirrors – a synonym here for the ‘cold and smooth’ surface of all realms of the ideal beyond our fallen reality – that Theresa can finally recognise her need to step outside their terms of apparent exclusivity. Therefore, before she turns from the mirror having touched it in this final scene, ‘She withdrew her hand and gazed again at her reflection’ (Madden, 1986: 141). By thus re-engaging with her mirror image while acknowledging its constraints, she makes herself ready at last to face the real. In other words, it is by virtue of her recognition of the play of similarity and difference between the mirrored and the real room, between her perceived and her actual situation, without denying the validity of either, that Theresa begins to turn definitively towards healing. At last she can ‘go beyond reflections’ by entering into an authentic relationship with these same reflections, empowered as she now is to ‘turn her back upon the mirror, with its cold, circular, distorted room, and look around the real parlour in which she was standing’ (Madden, 1986: 142). It is only through allowing such contrastive interaction between reflection and actuality, ideal and real, that Theresa can properly ‘realize’ her situation – ‘that she was very cold’ – and so finally can go about remedying her own illness with what power is at her disposal: ‘she crossed to the hearth, knelt down, and tried to rekindle the dying fire’ (Madden, 1986: 142). Judith Butler argues that grief-work requires us to realise a series of contradictions: [that] the past is irrecoverable and the past is not past; the past is the resource for the future and the future is the redemption of the past; [that] loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; [and that] loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own modes of expression. (Butler, 2003: 467)

These many contradictions of grief call us to recognise that states of loss are no more final than are states of security – an insight central to Deirdre Madden’s finely achieved novel, whose main protagonist gradually reconfigures a destructive life inheritance so as to open herself to other people and to the beginnings of hope.

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The present chapter has examined this first journey in Madden’s fiction in which a major character comes to terms with his or her own inclination to radical disillusionment, by learning to challenge the absolutism of inculcated impulses towards disenchantment in order to take fuller account of reality. It will not be the last. Hidden Symptoms inaugurates this trajectory towards personal and (it is implied) larger communal liberation through its pivotal exploration of how we struggle and re-engage with loss – a direction which will be followed with great distinction in this consummate writer’s subsequent work.

Note 1 Under this broad definition, some of the many orphans in Madden’s fiction include Theresa and Cathy in Hidden Symptoms (1986), Jane in The Birds of the Innocent Wood (1988), Aisling in Remembering Light and Stone (1993), Nuala in Nothing is Black (1994), the three Quinn sisters in One By One in the Darkness (1996), Julia in Authenticity (2002), the playwright-narrator of Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008), and Fintan in Time Present and Time Past (2013).

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Class and multiplicity in One by One in the Darkness Brian Cliff

In examining the ambivalent qualities of Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness, this chapter addresses two key elements of the novel: the depiction of class and the narrative investment less in a single event than in that event’s multiple after-effects. The novel’s quiet representation of class opens up a variety of perspectives, most centrally the contrasts between the financially modest family of Charlie, the protagonists’ father, and the aspirational middle-class family of their mother, Emily. Through these contrasts, the novel clearly rejects the deeply conservative views espoused by Emily’s family, but it does so without quite endorsing the somewhat more nationalist views of Charlie’s family. This depiction of class is part of the way in which the text evades assignment to the more starkly delimited points on Northern Ireland’s political spectrum, including the varieties of ‘post-nationalism’ that Colin Graham has sharply critiqued (Graham, 2001: 94–8), and may ‘challenge the legitimacy of the received discourses of identity that have sustained the sectarian divide’ (Harte and Parker, 2000b: 233). In place of such ‘received discourses’, One by One reaches towards making peace (however uneasily) with ambivalence and uncertainty. In the service of this aesthetic, the narrative withholds what, in a different sort of novel, would have been the hinge scenes: Charlie’s murder, and the family’s heated argument about Cate’s pregnancy. Indeed, Madden’s novels are characteristically invested less in such discrete events than in the process of living out those events, in the dispersed resonances and ripples that subsequently roll through people’s lives; as Geraldine Higgins puts it, One by One ‘is primarily concerned with grief and survival rather than the representation

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of violence itself’ (Higgins, 1999: 148). The novel is quite direct about this, as when the girls’ mother, Emily, considers that violent deaths like her husband’s ‘would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning’ (Madden, 1996: 127). Rather than just books in which things happen, Madden’s are books in which things have happened and in which those things continue to resonate; accordingly, the novel ends starkly, offering no ‘kind of solution or closure’ (St Peter, 2000: 120). One by One thus reflects a larger pattern in Madden’s work, which gives description and stillness a narrative momentum, so that her fiction, while underpinned by realistic narrative surfaces, has the quality not so much of revelation as of meditation. Through this meditative quality, the novel avoids some of the clichéd modes of Troubles fiction, notably the ‘consolatory images’ that Eve Patten has argued ‘provide for an unreflective but consensual response’ (Patten, 1995: 132). The novel’s images of class are largely integrated through Madden’s representations of family, which also open on to a range of other multiplicities in the novel. Indeed, much of the scholarship on One by One has examined the novel’s sense of family and home, with domesticity as a frequent and apt focus. Emphasising the ways in which questions of home and space are destabilised, for example, Geraldine Higgins, Jayne Steel, and others have commented on the novel’s opening and closing scenes, in which Heather Ingman sees ‘a protest against linear time’ with the suggestion of ‘a hidden, uncanny dimension’ that ‘runs right through the novel’ (Ingman, 2007: 163). The novel also uses this intimate scope, however, to introduce more public matters, at times in discursive passages that can approach the sociological: when Helen’s best friend, David, is showing his British boyfriend, Steve, around Belfast to discourage him from moving over from London, the narrative notes that ‘The “Peace Line”, an ugly structure of corrugated iron and barbed wire, which separated the two communities, apparently shocked Steve more than anything else he saw’ (Madden, 1996: 58). Here, Steve – a gently ironic stand-in for the reader unfamiliar with the intricacies of Belfast – facilitates blunt exposition. Emily’s early career as a teacher, a profession that offered upward socioeconomic mobility, makes her a vehicle for similarly overt commentary on class:

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As far as the unemployed fathers were concerned, the big shipyards and the other heavy industries of Belfast might as well have been on the moon for all the chance they or their sons had of getting a job there, because they were Catholics. Only the most gifted, the most determined and the most hard working had even the slimmest chance of making out well in the world: and yet education was their hope. (Madden, 1996: 119)

Such direct passages contribute quite clearly to the specific weight of the novel’s representations of family, class, nation, and the intersections between those forces. Amidst these intersections, the novel emphatically conveys varieties of difference beyond class, all within a community at times misread as homogeneous. This emphasis is apparent when the novel describes how Charlie is brought to cursing by the news that a young man from the area blew himself up planting a bomb at an electricity pylon: ‘“A pylon”, their father said bitterly … “A fucking electricity pylon”, and that startled them, for he almost never used language like that’ (Madden, 1996: 103). The unease that began with the shock of their father’s profanity builds for the girls to the funeral itself, which concludes when something happened to break the air of dignified sadness which had marked the day up until then. The men and women in black produced guns, and when someone gave orders in Irish, they raised their arms and fired a volley of shots over the open grave. Many of the mourners applauded loudly; some of the men even whistled and cheered. Their Uncle Brian was one of the men who clapped hardest of all, but their father didn’t join in. When they got into the car to go home, they sat in silence for a moment, and then he said to them, ‘Never forget what you saw today; and never let anybody try to tell you that it was anything other than a life wasted, and lives destroyed.’ (Madden, 1996: 105)

Here, as well as offering a complex kind of foreshadowing of Charlie’s own murder, the novel insists on the presence – within what is ostensibly one community – of divergent responses to the funeral and to the larger context of the Troubles. This divergence, in turn, implicitly questions the teleological sense of inevitability that sometimes cloaks the Troubles, as well as nationalism – both Irish and British – more broadly.

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At other times, the novel conveys these communal differences with a lighter touch, as when young Helen thinks that, had she known only Granny Kelly, she would have thought that all grannies were sad and forbidding, that they dressed only in black … If she’d only had Granny Kate to go by, she’d have thought a granny was someone who liked big hats and bright clothes … and who had a fat, juicy laugh, so loud you could hear it through thick walls and closed doors. (Madden, 1996: 37)

Most immediately, this passage helps establish the protagonists’ aesthetic and emotional preferences for the warm and empathetic over the grim and constricted. More particularly, this passage builds on the novel’s broader sense of differences to engage with class: these vibrant characteristics colour the rural, working-class background of their father’s family – no gentleman farmers, the Quinns – while the grimmer traits consistently belong to their mother Emily’s family, whose severe middle-class aspirations forego such vibrancy.1 ‘Tea in Granny Kelly’s house’, we are told, ‘didn’t count as real food, it was just another exercise to make sure you knew the rules, and that you kept them, too’ (Madden, 1996: 39). While these are for young Helen at first a surface question of preferences, partially articulated by her childhood self, One by One gradually develops a sustained depiction of the Kelly family’s class aspirations as deeply connected to the political divisions that unfold over the narrative. This more pointed depiction of class is woven throughout the book, as when the youngest sister, Sally, complains about her Aunt Rosemary: ‘She isn’t even trying to understand what’s happening here, and at some deep level, I don’t think she really cares, so long as her nice cosy middle-class life goes on the same as it’s always done. She thinks things are better in Northern Ireland than they were twenty-five years ago, because now there’s a Marks and Spencer’s in Ballymena. … I don’t think she’d even want peace here if it meant a significant change in the material quality of her life. … She’s the last person I know who’ll still say, “One side’s as bad as another.”’ (Madden, 1996: 143)

This scorn for her bourgeois aunt’s pretence of morality echoes criticisms made by a range of other authors, such as Christina Reid,

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Seamus Heaney, and Glenn Patterson. Sally, however, contributes here not a simple dismissal of Rosemary’s class (as easily mocked as she is) but more specifically a critique of her middle-class, quietist political morality as selfish, a critique that again highlights the role of class in shaping views of the Troubles. In tracing these roles, and in depicting a counter-essentialist sense of heterogeneity within Northern Catholic communities, the novel draws heavily on discussions between Helen and her friend David.2 These discussions are at their most overt when Helen and David discuss his English boyfriend Steve’s sense of Northern Ireland: ‘Do you know what he said? “It strikes me that what’s going on here is almost as much a class thing as a sectarian issue.” Is that shrewd or what? And so he argued then that he wouldn’t be exposed to the conflict very much, because he’d be safe in the part of town where I live.’ ‘So he hasn’t even moved here yet and already he’s trotting out the old line, “Where I live it’s safe, but in such and such a place you could get shot at any moment?”’ (Madden, 1996: 58, original emphasis)

Here, as both Helen and David see, Steve is at once perceptive in identifying the centrality of class to the Troubles and – like Aunt Rosemary – oblivious in his own bubble of relative class privilege. Building on this discussion (in a passage that, though just on the next page, happens months later), the two friends watch a documentary marking the first twenty-five years of the Troubles. As David comments ‘you can see too how it started’, the narrative voice continues: ‘The people on the screen looked weary and put-upon: it would have been easy to believe that they were too cowed ever to be a threat, and they could imagine the shock it must have been when their patience broke’ (Madden, 1996: 59). This observation of the ways in which the working classes can become invisible to other positions within structures of power, an invisibility on which their continued exploitation depends, spurs further discussion between the two friends: ‘What do you think is the biggest difference between now and then?’ Helen asked. David replied unhesitatingly: ‘We are. The educated Catholic middle class.’ …

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‘People like that’, and she pointed at the screen, ‘wouldn’t have been able to believe that their children could come so far, so fast.’ ‘Some of their children’, he corrected her. (Madden, 1996: 60)

Although in the novel’s present tense David facilitates such discussions and synthesises certain stances together with Helen, One by One presents these early stages of the Troubles almost entirely through the Quinns, whose background includes multiple class positions, as already shown. This is not to suggest that One by One offers a neat sociology of the Troubles, or of class and Catholicism. Instead, Madden uses class to depict a sense of historical uncertainty, a moment in which various elements of identity may not yet (or not necessarily) align in ways that have become more familiar over the intervening decades, particularly as the national-sectarian conflict elided other differences.3 Madden engages with this uncertainty by having the narrative draw out distinctions within Northern Catholic communities, countering a tendency in which, as Michael Parker has noted, ‘Too often critiques of its texts have overstated the homogeneity of the northern nationalist community’ (Parker, 2007: 178). It is in light of this pattern that One by One is invested in showing a cultural (and often, at least indirectly, political) heterogeneity behind the deceptive uniformity of ‘the two communities’ rhetoric.4 Within their family, for example, ‘Their father was always one of the first of the men to go up to Holy Communion. Uncle Brian only ever went to Communion once a year, at Easter. Uncle Peter never went to Mass, not even at Christmas’ (Madden, 1996: 11). These differences do to some extent signal specific personal traits of the characters: Charlie is the quietest and gentlest of them, while Brian is politically involved, and Peter is isolated. The passage’s more immediate function, however, is to establish the fact of diverging practices and perspectives within a single Northern Catholic community, indeed within one generation of a single family. This variety becomes increasingly important over the course of the novel, woven into the framework of meaning around the Quinn family’s experiences as seemingly minor differences are extended and elaborated. Young Helen articulates this most directly, in detailing political disagreements amongst her classmates as well as amongst the nuns who taught her: ‘Although the school was completely

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Catholic, there were still sharp divisions of political opinion within it. Girls like Brian’s and Lucy’s daughter Una liked Sister Philomena. Because she had grown up in Derry, they said, she understood how Catholics were discriminated against … unlike Sister Benedict, who was from the Republic’ (Madden 1996: 154). In contrast, other students, some from different class backgrounds, such as the policeman’s younger daughter … or another pupil who had an uncle an Alliance MP … complained that Sister Philomena was always bringing politics into education; Sister Philomena’s supporters maintained that education was already a political issue in Northern Ireland, and that it was Sister Benedict who was at fault, for trying to deny or ignore this. (Madden, 1996: 154–5)

Helen stands apart, ‘in that she thought Sister Philomena was right, but she liked Sister Benedict best’ (Madden, 1996: 155). Much like Helen here, the narrative remains ambivalent in its emotional and political engagement with these varied perspectives, and alert to all the shades of their complexity. Quite different from the quietist retreat of Aunt Rosemary, the text displays instead an agnostic engagement with complexity and class. The crux of these more substantial depictions of class differences comes when the Quinns visit Granny Kelly, their maternal grandmother. This scene could perhaps be read as the Kelly family simply identifying with authority rather than with ‘their own’, but the family’s arguments suggest something more specific about the aspirations of a rising middle class.5 The talk quickly turns to the Civil Rights marchers, disparaged by Uncle Michael as ‘“Bloody headcases”’: ‘“I mean, how do you think it’s going to end? … It’ll end in a bloodbath … The other side are going to resent the least thing that’s given. They have the power, and they’re not just going to let it be taken away from them”’ (Madden, 1996: 78–9). Amidst some gentle interventions by Charlie and Emily, Granny Kelly reasserts her narrowly middle-class sense of proper aspirations: ‘It’s the students I feel most angry about. Look at the chance they’ve been given. If they would sit in the universities and study and work hard, they’d have nothing to complain about, they’d get on in life, get jobs and money … The university should just close their doors on them, should boot them out and take in students who are prepared to stick to their books and work.’ (Madden, 1996: 79)

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Although Charlie steps in to defend the student marchers as acting from a selfless conviction that nothing will improve ‘“unless the people who do have something begin to speak out for those who have nothing”’, Granny Kelly sharply insists (with Uncle Michael’s emphatic approval) that ‘“It’s up to every person to look out for himself … I hate to have to say it about my own people, but the Catholics in this country are a feckless, lazy bunch. Give them an opportunity, and they’ll turn their backs on it and walk away”’ (Madden, 1996: 79); of course, this is deeply, darkly ironic if one is inclined to view Civil Rights as ‘an opportunity’. As well as reflecting her highly astringent sense of propriety, this also indicates Granny Kelly’s lingering and bitter disappointment at the way in which her daughter Emily left a teaching career to marry Charlie, whom she seemingly regarded as improvident. Thus, her animosity here is not only a political assessment, indicating her consistent perspective on the proprieties of class, but a deeply personal and familial condemnation, one that nothing in the novel endorses. This familial landscape is riven with fault lines, and reveals little internal consensus: they may all seek ways for Catholic communities to play an active role within Northern Ireland, but they disagree irreconcilably about how to do so, about what constitutes a proper role, and about the reasons for the absence of such a role. This intra-familial conflict spurs Emily to insist that she is taking the girls on the next Civil Rights march, from Belfast to Derry, underscoring a sense of crisis, of permanent and irrevocable change. Rather than representing that change in directly political terms, however, the narrative frames it through Emily, who – paralleling Helen’s and David’s comments on the Troubles documentary and their sense of a weary, downtrodden people finding their voice – had ‘lost her usual timidity and shyness. Helen knew to look at her how serious all this was: something important had changed’ (Madden, 1996: 80). Although the sense of change is unambiguous, it is also profoundly uncertain: the fact of change may be apparent, but the content or nature of that change is much less so, an unease captured in Helen’s vague but lucid awareness. This passage extends the novel’s logic of echoes and ripples, showing them passing across generations and classes. In a narrative in which the retrospective sections reflect an affecting childhood sense of safety and stability, these ripples suggest as well that the characters’ nostalgia

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is inescapably coloured by the repressions and class aspirations that have also shaped their lives. Such echoes across the novel weave amongst its present and past narrative frames, creating a subtle structure of parallels. As if anticipating Helen’s complaints about the distortion of stories by the media, the dispersal of these echoes – Madden’s ‘ability to establish poignantly ironic relationships between narratives within the narrative’ (Parker, 2007: 182) – is one of the ways in which One by One resists falling into the melodramatic potential its plot invokes. Helen’s childhood recognition that ‘something had changed’, for example, itself echoes an earlier traumatically tense time at Granny Kelly’s house, during which ‘their parents didn’t realise that the children’s sensibilities were delicately tuned to emotional falseness’ while they ‘sat neatly on the sofa, sucking pink wafer biscuits and sipping weak tea, and noticing far more than the adults in the room would ever have believed’ (Madden, 1996: 78). Later, we are similarly told ‘that children could pick up and understand far more than you would ever imagine in a house, even when they were tiny’ (Madden, 1996: 110), an observation so central to this novel as to explain much of its narrative structure and its underlying aesthetic philosophy. By framing these images of class differences in part through such familial conflicts and the subterranean fault lines that run beneath every family – what Anne Fogarty refers to as this family’s ‘dangerously submerged affective and political divisions’ (Fogarty, 2002: 9) – One by One reflects the tendency of Madden’s work to draw attention less to the event and more to the ripples or consequences that flow outward from it, casting their momentum backwards and forwards at once, shaping a response to future events while recasting past responses to earlier events. One of the main points of conflict in the immediate present of One by One, for example, concerns Cate’s announcement of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the immediate spur for her visit home from London. The news triggers a heated argument, which is only described loosely through the bruised silences that follow in its wake, in an aftermath of hushed anger and discomfort. Almost the only details come when Helen calls Sally ‘to tell Mammy I’m sorry for shouting at her earlier’ and Sally replies that ‘it’s the best thing you could have done. It worked like a charm … I’ve banned Cate’s situation as a subject of conversation for the rest of the night’ (Madden, 1996: 55). Here,

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again, the novel resolutely turns its focus from the strict sequence of events to their slowly and unevenly unfolding effects. Some of this may reflect a cultural reticence – shades of Seamus Heaney’s ‘land of password, handgrip, wink and nod’ (Heaney, 1998: 24) – but it is also in keeping with a deliberately un-sensationalist ethos, avoiding the kind of representations so sharply critiqued by Kirkland, Patten, Cleary, and others in their work on the Northern novel.6 Reflecting this approach, the event that appears to have the most determining force in the characters’ lives, the one around which more of the novel revolves than any other – the murder of Charlie Quinn, the girls’ father – is never directly described, never reported in full, never narrated directly by a witness (apart from the killers, the only person present was Uncle Brian’s wife, Lucy, who otherwise has a small presence in the novel). Charlie’s murder is, however, obsessively imagined by his traumatised daughters and their mother. The prominence of this event is made clear almost immediately, but with a pointed circumspection: Cate was aware of the other thing that bound them to each other, and that hadn’t been there in childhood: the thing that had happened to their father. … Cate felt that just by looking at them, people might have guessed that something was wrong, that something had frightened them; and that fear was like a wire which connected them with each other and isolated them from everyone else. (Madden, 1996: 9)

Here, ‘the thing’ is given a defining weight, without itself being articulated in any way other than through its effects. In part through this conspicuously veiled approach, the novel establishes a pointedly slow, undramatic register that is inflected by varieties of ambivalence and that accrues gradual force over the narrative. Even Charlie’s murder, significantly, is at once premeditated and purposeful while being accidental and random, in that the killers seem to have mistaken him for his brother Brian, a Sinn Féin member in whose kitchen Charlie was shot. Indeed, when a sentence elaborates on this murder, it is sandwiched between two much longer, much more descriptive paragraphs, and in its brevity comes as a shock: ‘But before the week was out, he had been killed’ (Madden, 1996: 27). The force of the sentence depends on its deferred nature, on the belated and almost offhand revelation of what exactly was ‘the

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thing that had happened to their father’: he had not simply died but had been murdered. Within the complex timeframe of the novel’s narrative sequence, chapters alternate between the adult present and the childhood past, a mechanism whereby some foreshadowing is effectively retrospective, or laden with the significance of hindsight. In a childhood chapter that comes after the sentence disclosing Charlie’s murder, for example, Emily, asked about her own father’s death when she was herself young, had ‘looked so sad when she said, “Oh yes, Helen, it was terrible. It made all the difference to me, all the difference in the world”’ (Madden, 1996: 40). Though she gets less narrative space than her daughters, Emily’s grief around her father’s death amplifies our understanding of the Quinn girls’ own loss, extending that loss outward from its initial impact. This passage sets the framework within which Emily’s experience of Charlie’s death is eventually articulated: She couldn’t change the fact of things but she could change how she saw them, and in that way she could determine the effect they had on her. … Oh she couldn’t tell even her own daughters what it was like … to know that your heart had been forced shut. To be a woman in her late sixties, to have prayed to God every day of her life, and to be left so that she could feel no compassion, no mercy, only bitterness and hate, was a kind of horror she had never imagined. (Madden, 1996: 125)

As Helen’s journalist friend David says, in discussing his own father’s murder when David was still a young boy and his experiences reporting on similar attacks as an adult, ‘only now as an adult, I can really see what [such loss] means. There’s something about it that … that never stops or ends’ (Madden, 1996: 52, original emphasis). With all of these varieties of echoes – those that roll out ceaselessly from a murdered father, from a shifting class position, or from Cate’s pregnancy – there is, again, an emphasis on effects within which One by One presents not the determining through-line of a historical narrative but a series of points on a multi-dimensional grid. Through this presentation, the effects of the narrative exceed the gradual accumulation of linear sequence, moving in multiple directions at once. As these effects and echoes connect, the novel poses questions about representation, particularly about how meaning is shaped or distorted by narratives. Though it runs throughout

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One by One, this is most fully articulated by Helen in her abiding scepticism about journalistic accounts of the Troubles: ‘But there’s something about the whole nature of it’, Helen argued, ‘about taking things and making stories about them, and that’s all it amounts to: making up stories out of a few facts, and presenting them as though that interpretation was the absolute truth. That’s what I can’t stand. … The medium is a blunt weapon in itself, that’s the problem. It isn’t fitted to dealing with complexity, it isn’t comfortable with paradox or contradiction, and that’s the heart of the problem, if you ask me.’ (Madden, 1996: 50–1)

Helen’s critique of journalism paints with a very broad brush itself, and David defends the profession in ways that the novel does not contradict. However, Helen’s larger underlying concern is about stories and how they are told, rather than narrowly about journalism. In particular, her ethical critique revolves around the erasure of ‘complexity’, of ‘paradox or contradiction’, reflecting her uneasy experience with having seen ‘stories’ made up ‘out of a few facts’. This unease, in turn, aligns with this novel’s attention to the ripples and echoes dispersed across the text. Crucially, here is no premature or false distinction between politics and real life, no easy ‘opposition of ideology to … “truth”’ (Kirkland, 2000: 229); after all, Helen is the one who makes this point, and she has devoted herself to a deeply political involvement with the law, in a practice that includes the defence of those accused of sectarian killings. This chapter has pursued two points of focus: One by One’s narrative investment in ripples and echoes, and its use of class to insist on the material basis of the Troubles as well as on the varied perspectives sometimes lost beneath the weight of identitarian frameworks of meaning. Both of these approaches allow the novel to embrace uncertainty. Sally, for example, offers what is arguably one of the novel’s ethical principles when she rebukes Cate: ‘In this society it’s the people who aren’t confused, it’s the people who know exactly what they think and feel about things who are the most dangerous’ (Madden, 1996: 142). As a young student, Helen received a similar message from her weary teacher, Sister Benedict: ‘Sometimes I think idealism is one of the most dangerous forces there is. I saw it myself when I was in Africa, time and time again. Girls like you, they were good-hearted, unselfish girls, but their

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minds were shut’ (Madden, 1996: 159). These two examples speak to the text’s broader mistrust of closed conviction, for One by One is deeply coloured by its acute awareness of an ambivalence running through every variety of intimacy, and by its corresponding faith in the value of uncertainty and in the multiplicity of its world. Madden’s novel articulates this faith through its representations of class, its recurring debates about media narratives, and its broader investment in the effects that flow outward from an initial event. It is here that the novel finds its centre – which, to be sure, is diffuse, constructed not in linear sequence but through the echoes across the text – couching its critiques not as an aestheticised retreat from the world into a hermetic sphere of art, but rather as an engagement in the world, and in the world’s multiplicity, with all the ambivalence and uncertainty that involves.

Notes 1 This is quite distinct from representations of ‘the gothicized working class’ that Aaron Kelly has dissected (Kelly, 2005: 144). 2 The mention of David’s homosexuality is so unproblematic in the novel as to reinforce implicitly the sense of Northern diversities, as Jennifer M. Jeffers notes: ‘In this, the novel does show that a thirty-something single heterosexual woman can remain unmarried and a thirty-something homosexual man does not have to be closeted in order to live in contemporary Belfast’ (Jeffers, 2002: 74). 3 Marianne Elliott, for example, argues that ‘sectarianism … has also stood in for class struggle in Ireland and usually destroyed any effort at socialist alliance’ (Elliott, 2009: 5). Similarly, J. J. Lee has contended that in the early part of the twentieth century, ‘Ulster Protestant workers saw little advantage in adopting the class politics becoming gradually more fashionable among British workers. Their reluctance was economically and psychologically rational, at least in the short term. They did better out of race than out of class’ (Lee, 1989: 5). John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary’s work (1995) is also relevant here, particularly their broad argument that class consciousness tended to function primarily within sectarian communities rather than ecumenically between them. 4 Glenn Patterson is hardly alone in his concise impatience with such communal homogenising: ‘Communities. A polite term for sides. There are apparently only two, though where this leaves the Chinese

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community, the Indian community, the Gay community, etc. is anybody’s guess’ (Patterson, 2006: 2). Aaron Kelly has also criticised ‘the dominant discourse of “the Two Communities”’ in detail, particularly as regards thriller fiction, arguing that ‘Northern Ireland is not neatly divided into self-contained and monolithic binaries; it is instead an integrated constellation of forces and relationalities simultaneously fractured and affiliated by the global historical dynamics of class, gender, sexuality, the city, regionality, etc.’ (Kelly, 2005: 24–5). 5 Here, we would do well to note McGarry and O’Leary’s reminder not to dismiss a ‘consciousness’ as ‘either manipulated or narrowly instrumental’ (McGarry and O’Leary, 1995: 70). For an extended discussion of left-wing Irish politics in the early and mid-twentieth century, and the difficulty faced by such politics in finding a place amidst the dominance of nationalism, see Brown (2004), Chapter 4. 6 In such critiques, Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal is sometimes used to exemplify those clichés; for a full discussion of the critical responses to Cal, see Haslam (2004: 39–54).

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Part II

Art and objects

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5 Objects in Deirdre Madden’s artist novels Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sylvie Mikowski

Various aspects of Deirdre Madden’s style of writing link her to the tradition of realism, insofar as her stories rely on real, existing contexts and can be said to mirror the social and political history of her times; such was the case for her Troubles novels, Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness, and for her post-Celtic Tiger era novel, Time Present and Time Past. However, another remarkable aspect of her work is the way several of her novels stage artists at work – painters in Nothing is Black and Authenticity; an actress, an art historian, and a playwright in Molly Fox’s Birthday – characters the writer sets up against one another in contrasting duets and trios so as to enhance the traits they are meant to embody. The austere, solitary Claire is opposed to the frivolous, compulsive consumer Nuala in Nothing is Black; all of the three main characters in Molly Fox’s Birthday seek in their own way to create, mask, or re-define their identity; the characters in Authenticity take different views of the balance to be established between the dedication to art and the search for material and social comfort. But above all, Madden sketches these characters and what they stand for through their environment, the houses they live in and how they are furnished and decorated, the kind of clothes they wear, and the objects occupying their rooms or which they fancy buying – or stealing, in the case of Nuala in Nothing Is Black. Thus, on the one hand, the use of objects as a way of constructing characters in Madden’s works can be said to fit the aesthetic codes of realism. On the other hand, the fact that these objects should be associated with artists is in keeping with her characters’ commitment to the search for ‘reality’, ‘integrity’, or ‘authenticity’, evidencing a belief in the capacity of art to unveil and give access

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to essential truths about people and life in general. In other words, the centrality of objects in Madden’s works stems not only from a desire to conform to the codes of realism and verisimilitude. It also has to do with her interrogation of the creative process, and the role played by objects – those observed and those produced – in this process; she also questions how the artist can pursue her or his quest for truth and authenticity in a world where the possession of material objects has become the key to social success. What is more, Madden shows that the urge to possess and to accumulate things may sometimes amount to a neurotic quest, thus pointing to the unconscious drives at play in the cult of objects, what Jacques Lacan defines as the lack which underlies our actions and behaviours. Madden’s novels published during periods of great social and economic upheaval in Ireland contain a scathing critique of materialism and of the acquisitive mindset which has accompanied the development of a liberal, capitalist society from the 1960s onwards. Yet some of her characters’ drive to acquire and accumulate more and more objects can also be accounted for by the need to fill the void of their existence, a compulsion which most of the time leads to harmful self-delusion, or induces them to build up a persona which at one stage or another in their development they find hard to reconcile themselves with, triggering the damaging lifecrisis that hits Nuala in Nothing is Black and William Armstrong in Authenticity. Madden’s Künstlerromane are thus underpinned by a tension between the exalted value granted to objects – whether natural or human-made – as artistic material used by her fictional artists as well as by Madden herself as a practitioner of realism and a critic of bourgeois materialism, and the modes of escapism encouraged by capitalism. In realist fiction, objects are assigned the structural role of providing the imaginary world with the ‘effet de réel’ described by Roland Barthes (Barthes, 1968: 84–9). However, objects in Madden’s writings are also endowed with an intrinsic aesthetic value, because they can be part of the characters’ own artistic production, as is the case with Julia’s installations in Authenticity, or with Claire’s paintings in Nothing is Black. Objects are therefore closely linked to the mystery of artistic creativity and imagination, which Madden interrogates in each of her self-reflexive novels, endowing the figure of the artist with the gift of seeing things; things possess the revelatory

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power to uncover invisible truths about life and the world. As a result, objects fulfil a dual, contradictory function in Madden’s fiction: they are symptoms of a superficial, nefarious materialism, which is duly condemned on a moral and ideological level, and lead some of the characters to deep psychological and existential crises; but they are also valued as the basic material artists need if they want to reach what Madden alternatively calls ‘authenticity’, ‘reality’, or ‘truth’. The formal realism she uses is therefore not the result of unimaginative conformism or unquestioning submission to the requirements of verisimilitude, but the expression of her belief in the capacity of art to unveil and convey essential truths. Conversely, we can observe that in the case of her female characters, the drive to possess superfluous objects is often linked to a troubled relationship with their mothers; Madden’s female artists tend to produce objects which are not figurative, but which can be related to what Julia Kristeva calls ‘semiotic language’ as opposed to ‘symbolic language’ (Kristeva, 1974: 22–5). Madden’s descriptions of objects make her the heir to the long tradition of the realist novel, which hinged on the creation of a mimetic illusion through the construction of a referential universe. Objects and their description were assigned a central function in the delineation of characters: their clothes, their belongings, and especially the houses and rooms they were supposed to inhabit signified their traits, their moods, their habits, their psychology, and also their desires and aspirations, notwithstanding their social status. Balzac thus famously opened Le Père Goriot with a long description of the Maison Vauquer, emphasising the fact that what the reader was reading was ‘neither a fiction nor a novel: All is true’ (Balzac, 1976: 50, my emphasis). Jane Austen always detailed the exact number of horses a family would keep, in order to draw fine distinctions between the landowning gentry and the rising bourgeois middle class. It is a description included in Gustave Flaubert’s novella, A Simple Heart, which led Roland Barthes to define what he called the ‘effet de réel’, a stream of superfluous details which, according to him, has no other function in the narrative than to establish a parallel with the extra-linguistic world. That heavy reliance on the description of objects and details was considered excessive by Virginia Woolf, who argued for the artist’s freedom to work outside the constraints of realism. She blamed the latter

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mode for the way it forces writers to provide their story ‘with an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccably that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the day’ (Woolf, 1925: 160). Moreover, the novel has classically been considered the chosen artistic medium in which the alleged virtues of bourgeois life and society could be extolled; as a result, right from its beginnings, the realist novel put a stress on the development of capitalism. Precise references to the new objects furnished by industrial mechanisation abound in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Émile Zola. In a well-known distinction between the language of fiction and the language of poetry, Roman Jakobson argued that the style of the novel was epitomised by the figure of metonymy, whereas the language of poetry is predominantly metaphorical: ‘Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details’ (Jakobson, 1990: 117). Descriptions of characters’ belongings are therefore used as a means of characterisation: for instance, the room inhabited by characters is supposed to reveal their personality. In this regard, James Joyce’s Dubliners can be said to stand at a crossroads between realist and modernist fiction: the story ‘A Painful Case’ opens with a careful description of Mr Duffy’s lodgings and furniture, complete with the colour of his bedspread and the number and even the titles of the books sitting on his shelves. But, as in all the other stories in the collection, Joyce also plays with repetition and deploys ambiguity; language is no longer regarded as a transparent medium supposed to mirror the extra-linguistic world, but as a vortex of multiple, infinite signification. Although she is aware of contemporary reservations about mimetic illusion and the role of the object, Madden nevertheless continues to apply the realist code in many aspects, particularly the device of characterisation through metonymy and synecdoche. For instance, she grants much importance to the places where her characters live, devoting long paragraphs to descriptions of their lodgings, to the point of making their abodes key markers of their personality and implying a parallel between their surroundings and their inner lives: as the narrator in Molly Fox’s Birthday puts it about the room

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formerly occupied by her friend Andrew: ‘every place where he has lived since then has had had something of the same air to it …, the mirror of an ordered mind’ (Madden, 2008: 37, my emphasis). In Nothing is Black, the fact that Claire has decided to live in an austere granite house, located on the edge of the Atlantic in Donegal, is supposed to reflect her solitary, uncompromising personality, her complete devotion to her artistic vocation, and her unrelenting contempt for material comfort or financial success: ‘[s]ome people would be clearly disappointed, or even shocked, by the austerity of the room in which they were to stay’ (Madden, 1994: 5). This frugality is in keeping with the things Claire has renounced and which have defined her personality, including love (she used to have a boyfriend called Marcus but the relationship did not last), family, and motherhood. Much of the dramatic tension in the novel derives from the clashing personalities of Claire and her cousin, Nuala, a married woman, the mother of one child, and the successful owner of a fashionable Dublin restaurant, who has brought along a clutter of objects for her stay at Claire’s cottage. They are clearly out of place there, pointing to the differences in the two cousins’ lifestyles and aspirations: Having unpacked everything she had brought with her, she realized that her possessions looked absurdly grand in the austere room: the green oiled jacket hanging from a nail behind the door, her diamond rings and pearls on the dressing table, her folding leather alarm clock on the chair beside the bed. (Madden, 1994: 20)

Each object mentioned connotes a specific aspect of Nuala’s character: the importance she grants to fashion and appearances, her attraction to wealth and luxury, her taste for the superfluous. The head-on opposition between the two cousins is mediated by the presence in the narrative of a third female character, Anna, a Dutch woman who has fallen in love with that part of Ireland after the break-up of her marriage at home. Anna’s house reflects her distorted view of the Northern Irish countryside as a kind of dreamland, a mythologised vision deriving from literature or tourist-board advertising. It lacks authenticity and reproduces a fake, constructed image of the place: She had been an interior designer back in Holland until her retirement some three years earlier and had created what she considered

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to be the perfect Irish country house. Claire wondered if Anna had noticed how unlike other houses in the area it was. (Madden, 1994: 28)

Anna’s inability to realise what the houses around her really look like is a sign of her deeper blindness to the needs and feelings of the people dear to her, a myopia which has led her to an emotional impasse. Julia in Authenticity, also a young, single, female painter, is very close to Claire in her choice of lifestyle: those who meet her are struck by the bareness of her flat in Francis Street, a bedsitter deprived of luxury. Her new friend, William, notes its ramshackle nature when he visits it for the first time: Looking around, he could see that much else was like this, improvised and shabby: cloths not quite covering boxes that served as tables, a bookshelf constructed from planks and bricks, flowers in a cut-down plastic water-bottle that served as a vase. (Madden, 2002: 55)

The interior of Julia’s flat is clearly meant to suggest her bohemian lifestyle, her abhorrence of domesticity, and her total dedication to art that precludes any concession to material success or comfort. The contrast with the character of William Armstrong, who has renounced an artistic vocation to embrace a lucrative career in a law firm, is equally evidenced by the description of his dwelling, as registered through Julia’s eyes: Left alone now, she had her first chance to look around the room in which she was sitting. Everything in it, burnished and glowing, bespoke money. The walls were painted a dark red that set off the gilt of the picture frames. … Traditional in its overall style, with many antiques, the few modern pieces in the room were carefully chosen and perfectly integrated. On the table beside Liz’s chair was a lamp made of sea urchins, next to it, a row of antique paperweights. (Madden, 2002: 69)

The device of describing a place through the eyes of a character who discovers it for the first time, underlying the two segments just quoted, is typical of the ethos of realist fiction: the belief in the capacity of words and language to make the reader actually ‘see things’ as if reflected in a mirror, as encapsulated by Stendhal’s definition of the novel as ‘a mirror held on the back by a man walking along a road’ in The Red and the Black. In the above passage from

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Authenticity, we also notice the creation of an ‘effet de réel’ through the superfluous detail of the lamp made of sea urchins, which is irrelevant to the plot or to characterisation, but adds extra verisimilitude to the scene. We can observe as well how judgemental the description is, filtered as it is through Julia’s censorious disapproval of the bourgeois lifestyle of William and his wife Liz and their pretence at cultivating a taste for art and culture. But, on other occasions, Madden uses the description of the rooms of her characters to contrary effect and to arouse the reader’s sympathy and approval of them. In Time Present and Time Past, a novel revolving around the changes brought about by the demise of the Celtic Tiger economy, the eerily preserved virtues of traditional hospitality and generosity of Colette’s uncle Finn and his wife Beth are conveyed through the description of the interior of their house as perceived by their niece: It was the strangest house she had ever seen. … Little or nothing had been done to change it over the years, so that it was remarkably oldfashioned. … It had been like going back in time, like stumbling into the pages of a story book. (Madden, 2013: 45)

However, it is in Molly Fox’s Birthday that Madden endows the metonymic pattern underpinning her technique of characterisation with a fully-fledged structural dimension, by having the whole plot of the novel revolve around the impressions, memories, and associations of ideas aroused in the unnamed female narrator’s mind by her stay in the eponymous character’s house. Stretching over one day only, from the moment of the narrator’s awakening in that Dublin house to when she goes to bed, the narrative follows the twists and turns of her thoughts and memories as they are triggered by the objects she encounters in the house, and that provide the readers with many insights into Molly Fox’s personality. The narrator herself emphasises how much a character is reflected by the place she lives in, as if in a mirror: ‘Being in the house was the next best thing to being with Molly herself’ (Madden, 2008: 42). From the beginning, the reader is invited to discover the house and garden through a description reminiscent of the style of the opening paragraphs of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘There is a pretty, if rather small, garden at the front that Molly keeps in a pleasing tangle of bright flowers all summer, like a cottage-garden. … Bees bumble and drone, reeling from one blossom to another

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like small fat drunks’ (Madden, 2008: 5). Wilde’s novel opens with a similar account of Basil Hallward’s studio: ‘the sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive’ (Wilde, 2006: 1). In fact, The Picture of Dorian Gray provides recurring intertextual references in this story dealing with art, acting, and the building of a persona. Molly’s personality, with her skill at exposing truth through acting, is set against that of Andrew Forde, an art historian and TV producer, who has constructed a new version of his identity as a means of escaping an austere, loveless Northern Irish childhood. His determination to fabricate this persona is reflected by the various lodgings he has occupied from his student days to the present. The narrator remembers visiting him the first time: ‘The whole room was neat and tidy, staggeringly so … I wandered around the room, examining the spine of the books in his little bookcase, then crossing to the desk where a textbook lay open’ (Madden, 2008: 38). The interior of his apartment reflects how he has dedicated his whole life to art and culture so as to escape the reality of his lowerclass, Protestant Loyalist family roots, and to forge a new identity for himself as an upper-class, Cambridge-educated scholar. Despite their different lifestyles and values – ‘While Molly’s house is full of stylish bric-à-brac, unusual but inexpensive things that she has picked up on her travels, pretty well everything that Andrew owns – vases, rugs, furniture – is immensely valuable’ (Madden, 2008: 10) – both Molly and Andrew have been able to construct a home for themselves, that is to say to shape their personalities according to what they really wanted to achieve, unlike the narrator: ‘As I walked away from the house I wondered at the facility some people have for creating a home for themselves. Molly can do it, Andrew too, but it has always eluded me’ (Madden, 2008: 99). In Authenticity, by contrast, much of the drama in the life of the artist, Roderic Kennedy, stems from his utter aversion to the idea of domesticity. The Irish painter feels trapped by his marriage to an Italian woman who sets great store by domestic interiors, a reflection of her attachment to a traditional, steady family life, at odds with the freedom artistic creativity needs to survive and flourish. Whereas Marta worries about the choice of a new paint colour

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for her walls, Roderic compares himself to Gulliver tied up by ‘thousands of tiny ropes’ (Madden, 2002: 248). Roderic’s brother, Dennis, understands from the start the disagreements that come between the spouses when he discovers the object offered to each of the wedding-guests as a keepsake: It was the bomboniera that came closest to embodying for Dennis what was wrong. … It had cost, he admitted, a ‘terrifying sum’, and of all the aspects of the wedding, it was the one that had preoccupied Marta the most; she had literally lost sleep over it. (Madden, 2002: 161)

Even though in Molly Fox’s Birthday the narrator acknowledges her own inability to create what she calls ‘an extension of me’ (Madden, 2008: 99) through the places where she has lived, as a writer she is a keen observer of the objects people surround themselves with, because they are the material she works with in order to give life to the fictitious individuals she invents in her plays: ‘How does such a person walk, speak, hold a wine glass? What sort of clothes does she wear, what kind of home does she live in?’ (Madden, 2008: 8), a set of questions which evidently applies to Madden’s own view of fiction writing. Clothes are indeed some of the objects the novelist likes to describe when sketching her characters’ personalities, making them the signifiers of their aspirations or social status, as exemplified by Nuala’s ‘green oiled jacket’ in Nothing is Black, or by Andrew Forde’s sudden change of style in Molly Fox: ‘He had disappeared, taking with him his trainers, his rank jumpers and his sports bag full of books. … – the clothes would become more elegant and well-cut, the attention to detail would become total’ (Madden, 2008: 67). In Authenticity, William’s change to ‘casual clothes he was wearing for the heat, chinos and an open-necked shirt’ (Madden, 2002: 240) symbolises his wish to break away from his regulated life as a successful, wealthy, suit-clad lawyer. However, walking down the street one day he catches sight of Roderic and Julia, in their ‘shabby clothes – her floppy skirt, his faded cord jacket’, and envies ‘their easy confidence and the relaxed way in which they talked and laughed together’ (Madden, 2002: 260), suggesting that he will never be able to look ‘shabby’ and therefore will not experience the happiness enjoyed by Julia and Roderic. Madden’s fictional world

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is divided between women who value fashion and clothes and those who ignore or even despise them. In One by One in the Darkness, for instance, a novel centring on three sisters who react differently to the political violence of which their father was a casualty, Cate’s desire to flee her Northern Irish surroundings leads her to embrace a career as a journalist in a women’s magazine, thus seemingly making the choice to embrace superficiality and frivolity, whereas her sister Helen, who became a lawyer defending Republican terrorists, leads the same kind of stern, austere lifestyle as her avatars, Claire or Julia. In Time Present and Time Past, the gap separating the personalities of Monica and Colette is evidenced by the stylish Dublin fashion shop the former owns, whereas the latter has poor taste and shows no interest in fashion. Elegant clothes and make-up are often also a means for Madden’s female characters to escape from a painful reality and to construct a new, protective image of themselves: Monica is trying to face up to the painful memory of a sexual assault, and Cate seeks to overcome the trauma of her father’s murder. If Madden therefore clearly uses interiors, furniture, and clothes as a means of characterisation, the importance she grants to such material details can also be accounted for by her wish to depict the evolution of Irish society. In other words, objects in her writings not only create an ‘effet de réel’ or help to delineate the characters’ personality, they are also markers of sociological change. The French critic Claude Duchet has argued that objects in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary add a sociological dimension to the text, and that the novelist who uses objects produces what he calls ‘a social text’, which justifies, according to him, ‘a sociology of objects in fiction’ (Duchet, 1979: 8). In Madden’s novels, objects become endowed with a semiological value which allows her to weave critical views of the social and economic changes at work in Ireland in the era of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy into them, as she observes her characters’ habitus and describes the codified practices, habits, and behaviour proper to the social groups to which they belong. In this regard, the clear-cut sets of opposing personalities which often feature in her stories – such as the three sisters in One by One; Claire, Anna, and Nuala in Nothing is Black; Julia, William, and Roderic in Authenticity; Molly, Andrew, and the narrator in Molly Fox’s

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Birthday; and Monica and Colette in Time Present and Time Past – imply different degrees of acceptance of the transition from an old, traditional, rural society to the new, urban, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, brought about not just by the economic boom, but also by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Thus, Claire has chosen to settle down in a remote Donegal village, as opposed to her Dublin-based cousin, Nuala, whose favourite activity is to shop in the city. Julia regularly returns to visit her father’s home in Wicklow, whereas Andrew Forde in Molly Fox’s Birthday has turned his back on his native North and his Protestant Loyalist family, choosing to emigrate to England, like Cate in One by One. Likewise, the Buckley family, who are the central subjects of Time Present and Time Past, have severed their connections with their Northern roots. Through them, Madden draws the portrait of an almost archetypal post-Celtic Tiger Irish family, who were born into a lower-class background but benefited from the sudden affluence that emerged at the end of the twentieth century, as evidenced by their large, comfortable house in Howth. Likewise, Fintan’s greedy appetite seems to epitomise the spirit of consumerism which overcame Irish society in those years, which in turn is criticised and even rejected by the Buckleys’ younger son, Niall. What is more, this new social order jeopardises the family, once a traditional pillar of Irish society, but which is now subject to disintegration, as Madden suggests through the portrayal of the chaos prevailing in the flat occupied by Conor, a divorced father, described from Fintan’s disapproving and appalled point of view: This is domestic chaos on an industrial scale. … The apartment is so coolly minimalist in its design, and yet so unrepentantly squalid, that Fintan cannot help but admire the other man for his sheer chutzpah in having comprehensively trashed the place, as a revolt against being forced to live there. (Madden, 2014: 137)

The final episode of the novel describes the return of Fintan and his sister to the North after long years of absence. The family’s distance from its Northern roots mirrors the Republic’s lack of interest in the political Troubles on the other side of the border all through the 1970s and 1980s, while their journey back is in step with the involvement of the Irish government in the Peace Process. They discover that the house where they spent their childhood holidays

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was pulled down and rebuilt, an obvious sign of change, and also a reminder of the cyclical pattern of destruction and reconstruction which governs history and human life, as suggested by the epigraph of the novel, borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past’ (Eliot [1935] 1998: 4). Thus the elegiac mood of the novel not only captures the death of a certain traditional Irish lifestyle, but also hints at the future collapse of the world the Buckleys are living in, as pointed at by the epilogue to the story, which summarises the 2008 collapse of the Irish economy in a matter of a few pages. In the meantime, the new Ireland evoked by Madden is a society where people want to forget the hardships of the past and to revel in their new prosperity, as Claire’s mother explains to her in Nothing is Black: ‘They grew up in hardship and now when they can have comfort and luxury, they want it, and who’s to blame them for that? Maybe you don’t like their cabinets full of Waterford Glass and their chandeliers, but they do.’ (Madden, 1994: 29)

Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century is thus full of vulgar and tasteless nouveaux riches who arouse the profound disapproval of Madden’s stern and frugal heroines; Julia in Authenticity is able to imagine what these people’s lives are like just by looking at a woman in a supermarket: A dream palace, absurdly ornate, all turrets and domes: that was what she was building. Julia saw her painstakingly painting her nails. … All of these actions, no matter how small or banal, contributed to maintaining the strange, elaborate artifice that would someday vanish, as though it had never been. (Madden 2002: 64; my emphasis)

Indeed, in keeping with Julia’s views, artifice is a key word around which Madden’s implicit critique of affluence is articulated, as hers is not just a protest against inequalities and social injustice – her characters’ relative poverty and frugality generally result from deliberate choice – but an ethical outcry against the falsity and self-delusions induced by the pursuit of material comfort and the compulsion to acquire unnecessary goods. At best, acquisitiveness is regarded as a sign of conventionality – as is the case with Liz,

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William’s wife, described from his point of view: ‘How suburban she looked, how conventional, with her twin-set and her quilted bag’ (Madden, 2002: 111). Liz’s most cherished dream is to furnish a spare room to her taste: ‘For the past year the spare bedroom had been her pet project. She’d spent an inordinate amount of time and money on it, and only two months ago had she completed it to her satisfaction’ (Madden, 2002: 114). She displays a preoccupation with domesticity and shares it with Marta, Roderic’s Italian wife, suggesting that most women are still alienated by the stereotype of the stay-at-home mother, despite the evolution of society. But, according to the fictional artists staged by Madden, the pursuit of wealth is above all a threat to the life of the mind and of the imagination, as Roderic explains to Julia about William. Because his money can buy their works, William has the power to control and corrupt them, by changing artistic creations into marketable goods. In Molly Fox’s Birthday, Andrew Forde also uses his money to forge a new identity for himself, dressing in elegant clothes, furnishing his apartment with fine art, in order to mask his true self, thereby losing what Madden’s characters deem the most valuable virtue of all: authenticity. This is a quality which attracts Roderic to Julia in Authenticity, despite – or because of – the frugality and disorder of her lifestyle: ‘he remarked in her the hyper-real quality that he had noticed before but that struck him now with greater force than ever. She was completely there, solidly, physically present in a way that was oddly reassuring’ (Madden, 2002: 194, my emphasis). Consumerism and the pursuit of material wealth breed delusions about who people really are, bringing about a diminishment in the meaning of their lives, as is the case with William, whose momentary physical collapse in Stephen’s Green is reminiscent of that of Antoine Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist novel, La Nausée (Sartre [1938], 1972: 36). Not only does Madden convey a moral and ethical indictment of contemporary capitalist liberalism through her characters, but she also exposes how the drive to purchase and to possess objects can turn for some of them into a pathological obsession, due to the corrupting influence of a materialist society. Such is the case for Nuala in Nothing in Black, whose deeply troubled psyche is evidenced by her compulsion to buy, then steal, useless, absurd objects, such as a teaspoon lifted from a teashop.

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But objects in Madden’s fiction do not just serve to critique the acquisitiveness of contemporary Ireland. They are also the very material her fictional artists work with and from which they derive their inspiration: investigating the role of objects in their lives is, therefore, also a way for the novelist to investigate the mystery of artistic creativity, as is made obvious by the title Julia Fitzgerald, the female artist in Authenticity, chooses for one of her exhibitions: ‘Found Objects for a new Millennium’ (Madden 2002: 21). What is more, the artists’ relationship with objects is shown to depend upon their capacity to see things differently to ordinary people, as suggested by Claire’s remark in Nothing is Black about the particular bleakness of the Donegal landscape: ‘To appreciate this area properly required a certain way of seeing things’ (Madden, 1994: 3; my emphasis). As a visual artist, Claire values objects which can offer her the aesthetic emotions she needs, thanks for example to their range of colours or their texture: ‘Such greyness! The stone pier, the sky, the sea itself; only the cabins and hulls of the trawlers were bright, and the blue plastic fishboxes’ (Madden, 1994: 2). Through this insight into a painter’s consciousness, Madden explores the creative process that leads artists to transform ordinary objects such as plastic fishboxes into a work of art, as is the case with still life paintings, like the one her father showed to Julia in Authenticity when she was a child: ‘She thought of the concentration it must have required, of how he would have stared at the things to get to their essence, but how he then managed to translate that to the canvas in paint was beyond her understanding’ (Madden, 2002: 29). Julia’s artistic vocation is accordingly accounted for by her capacity from earliest childhood to observe things with an outstanding acuity, as when her father had her play with an old calendar: ‘She used to stare and stare at it, and imagine that if she looked at the picture long enough and hard enough, she would be able to break its spell. Then she would be able to see into that lost world, and the diminutive skaters would begin to move across the ice’ (Madden 2002: 27; my emphasis). Julia’s early artistic vocation is thus justified by her ability to comprehend the creative process which carried the painter from the observation of everyday reality to its reproduction on the canvas. However, Julia as a child also discovers that painters might not just copy from reality but create things from their imagination, as her father explains to her: ‘Maybe he just imagined one from all

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the pies he had seen and eaten in his life. He might have painted it from a sort of picture he had in his head, rather than from a real thing’ (Madden, 2002: 30). Indeed, the authenticity alluded to in the title of the novel may not just relate to the moral and psychological integrity that characters such as Julia and Roderic try to maintain in a consumerist society; it also poses questions about the status of the work of art and the degree of reality and truth it can convey. The remark of Julia’s father may be paralleled with the distinction made by Paul Ricœur between the ‘reproductive’ imagination, which the philosopher links with historical narratives insofar as they try to reproduce the past, and the ‘productive’ imagination, on which fiction relies. The referentiality of fiction is uncertain but nonetheless it is, for him, ‘undividedly revealing and transforming’ (Ricœur, 1988: 158). Ricœur also defines the productive imagination as ‘the power of redescribing reality’. In keeping with this notion, Madden expresses her faith in the capacity of art and fiction to get at the truth of things and people, through the invented artists with whom she peoples her novels. In Molly Fox’s Birthday, the actress describes her first experience of theatre-going as a revealing one: ‘All of my life, and the past year in particular, was like a dream, and what I was watching on the stage, that was reality, that was the truth’ (Madden, 2008: 72). Additionally, her friend the narrator describes Molly’s talent as the capacity to reach truth through her art: ‘There was always something unmediated and supremely natural about her acting, it was the thing itself. Becoming, not pretending’ (Madden, 2008: 72). If we consider that Madden uses painters and actors as figures for the artist in general, including herself as a writer, we can read that remark as a statement of faith in the power of language not only to mediate or mimic reality, but to depict it as it is, as Ricœur would also have it, in his defence of narrative against the Platonic indictment of falsity: ‘Far from weakened images of reality – shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikôn in painting or writing (Phaedrus 274e–77e) – literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings’ (Ricœur, 1984: 80). The artist’s gift therefore lies in their ability to arrive at a higher level of truth or reality, hence their refusal of any compromise with the world of false appearances. Roderic loathes the ‘“business side of things” – galleries, dealers, exhibitions’ (Madden: 2002: 180).

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However, that refusal to commit oneself to the materialistic world can sometimes verge on meaningless self-denial, as in the case of Claire in Nothing is Black, perhaps the most poignant of all Madden’s Künstlerromane in its questioning of the limits of artistic integrity, as formulated by Marcus, Claire’s friend: ‘You can be too pure, too high-minded, you know. Sometimes you have to compromise’ (Madden, 1994: 63). There is indeed a mystical aspect to Claire’s ascetic, almost nunlike, renunciation of the world, the reward for which, in terms of personal or artistic achievement and fulfilment, is never certain: the novel ends with unanswered questions, expressing self-doubt only half mitigated by prayerful faith in human love: ‘What was worth knowing in life? The limits, the severe limits of one’s understanding and abilities, the power of love and forgiveness; and that life was nothing if not mysterious’ (Madden, 1994: 151). Madden’s view of the artist in touch with transcendent truth or reality is in keeping with the religious interrogation to which she often submits her characters; her critique of materialism is therefore not only underpinned by political undertones but also involves an attention to spirituality. But art is also revelatory of interior truths, and of yet another kind of object: the object of desire. Julia Kristeva sees certain kinds of writing as an expression of the ‘semiotic’ as opposed to the ‘symbolic’ function of language. She links the semiotic element of language to the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, sounds, and movements for every human being, whereas the symbolic element is associated with the grammar and structure of signification and the Law-of-the-Father. All speaking subjects are thus defined by the loss of this primary pre-linguistic relationship with the mother’s body, experience lack, and are doomed to search for the ever-receding object of their desire. Kristeva identifies the manifestations of the semiotic function with particular poetic modes, in which syntax, grammar, and logical connections are disrupted. She also advocates the need to submit such texts to ‘semanalysis’, the aim of which is to distinguish between the ‘genotext’ – the unformulated part of the text which is not reducible to the language system – and the ‘phenotext’ – the perceivable signifying system (Kristeva, 1984: 22–5). The relation between art as a signifying system and its semiotic function seems especially relevant to the kind of works Madden’s fictional female artists are supposed to create, insofar as each of

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them, in her own way, entertains a troubled relationship either with her mother or with motherhood. In this regard, Nothing is Black reads as much as a feminist novel as a condition-of-the-artist novel, in the sense that it presents three different attitudes to motherhood: Claire refuses to assume the role assigned to her by social stereotypes; Nuala willingly conforms to them but suffers a major breakdown following her mother’s death; and Anna is estranged from her daughter who has rejected her, blaming her for her parents’ divorce. It is quite evident that Nuala’s neurotic kleptomania can be interpreted as a symptom of the void or ‘lack’ induced by the death of her mother with whom she enjoyed an unusually intimate relationship; in this regard, the compulsion to buy or to steal objects is an unconscious attempt to recover the original object of her desire. Anna’s flight into an imaginary, picturesque Irish home is also a response to the severing of ties with her daughter which caused her to experience the pain of lack. This is borne out in her jealousy of Nuala’s symbiotic relationship with her mother: ‘Anna was shocked at the sudden, violent antipathy she felt for the young woman, founded as it was on nothing other than pure envy for the love there had been between Nuala and her mother’ (Madden, 1994: 75). Madden’s choice of visual artists as characters, or of an actress working with her body as much as with language, to a certain extent discloses the primacy she affords to the pre-linguistic, semiotic function over the symbolic. Claire’s relation to art and painting may be interpreted as the expression of the semiotic function insofar as her taste for raw, natural materials and for colour can be associated with the infant’s experience of the pure materiality of things. She prefers painting to words, as she reflects thinking of her male friend Marcus: ‘He used to lament being a sculptor, and insist that the visual arts were inferior to literature. … That was what she disliked about words, she thought they lacked subtlety’ (Madden, 1994: 60). Julia in Authenticity produces installations instead of paintings on canvas, and avoids the traditional, structured, elaborate, figurative language of forms. Moreover, her installations, made from bits and pieces of recuperated material, all revolve around memory and lost images, traits that baffle William, the down-to-earth, moneyed representative of the patriarchal order, who strives to assign a precise significance to them:

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The final box contained a series of documents: faded newsprint, torn letters, faint and blurred snapshots. This William found the most frustrating, even more so than the box with the fur and the wool, because his inclination was to attempt to read the fragments of text it contained but the constantly fluttering ribbons prevented him from doing so. There was about all of them, he thought, a mysterious, elegiac atmosphere, each presenting a small, sealed, rather beautiful but utterly inaccessible world. (Madden 2002: 98)

One is struck by the number of elements in this description of Julia’s installation which can be related to the workings of the unconscious, such as opacity, inaccessibility, and closedness. Her non-representational art may seem unintelligible to the rational, conscious mind. What is more, one of the rooms in Julia’s exhibition seems a transparent reference to the mother’s womb, to such an extent that William finds himself troubled: The inside of the second tunnel was darker, although like the first it was illuminated by tiny lights. There were no feathers: this tunnel was lined with dark red velvet, the same material from which the object on the wall was made. Again, he had to gingerly press his way through, again the tunnel closed behind him. The velvet brushed against his face, his whole body, and he could hear the laughter, the voices of the children. Suddenly he wished that he hadn’t brought them here, that he had come alone. He was swept with a feeling of confusion, and just at that moment he fell into the brightness of the room again. (Madden, 2002: 100)

The work of art is thus described as a bodily experience meant to return the spectator to a primary state of being, easily identified with the pre-linguistic, semiotic function referred to by Kristeva. Additionally, Julia’s vocation as an artist is associated with the death of her mother when she was only six, and her inability to remember her, except through scraps and scattered sensations, that are like residues of unconscious memories similar to the fragments of materials she uses for her installations. Even Molly Fox in Molly Fox’s Birthday has a troubled history involving an uncaring mother who abandoned her, which may account for her attempts at reconstructing an identity for herself through acting and bodily language. On this basis, it is tempting to conclude that Madden views art, especially when it is based on sensations and physical experience, as

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in the visual arts or acting, as a way of reviving the most intimate and inaccessible memory of all, that of infants before they became split subjects, structured and sustained by culture and language, forever pursuing the proper object of their desire. If objects therefore occupy such a central place in Deirdre Madden’s writing, it is because she applies the traditional code of mimesis, as when she uses them as a means of delineating her characters’ personalities and minutely describes their homes and interiors. But she also establishes a link between the consumption of superfluous objects to the psychological unease which assails some of her characters, either due to a personal history of loss, or because they have fallen prey to the deceptive attractions of contemporary consumerist society, which the artist characters generally turn away from in order to lead a life of frugality verging on deprivation. Moreover, through those artistic characters, Madden suggests how the capacity to observe everyday life and ordinary objects stimulates and triggers the creative process, as is evidently the case for herself as a writer, who has been an attentive observer of the minute evolutions of the world around her, as evidenced by her latest novel, Time Present and Time Past. Furthermore, the kind of art practised by her female artists, far from aiming at referential representation, expresses an aspiration to find a suitable, often non-verbal language to articulate their sense of lack and to evince the pursuit of the object of their desire. As a result, we may say that the ‘authenticity’ claimed by the writer for her characters is above all the search for what is most authentic in human beings – the reality of their desire, which only the semiotic function of language can give access to. This desire troubles, subverts, and contradicts the faith Madden displays, through her use of formal realism, in the power of referential language to mimic reality, constituting the work’s ‘genotext’, which we readers are invited to explore.

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Ageing and identity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity Heather Ingman

The fact that gerontology has been gaining in importance since the 1970s is scarcely surprising. Most people, at least in the West, are living longer, giving us all a stake in understanding the specific problems of ageing. Moreover, we live in a highly age-conscious world where, from the moment we enter primary school, we are conditioned to be evaluated, and to evaluate others, according to age. In Ireland, the National Council for the Elderly and the National Council on Ageing and Older People have been active in the past decades in creating greater understanding of the complexity of the ageing process and promoting positive ageing.1 In 2009, The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), based at Trinity College Dublin, produced the first of a series of reports on ageing in Ireland, looking at all aspects of the health, economic, and social circumstances of older Irish people. A concern in studies on ageing has been to correct the usual discourse on later life, which focuses on the disadvantages of ageing, in favour of an emphasis on each stage of life as associated with elements of growth and loss so that later years are envisaged as providing opportunities for development in perhaps new and unexpected ways (Cole, 1992). The process of ageing is often difficult to grasp, however, until we begin to experience it ourselves, and therefore the study of ageing in fiction is judged, even by specialists in the area, to be a useful balance against abstractions about the subject. Ageing is not only an experience shared with others, it is also one that varies with each individual and is influenced by factors such as biology, culture, gender, and social class. By concentrating on individual cases and presenting ageing as a complex interaction between body, self, and society, fiction reveals the extent to which

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our attitudes to it are shaped by culture. General studies of ageing in fiction have appeared since the late 1980s.2 However, with the exception of analyses of Samuel Beckett and W. B. Yeats, little critical attention had been paid to the topic in Irish writing until the appearance of the 2018 issue of Nordic Irish Studies, edited by Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh, looking at the portrayal of the ageing woman in Irish film, drama, and literature.3 Throughout her work, in novels such as Hidden Symptoms, Remembering Light and Stone, and One by One in the Darkness, Deirdre Madden has been preoccupied with ethical problems of identity and authenticity. Authenticity may have many different meanings in psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Central to Madden’s fiction is the existential definition of the authentic life as pursued according to one’s own inner morality, personality, and beliefs, as opposed to following society’s expectations, a mode that is characterised as bad faith, that is, disowning one’s freedom to choose.4 Madden’s characters may or may not possess religious belief, but their mental world remains shaped by religion, and often it is to art or nature that they turn in their search for a depth of meaning lost to them through inhabiting what has become in Ireland a predominately secular society. In Hidden Symptoms, in contrast to Robert’s dilettantish approach, Theresa looks on art as a calling akin in seriousness and commitment to the religious life and having as goals truth and authenticity. Contemplating the paintings and frescoes she encounters in Italy plays a central part in Aisling’s healing process in Remembering Light and Stone. In the same novel, Ted explains to Aisling his unexpected preference for Medieval and Renaissance art by saying that it represents a wholeness that contemporary society has lost. Madden has always been interested in exploring the life of the artist and the difficulty of remaining true to one’s vocation. These themes are central to her novel Authenticity, where she examines the artistic vocation from a variety of perspectives. Roderic has achieved a certain amount of success as a painter and has remained committed to his calling. Julia has a similar commitment but is only at the start of her career as an artist. Roderic’s older brother, Dennis, who abandoned his ambition to become a pianist because of stage fright, has come to terms with his change of career and is living the kind of life that is right for him. Ray, a marginal character,

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has the commitment but lacks the vision necessary to be a great artist. Finally, there is William, whose dreams of being an artist return in middle age to haunt him. All of these characters are living lives of varying authenticity. None of them would be classed as old in today’s terms. William and Roderic are both in their late forties, and even Julia’s father, Dan, is described as no more than middle-aged. However, all are having to come to terms with the ageing process in a way that poses problems of authenticity and identity. In discussing Authenticity from the perspective of recent work on ageing, this chapter will focus particularly on three characters – Dan, William, and Roderic – who in different ways illustrate the complexity of the ageing process. This approach is not intended to suggest that Authenticity is character-driven but rather that Madden here, as in her other novels, employs the inner consciousness of her characters to explore thematic concerns. Ageing has often been seen as a time of getting back to essentials, a journey towards a more authentic self. The eight stages of ageing drawn up in Erik Erikson’s The Life Cycle Completed have been hugely influential in this respect. In his theory, the first seven stages move from infancy to middle adulthood, while the eighth stage, which he labelled maturity, spans the years from sixty-five until death. This stage Erikson sees as a time either of ego integrity or of despair, of reflection on one’s life leading to, if all goes well, self-acceptance and a sense of fulfilment. In 1998, as a result of her observations of her husband in his nineties, Joan Erikson added a ninth stage covering advanced old age when loss of capacities may command all one’s attention. Expanding on Erikson’s stages, Lars Tornstam employs the term gerotranscendence to suggest the serenity, desire for solitude and meditation, and increased attentiveness to the world around us that may come with age (Tornstam, 2005; see also Erikson, 1998). Henri Nouwen and William Gaffney point out that ‘Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is slowly revealed to us’ (Nouwen and Gaffney, 1976: 14). Barbara Frey Waxman coins the term Reifungsroman (the novel of ripening) to describe fiction that reflects this concept of ageing as a time of growth, a journey towards a more realised self (Waxman, 1990).5 Less concerned with others’ approval, no longer

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burdened by society’s expectations around gender or professional roles and relinquishing power and competition, people during the ageing process, Waxman argues, may focus on different priorities – friendships, community, nature, and creativity – in order to reclaim buried aspects of the self. Time may even operate differently, with less emphasis on the constraints of clock time, more on an intensification of the moment. An awareness of the transience of life may deepen our appreciation of it. This is the case for Elizabeth Reegan in John McGahern’s The Barracks (1963) who, as death approaches, experiences a more profound awareness of the beauty of nature and the mystery of life. Life may even become richer, as memoirs of old age by writers such as May Sarton and Florida Scott-Maxwell bear out, suggesting that ageing takes place as much in the psyche as in the body (Sarton, 1984; Scott-Maxwell, 1979). In Authenticity, Dan, with his freedom from social convention, his serenity, and his solid sense of self, is the character who comes closest to this gerotranscendent ideal. He strikes Roderic as someone who is ‘simply and utterly and completely himself’, the only person capable of making Roderic, for all his bohemian artistic lifestyle, feel utterly conventional (Madden, 2002: 340). For Julia, Dan’s letters with ‘their pure-hearted simplicity’ are like blows ‘from the stick of a Zen master, waking her back into reality’ (Madden, 2002: 217). As she matures, she comes to understand that ‘at the centre of him was something quite free of time and society’ (Madden, 2002: 222). Significantly, the epilogue concludes with Dan’s words of recognition concerning the transience of human life: ‘“Oh there’ll be apples, Julia”, Dan said, “when we’re all of us gone”’ (Madden, 2002: 385). The fact that Authenticity ends on these words suggests their central importance to the novel’s thematic. Dan’s acceptance of death as a natural part of the human cycle goes against the Western emphasis on the autonomy of the individual and the importance of personal identity. For this reason, the process of Dan facing up to death as an inherent part of life is presented as fraught, since in the society in which he lives the reality of mortality has to be kept at bay. When Roderic’s father dies, his mother forbids any open display of grief. Similarly, when his wife dies, Dan tries to suppress his feelings through alcohol. As gerontologists have pointed out, contemporary Western society lacks any helpful philosophy around death (Moody, 1986: 3–40). Hence

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Dan’s acceptance of the transience of life is hard-earned knowledge, honed in solitude and lifelong mourning for his wife. Dan’s embrace of his own mortality is part of what makes him such an attractive character, enhancing rather than diminishing his humanity. It links him, undereducated though he may be, with writers like Henry Thoreau who have expressed a deep sense of being part of the organic cycles of the world and who argue that a person grows in integrity and authenticity in solitude (Thoreau, 1854). Awareness of the transience of human life is an insight shared by many of the characters in John McGahern’s final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), and indeed Dan would not be out of place in that rural community whose inhabitants know better than most how to handle ageing and death. Like them, Dan prizes the small communal rituals (the celebration of birthdays, Christmas, and Easter) that give shape to life and act as a stay against inevitable sorrows: ‘“Life will give you plenty of kicks in the teeth and there’ll be nothing you can do about it”, he insists, “so why turn your back on the good times?”’ (Madden, 2002: 221–2). Dan is one of those who with age develop a stronger capacity to handle negative emotions. His present serenity chimes with gerontologists’ observations that, despite experiences of ill-health and bereavement, older people often display surprisingly high levels of well-being because they have developed better emotional defences (see Bond et al., 2007: 55). Dan may be compared with the portrait of the cheerful and resilient Granny Kate in One by One in the Darkness, or the feisty and assertive Joan in Time Present and Time Past. Her days of childrearing over, Joan considers being a widow in her seventies the best time of her life. She takes pride in her appearance, exercises choice over where to live, and enjoys her own company. With such portraits, Madden’s fiction resists the predominant Western cultural narrative of inevitable decline while also making clear that ageing is not a homogeneous process: Joan’s gentle sister, Beth, for example, is portrayed as an instance of frail, though accepting, old age. Raymond Tallis has argued that ageing provides the opportunity for creating the story one wants for one’s life as compared with ‘the traditional, largely unchosen narratives of ambition, development, and personal advancement; and the biological imperatives of survival, reproduction and child-rearing’ (Hepworth, 2000: 125–6).

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In his forties, William has become conscious that the life he drifted into to please his father and those around him is inauthentic; it is not the narrative he would have chosen for his life. What he really wanted to do, and perhaps should have done, was paint. William has all the traits of ageing badly: he is trembling and hesitant in the park with Julia; he is prey to feelings of despair, loss of self-worth, anxiety, and depression. Indeed, his depression verges on the clinical. He feels numb, weary, separated from others by a sheet of plate glass and moves around in a ‘depressed fog’ (Madden, 2002: 112). When we first meet him, he has just resisted the desire to kill himself. In the past, he has tried to alleviate his inauthentic life by casual sex, with Hannah and other unnamed women. Now he latches on to Julia for help. William is consumed by an anger and bitterness that the much younger Julia only dimly comprehends. Roderic, who has a better understanding of William’s state of mind, warns her that he will draw off energy from her, as in the past, when he himself almost destroyed his brother Dennis by leaning on him in crises. Even as he cautions her against getting sucked into William’s problems, Roderic understands the grief of the middle-aged William for his unlived life and his failure to pursue his gift. Erikson points out that the ageing process can reveal hidden traumas and, while this may lead to wisdom and ego-integrity (or self-possession), it may also result in bitterness and despair if a review of one’s past life leads to the feeling that possibilities have been wasted. This is the case with William. He tells Julia: ‘“It’s been a strange time. Thinking about my life. Realising that I haven’t become the person I was supposed to become. Realising that it won’t ever happen now, and trying to come to terms with it”’ (Madden, 2002: 360). William’s despair is partly socially induced. He was raised to exercise self-control and willpower, qualities that have enabled him to succeed as a lawyer in a competitive, consumerist society. However, in the course of this he has developed a false self. The theory of the false self, advanced by D. W. Winnicott and elaborated on by subsequent psychoanalysts, describes a situation where the expectations of others, particularly those of parents, can become of such overriding importance that they overlie or contradict the deeper self (Winnicott, 1965: 140–52). The false self evolves to protect and conceal the true self. In such cases, the danger is that a

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fabricated set of relationships is built up and a façade maintained that conceals an inner emptiness. This inauthentic self blocks creativity and is utterly lacking in spontaneity, qualities that characterise William’s public persona. At their first meeting in Stephen’s Green, his appearance strikes Julia as almost painfully correct, and indeed he only succeeds in living this inauthentic life by tight selfcontrol. He later admits to Julia that his father was overbearing and nagged his two sons to get on in life and achieve. This kind of parental bullying can be symptomatic of a capitalist society where paid employment becomes a central source of identity, status, and power. It is especially so for families like that of William, which, in his parents’ generation, perpetuated the division between men as wage earners and women as homemakers. Anthony Clare explains how such tacit presuppositions operate: ‘I learned very early on that what a man does, his work, is as important as, even more important than, who he is; that a man is defined in modern capitalistic society in terms not of being but doing’ (Clare, 2000: 1). On first meeting William, Julia thinks, ‘A man like this didn’t do a job, he was his job’ (Madden, 2002: 5). The kind of milieu in which William lives equates masculinity with sexual and physical assertiveness, with competitiveness, aggression, self-reliance, and emotional control. In turn, this repression of emotions is what renders masculinity such a fragile construct, as Lynne Segal has pointed out: ‘Since all the linguistic codes, cultural imagery and social relations for representing the ideals of “manliness”, or what is termed “normative masculinity”, symbolise power, rationality, assertiveness, invulnerability, it is hardly surprising that men, individually, should exist in perpetual fear of being unmanned’ (Segal, 2007: xxiv). In a patriarchal society, men may become trapped in the role of breadwinner, and the novel is very clear on the damage done, for example to Frank, the father of Roderic and Dennis, a man temperamentally unsuited to family life, whose only outlets are listening to opera and solitary hill-walking. Frank’s example is a lesson to Dennis, who recognises in himself a similar temperament and as a result avoids marriage and family life. At the beginning of the novel, William is in tears; by the end he has refused, rather brutally, to empathise with Julia’s grief over her dead mother and buttoned himself once again into his lawyer persona. This false self lasts only a few weeks before it eventually destroys

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him. In terms of Winnicott’s theory, this is inevitable, as this fabricated identity is unable to organise conditions that would allow the person properly to flourish: Suicide in this context is the destruction of the total self in avoidance of annihilation of the True Self. When suicide is the only defence left against betrayal of the True Self, then it becomes the lot of the False Self to organize the suicide. This, of course, involves its own destruction, but at the same time eliminates the need for its continued existence, since its function is the protection of the True Self from insult. (Winnicott, 1965: 142)

William has been shaped by a masculinist culture and is unable to break out of it. To that extent, Roderic is right when he observes that, despite possessing genuine talent, painting is a parallel fantasy life for William and that in the last resort he will do nothing to endanger his money and position in society. The final image we have of William is through Julia’s eyes. He is on his way to work in a grey suit, carrying a briefcase; the expression on his face strikes her as ‘tense and forlorn’ (Madden, 2002: 368). Clinging to culturally stereotyped views of the lifestyle he should be leading has prevented William from growing and changing. In this sense, he illustrates Freud’s belief that adult development is fixed in middle age with no possibility of further change.6 Roderic’s sister, Maeve, is another example of someone who has hardened in middle age and remains consumed by bitterness at what life has offered her. Freud’s negative view of ageing was countered by Carl Jung, who believed more attention should be paid to the second half of life and to the development of an inner life. For Jung, ageing should be a source of discovery and growth, a time when one gains a new sense of freedom from society’s constraints and becomes less conformist: ‘The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different’ (Jung, 1966: 61). William’s tragedy is that, trapped by his family and by his social position, he is unable to grow and develop such inner resources. The novel presents William as partly responsible for his own despair. The Freudian model of the Oedipal struggle between the generations has been challenged by feminist work on ageing which instead speaks of generational continuity as a means of affirming identity (King, 2013: 99). Such continuity is available to William

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in the form of his young son Gregory, who is showing an interest in painting. William’s self-involvement means that he misses the opportunity to foster a potentially nourishing relationship with his son based on their mutual passion for art. He does have pockets of hope: he has always appreciated his solitary early mornings observing the light breaking in his garden; moreover, his collapse leads to time off work which allows him to return to art. He sets up a studio in his house and spends months painting. As Julia tells him, there is no secret to success, ‘“You just get on with it. You just do the work”’ (Madden, 2002: 261). However, William fears he has left things too late and does not seem to take in her observation that perhaps he does have enough time left to develop his art: ‘“art has its own laws concerning time. It’s not like other things. The years you have left may well be all you ever needed”’ (Madden, 2002: 294). Jung’s account of ageing is germane here. His seven tasks of ageing include reviewing one’s life, letting go of the ego (something William signally fails to do, remaining preoccupied with money and social status), and honouring the self, another failure for William, who stays consumed by self-hatred. The seventh task of ageing, according to Jung, is to engage unused potential to foster late-life creativity. There have been many studies of the late-life creativity of writers and artists such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Matisse, and Goethe (Said, 2006; Woodward, 1980). In an Irish context, W. B. Yeats is the obvious example of a poet who continued to explore his creative powers into old age and gained a new sense of freedom as the years advanced (Gullette, 1993: 19–48). The possibility of a late-flowering artistic career is there for William, but his self-absorption and depression are so deep-rooted that he is unable to attend to Julia’s words. William possesses talent. There is some suggestion that his pictures in middle age, though they may lack the vigour of those of his youth, are technically more accomplished and not without passion. Even Roderic admires his technique as a painter. But William is unable to shake off the values instilled in him by his upbringing, his education, and society and pursue a different way of living. Having once glamourised Julia as an independent artist living an intriguingly bohemian life, he comes to see her as a shabby young woman with no proper job and no money. His inability to discard his professional values prevents him from developing. As Roderic

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observes, William has not fully counted the cost of commitment to art. In this respect, he contrasts with Dennis, who is deeply aware of the challenges and discomfort of living as his brother does. William lacks confidence in his abilities, but is also too easily discouraged by comparisons with other artists, such as Roderic. That he is unable to prevent himself from drawing such comparisons illustrates how difficult it is for him to step away from the values of the competitive, goal-orientated society around him. Julia advises him just to get on with his painting, but, lacking the solid sense of self-worth possessed by someone like Dan, in the end William abandons the struggle too easily. The portrayal of William fits in with the recurring anti-consumerist themes in Deirdre Madden’s work. In Remembering Light and Stone, Aisling’s status as a foreigner and outsider leads her to observe and marvel at the materialism of Italian society. Nothing is Black, a precursor to Authenticity in terms of examining the costs and rewards of commitment to an artistic vocation, explores the tension between the pressures of materialism in contemporary Ireland and the integrity necessary for the artistic life. The uncertain rewards of living out an artistic vocation are portrayed in the asceticism of Claire’s life as a painter in Donegal, while her more materialistic cousin, Nuala, finds consumerism an empty compensation for the loss of her mother. Roderic has also experienced what it is like to be trapped in an inauthentic life. He married Marta partly out of gratitude that life with her afforded him the opportunity to stay in Italy and develop his painting. Marta gives him everything he could ostensibly desire – three daughters, a place to live, a studio, access to Italian galleries – yet he gradually comes to acknowledge, what Dennis recognised immediately, that Marta and he are terribly mismatched in terms of what they want from life. Like William, but not Julia, Roderic knows what it is to choose comfort and an inauthentic life. However, as Julia points out, it was easier for him to escape his inauthentic life than it is for William. Roderic had no interest in money or status; his father, unlike William’s father, put no particular pressure on him to choose a prestigious career, and he had Dennis’s unfailing help and understanding. Moreover, early on in his time in Italy, Roderic recognised his need for periods of solitude. During his fraught and unsatisfactory marriage, snatched days in the Albergo

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Perfetto became ‘sacred spaces’ for him during which he could connect, Thoreau-like, with the deepest springs of his being (Madden, 2002: 269). Unlike William, he has already taken time to practise a more authentic life. Yet ageing has also caught up with Roderic. His years of drinking and his failed marriage have combined to wreck his confidence. Conscious of so many failures in his life, he is susceptible to anxiety and depression. He particularly lacks sexual confidence, something he was never short of in his younger days. ‘Made hesitant by selfdoubt’, he has lost his nerve with women generally (Madden, 2002: 237–8). The fact that Julia is twenty years younger than himself preys on his mind: ‘it would be embarrassing for her to be seen with him’ (Madden, 2002: 190). Roderic lives in a society where the emphasis on youth and beauty that previously worked in his favour now renders him hesitant, underlining how unhelpful these values are for the ageing process. In the end, it is Julia who has to make the first move. Unlike Dan, Roderic has yet to negotiate that part of the ageing process that consists of integrating the past into the present, as he discovers during a trip to Paris. He remains haunted by dreams and waking nightmares of past failures, with Marta, with Jeannie, and with his daughters. Lynne Segal observes, ‘The older we are the more we encounter the world through complex layerings of identity, attempting to negotiate the shifting present while grappling with the disconcerting images of the old thrust so intrusively upon us’ (Segal, 2013: 4). Despite coping with past traumas, age brings Roderic renewed appreciation of the significant moments of his life, like his memory of standing in the chapel with Marta before they sleep together for the first time, or his feelings of joy after making love with Julia. His recognition of such interludes as happening outside of linear time (‘It was as though they had moved into a condition where the ordinary rules of time did not apply’ (Madden, 2002: 216)) corresponds to gerontologists’ recognition of the intensification of the moment in later life and the lessening significance of linear time (Tornstam, 2005: 50–1). The theme of time has always been important in Madden’s work. In One by One, time stands still for Emily and her daughters after Charlie’s death as they remain consumed by memories and flashbacks of their shared past. In her mourning, Emily rejects

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chronological time, preferring to regard time as circular. As a way of rejecting linear time, she ties her life into the seasons. In Time Present and Time Past, the speed of life during the Celtic Tiger years alarms the middle-aged Fintan, who wishes for time to slow down or even momentarily to stop. Like Roderic, he experiences strange, hallucinatory states when the boundaries between past, present, and future dissolve and he seems to slip through time into the past or into the future. Again, this is a theme Madden shares with John McGahern, whose story, ‘The Wine Breath’, for instance, moves away from time presented as repetitive and entrapping as in his earlier story, ‘Wheels’, to a transcendence of linear time through the sustained effort of the imaginative recreation of his life on the part of the priest, the main protagonist. In McGahern’s work, as in that of Madden, memory permits entry into a dimension outside linear time. McGahern himself declared, echoing Proust, ‘One of my favourite definitions of art is that it abolishes time and establishes memory’ (qtd. by Maher, 2003: 146). Part of the ageing process for Roderic involves coming to terms with his memories in a way that does not gloss over his past failures but that will allow him to integrate them into his present life. This connects with gerontologists’ recognition of ageing as a process of continuous growth, whereby people acknowledge buried aspects of the self and slowly come to see what they are (Nouwen and Gaffney, 1976: 14). Jung argued that looking back on one’s life is a crucial aspect of the ageing process but emphasised that it is a mistake to remain imprisoned by past memories. He advocated the ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ approach, that is, using memory to move forward (Jung, 1961: 51). This is what Roderic struggles to do as he fights against his alcoholism, makes efforts to reconcile with his ex-wife and daughters, and forges a new future with Julia. Comparisons may be drawn with Fintan in Time Present and Time Past. In his late forties, Fintan suffers from deep-seated anxiety and a generalised sense of guilt. This mid-life crisis draws him back into the past, to the world of early photography and to the retrieval of elements of his family history. Lars Tornstam has highlighted the renewed awareness of connection to previous generations as characteristic of the ageing process (Tornstam, 2005: 51). By the end of the novel, however, Fintan comes to realise the value of the present moment. He arranges a meeting with his cousin with the intention of recapturing

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something of his past. They end up speaking mostly about the present: ‘“If you think about it, we spent far more time talking about our lives as they are now”’, he tells his sister, ‘“rather than talking about Granny Buckley and when we were children”’ (Madden, 2013: 221). He finds this therapeutic. As in Jungian theory, Fintan resists being trapped in the past but uses memory to move forward in his life. An examination of ageing in Madden’s fiction reveals the extent to which this experience is shaped by the culture in which her characters live. William, raised to exercise self-control and willpower, qualities that have enabled him to succeed in a consumerist, capitalist society, fares least well when it comes to ageing. The novel also reveals that, though ageing is defined by society, it is nevertheless a heterogeneous process. Julia, we feel, will succeed in ageing well because she has been raised by Dan to look attentively at things and to value interiority. In her childhood, Dan taught her a memory game based on recalling visual images, and it is partly this, she believes, that led to her becoming an artist. Here, the themes of art, ageing, and memory draw together. Slowing down and paying careful attention to the world around us is not only part of the ageing process, it is also an integral part of being an artist, as Julia recognises. This is the reason, she believes, why in the busy modern world people prize still life paintings, for their element of repose. As a woman, Julia might in the future encounter problems particular to ageing in a sexist society, such as increasing invisibility, loss of physical attractiveness, prejudice against older women workers. However, since she is already marginal to the consumer society in which she lives, does not invest her identity in her appearance, and since gender has not, so far, been a barrier to her ability to choose a life for herself, it is hard to envisage that gender issues will play much of a part in Julia’s ageing process. She is in a strong position to resist what has been described as ‘the patriarchally constructed vision of female ageing into decline’ (King, 2013: 183). As is the case with many of Madden’s novels, it is possible to read Authenticity as sounding a warning note about the kind of society in which we wish to live. Her novel chimes in with the arguments of social theorists, like Henri Nouwen, Thomas Cole, and Erik Erikson, on the need to come to terms with the ageing process and to counter the inherent gerontophobia of Western culture.

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These writers argue that, in the past, religion counterbalanced the values of materialism by emphasising life as a spiritual journey and ageing as a progress towards wisdom. In a society like the one presented in Authenticity, loss of faith means that people have to look elsewhere to make the ageing experience meaningful: to art (for Roderic), to music (for Dennis and Frank), and to expanding one’s knowledge (for Dan). When materialist values such as money, status, or power are deeply engrained, as in William’s case, society proves to be extremely unhelpful for the ageing process, providing few resources and impeding the ability to grow and develop other talents. Above all, Authenticity highlights the fact that identity is never static but rather a continual process of renegotiation between society and the individual. The fact that so many of the characters fail in this process – William, Frank, Roderic’s sister Maeve, and his mother Sinéad – is presented by Madden as not simply a result of personality flaws but as an indictment of the world in which they live.

Notes 1 See, for example, Theories of Ageing and Attitudes to Ageing in Ireland (1994); and Healthy Ageing in Ireland: Policy, Practice and Evaluation (2003). For other studies of attitudes towards ageing in Ireland, see Kenny (1995); A Social Portrait of Older People in Ireland (2007); and Kennedy and Quin’s Ageing and Social Policy in Ireland (2008). 2 See, among others, Deats and Tallent Lenker (1999), Wyatt-Brown and Rossen (1993), Brennan (2005), Hepworth (2000), King (2013), Sokoloff (1987), and Waxman (1990). 3 For Beckett, see Woodward (1991: 131–46); for Yeats, see Albright (1972). 4 For a seminal discussion of the notion of ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), see Sartre (1958). 5 She discusses fiction by, among others, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, and Margaret Laurence. See also Waxman (1997). 6 See Woodward (1980: 26–52), for an extended discussion of Freud’s negative view of the ageing process.

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7 Sensing one’s way forward: psychological aspects of creativity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity Hedwig Schwall Authenticity is a vintage Deirdre Madden novel. In an interview, Madden observes that one has to see her work as a whole (Shields, 2002: 15); of Authenticity, she adds that it belongs to her favourite subgenre, the ‘novel of ideas’, that it centrally concerns ‘knowing what your life should be’ (Shields, 2002: 15). Indeed, getting in touch with one’s roots in order to find one’s destiny is vital to all of Madden’s figures, and pivotal to this novel. Many of her protagonists are writers or artists: as they have ‘a privileged consciousness’ (Estévez-Saá, 2011: 52), they are apt characters to stage what Michael Parker calls Madden’s ‘preoccupation with myths of individuation’. They ‘are conscious of themselves as … complex compositions of “inherited traits” … The premature loss of one – or both – parents is not uncommon, and so the stress of dealing with absence features prominently in the characters’ attempts to reimagine their lives’ (Parker, 2000: 84). Given her Northern Irish background, Madden has illustrated time and again in her novels that trauma must be articulated. It must be ‘known and grieved for’ (Madden, 1996: 181): if not, one’s life becomes ruled by fate rather than by destiny or the self. In the individuation process and the search for one’s roots, Madden observes that childhood objects and places can awaken the most intimate dimensions of our imagination. In a lecture on the topic, Madden indicates that a glass bottle of perfume, along with the glass beads of her mother, ‘led me straight back to my own childhood and to the very heart of my own imagination’ (Madden, 2001: 26). Later in the same talk, she refers to François Mauriac who ‘said that there is for each of us a particular place on earth where the earth reveals its mysteries. … this revelation … with which one grows up become(s) a benchmark

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of reality, taking on the force of archetypes. It is not simply a case of first impressions’ (Madden, 2001: 27). Authenticity shows precisely this: Julia and Roderic, the main protagonists, are both traumatised, but they want to push on and find their own way as artists. Madden describes this search in her typical ‘unshowy’ manner, as Cressida Connolly puts it (Connolly, 2008), but this does not mean that she does not ‘deal in a subtle way with the most delicate issues of the human condition’ (EstévezSaá, 2011: 60–1). Parker observes that ‘self-reflexive references’ are part and parcel of Madden’s novels (Parker, 2000: 83) and that the author often chooses, like in the case of Theresa in Hidden Symptoms, ‘subjectivity – and inarticulation … for her subject’ (Parker, 2000: 88). Yet while Estévez-Saá observes that Authenticity is ‘Madden’s most brilliant and comprehensive portrait of the artist in fiction’ (Estévez-Saá, 2011: 55), her article devotes no more than three paragraphs to this Künstlerroman. Britta Olinder gives the novel her full attention, along with the two other artist novels, Remembering Light and Stone and Nothing is Black, but she focuses on the ekphrastic moments, not on their psychological aspects (Olinder, 2009). Jerry White looks at Irishness in Madden’s art novels, drawing on Barthes, and notices how she ‘creates a swirl of emotions and memories’ (White, 1999: 454), but does not further examine the mechanisms at work in those swirls. In this article, I want to map out how three different artists find their way to their unconscious and their destiny via objects which help them to objectify their relationships with figures in their childhood, while another fails to overcome his inarticulacy and cannot develop his self. Authenticity differs from Madden’s previous novels in that the four main characters live in the Republic, in the Celtic Tiger era. Though the budding artist, Julia Fitzgerald, does not profit from its material wealth, she fully benefits from a more relaxed social atmosphere in her surroundings. Leaving out the complicating political themes means that the characters’ search for their selves can happen in the clearest possible ‘laboratory circumstances’: Authenticity offers a neat character configuration of three groups consisting of two people each, forming a spectrum of different degrees of mystic and artistic involvement with the world. The range goes from two totally unartistic but mystical personae (Julia’s parents) to the totally artistic and mystical artist (Roderic) and the budding artist

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and mystic (Julia), and finally the amateur artists, one successful (Dennis), one failing (William). The story is, in brief, as follows: Julia Fitzgerald, daughter of Dan, a car mechanic, witnesses her mother’s death in a car accident when she is six, but this trauma is totally repressed to the extent that she does not even have a mental image of her mother. After the catastrophe, her father goes through a severe bout of drinking, but he picks himself up and raises Julia in a loving way. She wants to become an artist and meets Roderic Kennedy, an established painter, who is traumatised by his divorce from his Italian wife and the separation from his family; this led to a self-destructive alcoholic phase, but thanks to the unswerving support of his brother, Dennis, he gets back on track. His relationship with Julia seems healing for them both. Julia meets William, a depressed lawyer, whom she rescues from suicide. William realises he thwarted his own desire to become an artist and takes leave from his job to start painting; yet after a year, he concludes that he is unable to live up to his gift as he cannot abandon his highly structured life, and he commits suicide. In the final scene, Roderic’s interaction with Julia helps her to reconnect with her mother. In order to map these characters’ development, I will draw on Christopher Bollas’s theory of object relations, specifically his concepts of genera and trauma. Combining Freudian ideas with the insights of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion into object relations, Bollas maintains that children whose parents allow them space to play with objects and to explore object relations will have the confidence to face their own unconscious and find images there that will signpost their destiny, thus permitting them to find a life pattern which absorbs both their conscious and unconscious energies so as to make them feel ‘whole’. In general, Bollas distinguishes between two models: those who fulfil their destiny by actively exploring their own desires and fears; and those who shirk a confrontation with their inner self and live passively, determined by fate – a word derived from the Latin fatum, which literally means, being spoken (Bollas, 2011: 43). Characters who realise their destiny do so by taking into account both their traumas and genera, respectively the scary and scarring elements of the past as well as its positive aspects, both of which have sunk into the person’s unconscious. Traumas may be subdivided into the acute and the insidious. In acute trauma,

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‘the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image of event’ (Caruth, 1995: 4–5); in the case of insidious trauma, we deal with ‘the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening … but that do violence to the soul and spirit’, often by those who are supposed to ‘love and care’ for the person (Brown, 1995: 107). Genera, on the other hand, yield a positive energy: ‘A kind of pleasure, derived in the beginning from the infant’s exploration of the mother’s body (real or imagined)’ (Bollas, 2009: 30). Genera are what Freud called ‘nodal points’, ‘psychic nuclei’, or ‘gathering points’, which may ‘lead to an epiphany’ (Bollas, 2009: 31). Bollas explains this further: ‘Psychic genera receive the impressions of life, sponsor new perspectives on the self’s existence, and at the same time drive to represent them in being, playing or relating’ (Bollas, 2009: 30; my emphasis). The fact that Authenticity opens and closes with the protagonist in bed between dream and waking already indicates that the unand preconscious will play an important role in this novel of ideas. The entire prologue is set in Julia’s early childhood, offering the reader the genera she will further develop throughout her life: When she was a child, she used to wake early … The hall light … illuminating the semicircle of glass above the front door. … only that fragile fan of yellow light …. She believed that she was a bird in a tree … She could feel the branches rise and stir under her as she waited for dawn … and she was also the child who lay under the patched and faded quilt and heard the bird singing, heard and imagined … the child who had fallen asleep the night before to the sound of those same plates and bowls being lifted from the press and set out in preparation for breakfast; the child who drifted off to sleep again, to dream about a set table in an empty room, about a bird in a tree, about a fan of yellow light. (Madden, 2002: 1)

From the start, the reassuring light left on by the parents, further stylised by the semicircle of glass and the sound of crockery being laid out in preparation for breakfast, indicates the positive power of the ‘transitional objects’ the parents offered their child – transitional, because they will help her to manage vital passages in life, as we will see. The reader also notices how Julia is empathic (she

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feels both child and bird and is at once under the quilt and in the tree) and tactile in her imagination, as she can sense the branches lifting the bird and crockery being moved around. While Julia is buoyed up by these childhood objects which smooth the transition from day to night and back, from conscious to unconscious and back, the parents in turn are also characterised as trustful and open to the unknown. This leads us to the first group of figures: Julia’s parents who are both open to mystic experiences. For Julia’s father, this happens through the element of air and the stars, which connect him to people beyond his knowledge: ‘The ancient sky was charged for him with the memory of … countless men and women … he felt close to these men who worshipped strange gods, to these women’ (Madden, 2002: 89).1 Julia’s mother has a similar mystic experience, but her revelation comes from contact with the earth. One day she sits in a particular fold in the mountains. … where the slopes softly interlock … she had fallen into a sort of … half-enchanted state, thinking of the landscape in which she was sitting but not in a willed or forced way, receptive rather. … She was aware of her own breathing, rising and falling, … aware of the great slope of the mountain on which she sat. And then all at once she realized that the ground beneath her was alive. … the stones themselves, everything, everything interconnected and living and complete. It was a sacred, astounding moment … She feels she can enter here into the life of things.… that was revealed there once. … she wears a gold watch and she studies it with pleasure, thinking of the man who gave it to her … The watch has a lozenge-shaped face … as if fashioned from the skin of some fabulous mythical fish. (Madden, 2002: 371–2, original emphasis)

Both Julia’s father and mother ‘connect’ to what Bollas calls ‘the unthought known’ and feel deeply enriched by it, as in an epiphany. Indeed, like Wordsworth in his chancing upon ‘that serene and blessed mood’ where ‘[w]e see into the life of things’, Julia’s parents experience the ‘deep power of joy’ such revelation brings (Wordsworth, 2012: 289, lines 41, 49, 48). Another interesting element in this experience of Julia’s mother is the ‘gold watch … she studies … with pleasure, thinking of the man who gave it to her’ (Madden, 2002: 372, original emphasis). Apart from the fact that mother and daughter share a deep empathy with things (the mother

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feels the slope of the mountain breathing as the daughter felt the rising and falling of the bird in the tree), they will later be connected through the watch. The second group of people is formed by the actual protagonists, the artists Julia and Roderic. Though the latter is the more accomplished artist, his role in this novel seems mainly to highlight and help in Julia’s discovery of her trauma and genera. Julia’s search was initiated by the homely objects mentioned in the prologue, but while these will turn out to be connected to the mother it is Julia’s father who, unknowingly but through simple play and caring attention, allows her to get in touch with her genera which lead her to her destiny: Julia ‘thinks she became an artist: because of a game she used to play with her father when she was a child’ (Madden, 2002: 27). When ‘her father noticed that she got enormous pleasure from the picture … he brought home a large book full of colourful reproductions of old master paintings’ (Madden, 2002: 28). Tellingly, Julia is especially drawn to a picture of a landscape, glassy with ice: ‘The painting had a peculiar atmosphere … the diminutive skaters would begin to move across the ice’ (Madden, 2002: 27). Another genre of painting that appeals to the child is ‘still life paintings’ (Madden, 2002: 28), because they convey an abstract form which is ‘more exact, more true, than the apples that grew in their orchard’ (Madden, 2002: 28). While the ice-skaters recall the glass from the prologue, the apples reappear on her twenty-fifth birthday, when she has just received her mother’s gold watch and stands in a ‘breeze [which] rustled through the trees of the orchard … the atmosphere around her told her she was at home’ (Madden, 2002: 225). Together, the ice/glass, apples/orchard trees, and the mother’s watch do form the ‘nodal points’ of Julia’s self, her ‘home’, and enabled by such genera, ‘a particular type of psychic organization of lived experience … will result in creative new envisionings of life’ (Bollas, 2011: 58). Indeed: Julia’s inaugural exhibition as a budding artist involves an installation of wooden boxes with a glass pane. The first box contains textiles, echoing the protective quilt Julia enjoyed as a child; the second box ‘displayed on shelves a series of china cups and saucers, each one perched precariously, as though they might fall at any moment’ (Madden, 2002: 97). Here, Julia’s dream logic seeps into her art through substitution and condensation: not only are the cups and saucers a metonymic substitution

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for the mother who set out the crockery for the next morning, but their being precariously perched brings to mind the mother’s vulnerability and her death in a car accident. Julia chances here on an art genre which perfectly suits her unconscious: still life painters (like Sebastian Stosskopf, Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Francisco Zurbaran, and Willem Kalf to name but a few) always make one item perch over the dark abyss next to the table’s rim in front of the picture. A third box of her installation condenses the apples and the glass again and combine them with the ‘fabulous’ watch: ‘There were shells … modest bivalves … opening into a glassy void pink as flesh; … as though made of some kind of fabulous glass’ (Madden, 2002: 98). Later the combination of apples and glass will trigger a traumatic memory in Julia. As often with Madden, it is scent which provides the prompt: She inhaled the sweet perfume of the fruit in her hand … She picked it [the apple] up from time to time, studied it closely and thoughtfully, did everything she could to make it offer up its secret, but it didn’t do so until the following night, which brought the first frost of that winter … The revelation of the memory was like a trapdoor opening beneath her … [a] few windfalls had been trapped beneath the ice and she stopped to look at them. Someone was with her. Someone was holding her hand; it was hot as a coal. The red of the apples was vivid through the thick glassy ice … Her sense of loss was borne in upon her with a greater force than ever before. (Madden, 2002: 357–8)

Trauma and genera, because they belong to the more unconscious layers of the psyche, cannot be reached by intention: it is only when several fraught images cross-connect, like when the frost links the apples with the ‘glass’, recreating the windfalls trapped in ice, that they reveal themselves as a ‘trapdoor’ to the trauma of the mother’s sudden death. Here, the apples yield the full range of their signalling power: not only are they a metaphor of the edenesque life Julia lived with her parents in the orchard before her mother died; but, being under ice, they are also a substitute for the mother, trapped in death and out of Julia’s reach. (The fact that the word ‘trapdoor’ and ‘trapped’, respectively in the contexts of daughter and mother, are so closely repeated, indicates the unsevered but repressed link.)

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Striking in this ‘inner grammar’ of Julia’s iconographic idiom is that her ‘genera’ here coincide with the trauma and indeed, when the traumatic content hits Julia, she briefly loses her balance. Yet Julia’s artwork stands her in good stead: she gathers ‘the psychic investments to an inner area of work’, ‘a process that involves the selection of specific objects which release idiom to its expression’ (Bollas, 2011: 58). In this sense, Julia’s art seems therapeutic: her installation is strongly autobiographical, selecting, managing, elaborating, and assimilating the objects which are specific to her libidinal life. This pairing of inner and outer life is something Madden finds important: ‘The degree to which one can live in a parallel reality to the physical reality one actually inhabits should never be underestimated’ (Madden, 2001: 29). Indeed, art is a playground in which to stretch the inner self in concentration and distance. Julia’s installation seems a perfect objectification of the imagination at work: on the one hand, it touches on genera (quilt, crockery, and glass) and on trauma-related objects (apples and the precarious position); on the other, it creates distance by adding a wind machine which makes ‘textile ribbons [to] flutter… over it’ (Madden, 2002: 97), so the traumatic cannot be faced head-on but only ‘glimpsed rather than plainly seen’ (Madden, 2002: 97). Likewise, the repeated boxstructure of her installation serves to ‘contain’ the potent associations of each vital object. This is noticed by William when he sees her work: ‘There was about all of them, he thought, a mysterious, elegiac atmosphere, each presenting a small, sealed, rather beautiful but utterly inaccessible world’ (Madden, 2002: 98). Briefly, in this installation Julia addresses her unconscious and realises her destiny as she combines bearing out Bollas’s theories ‘objects and experiences that yield positive qualia, although positive here does not mean optimistic, good, or conflict-free, but something that will link with and possibly elaborate the psychic material that is incubating into a new vision’ (Bollas, 2011: 65). Bollas further argues that ‘[t]he person who lives from this inner sense of destiny will have an intuitive knowledge of the object choice based on the need to express the idiom of the true self’ (Bollas, 2011: 51). In this, Julia is helped not only by her father but also by her partner, Roderic. Like all other artist characters, Roderic is introduced through bird imagery. While Julia’s empathy is captured in images of birds balancing in trees at dusk and dawn, ‘Roderic had looked like a

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golden eagle that had landed by chance upon a suburban bird table’ (Madden, 2002: 17). He is a powerful personality, ‘[h]andsome, ebullient’ (Madden, 2002: 107) like his father, but often moving ‘into that remote and rigorous part of his consciousness that was completely given over to art’ (Madden, 2002: 315). Though he is an established authority on painting, he still has the ‘absolute openheartedness that is the essence of children’ (Madden, 2002: 199). Roderic’s basic feature seems to be a certain indifference to the ego: unlike Julia, he does not want any form of therapeutic art. Even when he is ‘drying out’ in hospital, Roderic reflects ‘what a disaster it would have been for him had he ever allowed his art … to become self-expressive and to serve him, rather than he serving his art’ (Madden, 2002: 344). Roderic’s genera, too, were furnished by his parents. The Kennedy home is full of artworks, but the object which triggered Roderic’s passion for art is a print of the Custom House which he thinks is both abstract and yet more realistic than a photo. The other ‘catalyst painter’ is Turner, whose ‘watermark’ is a floating openness: ‘his pearly, hazy image with a bridge just visible in it, or a town that seemed to float, and that was it, it was the thing itself. Turner was a revelation to me, it was like coming home’ (Madden, 2002: 291). Roderic’s floating attention, like that of Julia’s father, will be beneficial to the budding artist. It is striking that the established painter of this novel is merely described in his ability to care for Julia. It seems to confirm that this Künstlerroman is more about the psychological dimensions of artwork. Roderic underscores this in his radio interview: ‘That’s what it really should be about: tapping into the primary energy of the thing’ (Madden, 2002: 287). That is exactly what he and Julia do; both are traumatised, cautiously tapping into their unconscious to deliver the full potentiality of their art: ‘The central facts of their lives – his years in Italy, her family situation – were established through oblique or passing references’ (Madden, 2002: 167). While solidarity is an unlikely phenomenon in art circles (they are usually dominated by rivalry, the very opposite of evenly floating attention), the age gap of twenty years between Julia and Roderic and the fact ‘that she was not his peer, that they were not constantly and discreetly measuring their own lives against each other’ (Madden, 2002: 165) makes Roderic more like a loving mentor.

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The story ends with a strange scene in which Roderic seems to manage to reconcile Julia with her mother’s death. After Julia told him about her sudden realisation that the icy apples reminded her of her mother, an apprehension which coincided with William’s withdrawing from her, Roderic embraces her lovingly and then steps back, pretending to be the mother: ‘You can’t see me’, he said ‘but you recognise me. You do know that it’s me. Do you realise what I’m getting at? Do you understand?’ When she opened her eyes again it was upon a new reality and he understood what he had just shown her even before he spoke, ‘You do remember your mother. You do remember her.’ (Madden, 2002: 384, original emphasis)

This act is a far cry from the analyst who invites the analysand to project the person (s)he has a problem with on to the analyst so they can work it out at one remove. And this seems to work, as the epilogue will suggest. The third group of characters is formed by the amateur artists – Roderic’s brother, Dennis, and Julia’s acquaintance, William. Whereas Dennis manages to realise his destiny, William fails. That Dennis is not introduced through bird imagery but through a piano concerto is significant: ‘he fancied that he was the pianist in evening dress walking on to the stage’ (Madden, 2002: 32). Dennis, a fine musician, is very different from his brother. Whereas Roderic is ‘vulnerable … like a walled city with its gates left unlocked and unguarded at night’ (Madden, 2002: 200), Dennis’s affairs are ‘like a Viking longship hung with shields: life insurance and house insurance, health insurance and pensions; savings plans and financial investments’ (Madden, 2002: 185). Roderic lives in a humble abode, while Dennis occupies a ‘tall, redbrick house in a leafy road near Seapoint’ (Madden, 2002: 35). Yet the two are very close: ‘He and Roderic understood each other in an almost animal fashion. They were like dolphins clicking and chittering at each other in the deep … [t]heir understanding of each other was uncanny’ (Madden, 2002: 33). This uncanniness dates from the moment Roderic was born: Dennis was only five, yet when asked would he look after his little brother he had said: ‘“I will. I’ll look after him.”’ Not only had Dennis ‘remembered it as well as if it had happened yesterday’ (Madden, 2002: 45), but ever since, ‘Dennis’ love … had been

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wholly unconditional’ (Madden, 2002: 306). As well as growing up together they even lived in the same realm of mental images: ‘The brothers unconsciously evoked the Renoir print that hung nearby of two sisters’ (Madden, 2002: 43). While Dennis chooses not to be an artist, he shows a deep understanding of his brother’s work. He always picks and buys the paintings Roderic himself loves best, sensing their impact. When lending a work he owns for one of Roderic’s exhibitions, he feels how ‘[t]he painting created its own well of calm in the hubbub of the room’ (Madden, 2002: 40). Formally, the orderliness of Dennis’s mind is illustrated by the circular structure of the chapter devoted to him; it starts with his identification with a concert pianist and ends with him performing on his grand piano at home: ‘And then he began to play’ (Madden, 2002: 41). That the chapter centring on Dennis ends on the word ‘play’ again characterises him as one who questions, dreams, and explores. Like with all the other characters, the narrative touches upon his genera. Predictably, these are related to musical complexities, more specifically Johann Sebastian Bach: in his daydream he sees ‘Kantor Bach, anonymous and unremarked … and over it all the music, the music, sacred in every way’ (Madden, 2002: 44). Like Julia’s parents, he senses the ‘sacred’ aspect of his most deeply connecting revelations. When the final character, William Armstrong, is introduced through the bird/music imagery, it immediately points to his lack of empathy: ‘The bird he liked best was the blackbird, with its vivid eye and orange beak, its … song. … these little islands of peace.’ Instead of bringing a sense of the sacred, his favourite experience only suggests ‘banal transcendence’ (Madden, 2002: 9) and solitude. This will be William’s core problem: where all other main characters open up to the unconscious in themselves and others, he does not dare to do so, an attitude which is traced to his relationship with his father, ‘a lawyer, … a forbidding man’ (Madden, 2002: 262): ‘I would never measure up to him, neither what he was, nor his expectations of me’ (Madden, 2002: 263). While Roderic and Dennis were raised by ‘[a] complex and compassionate man’ (Madden, 2002: 42), William suffers from a ‘rigid regimen’ (Madden, 2002: 262) at home and, as a result, develops a ‘false self’ which he can keep up thanks to constant ‘intellectualizations’ of his position (Bollas, 2011: 77). His education is totally opposed to that of Julia’s father,

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who has no agenda: ‘he was not covertly trying to educate her. … He led her on … like a blind man leading his companion to the very gates of a palace that he himself cannot see’ (Madden, 2002: 28). Whereas Julia suffered from the acute trauma of her mother’s death, William is a victim of insidious trauma at the hands of his living father, the kind which causes the self to mutate into the false self that is imposed from without. When people are out of touch with their own unconscious, the neglect or even thwarting of their own desires can rebound in the form of aggression, either against themselves or others. Though meeting Julia makes William start to open up to his deeper vocation, he is still full of negative energy. This is apparent when he commandeers the special room his wife had only just arranged for herself, and criticises his son Gregory for his interest in art. Thus the curtailing of the son by the father is a pattern William passes on: ‘William had not encouraged Gregory. On the contrary, art had always been for him a private passion that he did not want to share. It afforded him an escape from family life, and he realised now with a start that for his son it had exactly the same function’ (Madden, 2002: 116). Yet Julia does make a breakthrough when William participates in an installation for which contributors are invited to freely associate with a scent. This exercise brings about a positive moment where William shared a formative experience with his father: ‘The light before a big storm … I was ten years old … “Look”, he said, “out there, a school of porpoises” … the water, although riddled with light, was already grey. … this ocean, these porpoises, my father, me’ (Madden, 2002: 262–3). William acknowledges the importance of this moment: Julia had ‘unwittingly forced open a closed chamber of his heart, where his own past was hidden from himself’ (Madden, 2002: 265). Later, he even explicitly admits that ‘I’ve come to understand more about how things were between my father and myself. I value that knowledge even though getting to it has been extremely painful’ (Madden, 2002: 362). William’s genera even find their way into his art; the scene appears in a painting that has the ‘colours of a storm’s weird light’ (Madden, 2002: 383). Yet this work also shows a blockage: ‘At the centre of the page was a great O like a circular cave into which the colour dripped in sharp stalactites, bristling with energy against the empty sweep of white paper’ (Madden, 2002: 382). Here, we clearly see that genera ‘yield positive qualia,

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although positive here does not mean … conflict-free, but something that will … possibly elaborate the psychic material that is incubating into a new vision’ (Bollas, 2011: 65). But this is precisely William’s problem, though he knows he wasted his life on a false self, he wants to leave this ‘unthought known’ be, rather than to let it elaborate and incubate in his life and art. Roderic notices that William can ‘regiment’ himself to do good work, but he does not involve his whole self in it, does not work ‘existentially’: ‘it simply wasn’t in him to be what he wanted to be’ (Madden, 2002: 261). Of the six characters, William is the only one who does not dare to be whole, to connect conscious and unconscious aspects of his self. This, as Bollas points out, is due to his ‘parents’ adamant refusal to be alive to the child’s inner reality’ (Bollas, 2011: 28) – a negative attitude William passes on to his son Gregory. He is aware of his predicament – Roderic observes that ‘he knows he’s wasted his life’ (Madden, 2002: 231, original emphasis) – but cannot act upon it and so remains a ‘schizoid person … [in] inexorable sadness’ (Bollas, 2011: 5). Julia notices this schizoid state when she sees how ‘his face was stamped with that tense and forlorn expression that she knew so well’ (Madden, 2002: 368). As a result, he cannot relate in a deep way to others. This becomes painfully clear when he happens to be present when Julia suddenly connects her genera (glass, apples, and the iced-over windfalls) to the trauma of her mother’s death. Instead of providing a ‘holding’ personality, William does not help to weld trauma and genera together to become the whole person Julia wants him to be – rather, he abruptly walks out on her. It is only Roderic’s love which will reconcile death and life, and so confirm Julia in her resilient search for an authentic existence. The novel’s final scene again finds the protagonist in bed as she lets images incubate and mature to artistic representation, which is extended in the epilogue. Here, the apples reappear, but this time Julia and her father have left many unpicked so that they are iced and snowed over again. As the book’s final sentence shows, they are meant to be a monument to the dead mother and wife, but also to life, the undercurrent of art: ‘“Oh there’ll be apples, Julia”, Dan said, “when we’re all of us gone”’ (Madden, 2002: 385). This seems the perfect ending to a novel of ideas, which has delved into an artist’s ‘privileged consciousness’ as it tries to piece together each person’s ‘myths of individuation’. Authenticity is a Künstlerroman

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par excellence, starting with ‘the mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling [which] is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic’ (Bollas, 1987: 32). Yet the father’s education is equally important here, as Roderic and Dennis are raised by a ‘complex and compassionate man’ and Julia by a simple compassionate man, while William is mismanaged by a ‘rigid regimen’. Yet each finds their way to the unconscious via objects: Turner’s ‘bridge’ which ‘seemed to float’ was ‘like coming home’ to Roderic; the image of Kantor Bach going to work was sacred to Dennis; the combination of the porpoises, the father and son gave a flash of (artistic) life to William. Three main features may be distinguished in the life-giving aesthetics depicted in Madden’s masterly Künstlerroman. First, intentionality is of minor importance, compared to the receptive, attentive focus on the unknown we find in each character’s revelations. Second, the ‘unthought known’ that each character recognises in their genera works in a healing and intra- and interconnecting way. As the subject seems to touch here upon ‘the life of things’, or as Roderic would have it, is ‘tapping into the primary energy of the thing’, the revelation feels like a sanctification. Or, as Bollas states, it ‘provides … the person with a generative illusion of fitting with an object’ (Bollas, 1987: 32). While such an epiphany about genera in an aesthetic object makes an individual feel whole, these objects can also connect people. This happens when Roderic and Dennis feel the same ‘force of archetypes’ in the same paintings, but it also links Julia to her mother when she is given her mother’s gold wristwatch on her twenty-fifth birthday, the very watch she was contemplating at the mystic moment in the ‘interconnected’ mountains. (The fact that the moment after her mystic experience, Julia’s mother meets a man who is most probably Roderic’s father will turn out to be a vague ‘inherited trait’, as the daughter will relate to the son.) Third, Madden shows great precision in her representation of the ‘mechanics’ of the imagination. In Julia’s installation, we both see the desire to face the genera via the metonymies of the glass-wrapped apples, the crockery, and the quilt, but we also see the fear of the trauma, represented in the wind machine which only allows ‘glimpses’. Likewise, Dennis’s image of Bach’s morning walk is one that has been construed gradually, in a ‘camera obscura’ involving several ‘tilted mirrors’ (Madden, 2002: 44). In short, if Madden aimed in

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Authenticity at representing the modalities of people’s attempts to find their real self, it worked, as the novel does exactly that.

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Note 1 It is a characteristic of the novel’s metaphorical consistency that Julia’s father’s fascination with a starry sky matches his stated preference for the Chagall-like picture of ‘a bearded man suspended in mid-air’ (Madden, 2002: 31); and the only photograph Julia has of him is when ‘He was tugging on a piece of string, his cheerful glance skywards implying a kite on the other end of it’ (Madden, 2002: 58).

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8 ‘What can we do, what does art do?’: ethics and aesthetics in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Molly Fox’s Birthday Teresa Casal In a lecture delivered at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies in 2001, Deirdre Madden challenged critics to think about the criteria underpinning their practice and outlined her view of how they should approach literature: If the artist must needs put aside intellect to get to the only material of art, what of the critic? I would ask you to think seriously about this. I would argue in favour of a criticism that is also instinctive and imaginative, that attempts to approach any given work in the same spirit as the work itself. (Madden, 2001: 32)

Madden’s advocacy of a multifaceted critical repertoire capable of engaging with the singularity of a literary work chimes with Derek Attridge’s acknowledgement that ‘the experience of literary works … consistently exceeds the limits of rational accounting’ (Attridge, 2004: 3). Similarly, in Uses of Literature, Rita Felski challenges literary critics trained in ‘analytical detachment, critical vigilance, guarded suspicion’ to ‘engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading’ (Felski, 2008: 2 and 14), and argues that aesthetic response involves both cognitive and affective modes of engagement, ranging, respectively, from recognition and knowledge to enchantment and shock: I propose that reading involves a logic of recognition; that aesthetic experience has analogies with enchantment in a supposedly disenchanted age; that literature creates distinctive configurations of social knowledge; that we may value the experience of being shocked by what we read. (Felski, 2008: 14, original emphasis)1

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In her recent essay ‘Identifying with Characters’, Felski further elaborates on how audiences ‘become attached to fiction in an abundance of ways’, through ties that ‘can be ironic as well as sentimental, ethical as well as emotional’ (Felski, 2019: 77). She proposes ‘four strands of identification: alignment, allegiance, recognition, and empathy’ (Felski, 2019: 93) and notes that ‘acts of identifying, while they can be emotional, even passionate, are also reflective: they are informed by beliefs, ideals, and values. It is a matter not just of feeling but of thinking’ (Felski, 2019: 98, original emphasis). Concurrently, in Letting Stories Breathe: A SocioNarratology, Arthur W. Frank notes that, ‘[p]eople not only think about stories; far more consequentially, people think with stories’ (Frank, 2010: 47, original emphasis). Frank’s acknowledgement that we think with stories and Felski’s mapping of our multifaceted modes of engagement with literature point to ways of meeting Madden’s challenge to ‘approach the work in the same spirit as the work itself’. My aim in this chapter is to think with Deirdre Madden’s three novels directly addressing the Northern Irish conflict – Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Molly Fox’s Birthday – in order to identify how they ethically and aesthetically engage their readers and what role they claim for themselves in the society out of which they are written. If, as Richard Kearney argues, ‘[s]ometimes an ethics of memory is obliged to resort to [an] aesthetics of storytelling’, and ‘a key function of narrative memory is … empathy’ (Kearney, 2004: 62–3), fiction allows Madden to come as close as possible to ‘enter[ing] into another person’s mind’, that quintessential human wish to transcend subjectivity voiced by the protagonist of Nothing is Black (Madden, 1994: 141). In careful readings of Hidden Symptoms and One by One, Geraldine Higgins shows how they provide ‘narrative structures in which to contain and interpret traumatic events’ (Higgins, 1999: 143), while Michael Parker addresses the metafictional quality of Madden’s ‘highly sophisticated’ texts and demonstrates how they question not only ‘inherited pieties and verities’, but also ‘the authority of art itself’ (Parker, 2000: 83). In turn, Graham Dawson considers how One by One ‘engage[s] with and comment[s] upon the cultural representation of victims of the Troubles’ (Dawson, 2012: 140) and contributes to ‘moral and political reconstruction in post-conflict culture’

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by affording readers ‘imaginative connection with others’ (Dawson, 2012: 155). More recently, Marilynn Richtarik shows how ‘One by One in the Darkness underscores the reverberations of traumatic experience that continue to threaten the peace’ (Richtarik, 2020: 317). Building on these insightful interpretations, I focus on how the question that underpins Hidden Symptoms – what art does in the face of human-inflicted violence – is played out in Madden’s three novels addressing the Troubles, and I shall consider the way in which they invite us to experience fiction’s ability to afford us insight into others’ subjectivity, and challenge us to appreciate whether and how aesthetic experience expands our intersubjective insight and thus claims a role in processes of reparative remembering. Featuring a young writer-protagonist, Theresa, whose twin brother has been tortured and killed in a sectarian attack in Northern Ireland, Hidden Symptoms is framed by Theresa’s two key questions: her urgent ethical question, ‘what can we do?’ (Madden, 1986: 19) in the face of violence, and her subsequent aesthetic question, ‘[w]hat does art do?’ (Madden, 1986: 105). Between the first and the second question, some answers are discussed by Theresa and her literary-minded counterpart, Robert, while we are left to consider whether Madden’s novel endorses Theresa’s claims about our ethical and imaginative limitations. Theresa argues that ‘You can only ever see one side, the side you happen to be on’ (Madden, 1986: 106), which seems to be replicated in a novel that approaches the Troubles from the perspective of Northern Irish Catholics only. She also declares that she writes ‘about subjectivity – and inarticulation – about life pushing you into a state where everything is melting until you’re left with the absolute and you can find neither the words nor the images to express it’ (Madden, 1986: 28), a state that, as Parker notes, ‘refers not only to her own psychic condition following her brother’s murder but also to that of Northern Ireland after 1969’ where intense violence made ‘any utterance, private or public’ seem ‘diminished, inadequate’ (Parker, 2000: 88). Yet Theresa uses words to tap into what eludes them, which begs us to consider Madden’s engagement with literature and ours with her novels. The medical metaphor implicit in the title of Madden’s first novel refers to the hidden symptoms of a sickness lurking beneath the surface before the Troubles (Madden, 1986: 13–14), their

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unacknowledged hiddenness contributing to their violent eruption. Madden uses fiction to work against the abstract and tribal notions of identity that underpin sectarian violence, while attending to otherwise hidden personal grief. In an early exchange between Theresa, who grieves for her murdered brother Francis, and Robert, who seeks to escape politics by devoting himself to art, two different positions are voiced: unaware of Theresa’s predicament, Robert is tempted to keep ethics and aesthetics apart, while Theresa points to the destructive effects of a tradition predicated on sectarian hatred. Robert tolerates the Orange Order and overlooks the fact that, as Theresa claims, it ‘is, first and foremost, an anti-Catholic organization’ that ‘hate[s] Catholics’, and ‘hate is never harmless’ (Madden, 1986: 46). Refusing to be described as a Catholic, he is reminded that in a sectarian society his personal beliefs may be irrelevant to how he is perceived: Theresa laughed cynically. ‘Just tell me this: if you were found in the morning with a bullet in your head, what do you think the papers would call you? An agnostic? No, Robert, nobody, not even you, is naïve enough to think that. Of course you don’t believe: but there’s a big difference between faith and tribal loyalty, and if you think that you can escape tribal loyalty in Belfast today you’re betraying your people and fooling yourself.’ (Madden, 1986: 46)

Theresa’s cynicism points to how the individuality that Robert claims is precisely what is denied in a state of affairs ruled by what Amin Maalouf calls murderous tribal identities, that is, identities predicated on a single affiliation. For Maalouf, a divided society ‘encourages people to adopt an attitude that is partial, sectarian, intolerant, domineering, sometimes suicidal, and frequently even changes them into killers or supporters of killers’ (Maalouf, 2000: 26). His view chimes with that of Theresa, who notes that, ‘[i]t was the people who thought that they were above forgiveness that killed my brother’ (Madden, 1986: 138). Madden’s use of fiction to counter the mindset that she lays bare involves engaging with her characters’ subjectivity and activating our own subjective involvement with their predicament. In Hidden Symptoms, she uses Theresa and occasionally Robert as focalisers; through Theresa’s thoughts, the reader comes close to Francis but not to his murderer. As if anticipating Andrew in Molly Fox’s Birthday, Theresa ‘could not conceive

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of Francis’s killer as an individual … but only as a great darkness which was hidden in the hearts of everyone she met’. Violence is perceived as a pathology and the act of murder as a manifestation of the evil hidden within every human being, compounded by the refusal to acknowledge the other’s shared humanity (Madden, 1986: 44). This is the opposite of Francis’s faith, predicated on a fundamental connectedness: ‘I see God in everything, but God also sees everything in me.’ A God who ‘looks straight out at me through the eye of every human being, asking me to look straight back at Him’ sounds ‘terrible’ to Theresa, but to Francis ‘[n]ot being looked at at all’ is ‘infinitely worse’ (Madden, 1986: 53).2 By showing how subjectively nuanced the experience of faith may be, Madden counters the tendency for religion to be reduced to tribal affiliation in Northern Ireland’s sectarian society, while highlighting that Francis is targeted ‘because he belongs to the monolithic “rebel” community of his murderers’ imaginations’ (Parker, 2000: 94). Although Francis’s murderer remains invisible, the novel brings us close to partisan political belief in the person of Tom, a ‘Provo or Provo sympathizer’, married to Robert’s sister, Rosie. Now a member of the educated middle classes, Robert feels claustrophobic when he visits his working-class sister and disapproves of Tom’s politics (Madden, 1986: 75). Robert nevertheless acknowledges that ‘Tom was persuasive and articulate: in spite of his jargon, he knew what he was talking about’ (Madden, 1986: 75–6); he also recognises something innocent in his sister’s family and that he needs them in his life. His awareness of their kinship despite their differences keeps him grounded in the rhythms and particulars of life and (re) connects intellect and affect. It is such groundedness that the novel affords the reader, so that violence, injustice, grief, and reconciliation emerge as embodied rather than abstract notions. Just as Rita Felski reminds us that we ‘are less theoretically pure than we think ourselves to be’ (Felski, 2008: 14), so do Madden’s novels draw attention to how aloof, distorted, and misleading our abstractions can be if they do not acknowledge the interdependence between our intellectual constructions and our affective attachments. The lack of awareness of this interdependence may be another hidden symptom that Madden seeks to counter by inviting us to reflect on what we can do and what art does in the face of violence. As Theresa observes, what art does is subject to the uses we make

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of it, and these require ethical scrutiny. Art can respond to life either by engaging with it, or by distancing us from it. Evoking the horrors of World War II and how they highlighted the limits of art to ‘cope’, ‘prevent’, or ‘express’ the horror, Theresa compares artists to ‘priests who stop believing in God but who keep on going through the motions of religion rather than trying to face or find an alternative’ (Madden, 1986: 104), and argues that the proliferation of art since the war is the result of people’s need ‘to clutter their minds, because if they did not have art they would be forced to look into the silence and emptiness of their own hearts’. Her implicit plea is for art to be something other than a futile exercise in self-delusion and self-alienation, a cover-up for an underlying ‘silence and emptiness’ (Madden, 1986: 104); hence her earlier claim that she writes ‘about subjectivity – inarticulation’ (Madden, 1986: 28), tapping into what needs to be acknowledged and shared, and seeking a balance ‘between our fidelities to the uniqueness and communicability of memory’ (Kearney, 2004: 63, original emphasis). Madden’s One by One in the Darkness opens with a description of the local terrain perceived by Cate, the middle sister, who had been living in London and is now ‘going home’ to break the news of her pregnancy. The point of view zooms from the ‘huge sky’ and the ‘flat fields of poor land’ to ‘a solid stone house where the silence was uncanny’ (Madden, 1996: 1). Yet, for all the ‘deep, unconscious knowledge’ that the sisters had of their habitat, they ‘knew that their lives, so complete in themselves, were off centre in relation to the society beyond those few fields and houses’ and ‘recognised this most acutely every July’, during the marching season, when ‘you were made a prisoner in your own home whether you liked it or not’ (Madden, 1996: 75). It could be argued that Hidden Symptoms and One by One have the ‘guts to be partial’ (Madden, 1986: 106) insofar as they privilege a Catholic, middle-class, and predominantly female perspective of the Troubles. Yet, the latter novel adds scope and nuance to Madden’s approach. Focusing on the lives of the Quinn sisters, Helen, Kate (later Cate), and Sally, whose father was killed in a case of mistaken identity, and of their mother Emily, the novel encompasses a week and is divided into fourteen chapters that alternate between time present and time past. This narrative structure combines breadth and depth, so that ‘linear historical time is intercut by

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an alternative temporality of the internal world’ (Dawson, 2012: 147), thus replicating the grieving process, which ‘ripples in concentric circles from the death of a loved one’ (Higgins, 1999: 158). Concurrently, the narrative affords insight into the present experience of the Troubles, seen from the bereaved sisters’ and their mother’s perspective in the summer of 1994, leading up to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire in 1995: the sisters’ childhood memories, the outbreak of the Troubles in the late 1960s, and the experience of growing up in the midst of the Troubles; and their mother’s childhood and youthful memories that reveal the symptoms beneath the ‘forced’ normality passing as ‘a prosperous facade over discrimination and injustice’ (Madden, 1986: 13). Madden’s use of focalisation expands the scope of the novel temporally and spatially, and affords a multifaceted view of the Northern Irish Troubles as experienced by a Catholic family. If Hidden Symptoms is set in Belfast and provides an urban perspective, One by One is set in a rural community, yet uses the three sisters and their mother to provide diverse and complementary perspectives. Sally, the youngest sister, never left home and teaches at the local school, living the life that her mother had given up when she married; Kate moved to London, where she worked in fashion, remodelling herself as a cosmopolitan and less ostensibly Irish Cate, and is pregnant by a man with whom she does not intend to live; and Helen, the oldest sister and the closest to her father’s political concerns, is a solicitor specialising in terrorist cases in Belfast; Emily, the mother who, aware of women’s dependence, ‘had never wanted daughters’ (Madden, 1996: 110), had left Ballymena for Belfast to study and work as a teacher before getting married and giving up her job. Owning up to the partiality of this family’s views, or that of Theresa and Robert in Hidden Symptoms, is what makes such partiality ethically legitimate rather than covertly manipulative: it involves claiming the testimonial legitimacy of perspectives that are peripheral both vis-à-vis Anglo-Protestant rule and Republican or Loyalist activism but that are yet made central in the novels. One by One presents different beliefs within the same family, as epitomised by the murder of Charlie Quinn, mistaken for his brother Brian, whose Sinn Féin sympathies Charlie opposed. Diversity among siblings is replayed in the three sisters’ life choices and responses to grief, just as Granny Kate and Granny Kelly stand

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for different positions among middle-class Catholics, affectionate and engaged in the first case, detached and entrenched in class prejudice in the second. The Catholic Church likewise emerges as plural rather than monological: the ‘completely Catholic’ school had ‘sharp divisions of political opinion within it’ (Madden, 1996: 154); and while Derry-born Sister Philomena advises Helen to study because ‘[o]ur educated Catholics have a role to play in this society’ (Madden, 1996: 158), Sister Benedict, a former missionary in Africa, warns Helen against the dangers of ‘idealism’ (Madden, 1996: 159), which risks shutting people’s minds, thus causing injury rather than bringing about idealised change. The novel uses its Catholic, middle-class ‘partiality’ to show that no single trait determines one’s position, and, like Theresa, invites us to engage with characters’ subjectivity, thus activating processes of recognition that ‘promote a heightened awareness of the density and distinctiveness of particular life-worlds’ and spark ‘imaginative affiliations that bridge differences and exceed the literalism of demographic description’ (Felski, 2008: 46) or ‘tribal loyalty’ (Madden, 1986: 46). One by One elaborates on Theresa’s question about what art, specifically the novel, does, and sets it against the discourses of politics and journalism, which are felt to ‘[misrepresent] bereaved nationalist families’ (Dawson, 2012: 150). Helen had been aggrieved by ‘how her father’s murder had been treated by the media’, particularly by ‘the British tabloids’, which coldly and unsympathetically imply that ‘he had only got what was coming to him’ (Madden, 1996: 47). David, a journalist friend whose father had been killed when he was twelve, testifies to a similar unfair treatment on the part of the media, the British authorities and legal system, and the IRA, so that those killed in cases of mistaken identity seem to be ignored by all sides. The risk of ‘making up stories out of a few facts, and presenting them as though that interpretation was the absolute truth’ (Madden, 1996: 50) hence colludes with a reality that corners individuals into entrenched sectarian positions and ignores their predicaments. This entails a failure of the imagination, which, as Helen claims, is a requisite for empathy. Her criticism of the ‘blunt weapon’ of journalism and its inability to ‘[deal] with complexity’ (Madden, 1996: 51) suggests that the role of the novel begins where the journalistic report ends: as another widow warns Emily at Charlie’s funeral, killings are ‘written about in the

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paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if it was the end, when it was really only the beginning’ (Madden, 1996: 127). Madden’s novel thus features the otherwise unacknowledged grief of those whose voices are silenced or ignored by louder voices or weapons, as happens with Charlie, whose warning at the funeral of young Tony, a member of the IRA, reverberates throughout the text: ‘“Never forget what you saw today; and never let anybody try to tell you that it was anything other than a life wasted, and lives destroyed”’ (Madden, 1996: 105). By foregrounding voice and perspective, the novel draws attention to how words can be used as forms of manipulation or communication, as happens in the family discussion following the events of Bloody Friday in Belfast, on 21 July 1972, when Charlie urges Brian not even to begin ‘to try to explain or justify what happened’ and Brian ‘loudly’ voices his Sinn Féin slogans (Madden, 1996: 129). Using fiction’s ability to ‘enter into another person’s mind’ (Madden, 1994: 141), Madden presents history, politics, and geography not as abstractions or slogans, but as they are experienced by characters situated in time and space. Thanks to the multiplication of points of view that expands the narrative scope synchronically and diachronically, characters and readers can see contemporary experience and also think about it as it is projected on to past experience. As Dawson observes, this allows for what Dominick LaCapra calls ‘heteropathic identification’, which combines ‘critical distance and objectivity’ with ‘empathic openness’ and is at the heart of how ‘acts of imagination may contribute to conflict transformation and peacebuilding’ (Dawson, 2012: 142). Recognition of the Other and of the self (Felski, 2008: 25) is central to how Madden presents this intersubjective process, as instanced when David, whose father was killed when he was twelve, witnesses ‘what had happened to our family’ now being experienced by another family and realises that ‘“only now as an adult, [can I] really see what it means”’ (Madden, 1996: 52, original emphasis). If hindsight and maturity allow for the ethical and emotional awareness that is numbed in the acute aftermath of the traumatic event, the process also shows ‘how self-perception is mediated by the other, and the perception of otherness by the self’ (Felski, 2008: 49) for characters and readers alike.

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Similarly using ‘the force of her imagination’ (Madden, 1996: 179), Helen evokes her father in the last scene of the novel. Having opened with Cate zooming in on Northern Ireland as she flies home, the novel closes with Helen slipping into ‘a fold in her mind between her dreams and her imagination’ that she had ‘cultivated’ (Madden, 1996: 178) since her childhood: zooming out, she ‘can see and feel that the universe was alive’ (Madden, 1996: 179), then she zooms in on Ireland, the North of Ireland, and ‘the place where she lived’, and ‘finally Helen could see herself … not knowing that when she was a woman it would break her heart to remember all this’ (Madden, 1996: 180). What intrudes now is the vision of her father’s murder, ‘constructed in images borrowed from reports of real shootings’ (Dawson, 2012: 154), hence recognisable to readers who have lived through the Troubles and imaginatively construed for those who have not. Helen sees ‘two men in parkas’ (Madden 1996: 180) and ‘Halloween masks on their faces’ storming into the family kitchen with their guns; then, ‘in an abrupt reversal of the gentle descent of her childhood, Helen’s vision swung violently away’ (Madden, 1996: 181): Now her image of her father’s death was infinitely small, infinitely tender: the searing grief came from the tension between that smallness and the enormity of infinite time and space. No pity, no forgiveness, no justification: maybe if she could have conceived of a consciousness where every unique horror in the history of humanity was known and grieved for, it would give her some comfort. (Madden, 1996: 181)

Caught between her father’s tender vulnerability and an unreachable vastness, overwhelmed by a ‘grief she could scarcely bear’ (Madden, 1996: 181), Helen longs for a consciousness capable of acknowledging ‘every unique horror’ both as singular and as partaking of human history. The memorial envisaged by Cate gives architectural shape to the wish for some form of public recognition that may integrate personal grief: a ‘perfectly square room’, with three walls covered by names and the fourth with a window opening on to the ‘huge’ sky, it ‘would be a place which afforded dignity to memory, where you could bring your anger, as well as your grief’ (Madden, 1996: 149). By bringing the personal experience of unacknowledged trauma to public attention and activating intersubjective processes

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of recognition in the act of reading, Madden’s novel similarly forges a space inviting psychic and social connectedness. Helen’s acknowledgement that ‘[f]rom her work and her life she knew the fate of both the victims and the perpetrators, and both were dreadful’ (Madden, 1996: 52) anticipates the ethical and emotional challenge of recognising victims and perpetrators addressed in Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday. A first-person fictional memoir by an anonymous female playwright who wonders ‘what it was to be [the actress] Molly Fox’ (Madden, 2008: 6), it focuses on the power and the limits of the imagination. Though imagination is expected to assist the actress and playwright in their creative endeavours, it fails Andrew, who can only grieve for his dead brother after his first-hand experience of a terrorist attack in Paris. By confining us to a first-person narrative, the novel replicates our individual constraints, and like the narrator we are left to exercise our ‘moral knowledge’ (Madden, 2008: 98, 205) on the basis of the partial information available, while imagining what it is to be the characters whose voices feature in the form of dialogues or of the narrator’s memories: the playwright born into a large Northern Irish Catholic family who read English in Trinity College Dublin and then moved to London, where her career took off; her Dublinborn actor friend, Molly Fox, who hardly ever speaks of her mother, but is ‘fiercely loyal, viscerally close’ (Madden, 2008: 96) to her younger brother Fergus; the narrator’s friend, Andrew, a successful art critic born into a Protestant family in Northern Ireland, who studied in Dublin and whose brother Billy is a Loyalist paramilitary, causing him to move to London and erase his Belfast accent; and the narrator’s older brother Tom, a country priest who introduced her to the theatre, whose ‘full clerical garb’ (Madden, 2008: 86) and strong accent embarrass her in London, but with whom she shares a ‘private silence’ (Madden, 2008: 31) of mutual understanding, for both have taken a deviant course in their close-knit family. Wondering ‘how actors do what they do’, the narrator concludes that part of the ‘mystery’ behind Molly’s acting skills was ‘compassion. Molly never judged a character. … No matter how difficult or unpleasant a character might seem, she could find in herself an understanding of why someone might be as they were and this enabled her to become them’ (Madden, 2008: 20). Compassion, described here as the ability to feel with and understand, is the process whereby

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the actor Molly Fox incarnates her characters, and Andrew’s trajectory further suggests that compassion (including self-compassion) is also a pivotal resource when dealing with painful legacies. Madden crosses the sectarian divide by facing Andrew, and imaginatively the reader, with the challenge of mourning for his brother Billy, victim and perpetrator of sectarian violence. Rather than religious affiliations, the ultimate challenge confronting Madden’s characters thus concerns the use of violence. When Billy is killed, Andrew ‘didn’t feel anything at all, not for ages’ (Madden, 2008: 179); unlike his parents, he was unable to ‘properly mourn’ (Madden, 2008: 178) and later ‘began to think a lot about the idea of brothers’ (Madden, 2008: 179). Thinking takes over when feeling is numbed, and it is only when his son Tony is born that Andrew’s emotions emerge as he notices that his child ‘looked like Billy’: ‘Here he was, a miniature version of the dead brother I’d never much cared for, and I’d have walked through the fire for him’ (Madden, 2008: 180). This embodied recognition proves healing: ‘Tony brought about a kind of reconciliation between me and my parents’ (Madden, 2008: 181). Yet, it would take a first-hand experience of terrorism in Paris for Andrew to begin ‘to come to terms with what had happened to Billy’ (Madden, 2008: 183) and face what he had been running away from: My whole life had been a kind of flight from the north and everything that happened there. … Then I thought about Billy and how he had died, even though for years I had actively tried not to think of him. I rarely felt sorry or sad about him, just angry and disgusted at the waste of a life. And suddenly I felt the whole loss of him in a way I’d perhaps never allowed myself to feel it before. (Madden, 2008: 186)

Andrew’s words suggest that mourning involves the ability to move from anger and judgement to a cognitive and emotional acknowledgement of the loss suffered. That this requires ‘the force of [the] imagination’ (Madden, 1996: 179) is indicated by Andrew’s active musing about his brother: ‘I started to think about Billy, I mean really think about him, not in that abstracted, almost wistful way he used to come into my mind, but Billy himself, just as he was. … I started to mourn him that night. It was as if I’d been numb for all those years and only then begun to

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feel the pain of his loss … Billy’s death became integrated into my life in a way that it should have been years earlier.’ (Madden, 2008: 191–2)

What Andrew realises in hindsight amounts to the emotional legacy that he shared with his brother despite their differences: anger, which made Andrew want to leave Northern Ireland and led Billy to join a paramilitary group. Andrew’s ability to mourn relies on moving beyond judgement to the acknowledgement of his vulnerability and his connectedness to others. Andrew’s first-hand experience of terrorism seems to have provided him with the ‘knowledge’ (Madden, 2008: 199) that he had been unable to reach through imagination and empathy only, while his relation to his son had shown both the potential of empathy and the moral dilemma presented by his brother’s legacy as victim and perpetrator. ‘[A]cutely sensitive to each other’ (Madden, 2008: 191), Andrew and Tony try to protect each other from the pain of Billy’s violent death. As confidante of the father and the son, the narrator reveals how Tony had tried to piece together information about his uncle’s death and intuits that the brothers’ mutual estrangement ‘“must have made it even more difficult for Dad”’ (Madden, 2008: 195). Andrew admits that Tony’s eagerness to confront the past had made him aware of why he kept avoiding it: ‘“Coming to terms with the idea that he was murdered was one thing. That he killed people, innocent people, is something else entirely. I still don’t know how I’d explain that to Tony”’ (Madden, 2008: 197). Billy’s legacy is a complex one: he is victim, perpetrator, and family, and his death triggers aftershocks down the generations. Aware, like Cate in One by One, that memorials ‘have more to do with the living than with the dead’ (Madden, 2008: 197), Andrew works on a television series on the topic. Having first been the object of a documentary on terrorism and disliking its musical soundtrack, he is ‘aware of the sensitivities of trying to present other people’s realities in a way that [he] wouldn’t otherwise have understood’ (Madden, 2008: 199). Like Theresa in Hidden Symptoms, Andrew notices the ‘“discrepancy there is between the undeniable beauty of the memorial itself and the ugliness, the terrible violence of the deaths they record: acts of war, acts of the utmost inhumanity”’ (Madden, 2008: 162). Ultimately, he says to the camera at a

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World War II memorial in Paris, ‘“This is not a place you see. This is a place you experience”’ (Madden, 2008: 163), though one wonders whether the camera risks flattening the embodied experience that engages the senses, affects, and intellect. Noticing that he has ‘changed his tune’ (Madden, 2008: 164), the narrator reports his closing remarks: ‘“One of the most difficult things of all … was to stand outside our own time, to see the society in which we lived with a similar distance and detachment. Even to attempt to do it brought great insight”’ (Madden, 2008: 164–5). Though sensing ‘a kind of unease, as if he himself was not fully convinced of the arguments he was making’ (Madden, 2008: 165), the narrator detects ‘an enormous sympathy in his presentation … that tempered the scholarly and subtly emphasised the deep humanity of the subject’ (Madden, 2008: 160). The response he subliminally calls for from his viewers is therefore conveyed not only by his words, but by his example, which blends knowledge of, and sympathy for, his theme with intimacy with his viewers. In an ‘age of doubt and reason’ (Madden, 2008: 164), his trajectory shows that detachment may lead away from life rather than into it, and insight into ‘our own time’ (Madden, 2008: 164–5) requires the ability to put it in perspective while engaging with its particularity. By allying experiential and reflective knowledge, Andrew can finally mourn Billy, brother, victim, and perpetrator, while connecting to his son, his viewers, and himself. ‘Integration’ of loss into life and the development of ‘some kind of moral knowledge’ (Madden, 2008: 205) are presented in the novel as the desirable outcomes of mourning. Echoing the verb Andrew had used to describe ‘how Billy’s death [had become] integrated into [his] life’ after the Paris bomb (Madden, 2008: 192), the narrator notes that ‘[a]ll the tribulations he had been through … had not embittered him’; instead, he had developed ‘some kind of moral knowledge’ and ‘had successfully integrated these shocks and disappointments not just into his life but into his self, his sense of who he was’ (Madden, 2008: 205). Similarly, when recalling Molly Fox’s performance in The Duchess of Malfi, the narrator ponders the comment of an unknown visitor about ‘how something so artificial could also be so moving and true’ (Madden, 2008: 212) and describes the audience’s response in terms that involve a personal engagement with the play: ‘Each of them was making their own

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private connection with the work, each bringing their own experiences and emotions to bear upon the play, to interpret it and integrate it into their imaginative mind’ (Madden, 2008: 213). This is possibly what Madden expects of us when she calls for ‘a criticism that is also instinctive and imaginative’ (Madden, 2001: 32), and it indicates how literature may contribute to expanding our consciousness. In Hidden Symptoms and One by One, both written during the Troubles, Deirdre Madden uses fiction publicly to voice and prompt her readers’ engagement with the predicaments of the Catholic victims of sectarian violence who feel misrepresented and unacknowledged by political, legal, and journalistic discourses. In Molly Fox’s Birthday, written after the Good Friday Agreement, she faces us with the ethical challenge of acknowledging kinship with perpetrators of sectarian violence. In the process, Madden’s characters and readers are made aware of the power and the limits of the imagination: if Theresa is alert to the potential misuses of art, Helen suggests the need for literature to engage with the complexity of human experience overlooked by other media, and, after watching The Duchess of Malfi, the narrator of Molly Fox’s Birthday realises ‘that so much social interchange is inherently false, and real communication can only be achieved in ways that seem strange and artificial’ (Madden, 2008: 214); in turn, Andrew’s trajectory testifies to the limits of the imagination, yet shows both the need for processes of reparative remembering in a post-conflict environment engaged in a ‘continuing war over memory’ (Dawson, 2007: 84), and the emotional, imaginative, and ethical demands attending such processes, which involve ‘connecting and integrating traumatic histories, and engaging with the memory world of the other’ (Dawson, 2007: 77). The aesthetic experience afforded by Madden’s novels similarly relies on readers’ emotional and imaginative openness, assisted by our reflective and ethical resources, so that we may derive some insight, perhaps ‘some kind of moral knowledge’ (Madden, 2008: 98; 205) that may be integrated into our lives – the lives of those who have lived during the Troubles and of those who have not, including younger generations. In that sense, as suggested by Geraldine Higgins (Higgins, 1999: 143), Madden’s novels may be seen as textual enactments of the memorial envisaged by Cate: ‘knowing’ and ‘grieving’ for ‘every unique horror’ (Madden 1996: 181) inscribed

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on the walls, while pointing to the emotional opening on to the past and the future that may enable reparative remembering. If whatever impact texts may have on the world must happen ‘via the intercession of those who read them’ (Felski, 2008: 32), if aesthetic recognition ‘points back to the reader’s consciousness’ (Felski, 2008: 35) and ‘crystallizes an awareness of forming part of a broader community’ (Felski, 2008: 33), Madden’s novels, like her lecture in Québec in 2001, point back to us, her readers, calling for our affective and ethical engagement.

Notes 1 For further elaboration on the role of suspicion in literary criticism, see Felski (2015). 2 As Parker observes, this Big Brother surveillance is akin to that of Northern Ireland during the Troubles (Parker, 2000: 90, n. 29).

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9 Looking at animals and objects in Deirdre Madden’s children’s books and some adult fiction Julie Anne Stevens Deirdre Madden’s twenty-first-century children’s publications recall similar ventures into children’s literature by twentieth-century Irish writers of adult fiction, Edith Œnone Somerville and Elizabeth Bowen. Moreover, Madden’s comic stories include communicating animals, ghosts, and ‘portable property’ like paintings or jewels that call up the worlds of Somerville and Ross and Bowen.1 She shares their interests in art, humour, and childhood. Concentration on Big House living and animals’ consciousness in Snakes’ Elbows (2005), its later follow-up novel Jasper and the Green Marvel (2012), and Thanks for Telling Me, Emily (2007) may remind readers of selfconsciously artful colonial stories like Somerville’s illustrated children’s book, The Story of the Discontented Little Elephant (1912), or Bowen’s The Good Tiger (1965). Madden’s study of animals and objects in her children’s books reflects back on their use in some of her adult fiction and argues both for their vulnerability and their powerful significance in modern Ireland. What stands out especially when examining her work alongside the earlier writers is the dominance of one animal in particular from the feline family, either cat or tiger. Madden’s interest in childhood is not exclusive to her children’s books. She draws freely upon characters’ childhood memories in her adult fiction, and her 1992 novel set in Italy, Remembering Light and Stone, deliberates on the power of childhood memory. The recreation of a child’s world in the later children’s books would seem to continue such reconstructions. Certainly, reflections on childhood in the adult novel offer tantalising clues about the children’s books: comments on the significance of animals, for instance, or insidious hints regarding the secrets of childhood experience.

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Other works, including Time Present and Time Past, explore childhood memory; however, Remembering Light and Stone stands out because it directly anticipates Madden’s ventures into children’s literature. Examining this novel alongside her children’s fiction thus affords an opportunity to reflect upon Madden’s writing generally as well as on the nature of her children’s publications. However, while Madden’s books for young people may recall the artful worlds of earlier women writers, and while the parallels in her adult and children’s fiction may explain in part her move into children’s literature, her books for young readers must be examined by their own lights. The dynamics and the demands of writing for children are separate from those of writing for adults, and critical debate in this area concerns different questions as a result. Interpretations of children’s literature often revolve around issues regarding the assumed knowledge of an original childhood. Critics consider whether the representation of childhood is a construction or responds to some notion of a real child. Karín LesnikOberstein has argued that children’s literature criticism often bases itself on the need to ‘find … the good book for the child, through knowing both the child and the book’ (Lesnik-Oberstein, 2004: 20). Following in the wake of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature, Lesnik-Oberstein has stressed the discursive nature of childhood. She has directed attention to certain critics’ desire to discover in children’s stories a way of helping the child, as though the child were fixed and static rather than ever-changing in meaning. She contended that analyses of children’s books such as Bruno Bettelheim’s study, which asserts that fairy tales respond to children’s subconscious fears, assume that a defined or ‘real’ child exists. She claimed that this kind of analytical approach presupposes ‘uniform, stable meanings’. For such critics, she said, ‘children’s fiction exemplifies the processes whereby the child is defined as predictable and knowable –as definable – in order both to control the unconscious … and thereby also to stabilise the relationship between language and the world to create a world that is not interpreted as text but which is “real”’ (Lesnik-Oberstein, 2000: 227). As this chapter will show, Madden demonstrates a self-conscious interest in the ever-shifting nature of language and meaning when writing for children. As a result, her books indirectly reflect critical

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arguments regarding constructed notions of childhood. Her playfulness, ironic awareness, and tendency towards parody make her works evade any single concept about a child’s reality. At the same time, her compelling interest in visual discourse and perception in these books recalls the earlier arguments of children’s writer Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-known essay ‘Child’s Play’ (1881), Stevenson discussed children’s books in relation to ideas about perception, and his observations about the importance of a material reality in writing for children might be considered in relation to Madden’s use of objects and animals in her works. Madden’s interest in consciousness offers a further point of connection between her adult and her children’s fiction. It also links her writing to that of earlier Irish women writers, Edith Somerville and Elizabeth Bowen, whose interest in perception and the visual provoked their writing of children’s books. Although Madden’s children’s books are considered here in the context of children’s literary discourse, her treatment of consciousness allows for some observation that crosses over both to her adult fiction and the practice of Irish women writers who successfully moved from adult to children’s fiction. Some questions regarding the treatment of childhood in both adult and children’s fiction might thus be posed. In a lecture delivered in Québec about memory and childhood, Madden argued the pressing significance of the objects and places of childhood. She posited that ‘children are … particularly susceptible to the spirit of a place, its genius loci; are open to its reality in a way that becomes more difficult later in life, when received opinion and preconceived expectations can cloud one’s judgement’ (Madden, 2001: 27). She recalled a precious artefact from her own childhood, ‘a simple bottle of clear glass containing a light, pale oil’, that became ‘a potent object, charged with mystery’ (Madden, 2001: 26). This object that her mother had secured away in a drawer with other prized items acted as a kind of lightning rod that lit up in her mind all the other things that resided in that time and place of childhood. In her lecture, Madden claimed that for her ‘writing is a way not just of getting at something, but of getting back to something’. However, searching the past and seeking one’s childhood can be impossible: ‘sometimes you can’t get back’ (Madden, 2001: 30). At the same time, an object can hold the past, just like a clear glass

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bottle might contain precious oil. Referring to Marcel Proust’s Contre Saint-Beuve, Madden notes that the intellect does not serve to reach the past because ‘in reality, as soon as each hour of one’s life has died, it embodies itself in some material object, as do the souls of the dead in certain folk stories, and hides there’ (Madden, 2001: 32). Ten years earlier, in Remembering Light and Stone, Madden has her protagonist, a troubled thirty-year-old Irishwoman living in S. Giorgio, Umbria, Italy, warn against what she describes as the ‘easy nostalgia’ that can arise when remembering childhood: ‘You can’t hold on to the past, and if you try to do that, especially if you try to hold on to your childhood, you find that it goes anyway … you can’t hold on to your childhood’ (Madden, 1992: 103). Aisling, of course, has become immersed in memories of childhood, and the novel explores the power of vague and half-remembered emotions from the past. The text shows the need to confront a past childhood, even if you cannot secure or fix it. Madden’s subsequent children’s books concentrate on the material things that recall the past: churches, standing stones, pictures, Big Houses. Of course, children’s books give weight to concrete objects and often focus on detail. They exaggerate tactile experience, perhaps responding to what Robert Louis Stevenson believed to be children’s still undeveloped sense experience: ‘In the child’s world of dim sensation’, argued Stevenson, ‘play is all in all. “Making believe” is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character’ (Stevenson, 1946: 134). The child’s active interior life results from her or his less active exterior life. Stevenson’s attention to play, the way that a child might take up a stick and make it the centrepiece of a make-believe sword-fighting drama, stresses the child’s interiority and imagination. An intense inner world gives power to the simplest of objects. Moreover, children’s books allow these imaginary games to continue; they have ‘tools’ or objects that permit young people to enter the world of imagined experience and sensation. A book can be a kind of game, then, such as playing house or finding treasure. Indeed, Henry James described Stevenson’s Treasure Island as a kind of game on paper: ‘it is all as perfect as a well-played boy’s game’ (James, 1970: 168). Some of Stevenson’s contemporaries modelled their books on games. Lewis Carroll made his second Alice book, Through the Looking Glass, into a game of chess, for example.

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Snakes’ Elbows might also be seen as a kind of game, not treasure hunting or chess, but an Irish game about art robbery and arms dealing. Published in 2005, at the height of the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, the book describes the robbery of a valuable collection of paintings by an arms dealer called Jasper Jellit. Money lies at the heart of the novel, and even though Madden carefully eschews a specific setting, the situation around which the story revolves recalls the significant art theft of paintings from the Beit collection in Russborough House, County Wicklow, in 1986. Martin Cahill, ‘The General’, whose crime dealings linked him to Northern Irish paramilitary groups, successfully stole eighteen paintings from Ireland’s most valuable privately owned collection of portable property. The most expensive painting in this collection was Johannes Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, which at the time of the theft was priced at $150,000 per square inch.2 In Madden’s book, Jasper Jellit has made his money through buying and selling a wide range of arms to foreign countries. He successfully steals wealthy Barney Barrington’s paintings and lusts after one of them in particular, a painting of an angel that has been recently auctioned off by Big House owner, Mrs Haverford Snuffly. Like Martin Cahill, who spent much time in Mountjoy prison, Jasper is caught and jailed. The book’s illustrator, Tony Ross, includes numerous line drawings of money in the text, and a small stack of coins opens each chapter. The cover shows two men sitting atop towering piles of golden coins. Barney Barrington clasps a black-and-white cat in his arms. Barney, a retired concert pianist, has returned home to the small town of Woodford with his valuable collection of paintings. He adopts a ‘black cat with a white bib and socks and a white splodge over its nose’ that he names Dandelion (Madden, 2005: 144). When a homeless man called Wilf comes looking for work, he swiftly finds a comfortable home and in return transforms Barney’s life by providing delectable meals and friendship. By contrast, the local rich man Jaspar Jellit does not care about friends or animals. His two Alsatians, Bruiser and Cannibal, are the sorry recipients of his nasty moods, and they observe his shenanigans from as far a distance as possible. Jasper stockpiles arms and travels to foreign countries at war to sell his goods to both sides of the conflict so that destruction follows in his wake. He purchases the guns from an inventor called

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Mr Smith who has created a tiny bomb, ‘a bright red object the size of a pea’. When it explodes the word BOOM in red letters appears in the air instead of noise. ‘“Good, isn’t it?”’ says Smith, ‘“We’ve discovered the way to turn things you can hear into things you can see”’ (Madden, 2005: 108–9). The bomb expert’s synesthetic device might be considered one of the tools in the make-believe robbery game of the text. Other devices, such as fudge that makes someone disappear, also relate to the senses. Their operation suggests that the senses can be subverted. Hearing and tasting can become seeing. Similarly, Madden shows how people can use language in different ways and that sometimes words can be manipulated and are not always trustworthy. Animals’ names are not the ones they give themselves, for instance. Bruiser and Cannibal call themselves Rex and Snuggles, and by the end of the story they have been renamed Prince and Cuddles. Clearly, names do not stick in Madden’s book. A further instance of how unreliable words might be occurs when Jaspar Jellit, who has been carefully shown in the process of buying piles of guns, bombs, hand grenades, and machine guns, describes himself to the townsfolk as a ‘specialist in the area of material supplies concerning international conflict’ (Madden, 2005: 52). Words can be manipulated, and so can actual print. The local newspaper, The Woodford Trumpet, twists information by using newsprint in particular ways. It reports to the townspeople about wealthy Barney Barrington’s disappointingly plain living or Jasper Jellit’s much more interesting elaborate parties. But the newspaper’s typesetters place words in capital letters so that stress falls in particular places. When the text imitates the habit, it draws attention to the process of print: ‘I’ll drop the capitals from here on out if you don’t mind’, says the narrator, ‘I doubt if CAPITALS WILL HELP’ (Madden, 2005: 14). The Irish game of robbery and arms trade in Snakes’ Elbows has animals take leading roles. The black-and-white cat is kidnapped; the dogs discover and reveal the stolen paintings and the stockpiled armaments. Madden’s subsequent children’s books continue to give more presence to her thinking and acting animals than to their owners. Indeed, one could argue that Madden’s children’s books let her give free rein to animals that are usually well harnessed in adult writing. After all, contemporary children’s writing serves as the main vehicle for animal expression.

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When visual artist and writer Edith Somerville tried her hand at children’s picture books in the early twentieth century, she used humanised animals that recalled children’s writings by Rudyard Kipling and Randolph Caldecott in the way that the animals in both text and picture stood in for humans. The adult stories she was writing with Martin Ross (Violet Martin) at this time, The Irish R.M. series (1898–1915), included animals belonging to the hunting and shooting world of the Big House. But Somerville’s children’s book turned to more exotic animals. Her elephants in The Story of the Discontented Little Elephant wear spectacles and sleep in beds. However, they are portrayed in both Somerville’s pictures and her text in their natural habitat, the jungle where the tiger (who prefers his cave to a bed) reigns supreme. Somerville’s tiger is as fierce as that of the poet she admired, William Blake, whose ‘tyger tyger, burning bright’ resists capture: ‘What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’3 The ferocity of Blake’s tiger appears in Somerville’s tiger, who savages a young elephant by biting off and devouring its nose. He teaches the foolish little elephant to take greater care in the jungle’s wilds. Part of Edith Somerville’s training as a visual artist included visits to the zoo, where she sketched exotic animals such as camels, flamingos, and crocodiles.4 Her picture book about animals deliberately places them in the wild. This was not the case for Elizabeth Bowen when she turned to animals for her children’s book about a good tiger. She took the beast out of the jungle and put him in a zoo ‘in a little house of his own which was painted blue’ (Bowen, 1970: 1). He eats cake rather than flesh, befriends two children, and happily accepts their invitation to a tea party. But despite the tiger’s humanised characteristics, he discovers that he cannot manage the tea table. He upsets the cups and saucers and frightens the lady visitors. His awkwardness and disruptive presence are not helped by the fact that ‘he couldn’t talk people talk’, and so he cannot explain to the people he meets outside of the zoo that they need not fear him as he is a ‘good tiger’, as the children describe him (Bowen, 1970: 12, original emphasis). Of course, the reader knows the tiger’s thoughts and is privy to his dream about a forest where the sun shines hot, a place like the Indian jungle of Somerville’s book. The reader then understands that the pretty blue house in the zoo is not the tiger’s home. In fact,

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the modern-day tiger ranges homeless, unable to find a place in a new world. Bowen’s children’s book clearly tells us just as much about the changing world of Anglo-Ireland as it does about the tiger and urban life. However, I wish to stress the turn to animals in the children’s book, like that of Somerville, because it shows that looking at animals had special significance for these women writers. Animals attract the eye because they suggest a vanishing past. In an essay about the visual importance of animals that have been marginalised in the modern world, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, John Berger argues that ‘the zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals’ (Berger, 2001: 272). Framed in their cages like a series of paintings in an art gallery, they lounge about in fake natural settings, disappointing to children who are brought to view them because they are hard to discern, either lurking unseen or lying on the ground like bundles of discarded clothes. They are so much less than expected. ‘However you look at these animals’, says Berger, ‘even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize it’ (Berger, 2001: 271, original emphasis). I suggest that Bowen and Somerville, inheritors of an Anglo-Irish tradition that relied upon animals for both livelihood and sport, explore in their children’s books animals’ marginalisation. Somerville takes the zoo animal and places it in context, while Bowen takes the zoo animal and places it out of context. Deirdre Madden’s cats in her children’s books have left the wilderness far behind, but they also are invested with a wider significance. At first, however, they seem rather insignificant. For instance, although Madden notes at the end of her later children’s book, Thanks for Telling Me, Emily, that if she had a pet then she would own a ‘big tiger cat’, her fictional cats look quite different (Madden, 2007: 240). Dandelion in Snakes’ Elbows seems more in keeping with the domestic animals of Madden’s adult fiction than the tigers of Somerville and Bowen. She directly recalls a cat from the childhood of the character Aisling in Remembering Light and Stone. In this novel, Aisling’s memory of her pet is one of the few indications of the source of her troubled emotions regarding the past. Her brother gives her a tiny vulnerable kitten upon which she dotes:

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When I was six, I wanted a cat more than anything else in the whole world. I used to pray every night that God would send me a cat, and then one day, Jimmy came home from school with a kitten sitting in a box full of straw … I can still see that cat sitting in its box, as if it was yesterday. I can still see it struggling to its feet on the straw, and opening its pink, frail mouth. It was a female cat, so I called her Nora. She was a black cat with white socks and a white splodge on her face. I loved Nora so much, and I looked after her for years. And then when I was about twelve, my father killed her one night after he’d been drinking. The next day he said it was an accident, and my mother said Nora was an old cat, and maybe she had been going to die anyway, but I didn’t believe either of them. (Madden, 1992: 75–6)

Dandelion of Snakes’ Elbows looks just like Nora of Remembering Light and Stone. Of course, as Jasper Jellit discovers when he tries to kidnap Dandelion, black-and-white cats tend to look alike. Nonetheless, both animals are vulnerable, and although the cat from the children’s book escapes death, she is kidnapped and thrown into a cellar with the stolen pictures and the stockpiled guns. However, while the small cat in the children’s book by Madden seems more like the vulnerable kitten Nora than the jungle tiger of the other Irish women who wrote for children in the past, we might keep in mind that her diminution may reflect the author’s overall aim in this work. After all, Snakes’ Elbows turns the excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland into a children’s game, where things are simplified and greed is laid bare. It would seem fitting that the fierce beast of the past or the present-day Celtic Tiger should become in the children’s book a little thing called Dandelion. Just as the novel simplifies the greedy games of capitalism and war, so too it diminishes the raging beast whose name suggests such a possibility. The children’s books of Deirdre Madden give animals centre stage, and Tony Ross’s illustrations for two of these works emphasise their importance by featuring cartoon line drawings of animals throughout the texts. Cats, rats, dogs, bats, and a snake communicate through telepathy and unbeknownst to their owners. The thoughts of one animal enter the mind of another, but the barrier between animal and human consciousness is never pierced. Animals watch humans, and the dogs of Snakes’ Elbows endure (and eventually retaliate against) the absurd demands of their owner, Jasper Jellit. They are made to jump through flaming hoops at his circus

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party, or they are dressed as humans at his animal fête. Sometimes humans show awareness of animal thought. Barney Barrington, for instance, carefully reads out loud the newspaper report about his cat because ‘he knew the cat couldn’t read but he was too polite to say so’ (Madden, 2005: 49). Of course, Barney’s empathy for animals may be the result of his childlike nature. Despite his experience of the world, Barney has not mastered adult tasks and dislikes spinach and sprouts, just like a child. His preferred manner of carrying Dandelion is to insert her into his cardigan so that the cat might keep his ‘tummy’ warm. In Madden’s subsequent children’s book, Thanks for Telling Me, Emily, a pet shop in a small idyllic town called Gillnacurry allows for a wider range of animals to be introduced, including Noreen the snake, a parrot called Captain Cockle, and Bubbles, the Yorkshire terrier. A less likely pet-store animal, a large woolly sheep, has been called Nora, possibly after the cat from Remembering Light and Stone. The pet shop owner, Emily, treats the animals as conscious beings: ‘Some people thought Emily was a bit batty because she talked to animals, but she knew that animals understood her’ (Madden, 2007: 17). Mulvey, a cream and chocolate coloured Persian cat with eyes ‘as blue as sapphires and perfectly round’, is the story’s smartest animal (Madden, 2007: 32). His belly laugh and kindly treatment of his fellow animals, including Emily’s pet mice, mean that a kind of edenic harmony is enjoyed in the pet shop. But despite the kindness of the pet shop owner and the animals’ camaraderie, reality intervenes when nouveau riche Mrs Henrietta Fysshe-Pye arrives to purchase some pets as suitable decorative items for the nearby castle she has just acquired. Emily rarely sells her animals, as the inhabitants of Gillnacurry are quite happy with their own pets. But Fysshe-Pye is a new kind of fish and Emily finds herself completely unable to dissuade the castle’s greedy occupant. She sells her cat, dog, and parrot. The crass materialism of Jasper Jellit appears once again in the figure of Mrs Fysshe-Pye and, like him, she sees the animals as objects and slaves. The treatment of animals as merchandise, things that might be sold, mistreated, or kidnapped, in these children’s books exposes the impact of capitalist greed. It also shows that animals might be seen as objects. Although Madden’s stories for children avoid the butchering of animals described in Remembering Light and

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Stone, where a pig is killed and eaten by Aisling’s Italian friends, they reveal how animals can be at one and the same time conscious beings and prized or despised objects. The cat Mulvey’s sapphire blue eyes appear to awaken Fysshe-Pye’s greed, and the kidnapping of Dandelion in Snakes’ Elbows brings home the cat’s high value. Animals are portable property like paintings. In Remembering Light and Stone, one of Aisling’s few outbursts concentrates on animals and their vital importance to her. She tells her American boyfriend, Ted, that she had been surprised to see a young owl with predatory claws that indicate its wildness on the windowsill of her apartment in S. Giorgio: ‘The most sentimental person couldn’t have thought it was cute, for all its soft feathers and its littleness. I liked it for that, for its otherness, its pride’ (Madden, 1992: 75). The sighting of the owl seems to have opened a floodgate of emotion in Aisling, and she finds herself unable to stop talking about animals. She tells the American that what she likes is the fact that they remain outside of time: ‘I like the timelessness of nature, of animals’, she says. ‘If you see a seal, it looks as it would have looked had you seen it a hundred, a thousand years ago. I like the otherness, the completeness of animals.’ Animals suggest ‘beauty and mystery’, and she even likes to observe them in their cages in the zoo; she can look at them just as she can look at a painting: ‘The best thing of all is that they’re alive. They’re not like a painting, or a thing that’s been made’ (Madden, 1992: 75). Indeed, her longing for animals is such that she has decided that some day she will have her own animals, when she has left this apartment in Italy far behind. The animals that she would like are very specific: ‘a Persian cat and a cockatoo’ (Madden, 1992: 76). The Persian cat comes to life in Thanks for Telling Me, Emily. The cockatoo has been transformed into a parrot with multi-coloured feathers. The young owl of the adult novel also appears, even though it seems to have become ‘cute’ in the children’s book context. When the animals escape from Fysshe-Pye’s castle through magic, they find themselves atop a hill on the outskirts of Gillnacurry. It is midnight, and a large moon lights up their surroundings. Beside them is the ancient standing stone of Gilnacurry that has a hole in its centre: ‘it stood out black against the moon, with the exception of a small perfect circle in the middle of it, which was filled with silvery light’ (Madden, 2007: 111). And a small owl ‘that looked like

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a little heap of soft, creamy-coloured feathers’ appears and leads the pet-shop animals back home’ (Madden, 2007: 115). The exact same animals from Remembering Light and Stone – the young owl, the Persian cat, the exotic bird – are deliberately reintroduced into her children’s book and displayed against the moon shining through the hole in the stone so that the stone and light of the 1992 fiction are reproduced in the 2007 children’s text. Both books gain further depth when considered side by side. Before exploring further Madden’s deliberate re-use of adult material in her children’s books, I want to consider one final point about the aligning of pictures and animals in her writing. I am interested in the manner in which Madden looks at animals and gives them the same significance as certain objects. At the end of Remembering Light and Stone, for instance, Aisling has returned to her family home in Clare. She goes through her childhood treasures and decides not to discard the paper fan that a Japanese woman gave her when she was small (one further figure that reappears in the children’s books). She wanders off into the countryside and finds herself on an overgrown famine road, a Green Road. She has returned to something that connects her to the past, something that goes beyond her parents and herself to a space that embraces them all. She has finally come home, and as she walks along the Green Road she sees ‘a large cat, silent, angular, blinking, and [she] wondered what advantage there was for a cat to be on a Green Road, late on a summer night’ (Madden, 1992: 179). Well might Aisling wonder, because the cat seems to have no reason to appear in the book’s final scene except that like the ‘ancient place’ upon which the protagonist walks, the cat connects her to the larger past (Madden, 1992: 179). Animals serve as a vital link to a superordinate reality. Like pictures in their beauty they attract, but their mortality brings the viewer even closer to another dimension. As John Berger notes, Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal. An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox. This – maybe the first existential dualism – was reflected in the treatment of animals. They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed. (Berger 2001: 261, original emphasis)

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Madden’s animals are sacrificed at the altar of commerce in her children’s books. Like objects, they are portable and can be traded more swiftly than a house or land. They can be stored and even hidden with comparative ease. Previous women writers like Somerville and Bowen, who occupied Irish Big Houses, would have been very aware of the increased value of portable property as land became more vulnerable to nationalist claims throughout the twentieth century. Deirdre Madden concentrates on this sense of property in her children’s books. A painting of an angel with coloured wings or an emerald necklace are the focus of Jasper Jellit’s thievery in Snakes’ Elbows and Jasper and the Green Marvel. Animals are the means of trade, too, in Thanks for Telling Me, Emily. The books show the potent power of portable property. And this kind of property is significant not just for its monetary value or for its beauty, but for the added meaning of its materiality and its connection to something beyond the present place and time. But what of Madden’s deliberate re-introduction of earlier motifs from her adult fiction in her children’s books? Such self-referentiality may be part of the texts’ playfulness that is already evident in the display of how language and the senses are unfixed and might be manipulated. The novels are not just imaginary games but also show how text and language can shift. At times, in fact, the fun in Madden’s children’s books edges on parody. However, it is not always clear what the aim of some jokes might be, even if others are quite obvious. For example, the setting of Thanks for Telling Me, Emily includes the standing stone already mentioned, the ‘thousands and thousands of years’ old stone with a hole is called by everyone far and wide “the holey stone”’ (Madden, 2007: 9–10). Tony Ross’s accompanying pictures in both the text and on the cover of the book show the holey stone, and thus emphasise the linguistic pun while drawing attention to ideas of the sacred. However, Madden’s ironic sense becomes more elusive when the children’s books are examined alongside her adult fiction. I have noted that she transports some of her interests and obsessions from the adult to the children’s fiction. In so doing, the workings of these ideas are laid bare. For example, the various pictures and artists mentioned in Remembering Light and Stone sometimes become vehicles for the protagonist’s feelings. The frescoes in her Italian home by the Maestro di S. Giorgio include a depiction of someone

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vomiting a devil. Aisling’s internal torment caused by her own dark feelings becomes focused in the artwork and she sees herself in the image. In Snakes’ Elbows, lonely Barney Barrington also seeks solace in pictures. His paintings, however, have been stripped bare of titles or artists’ names; there is an angel with coloured wings, a salmon on a plate. The pictures cannot be sourced and are simple, beautiful things that attract viewers and cost much money. In a way they parody the paintings that populate Madden’s adult text. As already noted, other aspects of Madden’s novel about memory and childhood reappear in her children’s books. Aisling in Remembering Light and Stone recalls a Japanese woman she met as a child who startled her imagination and excited her curiosity about the world outside of her home in County Clare. In Snakes’ Elbows, Barney remembers a Japanese woman also, but in this book she actually appears at the end of the story – perhaps completing the circle that had been opened in Madden’s fiction so much earlier. And animals are important in the adult novel as well as the later material for children. As a result, the black-and-white cats of the adult and children’s fiction become invested with additional significance when looked at alongside each other. Of course, we could say that Madden is merely returning to pressing points of interest in both forms. Whether or not that is the case, the simplification and reduction of these leitmotifs in the children’s material make them into something new, while deconstructing facets of Madden’s creative impulse. I take my point here from Madden herself because she comments on a similar process in Remembering Light and Stone when Aisling, who takes various journeys across Italy to look at artwork, arrives at Florence. She finds the city strange in the way that tourism has marketed its great masterpieces. ‘It is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe’, she muses, ‘and you can buy there some of the ugliest things possible, like a plastic ashtray with a reproduction of a Botticelli on it, so that you can stub your cigarette out on Venus’s breasts’. The simple vulgarity of the tourist trinket seems aimed at parody. Aisling observes that ‘it becomes a work of art in itself, deconstructing the accepted canon’ (Madden, 1992: 35). Aisling’s passing thoughts in Florence give adult readers of Madden’s books for children some reason to suspect the author’s purpose when she puts adult things into the children’s material. Although Snakes’

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Elbows is not a tourist toy, it makes anew and even deconstructs central aspects of Madden’s creative world. Part of the play of the children’s fiction involves aspects of Madden’s writing itself. Deirdre Madden composes children’s books to continue her process of ‘getting back to something’ through writing. The works are central to her vision; indeed, examining them alongside earlier adult fiction lays bare key images that underlie the writer’s creative work. Moreover, studying the children’s books underscores the centrality of childhood in her oeuvre as well as in her reflections on memory. Above all, her children’s stories tell us that the simplest things and the most vulnerable animals – a stone, a kitten – contain powerful meaning.

Notes 1 Mr Wemmick in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations describes moveable valuables as portable property. He tells Pip, ‘my guiding-star always is, “Get hold of portable property”’ (Dickens, 1999: 157). 2 I am using Michael Hart’s title of his study of the Beit collection robbery of 1986, which he calls The Irish Game; he describes Vermeer’s painting as ‘one of the most valuable objects in the Irish state’ (Hart, 2005: 35). 3 William Blake, ‘The Tyger’, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Andrew Lincoln (ed.), plate 42. 4 Edith Œ. Somerville, 1882 Düsseldorf sketchbook, private collection, is discussed in my book, Two Irish Girls in Bohemia, which examines Somerville’s records of her art training in Düsseldorf and Paris from 1881 to 1915.

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Part III

Home and place

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10

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Nothing is Black: the early Celtic Tiger and Europe Jerry White

Reading Deirdre Madden’s 1994 novel Nothing is Black almost thirty years after it was published brings its cultural concerns into startlingly sharp focus. On one level, it is a story about what can and cannot be healed by family ties, female friendship, and romantic connection. In this way, it is very much of a piece with other Madden novels such as One by One in the Darkness, Authenticity, or Time Present and Time Past (all of which wrestle with how intimacy and kinship can either heal or fail to heal deeply seated traumas, whether of the emotional or cultural variety). Nothing is Black, though, is also a veritable primer in the transformation that Ireland was undergoing in the 1990s. In what follows, I want to discuss how Madden deals with the costs of Ireland’s new middle class, the slipping away of religion, the transformation of the Irish relationship to the rural, and Ireland’s links with Europe in ways which make it feel quasi-prophetic. The centrality of these four themes turns the novel into something of a blueprint of the cultural doldrums in the Celtic Tiger period. Evoking this far-seeing quality is not simply to read a novel from 1994 through twenty-first-century eyes. In a 2001 talk given at Université Laval (just outside of Québec City, Canada), Madden said that ‘I would argue in favour of a criticism that is also instinctive and imaginative, that attempts to approach any given work in the same spirit as the work itself’ (Madden, 2001: 32). My instincts tell me that Nothing is Black was written by someone sceptical about what Ireland was becoming, and that such scepticism becomes clearer in hindsight. It is a novel that showed what was changing, as well as what was being lost in those changes, and hinted at what parts of the European-led transformation of Irish culture could turn out to be for the best.

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Nothing is Black is a narrative about two very different visions of middle-class existence, both nearly unimaginable in the Ireland of the previous generation. The novel centres on two cousins, Claire and Nuala: the former an artist living in a rural isolation that she has chosen for herself, and the latter an inhabitant of the prosperous Dublin suburb of Monkstown, married to the owner of a chic restaurant. Madden is clearly, if implicitly, relying on the reader assuming that both professions – painter and restaurateur – sit somewhat awkwardly in Irish culture. That the figure of the painter recurs throughout Madden’s work is important, inasmuch as that figure is often in some kind of exile. In Authenticity, that means Europe; in Nothing is Black, it means Donegal. In both cases, Madden is presenting the artist’s vocation as a particularly lonely one, a calling that often entails moving far from the centre and leaving one’s home. But with Nothing is Black, she is also showing how the lives of her main characters are emblematic of the significant social and cultural shifts that were underway in Ireland. What Nuala and Claire evoke, much more so than Roderic in Authenticity, is the degree to which Ireland was becoming a society with a large, comfortable middle class, perhaps for the first time in its history. Madden’s description of the restaurant that Nuala runs with her husband, and especially the contributions that she has made to that operation, is the clearest example of this social shift. Early in the novel, Nuala recounts to Claire how she and her husband Kevin originally conceived of the restaurant: ‘Mind you’, Nuala had added, ‘it was my idea that we open an Irish restaurant. Kevin wanted it to be an Italian place, but I said no. Told him we wouldn’t last six months if we did that. Bacon and cabbage, colcannon, boxty, things like that I told him, but he thought I was being really cynical. “You mean a restaurant for tourists?” he said to me. “A good restaurant”, I said. I knew that if we offered the very best of Irish food, traditional dishes cooked to perfection, good bread, fish, beautifully served, that we would do well. “We’ll get everyone”, I said to him. “Tourists, locals, the lot.” And I was right, of course.’ (Madden, 1994: 33–4)

The most striking aspect of this recollection is the immediate association of distinctively Irish cuisine with tourism. Nuala clearly sees herself as combatting the idea that Ireland has no real culture of its

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own, that any invocation of Irish specificity is not only hopelessly touristic but ‘really cynical’. This would indeed have been a fairly mainstream opinion among the Irish middle class of the pre-Celtic Tiger period, which in the Republic was marked by a softening of cultural nationalism and an ongoing reliance on tourism in the face of frequent economic uncertainty. Irishness was very easily commodifiable in a way that precious little else was in the Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s. The changes brought about by the experience of the Celtic Tiger were not only that other aspects of national life became products for sale (housing, rural areas, and tax policy), but that with an increase in disposable income, local culture became consumable by locals, rather than just by tourists. Nuala’s dream for the restaurant may at first seem to have a soft-nationalist ring to it, but this aspect of the novel is more complex than that. Her business venture serves as a symbol of the way in which Ireland was, in the 1990s, being fully folded into a Western European consumer society, very much in the manner of France in the 1960s or Spain in the post-Franco period. Madden uses Nuala’s relationship with her husband Kevin as an embodiment of this emerging ‘New Ireland’; the tensions between the two of them evoke a new consumerist mindset that was emerging in Irish middle-class life. ‘Food was the only thing Kevin and Nuala had rows about’, Madden writes, ‘sometimes quite serious ones’ (Madden, 1994: 96). The seriousness of these fights, though, derives not so much from disagreements about the quality of the food, but about value for money: ‘When they came home from a meal where style had been more important than substance, Nuala would go straight to the fridge and get herself a hunk of bread and cheese, grumbling loudly. “What sort of idiots are we to pay money like that and end up coming home as hungry as we were when we left the house?”’ (Madden, 1994: 96–7). Nuala, then, is not simply invested in sentimentality about Irish cooking, but possessed of a distinctly practical view of what is going on around her. The changes in Ireland’s culinary landscape are noteworthy, not simply because they are more and more connected to foreign foods, but also because they seem to assume a new kind of opulence to pay for more than you receive – to indulge, in essence, in experience over consumables. That seems to be what Madden means when she invokes the spectre of style over substance.

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The fastidiousness about style, of course, has a literary manifestation as well. Nothing is Black is, like so much of Madden’s work, written in a traditional, straightforward novelistic voice, avoiding flights into the overly literary or formally excessive. Her novels, on the surface, appear to be embodiments of realism and provide generous helpings of narrative nourishment without too much fancy presentation. But this is deceptive, and the passage I just quoted is a fine instance of the author’s formal subtlety. The manner in which Madden moves inside and outside of her characters’ mental states (such as, in this case, that of Nuala), blurring the line between interiority and description, is more than simple narrative omniscience. It is an example of a writer trying to evoke large-scale problems through a focus on tiny details. The narrative omniscience slips every once in a while, the perfectly sewn novelistic garment, from time to time, gapes, and a glisten of the flesh of the characters’ interior lives becomes visible. This image derives from Roland Barthes’s well-known formulation in Le plaisir du texte: ‘Isn’t the most erotic place on a body where the garment gapes? … that place where the skin sparkles between the two pieces of clothing (the pants and the sweater), between two sides (the half-open skirt, the glove and the sleeve)’ (Barthes, 1973: 17). What this combination of highly disciplined, novelistic realism and occasional segues into other kinds of perspectives or verbal strategies recalls most strongly is the sensibilities embodied in James Joyce’s Dubliners. This collection is a key work of early modernism inasmuch as its classical sheen hides a deeper uncertainty, a textual instability that is a clear echo of the condition of a colonial metropolis in a state of transition, no small part of which is the consolidation of the Irish urban middle class, vividly evoked in stories such as ‘A Painful Case’, ‘A Mother’, and ‘The Dead’. Madden achieves similar effects in Nothing is Black. Her attention to traditional novelistic form is self-consciously on display throughout the novel via her linguistic precision and narrative efficiency, but from time to time the language slips into ambiguity. When that happens, it becomes harder to distinguish interior from exterior in her dialogues, and that evokes the degree to which old assumptions are beginning to give way. A fine example of this subtle break with realism comes in the novel’s last two pages, when Claire finds her mind wandering back to her days in Europe, her vocation as an artist, and ageing:

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She picked up the apple she had been drawing, and examined it as closely as she had examined the texture of the page which bore its image. The fruit had lost its lustre during the days she had kept it in the studio. The skin was puckered and shrunken; and the deep fragrant scent of the apple had diminished to an unpleasantly sweet smell, redolent of decay. What would she draw tomorrow? A loaf. Roses. More fruit. (Madden, 1994: 150–1)

This passage is important for our purposes here because of the way that it slowly, self-consciously zooms in on the physical properties of the object: its texture, its size, its smell. Then, suddenly, we have a shift of tense, a shift of subject, and a series of sentence fragments. If we were speaking in cinematic terms, we would describe this as a gentle long take followed by a sudden montage of short images. The break with realist clarity is not a sharp one but it is discernible, and it is moreover part of an ongoing strategy to evoke not just the subject matter of the characters’ interiority, but to give a glimpse of how they experience that inner life as well. Perhaps the most important assumption about Irish identity that Nothing is Black shows to be giving way has to do with religion, and that is, of course, quite connected to what the novel is dealing with in terms of its sense of the emergence of a new middle class. The most noticeable difference between Irish culture before and after the Celtic Tiger period has to do with the retreat of Catholicism, especially from the public sphere, and the emergence of a kind of tentative secularism, one that Madden indicates is gradually moving towards something more fully thought through. While some trappings of religion still remain in the Irish everyday (embodied by the fact that the national school system is largely controlled by the Catholic Church), there can be little doubt that Ireland has experienced a large-scale wave of secularisation that began in the late 1990s. Nothing is Black is not only a vivid documentation of that phenomenon from the relatively early vantage point of 1994, but it also precisely presents the broader social and cultural implications of that shift towards the secular, and what was being lost in the process. Just as the emergence of a new middle class is represented by the figure of Nuala, so too is the tentative secularism of Irish society personified by her cousin Claire. One of Claire’s ongoing sources of melancholy are memories of her German lover, Markus, whose

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ideas about culture and art preoccupy her, in no small part because she is re-evaluating her own career as a painter. Early in the novel, Claire reflects on sitting in a German café with Markus, talking about art: He said that sometimes he felt redundant as an artist, and that it was hard to be vilified, but harder still to be ignored. ‘People in Europe now aren’t interested in art because it has to do with death. It teaches you how to die, and people don’t want to know about that. In that way art is religious. There was always, until this century, a distinction between things which were true art, connected with religion, and things which had a social function, which were decorative or for entertainment. Now we have only two divisions: money and entertainment. What matters is making money, and then you rest from that by being entertained with what people like to think of as art.’ (Madden, 1994: 8–9)

To a certain extent, this passage sets up the problems addressed above, the emergence of an Irish middle class that is more concerned with consumption and leisure than the generation that had come before it. But it also evokes a deeper crisis that haunts all three of Madden’s female protagonists: the loss of a meta-narrative that will help them find their way in the world. Religion is the ultimate metanarrative, of course, but its slipping away here evokes the other crises of faith which define the novel: Claire’s in her artistic practice, her Dutch neighbour Anna’s in her family, Nuala’s in her identity as an autonomous individual able to find meaning in her life. None of these women is able to find the kind of meaning that Markus broadly characterises as religious; that is to say, as non-tangible or non-materialistic. Each of them has access to enough material comfort, as well as to entertainment or leisure. What they are missing are the things that cannot be measured in terms of either money or entertainment. This absence is not religion, exactly, although in Ireland, with its long linkage of national identity with Catholicism, religion makes for a decent approximation. What Madden has Markus describe is the slow emergence of a fully materialist way of seeing the world, one that had been part of Western European culture since the 1960s, but which was slower to take hold in Ireland. Indeed, until the 1990s, conservative Catholic thinkers all over the world saw Ireland as a holdout against materialism and decadence,

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a state of affairs that relied in no small part on the country’s widespread poverty, both in terms of individual income and national infrastructure. The Celtic Tiger signalled the end of that kind of poverty, and so it was no surprise that it heralded the demise of a spare and severe Catholicism as well. Nothing is Black is a chronicle of the end of une certaine idée of Irish culture, one that is unblinking in its portrayal of what was swept away when the Irish Church turned its attention to survival in a modern age. Madden evokes what was lost quite vividly midway through the novel, when Claire recalls the death of her art-school friend, Alice, whose atheism Claire saw as ‘not just a poorly thought-out reaction against authority, but a considered and deeply held position from which she would not be budged’. But she also remembers that one of her friends had told her that ‘[w]hat Alice believed was bleak and she felt the bleakness of it, every day, right up to the end’ (Madden, 1994: 62). Nothing is Black chronicles an Ireland where a sense of ‘the bleakness of it’ was becoming a larger and larger part of everyday life. But Madden shows how the unhinging of religion from daily existence means not only a failure to adhere to Catholicism as such, but a failure to adhere to anything. Alice is important as a memory for Claire, not only because of her atheism, but because of the committed quality of that atheism, its fully considered aspect and her willingness to accept the consequences of that commitment, ‘right up to the end’. Madden contrasts this vividly with Claire’s own sense of aimlessness, in what may be seen as the key passage of the novel: What this had challenged in Claire was the thoughtless faithlessness that she had drifted into when she was in school, and the full consequences of which she had never properly thought through. She couldn’t fully accept Alice’s view of things, but she wasn’t clear what a valid alternative might be. (Madden, 1994: 62)

Nothing is Black shows Ireland of the early 1990s to be a place epitomised by an inescapable and ultimately unconsidered drift into faithlessness, but not only in a religious sense. Faithlessness in the novel is an existential state marked not by a desire for that modernity, liberalisation, or pluralism that would characterise the optimistic visions of the Celtic Tiger period. This is a period that was not defined by a desire for anything.

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The condition described in the novel is very different from what is widely understood as secularism; Charles Taylor’s reflections on this subject are indispensable for a full understanding of the stakes of this concept. He takes pains to distinguish between ‘secularity’ and ‘absence of religion’. For him, the key concept is that of ‘profane time’, which modernity makes more and more difficult to consider simultaneous with ‘higher time’:1 Now the move to what I am calling secularity is obviously related to this radically purged time consciousness. It comes when associations are placed firmly and wholly in homogenous, profane time, whether or not higher time is negated altogether or other associations are still admitted to exist in it. Such is the case with the public sphere, and therein lies its new and (close to) unprecedented nature. (Taylor, 2004: 98)

For Taylor, this new approach to time is the sine qua non of a fully functioning public sphere, but the 1990s is not exactly noteworthy in Irish history for the emergence of such a sphere. What I would posit was missing was a widespread ability to acknowledge the possibility that, in Taylor’s formulation, higher time did not necessarily need to be negated in order for a new public sphere, a fully fledged modernity, to emerge. The receding of any concept of ‘higher time’ is a recurring issue throughout Nothing is Black. Madden’s vision is of an Ireland defined by an increasingly single-minded view of time as profane. Her 2001 talk provides ample evidence of Madden’s complex sense of the interplay between religion and modernity, and can very fruitfully be read as a companion to Nothing is Black, a sketch of ‘what a valid alternative might be’ (Madden, 1994: 62). She opened the Université Laval lecture by recalling how she thought it would be interesting to come to Québec, a place about which she knew nothing. But then her mother reminded her that when her father had been very ill, a bottle of Saint Anne’s oil had mysteriously arrived in the post from Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, just outside of Québec City. ‘Obviously one of her friends or a neighbour had arranged to have it sent to her’, she wrote, ‘but to this day she doesn’t know who it was’ (Madden, 2001: 26). Madden clearly regards the oil as significant for reasons that are connected to the Catholic tradition that she grew up with. But its meaning goes beyond these associations:

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I was used to the idea of holy water from places like Lourdes or Fatima, or Easter water from the midnight ceremonies, but this oil had been blessed and was new to me. It was a holy thing, and therefore it had that aura of power that pertains to such things … Yes, I remembered the oil very clearly as soon as my mother mentioned it, and remembered too that she had kept it for years after in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. In my mind’s eye, I can see it, but stranger still, I can see too all the other things that were there: the bottle of Chanel no. 5 my mother’s sister had brought her from America; the red box in which she kept her jewellery, glass beads and a crystal necklace, ropes of fake pearls; and the green box in which my father stored Victorian pennies that he would find in his change, some of them rubbed almost blank with use. (Madden, 2001: 26)

What we see here is the slow, tentative working out of what Claire in Nothing is Black cannot quite enunciate, a sense of mystery and the ineffable that embraces the memories of Catholicism that define so much of Irish culture but which are not limited to them. This is higher time, in Taylor’s sense, which, following his formulation, Madden does not at all seek to negate. But a great deal of her lecture is actually about what Taylor would call ‘profane time’, that is to say, the landscape of her childhood village in County Antrim, the very immediate conditions of her experience as a writer living between Ireland and the Continent (at the time she was resident in France), and her experience of reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys as well as Proust. Overall it leads her to conclude, echoing the Barthesian notion of a garment gaping to reveal something shimmering, that Artistic truth is to be found in the interface between time and place. The eternal lives in the ephemeral, in things that are passing away even as we apprehend them. Art is the finding and figuring forth of these things, one in the other. They are not at odds with each other. Only the imaginary is real. (Madden 2001: 33)

Nothing is Black is marked by the absence of these kinds of insights on the part of the characters. The landscape that they trip through, the memories that come rushing back to them, the sensual experiences that they have, trigger few of these kinds of responses. The book is full of genuinely lyrical descriptions of Claire’s relationship to colour that are entirely in keeping with her role as painter.

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The poetry of the narrative voice’s descriptions feels revelatory in the manner of Madden’s Université Laval talk. But it is the narrator’s voice that is poetic, open to the revelation of the eternal in the ephemeral. It is not the characters that figure forth such complexity. In the novel’s first pages we read the following meditation on the landscape of Donegal, where the book is set: Because of the wind coming in off the Atlantic, it was never static. Claire liked that about it, and she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone. The road ran high along the coast, overlooking headlands and small pale beaches. After a certain point it veered right and ran through a stretch of bogland, past cut stacked turf. The grass was grey there, not green, grey against the rich dark brown of the cut earth. The grass looked dry, the peat was a moist brown. (Madden, 1994: 3–4)

This kind of detail, the mixing of eternal landscapes, like oceans and headlands, with the ancient reality of a bogland marked by the human activity that is turf cutting, nicely exemplifies Madden’s sense of ‘finding and figuring forth of these things, one in the other’. But it is the narrator that voices this, not Claire. Later, the novel describes Claire’s devotion to painting; while it starts by evoking her love for the medium and her faith in it, it winds up comparing it with her father’s relationship with Catholicism. Claire recalls asking her father, ‘What would you do if somebody proved to you that there’s no God? I mean, beyond any doubt?’ The response she remembers is as follows: ‘“Ah, it wouldn’t make much odds”, he replied mildly. “I wouldn’t let it keep me from Mass of a Sunday, whatever else.” Claire’s own dedication to painting was something on the order of this reasoning’ (Madden, 1994: 59). What she evokes here is empty ritual, both at church and in the artist’s studio, beliefs born of habit and attachment as opposed to deep connection: religious and artistic practice in the absence of anything that transcends them. It is a bleak vision of the state of Irish cultural life at the beginning of the period in which everything was supposedly opening up and when the country finally seemed to be entering the brave new world of secular modernity. But as Taylor points out, this is not really secularism at all, and moreover it is not really even modernity: ‘Modernity is secular, not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates

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the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action takes place in profane time’ (Taylor, 2004: 194). In her Université Laval lecture, Madden searches for that newly different place and for a fresh understanding of the relationship between social and spiritual action, between profane and higher time. Her quest comes into sharp focus against the background of the characters she creates in Nothing is Black, whom she is very clear are wandering carelessly towards secularism without really understanding where they are headed or why. Something similar is true of the way that Madden evokes the changing Irish connection to rural life. The novel is set entirely in rural County Donegal where Claire has moved as part of her quest for artistic purity. Her cousin Nuala comes to visit in order to stave off the alienation of middle-class suburbia, and Claire’s Dutch neighbour, Anna, has bought a house she meant to be a summer retreat but which slowly morphs into an escape from her troubled family life in The Hague. Indeed, the drift that we see in Nuala’s relationship with the middle class and Claire’s relationship with Catholicism is just as visible in Anna’s relationship with rural Irish life. Madden seems to present Anna as having a contradictory view of Donegal and its cultural complexity. But what binds it all together is a feeling of emptiness, quite similar, finally, to the sense Claire’s father had of Mass on a Sunday. ‘She had no idea what part of the country that was’, Madden writes of Anna’s first arrival there, ‘for until then, Ireland was a place to which she had given no thought. She was glad that it was, for her, a neutral place’ (Madden, 1994: 69). But as she grows closer and closer to Nuala, Anna’s relationship with Donegal starts to come into sharper focus: ‘Anna was beginning to develop an Irish accent, Nuala noted with mild irritation. Her own culture must have been pretty bland to slough it off like that and effortlessly absorb another’ (Madden, 1994: 122). This leads Nuala to reflect melancholically on how she could never love the place like Anna, and that like her Donegal-born mother she was bored by it. What she fails to see, and what the text makes implicit, is that Anna’s relationship with the place is just as marked by loss and lack, Irish accent or no. Madden had already made that viscerally clear when earlier in the novel she explained Anna’s

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relationship with her estranged daughter, who had never forgiven her for divorcing her philandering husband. Before Nuala makes her unspoken, snarky assessment, Madden had Anna silently recall how she had tried to go to her daughter’s apartment, only to be left forlorn, vainly ringing the doorbell, with the awareness that her daughter is obviously refusing to acknowledge her. She imagines ‘her daughter standing in a warm hallway, looking at the image of her mother’s face on the tiny grey screen, listening to her tearful, pleading voice, but not yielding, making no reply, showing her no mercy’ (Madden, 1994: 74–5). And then suddenly, almost jerkily, she shifts gears, writing in the very next sentence, ‘Once Rita had asked her what she liked most about Donegal, and Anna, remembering that evening, had replied, “I like the way everyone leaves the key of their house sticking in the front door”’ (Madden, 1994: 75). Thus Anna’s connection to Irish culture has nothing to do with its blandness. Indeed, it has little to do with Irish culture as such. Ironically, this is what makes Anna very Irish indeed. Luke Gibbons has offered a strong critique of the idée reçue that Irish culture has been dominated by a rural sensibility and that as a result it was unable to develop a proper urban culture. He writes that such a conception ‘ignores the extent to which idealizations of rural existence, the longing for community and primitive simplicity, are the products of an urban sensibility, and are cultural fictions imposed on the lives of those they purport to represent’ (Gibbons 1996: 85, original emphasis). Gibbons’s statement is a very precise evocation of the longing that Anna seeks to fulfil in Donegal, a longing that had driven her out of the globalised European capital of The Hague. Nuala has recourse to Donegal due to the alienation of middle-class life in the suburbs of Dublin, but the conclusion she finally comes to is that there is nothing in the west that can help her find what has been missing in her sense of self. Claire comes to the west to try to ‘find herself’ as well, that is to say, to try to find some focus as a painter. But Madden makes it clear that her identity as a painter came into sharpest focus as she wandered major European capitals after art college, an experience that provided a now-lost sense of clarity. The understanding of both Gibbons and Madden of the urban nature of rural imagery is strongly influenced by Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City. In this study, Williams describes how

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bright young Georgian poets took refuge in the country: ‘Such men came to the country; that is the critical point. Their nerves were already strained, minds already formed … They had brought with them from the cities, and from the schools and universities, a version of rural history which was now extraordinarily amalgamated with a distantly translated literary interpretation’ (Williams, 1973: 256, original emphasis). One way of describing the broad contours of Madden’s narrative is that it is a story about how her three central protagonists came to the country, their nerves strained and minds formed not by literary interpretations but by psychological ones, by the emotional impossibility of processing the loss of familial intimacy, of a larger purpose in life, of a transcendent connection with art. For Madden, the changes sweeping Ireland only reinforced the degree to which the edges of the country always faded into the background. One issue that Nothing is Black brings to the fore, much in the manner of The Country and the City, is the degree to which the older ‘ways of seeing’, older manners of thinking about or representing rural areas, almost always had roots in an urban sensibility. The issues discussed so far are all fairly explicit in the novel. What is left largely unspoken but nevertheless clearly of vital import is Ireland’s changing relationship with Europe. Madden wrote this novel at a time when signs of the European Union (EU), with their unmissable blue and gold flag with stars, were beginning to appear all over Ireland, advertising the rising support the country was receiving from Brussels, especially from EU Structural Funds. Such support was having a transformative effect on Irish life, and not just because it was getting easier to patch the financing together to fix a bridge or widen a road. The larger purposes of these subventions, as with all EU funding, is greater ‘cohesion’, a term that is infamously hard to define. Nothing is Black is, in part, a meditation on what such cohesion might look like. Anna is the most obvious symbol of this ideal, a Dutch woman who has an easy enough time settling in Donegal after she buys a house there; everyone seems to see her as not quite Irish but also not entirely foreign, and as such she embodies the reality of EU-empowered freedom of movement. Indeed, Madden notes that Anna had bought her cottage from a German family; there seems to be no shortage of Western Europeans in this area of Donegal.

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Part of what is being evoked by these not-quite-foreigners is clearly the degree to which the Irish countryside was becoming more and more dominated by the tourist industry, with the city migrants discussed above replaced in some part by mobility-empowered, cohesion-seeking Western Europeans (many of whom, like Anna, are also urban dwellers). No doubt an increase in tourism is not simply synonymous with opening up to Europe, but the kind of tourism that is being evoked here is of a very different kind than what had built earlier iterations of Ireland’s industry. Anna embodies this new experience of travelling, being someone who is neither in Donegal simply for a holiday nor really there as an immigrant. This kind of ‘in-between-ness’, while certainly not unprecedented, was something new in Irish culture as a mass experience, as a phenomenon widespread enough to affect real-estate prices. Madden makes the ‘in-between’ quality of this kind of migration even clearer by depicting Anna as a passionate student of Irish history, someone who seems determined to integrate, even though she never quite manages to do it. In addition to the above-mentioned discussion of her accent, Nuala marvels to her husband Kevin about how much more Anna knows than her about Irish history; early in the novel, Anna laments the poor standards of building in this area of Donegal: ‘“I tell you Claire, it is a national disgrace”’ (Madden, 1994: 29). These attitudes towards history and education are not typically touristic; crucially, though, Madden shows that they are also not typically Irish. Nuala and Claire, the text indicates, notice in Anna a kind of zeal of the converted, that is not so far from being a definition of the ‘cohesion’ that Madden might be looking for in the European project: a new sense of belonging to a place, one that is not entirely inborn and also brings new kinds of energy. The concept of Europe in the 1990s seemed to be about fresh ways of understanding the connection between identity, history, internationalism, and daily life. This may seem a long way from the present-day discussions around the EU and its future, which are too often bogged down by arguments about bureaucracy. But the concept of ‘Unity in Diversity’, which is the Union’s motto, is a good way of looking at the kind of tension that we see just on the edge of Nothing is Black, without its characters quite being able to enunciate them. They can see cohesion coming, but all the present-tense talk is about real estate, small businesses, and the gallery market.

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Family life; shifting gender roles within marriages; lost lovers with whom a continental history of religious art could be discovered: in Nothing is Black, all that is a matter of the past tense. That is to say, those aspects of Irish life undergoing such obviously modernityinflected, and thus European-inflected transformation, are present in the novel as a matter of the characters’ imaginings of their own past. What was missing from the Irish experience at the dawn of the Celtic Tiger was an ability to speak about, to come to terms with, struggles that were not purely materialistic: struggles around what to do with a newfound prosperity, what could fill the very real hole left by the falling away of religious commitment, whether these needs could be met by a retreat from the cities, or whether they could be met by trying to feel closer to what was further away, closer to the European continent. These kinds of questions simply could not be answered, Madden shows us, through the language of materialism that was becoming the real lingua franca across Ireland. The answers to such questions could only come from acts of generous imagination: imagining one’s self to be connected to more than what was simply right before you, to more than restaurants, or careers, or rural idylls. Such pursuits were the beginning of the story of Ireland’s transformation, not the end. Nothing is Black is calling, finally, for a new and more accurate language for explaining the way that Irish people connect to each other and to the larger worlds they are part of. This was precisely the insight that Madden had so plainly explained to us in Québec: ‘Only the imaginary is real.’

Note 1 The concept of simultaneity is important for Taylor here, and he writes eloquently of his indebtedness to Benedict Anderson’s work in Imagined Communities (1983) on how national consciousness is made possible by a modernity-enabled concept of simultaneity (itself a result of the rise of print culture and mass media).

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Imaginaries of home in Deirdre Madden’s fiction Elke D’hoker

Early in Molly Fox’s Birthday, the narrator describes one of her plays as ‘a work that dealt with the nature of home, how it was often a state of the mind as much as a place’ (Madden, 2008: 57). The remark is clearly a metafictional one as it applies to the novel’s own exploration of the nature of home and its relation to notions of belonging and identity. In fact, the description could even be considered apt for Madden’s oeuvre as a whole, since the question of home is a central one in all of her novels. One need only look at their opening or closing scenes, from the image of the weather house that inaugurates Hidden Symptoms and the destruction of ‘the family home’ in the first paragraph of The Birds of the Innocent Wood to the evocations of Julia’s childhood home in the prologue and epilogue of Authenticity. In addition, ‘Home’ is the first word of One by One in the Darkness and it is the last word of Time Present and Time Past, while Remembering Light and Stone starts with ‘I don’t belong here’ (Madden, 1992: 1) and ends with Aisling’s decision to return home. In the course of these novels, home takes on many different forms and evokes a host of conflicted feelings in the characters. Yet, the question of home is an important one for all of them, as it is, one may presume, for their author. In contemporary critical thinking, too, the question of home has been debated and scrutinised across a variety of disciplines. ‘Is [home] a place, a space, feelings, practices and/or an active state of being in the world?’, Shelley Mallett asks in a survey essay on the topic, before concluding that home is, or can be, all of these things (Mallett, 2004: 65). Although popular usage sometimes conflates it with the house, she argues, home is in fact ‘a multidimensional concept or a multi-layered phenomenon’, which has been theorised in many different ways (Mallett, 2004:

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68). Mallett calls it is ‘a socio-spatial system’ (Mallett, 2004: 68); for Avtar Brah, it is ‘a lived experience of locality’ (Brah, 1996: 4); while Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling define it as ‘a spatial imaginary’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 2). What these definitions have in common is an understanding of home as both a place and our interactions in and with that place, including experiences, emotions, social relations, dreams, ideas, and ideologies. Blunt and Dowling summarise this interweaving of associations as follows: Home is much more than a house or the physical structure in which we dwell. Home is both a place or physical location and a set of feelings. … [H]ome is a relation between material and imaginative realms and processes, whereby the physical location and materiality, feelings and ideas, are bound together and influence each other, rather than separate and distinct. Moreover, home is a process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging. Home is lived as well as imagined. What home means and how it is materially manifest are continually created and re-created through everyday home-making practices, which are themselves tied to spatial imaginaries of home. (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 254, original emphasis)

In this chapter, I propose to take a closer look at the spatial imaginaries of home that can be found in Madden’s novels. What does ‘home’ mean for Madden’s characters? What are their experiences, memories, and dreams of home? Do the imaginaries of home change from one character and one novel to the next, or is there a certain view of home that is privileged throughout all the novels? Is there an evolution to be traced in the images of home the novels portray? These are some of the questions I hope to answer through a close reading of relevant passages from Madden’s novels. Hidden Symptoms opens with the following childhood memory of its main protagonist: When Theresa was small, she thought that the saddest thing she had ever seen was a Bavarian barometer with a little weather man and a little weather woman. It was so sad that always when Hans was out Heidi was in and vice versa: never together, always alone, so near, so far, so lonely. (Madden, 1986: 9)

Made to resemble Alpine farms, the Bavarian barometer or ‘weather house’ evoked here has all the trappings of an actual home. With

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its nicely carved wooden structure, curtained windows, flowers on the sills, and a light above the door, it is reminiscent of Heidegger’s iconic dwelling, a farmhouse in the Black Forest (Heidegger, 1996: 361), as well as of Bachelard’s oneiric house, a ‘refuge’ providing safety, shelter, and comfort (Bachelard, 1994: 37). Yet, to Theresa, the weather house signals only loneliness and triggers similar images of desolate homes: ‘the homes of lonely pensioners, and grim bedsitters where all the coathangers were made of wire, and the solitary soup-drinker might at any moment be plunged into darkness by an expiring meter’ (Madden, 1986: 10). These unhomely homes, places of darkness and loneliness, prefigure the closing image of the book, where Theresa, ‘shivering’, ‘crossed to the hearth, knelt down and tried to rekindle the dying fire’ (Madden, 1986: 142). If in the humanist tradition of Bachelard and Heidegger, the hearth too is seen as an iconic element of the home, in Hidden Symptoms it is again inverted to become an image of alienation.1 Between these two images of unhomely homes, the plot of the book unfolds and the reader quickly learns that, on one level at least, they symbolise Theresa’s family home which has been made unheimlich by the violent sectarian murder of Theresa’s twin brother. This blighted home is, of course, itself an image for the violence that haunts her home town and Northern Ireland in general. Moreover, Theresa reads the current violence as an eruption of tensions and inequalities long festering beneath a civilised veneer: ‘Ulster before 1969 had been sick but with hidden symptoms’ (Madden, 1986: 13). Or, like the Bavarian weather house, what appeared to be a place of prosperity, warmth, and happiness turns out to be unheimlich: lonely, cold, and utterly divided. At yet another level, however, Theresa’s bleak reading of the weather house also hints at a deeper, more existential, sense of loneliness that preoccupies her throughout Hidden Symptoms. This is a loneliness born of an awareness of the radical gulf between human beings, which makes ‘perfect’ unity or ‘total’ communion impossible. As her brother put it, ‘other people never understand fully and never love fully. Then they die’ (Madden, 1986: 54). Yet while Francis found consolation in his religious faith, his sister, even when she was with him in Rome, ‘had felt very lonely’ (Madden, 1986: 56). Later, in Belfast, her extensive reading ‘frequently confirmed her fear that loneliness was inescapable … only a tiny facet of one’s

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self was exposed and communicable to others, with the rest locked in ice, vast, submerged and impossible’ (Madden, 1986: 81–2). In short, if the unhomely homes of Hidden Symptoms are, on the one hand, evidence of the destruction of home by sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, they also represent, on the other hand, a more profound rejection of the possibility of home as a place of warmth, sharing, and shelter. Being-at-home is both contextually and existentially impossible in Hidden Symptoms. In spite of this, Theresa is very much aware that she has a home, both in the sense of the house she lives in with her mother, and in the sense of the city, or more precisely neighbourhood, to which she belongs. The close connection the novel thus installs between home, identity, and belonging is a familiar one in the traditional poetics of home. As Blunt and Dowling put it, ‘home as a spatial imaginary helps to constitute identity, whereby people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 256). Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes argue similarly: ‘identity politics and the politics of location are intimately linked’ (Wiley and Barnes, 1996: xvii). In Hidden Symptoms, however, also this aspect of home is felt to be largely negative. It is evoked primarily through Theresa’s friend, Robert, who wishes to escape his West Belfast working-class home and identity by making himself anew: he rejects religion, denounces Republican ideologies, and carefully fashions his identity as an intellectual, who remains aloof from sectarian conflict. His flat near Queen’s University reflects this self-fashioning: ‘The room screamed of the persona he had created for himself: short of whitewashing the walls and writing I AM AN INTELLECTUAL in large red letters, it could not have been made to “say” more’ (Madden, 1986: 25). Yet, his Falls Road home and family bonds literally pull him back several times during the novel. Moreover, Theresa vehemently punctures his hopes of escaping the identity he was born into: Just tell me this: if you were found in the morning with a bullet in your head, what do you think the papers would call you? An agnostic? No, Robert, nobody, not even you, is naive enough to think that. Of course you don’t believe: but there’s a big difference between faith and tribal loyalty, and if you think that you can escape tribal loyalty in Belfast today you’re betraying your people and fooling yourself. (Madden, 1986: 46)

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In his desire to make himself anew, Robert prefigures Andrew in Molly Fox’s Birthday, whom the narrator calls ‘the most patently and successfully self-constructed person I have ever met’ (Madden, 2008: 38). Yet, in spite of his ostensibly triumphant makeover, Andrew turns out to have spent many years trying to come to terms with a repressed aspect of his identity: his family home in Protestant Belfast and his Loyalist brother murdered in a paramilitary feud. Several other characters in Madden’s novels will similarly find out that the identity conferred by one’s childhood home is difficult – if not impossible – to leave behind. Theresa also prefigures subsequent Madden protagonists in her self-conscious loneliness and austerity. The first of these is Jane in The Birds of the Innocent Wood, who is not only spiritually and emotionally homeless like Theresa, but also actually homeless after ‘a fire … completely destroyed their family home’ (Madden, 1988: 1). The first chapter of the novel evokes the lasting effects of this traumatic experience on Jane. The absence of a loving home leaves her unhappy and lonely, but also ‘cold’ and ‘self-contained’, as she finds it difficult to connect to people (Madden, 1988: 31). Still, subsequent chapters show her attempting to make a home with her husband, James, on his family farm in the Northern Irish countryside. The process is shown to be a difficult one: she feels an outsider in the local community, has to learn to live with the constant presence of her father-in-law and the farmhand, struggles to find true communion with her husband, and has to cope with the trauma of a still-born child. When these struggles finally seem to find a resolution in the birth of two healthy twin girls, the novel leaves Jane’s perspective, and the narrative is only taken up again, from the point of view of her two daughters, after Jane’s death. As a result, the family home Jane managed to create against all odds remains a hole in the centre in the novel, evoked only in a brief memory of family happiness on the part of Catherine. If the happy childhood home is present only through its absence, literally so for Jane and in narrative terms for her daughters, other spatial and temporal aspects of the home are explored in greater detail in the novel. First, there is the spatial association of home with the land. For Sarah, ‘home’ is ‘the lough’, ‘the desolate sound of the wild birds’, and ‘the great sense of space given by the wide sky and the flatness of the land’. Contemplating this vista, she thinks,

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‘If you have been born here you can never belong elsewhere. If you have been born elsewhere, you can never belong here. Sarah knows that she is trapped’ (Madden, 1988: 22). This land is also home by virtue of its temporal dimension: it is Sarah’s ancestral homestead, the place where her family has lived for many generations. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Sarah and Catherine are also ‘trapped’ by this aspect of home, since the sins of the father are shown to blight the lives of subsequent generations. In true gothic tradition, the extra-marital affair of their grandfather and the illegitimate child born from it turn out to be responsible for the suicide of two people as well as for the unspoken tensions between Jane and James and, later, between Sarah and Catherine. Hence, the ancestral dimension of home, as a place that confers roots and identity by virtue of its temporal reach, also receives a negative reading in The Birds of the Innocent Wood. Like the connection to the land, it grounds but also constricts the lives of the daughters, and any attempt to escape is in vain. As we have seen, the notions of home evoked, mostly in negative terms, in these first two novels can be situated on different levels: house, family, neighbourhood, city, and land. Cultural geographers refer to this as the ‘multi-scalar’ dimension of home (Marston, 2000: 229): ‘Home places can be a suburb, neighbourhood, nation, or indeed the world’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 29). Mallett uses the image of ‘concentric circles’ to describe this: ‘These circles represent an aspect of existential experience that include, house, village, or town, family, social environment, professional environment, the nation, civic society, the civilization and the world’ (Mallett, 2004: 83). To the different scales of home evoked in Hidden Symptoms and The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone adds yet another level: that of home as country or motherland. With it, comes the question of how that sense of national identity is renegotiated when one lives abroad: I had found out more about my own country, simply by not being in it. The contrast with Italy was a help, but in many ways I felt I could have gone anywhere, so long as it was far away and provided me with privacy, so that I could forget all about home for a while, forget all about Ireland, and then remember it, undisturbed. (Madden, 1992: 2)

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Aisling, the protagonist and first-person narrator of Remembering Light and Stone, has made good Sarah’s dream of escaping the family home. Leaving behind the constricting ‘homogeneous’ nature of her life in Ireland, as well as her authoritarian father (Madden, 1992: 37), she has made a life for herself first in Paris, and subsequently in a small town in Umbria. Although Aisling predominantly tells of her life in these places, her narrative itself is framed by her return home. In the opening scenes of the novel, she is in Rome with her lover Ted, in advance of their flight to Dublin, thinking ‘I don’t belong here’ (Madden, 1992: 1); in the final few pages of the novel, she is back in Ireland and decides to come ‘home’ for good. Since Aisling’s life in Italy is thus enclosed within a narrative of homecoming, the novel seems to invite being read as a plea for a return to one’s roots as a cure for all feelings of alienation, unhappiness, or loneliness. Or, as Aisling’s Italian doctor puts it when she consults him about feelings of depression early on in her stay in Italy: ‘È la nostalgia’, he said, picking up his pen. ‘Homesickness.’ The best thing to do, he said, would be for me to go back home to where I came from, back home to my mamma. I told him she was dead. He frowned, but went on writing and said that I should probably go back anyway. I could see he thought that I was being unreasonable. If I went away from my own home, what could I expect, only unhappiness and loneliness? (Madden, 1992: 68)

Aisling dismisses the idea, as she sees her childhood home as precisely the source of loneliness and unhappiness from which she tried to escape by ‘going south’: ‘I couldn’t be cured either by being close to what had hurt me in the first place’ (Madden, 1992: 68). Moreover, the novel as a whole questions the doctor’s conservative equation of home with identity, stability, and happiness in other ways as well. First, Aisling’s uprooted life in Italy is juxtaposed with that of her Italian friend, Franca, who is in every way her opposite. Living in the same town her family has lived in for generations, she has a happy home with her husband, her daughter, and her mother-in-law, and is firmly embedded in the communal network of the town. To Aisling, this conventionality is faintly ridiculous – ‘Why bother to live your life when you can let not just your parents, but the whole of society live it for you?’ (Madden, 1992: 116), she wonders sarcastically – and she likens Franca to ‘a great big tabby

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cat, living on pure instinct’ (Madden, 1992: 47). However, Franca’s rooted, domestic life does not insulate her against loneliness and despair, and eventually she commits suicide, thus enacting the fateful image that has haunted Aisling throughout the novel. Second, far from simply opposing Franca’s conventional family home to Aisling’s feelings of loneliness, the novel evokes at length Aisling’s quite successful attempts at homemaking in Italy. Her flat, her work, and her friendship with Franca secure her a place in the community of S. Giorgio, which she calls ‘my’, and subsequently, ‘our’ village (Madden, 1992: 10, 11), while her relationship with Ted brings her profound personal happiness as well. The home she makes for herself is different from that of Franca – it is the ‘solitary’ home of a ‘real lone wolf’ (Madden, 1992: 15), as she calls herself, but it is a home, nevertheless: ‘I fitted in well in S. Giorgio – eventually, and as well as I would ever fit in anywhere’ (Madden, 1992: 14). After her visit to the United States with Ted, she contemplates the sunlit square from her bedroom window: ‘I always thought Italy was a lovely country to come back to. I was happy to be home’ (Madden, 1992: 162). In short, by juxtaposing these two very different realisations of home in the lives of Aisling and Franca, the novel challenges the traditional reading of home as ‘a source of belonging, identity and security’ (Massey, 1996: 170), which is suggested by the plot of return. Instead, we observe these two women in the process of making the home that suits them, through daily social and spatial interactions. The brief paragraphs describing Aisling’s visit to her home village at the end of the novel suggest that that process of homemaking is also one she will have to take up again upon her return. She spends the week ‘on [her] own’, ‘tidying and cleaning’, walking along the beach (Madden, 1992: 177–8); she does not revel in happy memories, but ‘[throws] a lot of things away, mainly clothes and old letters and papers’, and in the village shop she feels ‘siz[ed] up’ and ‘judged for having been away when [her] mother died’ (Madden, 1992: 177). In many ways, these paragraphs suggest, the home she will make for herself in Ireland will resemble that in Italy, except for the relative closeness of her brother in Dublin and the connection with her heritage in the land around her. Moving beyond the confines of this novel, one could speculate that Aisling’s life in Ireland would probably resemble that of Claire

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in Nothing is Black. Like Aisling, Claire has returned to the land, if not the house, of her ancestors after some years spent on the Continent. And like Aisling (and many other Madden protagonists), she is a solitary, self-contained woman, who rejects the idea of marriage and family in favour of a dedication to her art. The bleak magnificence of the Atlantic coast where she lives suits her: ‘She would never live far from the sea again, its vastness a comfort, its anonymous ancient waves crashing over the detritus of centuries: broken ships, coins, bones, weapons. She would never have believed that it would be possible to feel so much at home’ (Madden, 1994: 113). Matching the bleakness of her surroundings with the austerity of her rented home, ‘a small, grey, stone house’ (Madden, 1994: 4), she refuses ‘to build a little domestic empire around herself’: ‘she’d never wanted a house, never even wanted to own things. Once they began to accumulate to any serious degree they made her feel nervous so that she had to get rid of them’ (Madden, 1994: 108). In another of Madden’s symmetrical structures, Claire’s radical rejection of the common material trappings of the home is juxtaposed to the craving for material possessions of her cousin Nuala. With her husband and child, Nuala lives the bourgeois life of an affluent Dubliner, enjoying expensive clothes and a home styled to perfection. She enjoys weekly shopping trips with her mother, but after the latter’s sudden death Nuala’s shopping takes on a compulsive edge: she buys ever more expensive items and, when these no longer satisfy her, she takes to stealing objects she does not really want. Through a reference to Giacometti, ‘shocked out of domesticity for ever by an early confrontation with death’ (Madden, 1994: 109), the novel makes clear that Nuala’s craving for material possessions is but a futile attempt to deny death: ‘In the face of certain annihilation, the clutter of domesticity was … a monstrous lie. Why pretend life is anything other than transitory? Why pretend you are anything other than utterly alone in your existence’ (Madden, 1994: 109). In this way, Nothing is Black questions yet another dimension of the traditional understanding of home. The commodified home, celebrated in women’s magazines, is exposed as a vain attempt to deny mortality: accumulating material possessions creates a false illusion of permanence, but also of shelter, safety, and security. Claire, on the contrary, has clearly followed Giacometti’s example: her austere, solitary existence is an attempt to stare mortality in the

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face. Although the novel seems to privilege Claire’s perspective – if only in terms of the share in the narrative meted out to her – there is understanding too for Nuala’s more conventional choices, ‘the lies were necessary, because to face the truth was just too damn hard’ (Madden, 1994: 109), as well as a warning that ‘you can be too pure, too high-minded … sometimes you have to compromise’ (Madden, 1994: 63). This juxtaposition of an artist’s austere home and a cluttered, bourgeois one will occur again in Authenticity, but first Madden returns to the Northern Irish homes of her first two novels in One by One in the Darkness: Home was a huge sky; it was flat fields of poor land fringed with hawthorn and alder. It was birds in flight; it was columns of midges like smoke in a summer dusk. It was grey water; it was a mad wind; it was a solid stone house where the silence was uncanny. Cate was going home. (Madden, 1996: 1)

With its references to the flat land, the birds, the sky, and the wind, the home evoked in this opening passage recalls that of Sarah and Catherine in The Birds of the Innocent Wood. If in that novel the girls’ childhood home remained a vacuum in the book, in One by One in the Darkness it dominates the narrative through the memories of the three Quinn daughters: Helen, Cate, and Sally. Still, already in this first passage, the word ‘uncanny’ alerts us to the unhomely dimension of their home: the silence in their home has been made unheimlich, threatening, and strange due to the sectarian killing of their father – a trauma that reverberates throughout the novel. Taking their cue from this opening passage, critics have read the novel as expressing the painful loss of home and a concomitant ‘intense nostalgia for a lost home, a lost past, a lost childhood’ (Kennedy-Andrews, 2003: 156). Indeed, Cate ‘had always thought of her childhood not principally in terms of time, but as a place to which she could always return. Now that was over’ (Madden, 1996: 143). Nevertheless, all three sisters continue to return to their intensely happy childhood by remembering family visits and outings as well as shared meals and ordinary conversations and habits: For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons. The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts:

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Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep, unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for its habitat. The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to define it. (Madden, 1996: 74–5)

This passage admirably captures Brah’s description of home ‘as the site of everyday lived experience’, where feelings of rootedness ensue from the mundane and the unexpected of daily practice. Home here connotes our networks of family, kin, friends, colleagues, and various other ‘significant others’. It signifies the psychic and social geography of space that is imagined in terms of a neighbourhood or a home town. That is, a community ‘imagined’ in most part through daily encounter. (Brah, 1996: 4)

Madden’s reference to feasts and celebrations, in particular, foregrounds this social dimension of home as in Doreen Massey’s claim that home is not ‘static’, but rather ‘formed out of a particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location’ (Massey, 1996: 168). Nevertheless, to Michael Parker, the description of home in the passage above is a false one: it is a nostalgic view, whose ‘sense of wholeness and holiness has been achieved only by conscious, willed acts of exclusion’ (Parker, 2000: 97) – exclusion, notably, of the injustices and violence of Northern Irish society. Yet I feel that this reading of the novel as a nostalgic celebration of a lost childhood, which may never have existed in the first place, fails to do justice to the positive dimension home continues to have for the Quinn girls, in spite of the loss it also represents. Especially when compared to the evocations of home in Madden’s previous novels, these positive feelings stand out. Hence, I will read the novel more as a tribute to the strength and flexibility of home than as a nostalgic lament for what is lost. First, far from being suddenly ‘invaded’ by the reality of life in Northern Ireland through the murder of their father (KennedyAndrews, 2003: 153), the Quinns’ childhood home was always already marked by an awareness of problems outside their family unit: the alcoholism of their Uncle Peter, the family feud with

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their mother’s family, and the larger political problems of their home country. In fact, Madden nicely demonstrates how the different scales of their home – house, family, community, village, region, and country – are not distinct but profoundly interconnected. The spiralling violence of the Troubles enters their home through radio and TV bulletins, heated discussions among the brothers, and their uncle being injured during a civil rights march. It also enters their village when a local boy dies trying to place a bomb, and it even changes the land as soldiers block roads and question villagers. Yet for all that, their home continues to be home, both as a place of sanctuary and as a social sharing of space through daily habits and rituals. Hence, when their father is killed, what is lost is primarily the traditional Bachelardian conception of home as shelter and sanctuary, a ‘bounded’ place, offering refuge in a hostile world. What the sisters and their mother continue to preserve, however, is the social dimension of home. In the chapters describing the narrative present, we observe the family in the ordinary processes of homemaking: making tea, sharing meals, going to mass, visiting family, and tending to flowers. The first chapter describes Cate’s homecoming in terms of the shared meal: ‘Cate always loved the first meal with her family when she came home, and they would talk and laugh and tell each other the bits of news they had neglected in their many phone calls and letters’ (Madden, 1996: 8). And the final chapter also closes on a family meal: ‘After dinner, they sat around the stove in the kitchen, drinking tea and talking, far into the night’ (Madden, 1996: 177). The loss of their father has inevitably changed their experience of these rituals, and of their life in general, but it has not destroyed their home. In the evocation of their gathering at the end of the book, they start talking about Cate’s pregnancy: ‘It’ll be strange having a baby around the place again’, Emily said. ‘I have to admit I haven’t thought that one through yet; I can hardly imagine it.’ None of her daughters said anything in response to this, but their silence was eloquent; and Emily knew that that was what she needed to imagine. (Madden, 1996: 177)

This eloquent silence recalls the uncanny silence evoked in the opening pages and repeated in the final lines, after Helen has been left alone with her fears and memories. The contrast between these

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two silences in the final chapter testifies to the continuing struggle of homemaking in the face of what has happened. As their conversation shows, sharing memories too is part of that process of homemaking. The lengthy childhood memories evoked in the novel are therefore more than an indulgence in nostalgic illusion. Commenting on the oft-forgotten dimension of ‘preserving and nurturing’ in Heidegger’s conception of dwelling (Heidegger, 1996: 349), Iris Marion Young notes how women’s homemaking consists in the activities of endowing things with living meaning, arranging them in space in order to facilitate the life activities of those to whom they belong, and preserving them, along with their meaning. Dwelling in the world means that we are located among objects, artefacts, rituals, and practices that configure who we are in our particularity. (Young, 1997: 153)

bell hooks argues similarly that ‘remembering home’ does not need to amount to nostalgic longing, but can be seen as a positive act that carries the past into the future (hooks, 2014: 43). In this respect, it is significant that the memorial to the victims of the Troubles which Cate envisages, takes the form of a domestic structure: She imagined a room, a perfectly square room. Three of its walls, unbroken by windows, would be covered by neat rows of names, over three thousand of them; and the fourth would be nothing but window. The whole structure would be built where the horizon was low, and the sky huge. It would be a place which afforded dignity to memory, where you could bring your anger as well as your grief. (Madden, 1996: 149)

The flat land, the huge sky, and the square stone structure recall Cate’s view of home evoked in the opening pages of the book. To Cate, their family home is perhaps already such a place where their private grief and anger can be expressed, but always with a view to the outside world. This openness also marks Julia’s childhood home in Authenticity, a domicile shaken, but not destroyed, by the death of a parent. In the opening prologue, Julia ‘remembers that she used to lie [in bed] and make believe that she was at once both inside and outside the house’, both ‘a bird in a tree opposite the house’ and ‘part of the solid rectangle of a house’ (Madden, 2002: 1). Julia’s early

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memories of home as at once ‘fragile’ and ‘solid’, a source of freedom and shelter, are confirmed throughout the text and shown to be, to a large extent, due to the heroic homemaking efforts of her father after the death of his wife. Although home is not, perhaps, the central concern of this novel, the opposition of Julia’s positive experiences of home to the considerably more troubled ones of Roderick and Dennis, William, and Roderick’s daughters, suggest that Julia’s happy, but not sheltered, childhood home is considered an important source of her present confidence and kindness. Indeed, the past and present reality of this home, ‘a place in which to relax and dream’, as the epilogue puts it, enables Julia to feel herself ‘at home’ in different places throughout the novel: in her shabby flat, in the Wicklow mountains, and in, or with, her art work (Madden, 2002: 56, 372). In a Woolfian moment of being, Julia also perceives the primarily social dimension of being-at-home: What if the people she loved were all here with her, and she simply couldn’t see them in the dark? What if her mother was here with them looking at the stars, standing silently beside Dan? What if Roderick was standing between Julia herself and her father? The power of the wish made it so: suddenly she could imagine their presence so completely that they were there. She experienced a peace, a deep contentment such as she had rarely known before. (Madden, 2002: 225–6, original emphasis)

Julia’s ability to find herself at home in many different places is also shared by the narrator of Molly Fox’s Birthday. While the house of Molly Fox is a central presence in the novel, the narrator’s house does not figure at all. Instead, the narrator recalls being at home in different places – in her brother’s house, in Andrew’s apartment, and in Molly’s kitchen: I had seen this room – and this house – at all seasons, at all times of the day and night. I had been here when the whole place was cocooned with snow. I had seen it by candlelight. I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. (Madden, 2008: 159)

Pleasurable memories of these houses endow them with a sense of home. At the same time, the narrator thinks of her childhood home not in terms of a house, but, following Brah and Massey, as a spatial

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experience of social relations. Home, for her, is ‘a great warm web of people, sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, nieces and nephews, like some vast, complex soap opera but without the rows and the tension, without the violence and drama’ (Madden, 2008: 30). Yet home is also a space: ‘I crested the brow of the hill, and there below me were the mountains of mid-Ulster, low and ancient, with their soft skyline … To me these mountains said one thing above all: home. At this precise moment, this was where I needed to be’ (Madden, 2008: 115). The novel thus continues the disentanglement of home and house, which is evident in Nothing is Black and Authenticity and which allowed the artist protagonists to be at home in different places. Yet in its scrutiny of identity, Molly Fox’s Birthday also revisits the strong link between house and identity which could be found in Madden’s earlier novels. In Hidden Symptoms, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, and Remembering Light and Stone, as we have seen, home was perceived as ‘a source of a belonging and identity’ (Mallett, 2004: 170), from which it was hard, if not impossible, to escape. The narrator of Molly Fox’s Birthday echoes this view, in a more positive way, when she notes ‘I have always believed that I know who I am, no small thing in the shifting dream that is contemporary life. I put this down to my background, my identity as solid as the mountainside on which I grew up’ (Madden, 2008: 58). Yet she is forced to question this belief when confronted with the ‘self-made’ homes and identities of her friends, Molly and Andrew. Far from being determined by their home, they endeavour to make their homes into an extension of themselves: Being in the house was the next best thing to being with Molly herself. She loves her home with an extraordinary kind of psychic intensity, and her whole sense of self, her identity, is intimately bound up with it in a way I had thought only possible when a house had been in a family for generations. That sense of gratitude to the dead who had planted those trees, those roses, who had chosen those possessions … gratitude and a sense of obligation to the future: there is none of that here. All of this is Molly’s choice and her creation. (Madden, 2008: 42–3)

If, in Hidden Symptoms, this performative construction of a self through a house was still perceived as a falsification or a betrayal of

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one’s inherited identity, in Molly Fox’s Birthday the appeal of such a projection is acknowledged. The narrator wonders ‘at the facility some people have for creating a home for themselves’, and thinks that such a home would be ‘an extension of me, and would allow me to communicate something of myself to others’ (Madden, 2008: 99). In the case of Andrew, too, the hold of his Belfast upbringing is countered by his determined attempts to forge his own identity and home. Contemplating the lives of both Molly and Andrew, the narrator does recognise the often difficult negotiations involved in this process of identity formation or ‘homemaking’. Still, in affirming the reciprocity and fluidity of the relations between identity and home, ‘whereby people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 256), Molly Fox’s Birthday clearly moves beyond the more fixed and deterministic view of that relation offered in the early novels. In its exploration of family relations, Time Present and Time Past once again juxtaposes different homes. The home of Fintan and Colette is, like Molly’s house, a home they have made for themselves. It is a home in all the different senses of the word. It is shaped by the objects which Colette has arranged with great skill and which have ‘become a part of home’ (Madden, 2013: 42), as well as by the daily interaction with these objects. Home is also constituted by the social interrelations between the family members, symbolised by the family dinners by which Fintan sets great store. And it is the sum total of all the family members’ feelings and ideas about the place. Early in the novel, for instance, Colette pauses to reflect on the particular sound their front door makes and the half-conscious thought that comes with it: a thought caught somewhere between a prayer and a simple wish, that the place will be safe until she returns. As she walked away today she had thought of the empty house, of it sitting there … intact and sealed like a snow globe, a little closed world onto itself. … But it was fragile too, and could be destroyed, as a snow globe can be broken … Their lives could be overtaken by calamity, the dark act of some black force could bring it all to an end tomorrow. (Madden, 2013: 43–4)

Their home is at once safe and porous, closed and yet, as the plot of the novel will make clear, open to the wider world.

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In opposition to the self-made home of Fintan and Colette stands the ancestral home inhabited by Beth and Martina. In their home, the objects are suffused by what Molly Fox’s Birthday called ‘a sense of gratitude’ to the previous generations who acquired these objects and lived them (Madden, 2008: 43). To most of the characters, it is a place of ‘extraordinary appeal’, suffused with ‘a sense of deep peace, as if the happiness of decades was annealed into the very air. All the love, all the contentment had lingered on’ (Madden, 2013: 154–5). It is a home where objects and memories of the past are, to use Young’s image, carefully preserved for the present and carried on into the future. Midway between both homes is the Northern Irish farm which Martina and Fintan refer to as ‘the old homeplace’ (Madden, 2013: 122): their father’s birthplace which they used to visit as children. At the end of the novel, Fintan and Martina visit the place again, now inhabited by their cousin Edward. Fintan, who has become increasingly preoccupied with the past, sees this as a chance to revisit a lost childhood and is dismayed to find that his cousin has built a new house in the place of the old: ‘he regrets the loss of the old home-place, its dark rooms, its flagstones and deep windows … Fintan imagines another house contained within the shell of this one: a dream-house, eternal, where the three of them are still children and Granny Buckley is still alive and always will be’ (Madden, 2013: 214). This image evokes – and, I would argue, gently mocks – Bachelard’s idealised dreamhouse, as a unique place of refuge and belonging. Martina, on the contrary, had warned Fintan beforehand that their trip ‘isn’t about the past’ (Madden, 2013: 198), and at the end of their visit, Fintan has come round to her perspective: ‘“You were absolutely right about one thing”, he says. “It wasn’t about the past … we spent far more time talking about our lives as they are now, rather than talking about Granny Buckley and when we were children”’ (Madden, 2013: 221). What matters, Fintan realises, is not the recovery of a long-lost home, but the rekindling of the relations that made it a home in the first place. Looking back on the many different experiences and imaginaries of home evoked in Deirdre Madden’s novels, it is fair to say that they are too varied to distil a single definition of the nature of home. Nevertheless, some general tendencies can be discerned. First, Madden’s novels admirably capture the multi-scalar dimension of home: how it extends across different levels, from the house to the

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nation, and how these scales feed into each other. Think of how ‘Belfast was poisoned for [Theresa]’ after the murder of her brother (Madden, 1986: 44), how Aisling left Ireland to get away from her authoritarian father, or, conversely, how the Quinns’ happy family home proves increasingly porous to the reality of the Troubles. Second, I would argue that the concept of home undergoes a significant shift in the course of Madden’s oeuvre, from an angry rejection of traditional definitions of home to an exploration of alternative imaginaries of home. Hidden Symptoms, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, and, to a lesser extent, Remembering Light and Stone all contain angry rejections of the home when it proves not to deliver the safety, shelter, warmth, and authenticity traditionally associated with it. Yet, starting with Aisling’s homemaking efforts in Madden’s third novel, subsequent works try to imagine home as more fluid, open, and relational than Bachelard’s prototypical dreamhouse allows for. What is emphasised in several novels, in this respect, is that home is a process far more than a product, one in which most protagonists are actively engaged. As the houses of Colette, Nuala, Andrew, and Molly show, this homemaking may involve the commodified home conventionally understood by the term, yet it goes much further than that. It also involves habitual interactions with a given place, as in Claire’s daily walks on the Donegal coast, Dennis’s hikes in the mountains, or Cate’s aimless driving through Ulster on her visits back home. Perhaps even more important, Madden’s novels show, are the social interactions that make a home: the family meals lovingly described in One by One in the Darkness and Time Present and Time Past, but also the latenight chats in Molly Fox’s Birthday. Like Young and hooks, Madden also indicates how remembering is part of homemaking, not in the negative sense of a regressive nostalgia for an idealised childhood home, but as a Heideggerian act of preserving past memories, traditions, and inherited objects that is also a part of ‘dwelling’ or being at home. For feminist critics like Young and hooks, the concepts of remembering and preserving serve to build a bridge between performative and inherited dimensions of the home, between the home you make and the home and identity you inherit. In Madden’s fiction, by contrast, these contradictory aspects of the home are not so easily resolved. Rather, the protagonists’ more or less successful efforts at

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making a home and, hence, a self often stand in uneasy tension with the identity forged in their childhood home. If for some characters, like Julia or the narrator of Molly Fox’s Birthday, the movement from childhood home to an adult sense of being-at-home in different places seems fairly straightforward, for many other characters in Madden’s fiction, the relation between home and identity is a source of conflict, ‘a fertile site of contradictions, demanding constant renegotiation and reconstruction’ (Wiley and Barnes, 1996: xv). Still, this very idea of home as a socio-spatial site of negotiation and construction shows how far we have travelled from Theresa’s thoughts about home in terms of house, hearth, and tribal belonging.

Note 1 ‘Home is hearth, an anchoring point through which human beings are centered’ (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 11).

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12 The architectural uncanny: family secrets and the Gothic in The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone Anne Fogarty The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone are something of misfits in Deirdre Madden’s oeuvre. Despite being generally praised by early reviewers, they have subsequently been critically neglected. The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Madden’s second novel, was published in 1988, close after the appearance of the novella, Hidden Symptoms, in 1987. Although it was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1989 and singled out in the citation for its stylistic accomplishment and virtuosity, it has only elicited sporadic commentary. It seems an oddity too because it eschews the author’s usually precise rendering of Irish or European settings for a vividly evoked, eerily symbolic, but unnamed, rural lake-land locale that is reminiscent of the countryside bordering on Lough Neagh, the area in which Madden grew up. Nonetheless, the environment remains hazy and diffuse and refuses to be tied down to exact co-ordinates. Yet Birds is also a quintessential Madden fiction that bears all of her hallmarks. In spare, oblique prose, it portrays trauma, loss, and the privations and exactions of the interior self. It also, like many of her works, is preoccupied with the unspoken and the burden created and imposed by family secrets. Amongst its accomplishments is its ability to evoke trailing Gothic effects which are subtly insinuated into the text but remain teasingly open. Haunting is at once a trait of the heroine and of the several families in the novel that all share a propensity for secrecy. Indeed, the plot refuses fully to divulge many of the enigmas that it suggests. The traumas at the core of this novel remain elusive and are knowable only in part.

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Remembering Light and Stone conspicuously departs from the setting of Birds, as it leaves Ireland behind to track the restless and ever-widening ambit of the travels of Aisling, the central protagonist, as she moves from Paris to San Giorgio, a small Umbrian village, to the United States. Yet pointed Gothic themes and motifs seam this text too, albeit in a more oblique manner, which hinges on a family secret that remains obdurately unspoken and centres on a heroine who seems possessed and often in the throes of an emotional breakdown. The nature of the hurt that impels Aisling to leave home and to work in Paris and then San Giorgio is never revealed and constitutes an unsettling gap in the narrative. One reviewer, the writer Mary Morrissy, even went so far as to claim that Madden showed disdain for her audience in withholding so much information from them. Readers may adduce, if somewhat tentatively, the circumstances of Aisling’s early life, but the violence at the heart of her family is never unlocked. Moreover, she herself is a rebarbative and sometimes malign presence, occluding the nature of the damaging family history that has lastingly imprinted her and clouding our apprehension of the psychic conflicts that beset her. The aim of this chapter is to examine the diffused Gothic patterns in these highly ambiguous, beguiling, but often perplexing novels and to decipher how Madden threads a number of tropes such as the double, the haunted dwelling, and the divided and encrypted self into her narratives and uses them to configure these shadowy tales. My argument will be that these texts deploy aspects of what has been dubbed the ‘female Gothic’ by Ellen Moers, while also conspicuously troubling and deconstructing our presumptions about this mode and the devices associated with it (Moers, 1978: 90–110). The Gothic in Madden’s texts is protean, faltering, and unstable; it is intertwined, moreover, with several other forms, the fairy tale, the romance, the travelogue, the Bildungsroman and also draws on the resources of allegory and the lyric. Birds and Remembering Light and Stone are akin in their subtle replication and re-channelling of Gothic motifs to relay dark feminist fables and modern-day existential stories about the horror of non-identity. They deftly portray the quest of their female protagonists for autonomy and their simultaneous struggles with inescapable family legacies and psychological burdens. Displacement is a defining aspect of the lives of the anti-heroines of these works. Strikingly, the differing abodes in

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which they find themselves, whether public or private, institutional or domestic, become spaces of the uncanny and act as correlatives of their sense of unease, dividedness, and non-belonging. Despite its prevalence, there are few concepts that have been more contested than that of the Gothic. Even the once accepted point of origin of the genre in the novels of Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe published in the 1790s has been queried. Christina Morin, for example, has traced its beginnings in an Irish context to tales and romances by Elisabeth Griffith and Regina Maria Roche that appeared from the 1780s onwards and has also argued that the tale of terror set in a remote location and antique past is only one manifestation of the mode (Morin, 2018: 126). In a similar manner, the continuing afterlife of the Gothic as a genre and its current forms have been actively debated and are subject to constant re-inspection. Most accounts of contemporary Gothic, moreover, recognise that essentialist or prescriptive definitions cannot adequately account for this phenomenon. This chapter will contend, following the proposition by Robert Miles, that the Gothic as it manifests itself in Deirdre Madden’s novels is not fixed but rather a ‘discursive site’ that accommodates many different themes and that it is parasitic of other modes (Miles, 1993: 4). The subtle, selfreflexive deployment of Gothic motifs in The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone allows hauntings, buried truths, doubles, and uncanny disturbances to co-exist with other themes, including sibling love, the porous boundaries between the self and the natural world, the problem of consciousness, and the values of civilisation. The core concerns of Gothic fiction have been variously identified. Fred Botting has contended that the Gothic is rooted above all in a negative aesthetics which operates to disturb the ‘borders of knowing’ and to countermand the workings of reason (Botting, 2014: 1–19). In plot terms, such disturbances were regularly associated with the overwhelming effects of violence, ghosts, and apparitions. The distinct mode of the female Gothic mooted by Ellen Moers, however, is associated as much with the ability to withstand terror as to fall prey to it (Moers, 1978: 90–110). She holds that the bifurcated heroines of Ann Radcliffe, who are at once persecuted and resistant and ultimately manage to evade the dangers with which they are threatened, exemplify a peculiarly feminist strain of

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Gothic. Radcliffe’s penchant, moreover, for explaining the macabre stories that she had set in motion, the so-called explicated Gothic, was seen as a further constituent trait of this female variant. Thus, women writers avail of the malleability of the Gothic to disturb its conventions while limning stories of female oppression that also depicted the ways in which beset heroines could fight back against patriarchal oppression. The assumption that the female Gothic is unitary and that it automatically serves as a vehicle for feminist protest has been much queried, and several critics have made a case instead for its multifariousness and pointed out its sometime conservatism.1 Widened and corrective views of this mode have, nonetheless, drawn out its salience and the interlocking ways in which women writers have used it. Robert Miles, for example, has identified a distinctively feminist matrix in the foundational fiction of Ann Radcliffe; utilising the motif of a heroine in flight, she gives prominence to issues of property, the relationship of women to the sublime, and the recuperation of the mother (Miles, 2009: 42–59). Anne Williams has similarly contended that the female Gothic is concerned not just with blurred boundaries between self and non-self but the very specific terrors generated by the patriarchal family. This sub-genre in her eyes is peculiarly driven by the desire to lay bare and also to countermand the ways in which women are subordinated and imperilled by the tyrannical fathers and lovers of traditional social structures (Williams, 1995: 1–24). In step with the current critical endeavour to calibrate the narrative grammar of the female Gothic while continuing to recognise its openness and slipperiness, this chapter will concentrate on two interrelated facets of The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone evincing the uncanny, spectrality, and architectural space. Strikingly, the heroines of Madden’s novels, Jane in Birds and Aisling in Remembering, are at once haunted and haunting; they are burdened by troubling dreams and memories, but they themselves are also disturbing presences who often spark fear. Derrida defines the spectre as a ‘paradoxical incorporation’ that makes concrete ‘the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible’ (Derrida, 1994: 6). In his analysis, the spectre is memorably tied to the ghost of the father in Hamlet and the phantom of communism enunciated by Karl Marx; by contrast, in Madden’s

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novels, spectrality is an emanation of the feminine and a signature of the unfinished story of the mother and the quest of the daughter to understand herself and make her way in the world. Spectrality, moreover, is insistently spatialised in these novels and rendered an indivisible aspect of the abodes in which the protagonists live – the farmhouse and cottage by the eerie lough in Birds and the cottage in County Clare and apartments in Paris and in San Giorgio, Umbria, in Remembering. Figurally, these domestic spaces become outward emanations of the discontent and malaise of the heroines; their existential dilemmas are mirrored and refracted in what Anthony Vidler has termed the architectural uncanny, whereby built spaces serve as vehicles for feelings of alienation and conditions of homelessness (Vidler, 1992: 1–14). Spatial estrangement acts as a correlative of Madden’s brooding, unappeasable female subjects, but also provides the optics by which they can begin to grasp and overcome their pained condition. Jane in Birds is cast as an improbably overdetermined Gothic heroine, endowed with a story that invites pity but also stretches credence, since she loses both her parents as a child while she is in hospital when they burn to death after their house catches fire. Deprived of her home and her parents and even any photos of them, Jane resorts to regaling her school friends with the terrifying story of their death, with the purpose of eliciting ‘their pity and their sense of horror’ (Madden, 1988: 5). She becomes a fabulist of her own existence and takes on the job of fictionalising it, but in doing so ends up compounding the effects of the Gothic story of which she is a part. Instead of repelling the uncanny, she becomes the occasion for it. Her neediness is transmuted into coldness and cruelty. In a novel replete with doublings and echoes, moreover, glancing but suggestive literary parallels abound, particularly to the fictions of the Brontë sisters; many facets of Jane’s story, including her name, repeat aspects of Jane Eyre, such as her neglected, orphaned state and her desire for love, only then to swerve in a different direction. We are never, moreover, told her surname; her chiming with Charlotte Brontë’s heroine is thus another aspect of her incomplete condition. Jane is brought up by an uncaring aunt who reinforces her sense of alienation and feelings of abandonment. The accoutrements of the latter’s job as seamstress, her ‘vicious treadle sewing machine’ and

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‘the Judy’, a headless dummy in her workroom, become symbolic of the violent hostility of this domestic world devoid of nurturance (Madden, 1988: 1). The primal loss of her mother and her own now truncated identity are conjoined in the image of the Judy, which she imagines restlessly pacing up and down at night. Additionally, the absent-maternal and the cruelty of the non-maternal aunt fuse in this spectral emanation that exudes malice. Paradoxically, desire for and fear of the mother appear to be inextricably bound up with each other. It is noticeable that architectural images are regularly evoked to depict Jane’s sense of anguish and her desire to shut away or transmute this defining family tragedy. Liminal spaces and ones that facilitate trafficking between the material and non-material world predominate. Hence, Jane (echoing window scenes in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights) is transfixed by the ‘magical birds’ that she glimpses through the coloured glass of a window in an upstairs alcove of her aunt’s house. The birds, ‘stained red or green or blue’, portend a possible metamorphosis, but the intervening window-pane indicates that she is cut off from this enchanting scene (Madden, 1988: 1). Her longing finds expression but is prevented a full outlet. In the convent boarding school to which she is later sent, she gains solace from ‘a long, bright corridor’ which seems to her like ‘a tunnel filled with dazzling light’ (Madden, 1988: 3). The attraction of the pristine scene lies in its emptiness, the effulgent light mirroring her desire for a transformative revelation. Yet corridors also act as forms of regulation as well as of communication as they seal off and divide internal spaces in buildings. Kate Marshall has contended that the corridor is above all a space in-between; it at once safeguards and encloses private space but also makes possible conveyance, intersections, and what she terms passability, that is the ability to move between discrete zones (Marshall 2013: 1–42). The convent corridor appeals to Jane because it mirrors her sense of internal lack; she confides to Sister Imelda the nun accompanying her: ‘That was like being nowhere.’ But she is also attracted by the ‘beautiful corridor’ because of its symmetry and the semi-transparency of one side which is made entirely of glass and ‘hung with long white muslin curtains, some of which were buoyed up by waves of soft air from the open windows behind’ (Madden, 1988: 3). Unlike the toxic secrets that proliferate in the novel and

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damage the lives of all the protagonists, the mystery of this corridor is freeing and connective. Jane is beset as she grows into adulthood by an inescapable emptiness. Mirror images and mocking reflections emblematise her sense of lack. When she views her naked body in a mirror while taking a bath, she joltingly recognises it to be ‘bare as a corpse’; femininity is construed in her searing self-assessment as negative and a form of living death (Madden, 1988: 13). She suffers two recurrent and opposing nightmares: one in which she is trapped in a harshly lit room, mercilessly exposed to the gaze of people who are on the other side of a glass; and another in which she is imprisoned in a darkened space, unable to locate the other person present for whom she frantically searches. Her loneliness and all-prevailing sense of being watched by nameless presences are parsed in terms of enclosed spaces and paranoid fantasies. To assuage her loneliness, she pursues a love affair with James in which she assumes the power over the gaze, spying on him in advance of their meetings. Yet, his proposal to her in ‘a vast, empty gazebo’ in a city park which has ‘a wonderful sense of air contained’ conveys her fragile hopes for this liaison (Madden, 1988: 16). Reinforcing this foreboding, her marriage ensconces her in a terrain that magnifies her anxieties, projecting them onto a larger canvas and duplicating them. James lives with his father in a farmhouse by a lough; nearby is a cottage inhabited by Ellen and her son Peter. The farmhouse proves to be a further locus of the architectural uncanny. Even though she embraces it as home, Jane immediately discerns that ‘she would never love this place, and it would never love her’ (Madden, 1988: 17). An unhomely abode, it has been neglected since the death of James’s mother. The ‘damp, musty smell’ that pervades even the best room, the parlour, signals that this is an encrypted space in which death and femininity ominously commingle. This sense of dread is inscribed in the landscape outside the house too as Jane is frightened of the lough close-by and perturbed by the ‘weird cries’ of the birds in the vicinity (Madden, 1988: 17). A presiding nexus of images, the wild birds inhabiting the surrounding landscape belong to that spectrality attendant on all the female characters in the novel, especially Jane. Although a facet of the natural world, they are experienced as unnatural and threatening. As Hélène Cixous has contended in an analysis of

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Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., birds are frequently held in patriarchal culture to be ‘immundo’ or impure and categorised, hence, alongside the feminine as abject and alien to this world (Cixous, 1994: 111–13).2 This coincides with the role they fulfil in Madden’s novel. Birds are uncanny and Other in the text, but they also align with the struggle of the female figures to negotiate the maternal and to understand their bonds with each other. Jane fears the ‘noise of the birds: implacable, uncompromising, cruel’, but yet feels pity for them when her husband goes wildfowling and brings home a wild duck he has shot which looks to her ‘like nothing so much as a dismembered baby’ (Madden, 1988: 47, 48). The mutilated foetal bird concretises female abjection but also signals thwarted maternal desire. Madden uses split narration in Birds, whereby the story is conveyed in relay by the central mother and daughter figures. Chapters told from Jane’s point of view in the past are interleaved with ones focalised from the perspective of her twin daughters, Catherine and Sarah, in the present. All of the women are at odds but deeply entangled with each other. Jane’s daughters, we learn, have been afraid of her and rebuffed by her coldness and lack of maternal feeling; Catherine – who is unknowingly dying of a fatal illness, the existence of which has been withheld from her – fractiously spies on her twin sister, Sarah, jealous of the clandestine affair she is conducting with Peter, son of Ellen, both of whom reside in the neighbouring cottage. Sarah, in turn, anxiously inspects her sister’s actions and also tries to make sense of the loveless but compulsive affair that she has instigated with Peter. The effect of the multiperspectival narration is, on the one hand, to braid and conjoin the women’s stories while, on the other, to hold them apart and point up their distance from each other. For Freud, the figure of the double and the patterns of involuntary repetition associated with it are primary manifestations of the uncanny (Freud, 1985: 357–60). In Birds, all of the female characters serve as doubles of each other; aspects of their lives disturbingly replicate themselves in their converging biographies. Catherine, when she looks at Sarah, her twin sister, ‘sees herself divided’ (Madden, 1988: 89). Jane, instead of escaping her past, encounters an even more troubling version of it in Ellen, who not only looks uncannily like her, but also has suffered devastating familial loss

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when, some years after the suicide of her violent and spendthrift father, her mother was burnt to death in the crumbling family home. The ‘creeping and inexorable decay’ of this latter house is a further embodiment of the architectural uncanny and a manifestation of the ubiquitous peril that undoes women in domestic environments (Madden, 1988: 52). Karl Miller has observed that doubles and orphans invariably coincide and are ‘usually fatal to the first self’ (Miller, 1985: 47). Additionally, psychic conflicts and splits may be discerned as instigating dualistic states. Madden complicates these facets of the doppelgänger to the degree that each of her orphaned or solitary female figures is at once self and double, and hence they mutually endanger and compete with each other. Ellen, it turns out, was once in love with James, Jane’s husband, and consequently becomes a rival in love; Jane torments her daughters because of her dark, unyielding nature; and Sarah and Catherine vie for each other’s love and affection and attempt to control one another. Bearing out Anne Williams’s claim that Gothic fiction exposes the malign effects of monstrous domestic secrets, Jane, in marrying James, gravitates towards another family shaped by an unspeakable history (Williams, 1995: 10). She learns from her father-in-law just before he dies that he has had a secret affair and that Ellen is, in fact, his daughter. Nicholas Abraham and Mária Török have argued that unvoiced secrets can assume an intrapsychic dimension and be transmitted to later generations within a family where they continue to do damage (Abraham, 1994: 165–9). Abraham contends, moreover, that ‘what haunts are not the dead but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others’ (Abraham, 1994: 171). The malignancy at the core of the two entangled families in Birds derives from such gaps and festering intergenerational legacies. Moreover, the spectrality of the families of Ellen and Jane expresses itself not just in feelings of alienation and hostility but also in inimical relations between mothers and daughters and compulsive incestuous unions. The affair between James and Ellen is forestalled, but the love-hate relationship between Peter and Sarah proves more stubbornly persistent. Andrew Webber has contended that visual double-binds serve as the basis for the splitting of the subject that leads to instances of the double (Webber, 1996: 3). The anxious self-scrutiny and watchfulness of Madden’s troubled subjects particularly bear out this aspect

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of their haunted states of mind. Their cloven existences are, moreover, paralleled by the contiguity of the two abodes, the farmhouse (in which Jane lives) and the cottage (the dwelling of Ellen), to each other. This architectural doubling also invokes literary antecedents such as the opposition between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, thus reinforcing the intimations of the uncanny. Jane, Sarah, and Catherine frequently peer from the windows of the farmhouse to examine outdoor scenes, to spy on others, or to discern what is happening in the cottage. Moments of illicit seeing abound: Jane watches as Gerald the farmhand, who has married Ellen, drowns himself after discovering her true identity, and Sarah fretfully searches through Catherine’s diary to find out if she has guessed the truth about Peter and the gravity of her illness. Conflicts of vision are also manifested in things that remain unseen or repressed. Jane refuses to view the body of her stillborn first child, thus compounding her sorrow and rendering it enduringly wraithlike. The inexplicable and callous exclusion of the child from the family grave by James and its nightmarish reality ‘outside time’ ultimately cause her to have a nervous breakdown (Madden, 1988: 101). Birds is a bleak fable in which redemption is scarcely possible. Jane recovers from her collapse and bears the daughters for whom she has longed, albeit she seems cold, removed, and taciturn to them. But an equilibrium of sorts emerges from their tormented examination of themselves and their solitary introspection. Just as Jane loses her fear of the ‘clamour of the birds’ and begins to pity them and correlate their otherworldly nature with her own, so too her daughters partially reconcile themselves with their violent family legacy and the memories of the mother who frightened them (Madden, 1988: 103). Sarah remembers hearing the ‘cry of invisible birds’ on the first dawn after her mother’s death and piercingly realises that the ‘noise is wild, living, continuous as though the whole earth is being wrung in re-creation’ (Madden, 1988: 130). Cathartic truth is unavailable to the sisters except in this cryptic form. Rather, silence, secrecy, and stoic resignation bind them together at the end. The hopeful rituals that accompany Easter Sunday morning, chocolate eggs and five pink tulips in bloom, are uneasily counterpoised in the ‘Epilogue’ that closes the novel with the knowledge of Catherine’s encroaching death and the recognition that ‘there were things beyond comfort’ (Madden, 1988: 146).

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Aisling in Remembering Light and Stone is one of Deirdre Madden’s most anguished protagonists. Her opening declaration, ‘I don’t belong here’, sums up not just the insight that she is an outsider in Rome but her parlous existential state overall (Madden, 1992: 1). An unreliable narrator, she veers between equivocation and skewering moralistic summations of the world around her and the people with whom she interacts. Her vision is inveterately splintered as she constantly cross-connects her home-place in County Clare with the landscapes of Italy. The ‘stark beauty’ of the limestone caverns near Trieste reminds her of the Burren; her reminiscences, though, are anything but nostalgic, as she further confides that what she misses about this bleak albeit pleasing landscape is ‘the violence of nature’ (Madden, 1992: 2, 31). Typically, too, she at once welcomes and resists the spatial interrelationships in which she finds herself caught up. She informs us that she ‘had found out more about my country, simply by not being in it’. But she also recognises that the aim of her travels is to ‘forget all about home for a while’; she relishes, on the one hand, the sense of voided subjectivity that assuming a fresh identity in another country affords her and, on the other, is tormented by memories, nightmares, and hallucinations (Madden, 1992: 2). Like Jane in Birds, Aisling, whose name means dream in Irish, is a conspicuously overdetermined Gothic heroine whose symptoms seem curiously antiquated; they are throwbacks to medieval legends, eighteenth-century tales of terror, and nineteenth-century case histories about female hysteria. Driven by self-hatred and subject to debilitating depression, she frequently suffers from a sense of dissociation such as the ‘gnawing feeling of terror’ that suddenly overcomes her when she visits her boyfriend, Ted, in Florence (Madden, 1992: 34). Even though she is a vehement advocate of modern art, she still finds solace in the frescoes in medieval churches. Passing these mentally in review, she is particularly soothed by ‘hearing the voice of a tormented angel scream down the centuries to me’ (Madden, 1992: 9). But it is an image of demonic pain, a writhing man vomiting a devil, that she finds especially redolent. This depiction of an exorcism in a fresco in the local church of San Giorgio, the Umbrian village in which she lives and works, seems to parallel and give a context to her own sense of being possessed. Yet, she also acknowledges that the spectrality she experiences is groundless and

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unique and that since she arrived in Italy she ‘had met no one who was haunted as I was’ (Madden, 1992: 25). Aisling is a shape-changer, and her precarious psychic reality is predicated on contradictory states. Despite her carefully preserved solitariness, she prides herself on fitting in and having assimilated so much to Italian life that she looks and sounds like a native. Yet, she ruefully recognises that this seeming social adjustment and cosmopolitan flair are merely outer show. In fact, her inner pain is such that she feels that a ‘dark self’ torments her and that, in the manner typical of such dualistic conditions, her ‘self was split in two, and one half threatened the other, the weaker half’ (Madden, 1992: 65). Rebecca Munford has contended that spectrality is frequently deployed in modern fiction to examine the ‘instabilities and contingencies’ of femininity (Munford, 2016: 132–3). Aisling’s haunted state often functions in this way. Not only does she feel herself to be split, but she constantly weighs herself up against her two friends, Franca, her kindly landlady, and Fabiola, the wealthy wife of the factory owner for whom she works. Franca and Fabiola in turn are juxtaposed, as they represent often opposing traits. Franca is a carefree traditionalist who does not want to stir from home and is happy running the local store, while Fabiola is nouveau riche, enjoys amassing material goods to signal her wealth, and freely travels the globe without, however, acquiring any wisdom in the process. Thus, Aisling’s spectrality allows her to examine and adjudicate on varying aspects of modern femininity and also to measure her own troubled state against that of her friends. Even though she is more taken with Franca and roundly denounces Fabiola for her materialism and ‘life of pure surface’, both women nonetheless embody competing aspects of Aisling’s world view, torn as she is between an ascetic desire for a reclusive, traditional existence and a belief in bourgeois comforts and cosmopolitan freedom (Madden, 1992: 81). Her two American lovers, Bill, with whom she had an affair in Paris, and Ted, whom she meets in Italy, also act as doubles, incorporating opposing traits. While Bill awakens her terror of abandonment when he suddenly deserts her to travel to the South of France, Ted, who is supportive and companionable, triggers her fear of intimacy. All of the men in the novel, moreover, are unwittingly associated with the uncanny, in particular the veiled threat of violence. This violence is literally unspeakable, and consequently its nature

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is never completely divulged. Instead, we are offered half-glimpses of Aisling’s childhood and upbringing in which her father’s abusive nature is intimated but not sketched out in full. We learn that she grew up with a ‘feeling of dread in her own home’ and that she did not particularly mourn her father when he died (Madden, 1992: 59). Two suggestive incidents hint at the extremity of this violence: the occasion on which her father kills the pet cat with which she was besotted, writing it off as an accident, and her sudden nightmare apprehension that her father is Other, ‘a total stranger’, when she is travelling with him in his car as a child (Madden, 1992: 153). It is intimated that violence, male Otherness, and a dark eroticism are unconsciously linked for her. The deadly force of the male uncanny constantly waylays her as an adult, erupting into her everyday life without warrant. She drops into a hysterical faint when Ted waylays her on her balcony and also blacks out when looking at the pig that has been slaughtered on the farm of Michele, Franca’s brother, following a heady evening of flirtation and feasting. Kate Ferguson Ellis has identified a sub-category of the female Gothic in which the heroine is imprisoned and threatened in a domestic space (often a castle) but succeeds ultimately in recuperating it and freeing herself (Ellis, 1989: ix–xviii). In Remembering, the apartment, despite its modernity and ordinariness, is the principal site of the architectural uncanny. Aisling’s quest to break free from her abusive past and the provincialism of Ireland and to remake herself centres on her efforts to build up an independent life. A central index of her success at liberating herself are the apartments in which she lives, initially as a student in Ranelagh, Dublin, and later as a single professional in Paris, and San Giorgio. These latter two dwellings, in particular, emblematise her ability to uphold a bohemian lifestyle and to render her surroundings consonant with her emotional and intellectual aspirations. Contrary to Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s contention that apartments allow urban flow and human contacts an entry into private space, her dwellings appear to shield her from the world without (Wojcik, 2010: 267–77). But they are nonetheless double and as susceptible to Gothic incursions as the ominous castles and mansions depicted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. She immediately abandons her flat in Paris as it is tainted after what she sees as Bill’s betrayal. Her apartment in San Giorgio, even though a further

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protective bolthole, is noticeably double in nature. First, it is situated in a place that has two faces: it splits into an old, historic town on a height and a more modern town on a plain. Second, as she notes, the dwelling itself has dual aspects: one balcony overlooks the comings and goings in the scenic old town while another faces on to the more mundane and workaday aspects of the location. Aisling, who constantly inspects the events outside on the square, thus views things through a double optics whereby an idealised community is counterpoised with a more base, venal, and nightmarish version, a romanticised perspective is undercut by and at conflict with a phantasmatic one. Particularly emblematic of this latter view is Aisling’s repeated, macabre, waking hallucination of a hanged woman. Disturbingly, it proves to be a premonition when Franca, her friend, who has suffered a recurrence of the cancer from which she has been suffering, hangs herself in the building in which they both have been living. Aisling harshly blames her friend for not reconciling herself to her illness and inevitable decline, but an irresistible interpretation is that Franca has died in her lieu or that Aisling has somehow malignly brought about her demise through the fatal opposition that pits self and double against each other. The causes of Franca’s suicide, a chilling Gothic crescendo in the novel, remain undecidable. Her passing appears, however, to liberate Aisling, who travels to the United States with Ted to visit his family in Washington. Tellingly, she discerns in them inveterate patterns of thwarted female desire that get repeated across generations. Thereafter, she makes the decision to return home to Ireland. Spatial metaphors particularly capture this final change as she exchanges the historical redolence and timelessness of San Giorgio for the stark beauty of the Burren and the neglected family cottage in County Clare where, like a revenant, she decides to continue her life, belatedly fulfilling her mother’s wish that she come home. But the ending delicately suggests that this is an effectual metamorphosis and not a regression. Rather, she can now face up to the past, grapple with the elemental, and take on the everyday in all its alluring solidity and banality. Animal motifs have formed part of a web of warring oppositions in the novel, Aisling’s dead cat and the slain pig particularly designating the unspeakable effects of male violence. However, a counter-strand depicts animals as at once different and familiar and

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thus as a saving aspect of the uncanny.3 Aisling tells us that she likes ‘the otherness, the completeness of animals’. She welcomes an owl that lands on her windowsill in San Giorgio, appreciating it because of its wildness and ‘pride’ (Madden, 1992: 75). In a similar vein, she considers her friend Franca as carefree and unencumbered because she pursues her life instinctually, like a cat. After returning to Ireland, as well as making peace with her brother Jimmy and creating an abode for herself in the family cottage, she roams through the nearby familiar landscape, revisiting locations she has known. She promises to show the sights of the Burren to Ted, including the ‘Green Roads’ that had been built as a form of relief during the nineteenth-century Famine.4 It is thus intimated that she has reconciled herself in part to the traumatic pain of the Irish past that is inherently inscribed in the landscape. This all-embracing panorama includes her own troubled past as well as that of the nameless Irish people who have either died of hunger or emigrated. The final moments of the novel dwell on the interconnections between the human and the non-human, the spectral and living: ‘I turned and walked back on the grassy road. The corncrake was still calling, but the cat on the wall had gone’ (Madden, 1992: 180). The rasping cries of corncrakes are audible, albeit the birds themselves remain hidden, and the phantom cat bears with it brittle memories from her childhood as well as reminders of her deceased Italian friend. Spectrality ultimately is commuted to a positive force, and the divisions that have beset Aisling appear to have been allayed to a degree.5 Anthony Vidler has contended that modern architecture is particularly beholden to myths of transparency and spatial penetration, but that these ideals in turn spawn anxieties about reflectivity and surfaces that lack depths (Vidler, 1992: 217–25). By contrast, Madden’s novels have the facility to counterbalance transparency and opacity, knowledge and blockage. The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone utilise Gothic motifs to probe the dark, estranged states and troubled interiority of the protagonists and also to take soundings of the divided conditions of subjects in the contemporary world. Her female figures in particular feel themselves to be injuriously wounded and split and trapped in fateful, repetitive cycles. Their abodes, instead of being refuges, become sites of the uncanny, and they themselves act as involuntary

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vehicles for a perturbing spectrality and often destructive femininity. Meta-textual allusions to nineteenth-century novels signal, however, that the female Gothic is an enabling resource that can be drawn on, rethought, and also deconstructed. The endings of Birds and Remembering side-step the denouements such as death, marriage, escape, and restitution that earlier fictional plots reached for. Instead, Madden creates symbolic spaces in her texts in which transparency and depth are uneasily but fluidly played off against each other and the painful antinomies of existence explored. Her texts plumb the secrets of the characters and families depicted, but never presume to unlock or put paid to the spectral and the unspeakable in any lasting or definitive way. Instructively, the oneiric and the uncanny remain an indivisible aspect of the tangible fictional worlds Deirdre Madden constructs and invents for us.

Notes 1 See, for example, the essays in Fleenor (ed.) (1983), and Horner and Zlosnik (eds) (2016). 2 The adjective, immundo, used by Lispector means impure in Portuguese; she also draws out a secondary sense: out of this world. 3 See Baker (2016: 2–3) for a related discussion of the function of animals in Molly Fox’s Birthday. 4 The predominant images here curiously and uncannily foreshadow Anne Enright’s The Green Road, published in 2015. 5 See Ingman (2007: 101–4) for a similar interpretation proposing that Aisling finally heals the divide within herself.

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13 Living lives: Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, Time Present and Time Past, and the Irish Celtic Tiger novel Derek Hand The Celtic Tiger era in Ireland, from 1994 to 2010, and its aftermath was a time of quickening. The dominant mode in national discourse revolved around speed. Change and transformation became the collective and conscious communal aspiration as traditional social mores, and accepted notions of cultural belonging and identity, as well as links to space and location, came under pressure. The concept of ‘liquid modernity’ underpins this contemporary Irish narrative: what was once solid, a priori, and given was no longer so (Bauman, 2000). Much Irish writing of this period reflected this shift in emphasis in a number of obvious ways. A writer such as Anne Enright, for instance, manifests this in her style: a loosening of formal and linguistic constraints, brashly flirting with indeterminacy, both signifying and enacting a formal break with the past (Cahill, 2011: 97). Enright, John Banville, and Colm Tóibín also return to that past, both to acknowledge the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ and also, narratively, to retreat to a less volatile era where the world and its demands were more concrete and known. A consequence of such manoeuvrings, at one level, is to position the present moment as a critical turning point, a period of existential crisis where the solid coordinates of being and identity melt away and dissolve. Many literary critics embrace this model of change and crisis as the way to apprehend and understand the contemporary Irish novel (Cahill, 2011: 3). One difficulty with this approach is that it fetishises the ‘new’, as if the only condition of value is to tell stories that have never been told before in ways that have never been attempted. But it is important, I would argue, to recognise how

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nuanced and complex much of contemporary Irish writing actually was, and is, in its confrontation with modernity. Rather than thinking about the present moment or the recent past as utterly unique it might be more productive to acknowledge that nothing is ever really new and that it is important to forge links with the past as opposed to abandoning it wholesale. Deirdre Madden’s response to the Celtic Tiger moment is charted in three novels: Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past. All three eschew the stylistic and linguistic flamboyance deployed by some of her peers, having no recourse to verbal and formal pyrotechnics in order to register her anxieties with the shifting demands of the age. Without these distractions, her work offers, at the level of plot, uncomplicated low-key narratives of middle-class Irish life in the contemporary moment. Her fictive world is one in which not much occurs, though what does actually happen is delicately and often intensely believable. At a time when Irish culture embraced and celebrated the realities of a quickening of experience and the very notion of rapidity itself – rapid change, rapid acquisition of wealth, rapid movement from place to place – was an indicator of success and worth, her novels revolve around moments of individual stillness and reflection on identity. Her stories are also concerned with the ways in which individuals make connections, not only with the natural world but also, significantly, with other people. An absence of formal trickery does not necessarily signal a disinterest in the complexity of form (Parker, 2000). Aligned with her meditation on private lives in these three novels, there is a parallel concern with the nature of art and language. Via painting in Authenticity, acting in Molly Fox’s Birthday, and photography in Time Present and Time Past, Madden probes how art, language, and the imagination respond to a world where they are now under serious pressure to perform and enact that rapid transformation into the future that underpins the Irish Celtic Tiger experience. The kind of brash knowing at play in Anne Enright’s novels or the myriad pop culture references in Patrick McCabe’s work, for example, are a consequence of a literary world increasingly dominated by noise: advertising, television, music, cinema, all competing for attention. Literature and the novel must be as loud and bold as those other forms in order to be heard or to achieve relevance. Yet it could be argued that there is a note of defeat being struck in those

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novels: despite the outward stylistic bravura and confidence, it is those other popular forms which set the agenda and templates for fictional discourse. The novel is no longer at the forefront of innovation and experiment; rather it is simply playing catch-up. The ground inhabited by a writer such as Madden is one where the anxieties of art are played out and tested. In this space, perhaps, it might be suggested, the novel form reinvigorates itself, struggling to make itself relevant on its own terms. Madden’s novels, then, at the level of both form and content, challenge the dominant discourses of Celtic Tiger Ireland, offering an alternative narrative of human feeling that contrasts sharply with plots centring on material wealth and success.1 Her work charts a remarkably different course to that of many of her contemporaries. At a moment in Irish history when notions of religion and community were being reimagined, along with many other indicators of Irish identity, Madden consciously charts and interrogates the moral codes by which people interact with one another: be it family or friends. Her realm of action and interest is the private and the domestic, but working through the conflicts inherent in this sphere is necessarily to comment on the wider world of macro-politics and communal relations (Fogarty, 2002: 16). Authenticity, centred as it is on a relationship between an older and younger painter, Roderic and Julia, allows Madden the room to consider the nature of art and its connection to the real world it renders. She refuses to wallow in abstract ideas and musings, constantly alerting her readers to the fact that art matters precisely because of its origins, ultimately, in the lives of real people and their actual concerns. Looking at a still life on a postcard, Roderic comments, ‘people once painted like that. That was how they saw the world. And now we can’t trust our own eyes, can’t believe that what we see before us is what it is: a table, a bottle, a dish. Why is it … that people like still life paintings so much nowadays? Is it for the quality of attention that is in them?’ (Madden, 2002: 140)

Julia counters this focus on the work of art itself with a reorientation toward the experience of the viewer: ‘No … A still life is full of repose. That, above all, is so hard to find in the world as it is now. That’s what people respond to, that’s what they seek’ (Madden, 2002: 140).

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Julia articulates the theory that art must be relevant to the viewer: speak to their needs and desires; in the modern world what is required is an art that celebrates stillness, if not silence. It is a subtle yet important manoeuvre to position art as being utterly necessary if it is to remain pertinent to those that might engage with it. Another contemporary Irish author, John Banville, many of whose concerns Madden shares on the surface at least, suggests that we inhabit a fallen modern world in which the connection between art and life is ruptured. For him as an author, and his characters such as Copernicus or the unnamed historian in The Newton Letter, or Max Morden in The Sea, this is merely one more indication of the rift and break between the human imagination, in all its forms, and the real world of action beyond it. That note of failure is not struck in Madden’s fiction, where characters actively seek out a means, not of recognising that there is nothing to be done, but rather in reinvigorating the position of art in contemporary experience. Significantly, the tranquillity and repose of the still life painting are to be discovered, and cherished, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of everyday existence: And then it happened: whatever it was. All the noise died away, all movement abated, as if the world were slowing down on its axis, as if time itself were being held in suspension. And now, even as she stood at the heart of the city, she stood at the centre of complete stillness and silence. (Madden, 2002: 324, original emphasis)

What is being acknowledged in these moments is not simply, I think, a twenty-first-century updating of the privileged confrontation of the Romantic imagination with the sphere of nature, a Wordsworthian ‘spot of time’, but instead a kind of apprehension that reinforces the centrality of lived experience, or at least a sense of equivalency between the world of art and lived experience. The postmodern rupture that underpins other contemporary writing is not a given in Madden’s fictional rendering of the world. A further important moment comes at the close of the novel when Julia relates an encounter she had while hillwalking in the Wicklow mountains. She falls into conversation with a man on her way back down the hill she has climbed, who tells her of his experience of an epiphany similar to the one she had undergone earlier in the city. He struggles to find the words to describe what had happened to him

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but it is clear it was a profound revelation bookended by silence in which neither of them speaks: ‘Neither of them ever forgot the other. Neither of them ever spoke to anyone else of what had happened that day. They never met again’ (Madden, 2002: 374, original emphasis). Some readers might quibble that the notion being flagged here, that ‘language is not needed’, is somewhat redundant in that the spell is broken – the conceit undone – as the ineffable insight is told to us. More significant though, I believe, is how Madden challenges the primacy of exposure in the novel form generally, but certainly in the Irish novel form in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Madden’s anxiety centres not on the mechanics of words or language as a system, rather it focuses on the very idea of novelistic revelation itself. This is not a celebration of concealment – the weaving of fictions that might divert attention away from truth and reality, as happens in John Banville’s work and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, for instance – but an acknowledgement that there are stories that do not need to be told, that there are things that can be left unsaid, private moments that need not be made public.2 This uneasiness about the act of telling which in part is an inheritance from Samuel Beckett – in art and in life – is what marks off Madden’s work from other contemporary Irish fiction. Once notions of revelation are jettisoned and overcome as dominant, then other points of interest emerge. I would suggest that the most fruitful approach to Madden’s recent novels is to understand them as a series, a trilogy or triptych perhaps, which circle around similar themes and concerns, echoing and building upon each other, reflecting back and forth. She herself suggests such a reading in the musings of Julia: What Julia did not understand was that between the joy of an experience such as she was then living and the recollection of it years later, might fall the shadow of the intervening time. She knew that each artist creates her own precursors. She knew too that a work of art changed by being viewed through the filter of later works, but she did not understand that this was also true in life. (Madden, 2002: 243)

In this manner, Authenticity sets up some of its main ideas and concerns – the interplay between private and public, between what is

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said and shared and that which remains unarticulated, that Madden will develop, refine, and adumbrate in the later novels. Molly Fox’s Birthday further advances and intensifies this meditation on the nature of art with its focus on a playwright and an actor. Madden weaves these concerns unobtrusively into a narrative that does not hinge wholly on these aesthetic matters. Art is not privileged over ordinary life; rather, art is simply a part of life, not separate from it. The emphasis is put on acting and playwriting as craft, just like being a television presenter, the profession of another character in the novel, is a craft; what is important is doing them well. The unnamed playwright suggests that nothing occurs in her work, her plays, other than what happens in life: ‘a play, where, as in life, people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say, where they act against their own best interests and sometimes fail to understand those around them’ (Madden, 2008: 8). The narrator suggests that we as readers need not expect wisdom or knowledge from art, or her art at least. Art, in this reckoning, is as inconsistent and contradictory as the everyday. Once again, the idea of revelation, and specifically revelation as illumination, is being undermined and challenged. In its stead what is offered is the notion of struggle or work in progress. As the playwright goes on to admit, ‘For me, the play is the final destination. For Molly, it is the point of departure’ (Madden, 2008: 8). The theatrical experience, and by extension the artistic experience, is an interactive one, or ought to be. Here, it is the actor who finds freedom in the text and the potential to make out of it what she will: that is her skill and her gift. The figure of the actor obviously raises questions about the notions of identity and selfhood and the nature of authenticity. John Banville makes use of the actor figure as a means of elaborating on his modernist/postmodernist sense of catastrophe. His character, Alexander Cleave, suffers a breakdown on stage when uttering a line from Heinrich Von Kleist’s play, Amphytrion: ‘Who if not I, then, is Amphytrion?’ (Banville, 2000: 89, original emphasis), signalling an existential crisis. But for Molly Fox, playacting allows her to be herself. For her, this ‘being other people’ is who she is. It is her reality, and it is not an occasion for raising questions but rather for answering them. As a tearaway teenager Molly had been wracked by the question, ‘Who am I? Who am I?’, but on a school

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trip to the theatre to see a production of Hamlet she comes to know who she is: And as I watched the play … I gradually came to realise something: So that’s who I am: I’m an actor. This is a crucial distinction – it wasn’t that I wanted to be an actor, I knew that I was one already. And it wasn’t that I wanted to pretend to be other people either. All I ever wanted was to be myself. Who am I? Who am I? I never again heard that voice screaming in my head. I now knew exactly who I was. I was an actor. (Madden, 2008: 72, original emphasis)

There is no angst here. Madden’s characters meditatively, even methodically, it might be said, work through issues in order to find solutions. It can be argued that a gendered perspective is being offered here. The male world of John Banville’s fiction is predominantly one of failure: his characters repeatedly make the same mistakes, just as he as author returns again and again to the same story. Madden’s feminine view is to actually accommodate the problems of modern living in order that one can continue to, in Beckett’s phrase, ‘go on’. Such a feminine perspective, importantly, is not just the preserve of the female characters. Andrew, the historian TV presenter, has, like Molly, also created a mask in order to survive his childhood in the war-torn Belfast of the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s. The playwright, in many ways, is suspicious of this creativity, constantly alerting the reader to her feeling that Andrew’s mask is just that, a mask and therefore not real, and that he might be open to the charge of inauthenticity. And yet she is forced to admit that he has become ‘the person he needed to be’ (Madden, 2008: 78). What she comes to realise is that the mask is utterly necessary for Andrew, as he is playacting for Molly. The reader learns that Andrew’s brother Billy, who was involved in terrorist activities, is murdered in the North of Ireland: ‘I hadn’t realised that such a tragedy wasn’t fixed in the past, but was an active, malignant thing, that changed and mutated over the years; and it never went away’ (Madden, 2008: 114). Thus the modern individual must also keep creating and inventing and remain open to the necessity for mutation and transformation. The project of selfhood is an ongoing process. It is a hard lesson for the playwright to accept. Molly suggests that writing plays with identity and the creation of different characters is a means of

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acknowledging multiple selfhoods. The playwright responds that that might suggest she was giving expression to a certain dissatisfaction with her ‘real self’: ‘She smiled at me pityingly and said, “Your ‘real’ self? Ah, if only such a thing existed!”’ (Madden, 2008: 129, my italics). As with the earlier novel there is a moment – a bomb attack in Paris that Andrew is caught up in – which allows for a meditation on the nature of revelation. It is obviously a disturbing event, the repercussions of which reverberate throughout the text, especially for Andrew. Crucially, though, he is not overwhelmed by this occurrence and is able to accommodate it within his own narrative of self. He does speak of the bomb to his friend the playwright but asks her specifically not to tell his son. It is an act of paternalistic solicitude on the father’s part; he wishes to withhold information that might frighten the son. In the context of contemporary Irish society, however, which has collectively experienced the trauma of revelations concerning clerical sexual abuse, for instance, this quite traditional act of reticence is interesting. Again, Madden runs counter to the prevailing desire to say everything, the rush to reveal the hidden and expose all the dark areas of Irish life to illumination. The deadening or slowing of the pace of things, life, and narratives, which was so central to Authenticity, is also further developed in this novel. The playwright’s brother Tom is a priest, and he too, like Molly and Andrew, acknowledges the theatricality of his existence; he too, has no difficulty in embracing the possibilities of the mask as a means of getting at some essential truth about the self: ‘It’s my role in life, quite literally, and I’m seldom out of costume’, and he gestured to his collar. ‘But it’s always really me.’ ‘Then it’s exactly the same as being an actor’, Molly said. ‘Not exactly, but similar, yes. It’s a way of translating your whole self.’ (Madden, 2008: 89)

He goes on to argue: ‘I suppose what’s similar about being an actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest’s business. But we all live in time … [Theatre] exists in time – a play lasts about an hour and half … but if it’s any good at all it takes you somewhere outside time. And then you can see things … differently.’ (Madden, 2008: 90)

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These concepts of time and of being-in-time, and the connecting of art to the notion of eternity, are vital here. They link the novel’s concerns with the overall theme of combating the speed of modern life and the need for mechanisms – art being just one – that might allow that to occur. Walter Benjamin argues that the still life in photography, which was ‘put together from tickets, spools of cotton, cigarette butts’ and then ‘put in a frame’, forced the viewer to see the world anew: ‘Look, your picture frame ruptures time; the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than a painting’ (Benjamin, 1978: 229). This understanding of modern art – while applied to photography here – is also, as Benjamin notes, pertinent to literary forms. It importantly and powerfully brings together the various threads and themes of Madden’s art on display thus far: the reorientation toward the everyday and the mundane, the nature of the authentic, and a predominant preoccupation with time and speed. Crucially, too, Benjamin’s focus on the modern art form of photography and its relationship to time point to Madden’s most recent novel, Time Present and Time Past. In this novel, photography, and particularly autochrome photography (an early method of producing colour pictures), is the art form through which Madden meditates on ordinary life lived outside the realm of public history. And yet, history does intrude somewhat jarringly upon the narrative and the lives of the characters, in the guise of the crash of the Celtic Tiger and the night of the infamous bank guarantee, on 30 September 2008. It is awkward, perhaps only in hindsight, as numerous other ‘historical’ moments, pivotal junctures, crossroads between then and now have been charted in Irish economic history. The effect generated in the previous two works of desiring to rise above time and enter into eternity is undone here. Still, the fact that Madden so deliberately brings the reader’s attention to the setting of the story of the novel during the Celtic Tiger period and the time just before the banking crisis is significant: ‘It is Ireland in the spring of 2006 and failure, once an integral part of the national psyche, is an unpopular concept these days’ (Madden, 2013: 2). Failure has been replaced by success and a slow meandering pace of life abandoned for the speed of success. In a subtle way, too, a clear distinction is set up between the past and the present, then and now, with the inference being that all is changed in this

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brave new world. Fintan Buckley is a prosperous Celtic Tiger legal advisor with a fine house in the fishing village of Howth and a happy family life. The section near the end of the novel, which gestures toward 2008 and the night of the banking guarantee, and its as yet unforeseen but shattering consequences for the nation and for people like Fintan and his family, serves, it might be argued, only to reinforce the uncertainty of our being-in-time. Linking the personal with the national, the private with the public suggests that what is being dealt with here is a crisis. What is atypical, and why I believe this concrete connection to recent events appears at first to be so strained, is that it seems to be an attempt to give significance and import to what can be labelled Fintan’s midlife crisis. Whereas in the previous two novels these kinds of ruminations and moments gained import from their being toned down and presented in a restrained fashion, here the aforesaid link appears too self-conscious. Another reading of the novel, though, suggests that Madden, in her characteristically measured way, is actually underpinning and reinforcing her aesthetic commitment to the everyday and the ordinary human stories central to her work. The Celtic Tiger crash is talked of as occurring in the future, meaning that for the characters their present is always provisional, because the future can never be known. In other words, Fintan’s crisis would have happened with or without the historical reality of the economic boom and its demise. Still, it is hard to escape the significance of the time in which the story is set. A brilliantly modernist moment occurs in the early pages of the novel. In a café, Fintan looks at the letters and the words they make, ‘Carrot Cake’, and realises their arbitrariness and how they have no link to the object they describe: ‘They might as well be written not just in a foreign language but in a different alphabet, might as well say 6ИCKBИT or TTavTƩOáví’ (Madden, 2013: 9–10). This experience of defamiliarisation – reminiscent of one of the classic modernist occasions in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, when the crowds on the streets of London share such a moment as an aeroplane flies overhead spelling out letters in spumes of ethereal smoke – is the trigger for what develops into something of a crisis for Fintan (Woolf, 2000: 17–19). This critical juncture does not herald a wholesale re-evaluation of his life, but a chance for serious reflection on the dilemmas of middle age (see Dunmore, 2013). For

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soon after, he experiences a similarly perplexing encounter with a series of photographs: ‘There is a dislocation between the familiarity of the locations and the strangeness of what is shown’ (Madden, 2013: 11). As is the case in Woolf’s novel, Madden suggests that these are moments which are not only intellectually confusing, they also have physical consequences. Fintan feels ‘ill’, but not in the sense of a ‘simple cause and a simple cure’; rather, he is deeply and profoundly ‘uneasy and anxious’ (Madden, 2013: 65). As was the case in her earlier novels, art is not cut off from the world of action. Its importance is to be found in its centrality to the lived life and how it reflects that life. Here, Fintan’s sense of disorientation and the feeling of making strange encompass not just words, art, and photographs, but his family and people on the street: ‘And if people who are close to him are becoming strange, he is also beginning to see strangers in an intimate and overly familiar way’ (Madden, 2013: 69). But if art, particularly in the form of photography, has been the cause of this predicament, it also possesses, like Derrida’s conception of the pharmakon, the possibility of accessing the cure (Kearney, 1986: 118–19). Thus photography, and autochrome photography most notably, become the medium through which the processes of making the world both strange and familiar are brought to the fore. Defamiliarisation, the process by which art makes the mundane strange and the ordinary extraordinary, is what Fintan reflects upon. That he comes across a book of autochrome photographs owned by his son, and that they enter into a conversation about how they work, are significant steps in the development of this meditation. The accessibility, and modernity, of the photograph (photography is, and was, always a signifier of the innovative and the new) allows Madden to consider the nature of contemporary art especially and how it ought to relate to the ways we live now. Selfreflexively, then, such a focus on photography – that form which is most linked with the advent of modernity – further allows for consideration of the relationship between the past and the present, as Susan Sontag recognises when she declares ‘All photographs are memento mori’ (Sontag, 1977: 15). Fintan comes to understand a number of things about art through his ruminations and his conversations. First, he realises that art is a construct and not reality. To be sure, photographs appear to

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‘stop’ time, but they are really only an illusionary recreation of the real world (Madden, 2013: 78–9). More significantly, his conception of the past is fundamentally altered: his daughter asks at one stage when the world became colour, and this idea influences his appreciation of these turn-of-the-century photographs, since he too confuses, as he says, ‘the technology with what it was recording’ (Madden, 2013: 80). This revelation has a profound effect upon him, because what it prompts is a reappraisal of his understanding of the nature of the past and memory and their interlocking relationship. It is here that the true import of the setting of the novel during the Celtic Tiger period emerges. As well as the motif of speed underpinning cultural and economic endeavour, the Celtic Tiger moment celebrated the new and the now, above all else. If the past appeared it did so usually as trauma, suggesting that in the present the horror, failures, and repressiveness of the past had been overcome and the future (whatever that may be and whatever that may hold) was within reach.3 In this novel, the past is not represented as distant or different, rather it is a site of potential connection. Many of the autochrome images are of everyday objects: There are pictures of lemons and trout, pale eggs in a blue bowl, biscuits and studies of flowers. What strikes Fintan … is how alarmingly familiar all these things look, exactly like eggs and biscuits, fish and flowers which he might come across on any day of his life. (Madden, 2013: 76)

The value of art need not be found in the realm of the elsewhere, in the exotic, or the unfamiliar. The strangest of all things, perhaps, is the ordinary and the everyday and, it seems, for Madden at least, it is a function of art to simply remind us of that. Susan Sontag argues that photographs are not an interpretation of the world, that they ‘do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it’ (Sontag, 1977: 4). Thus, as ‘found objects’, photographs appear to be ‘unpremeditated slices of the world’ (Sontag, 1977: 69). Her thesis, therefore, might be summed up in the phrase: the snapshot. And certainly, this is what Fintan at first appreciates about photographs: their stillness, their being a record of a single moment plucked out of time. He experiments

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with his family at one stage, asking them to ‘Stop’ talking and to sit for a short time in silence at the dinner table (Madden, 2013: 35). Later, he ponders this moment and its possible meaning for him: Now he thinks that maybe it has had something to do with the idea of stopping time, of working against just this rush of life that he finds so disturbing. He wanted to keep the moment, to preserve it, and even by the strangeness of his request to make of it something that they might all remember. (Madden, 2013: 67)

Here, the necessity of slowing down the mad whirl of things is expressed amid the context of a modern Ireland in love with speed and movement. This, though, is not the final answer, because it is not ultimately what Deirdre Madden considers the function of art to be in the contemporary period. She refuses to accept that that is all that art, and indeed her own literary art, can do. As we know, she favours an aesthetic premised on continuing engagement and transformation: it is the struggle and the process which are emphasised again and again. Earlier, it was suggested that perhaps Madden’s perspective on modern life and how it might be best lived is gendered, in that her female characters find ways and means of coping with existential crises and carrying on. In this novel, it is Fintan’s sister Martina who offers a contrasting reaction to events. Martina had a successful career in London but returned home to Dublin suddenly without offering a full explanation to her family. She had left because she had been a victim of a sexual crime, having been abused by a man she was beginning to have a relationship with; he had violently and without warning assaulted her. She returned to Ireland and sought refuge in her aunt’s house. Significantly, what is stressed is that she felt safe and how she and her aunt’s husband Christy sat in silence: That man would never find her here … Christy said almost nothing – maybe he didn’t even speak at all … She thinks that she then moved to speak but he raised his hand, and they sat in silence for a few moments longer: but such a silence. It deepened and intensified. Any word would have been too abstract to define what had entered the room, but the spirit of it was the absolute antithesis of what had been done to her the night before. (Madden, 2013: 188–9)

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As in Authenticity, a conscious non-articulation, the withholding of speech, is emphasised. Even such a violent and traumatic event does not lead to paralysis, nor does it necessarily become the defining moment of Martina’s life. Rather, it is just one more moment among many. An unintended consequence of this toning down of key events is that they are denied the significance and importance they ought to have. Still, the effect is that Martina’s existence is not reduced to a unitary snapshot: a single moment that is forever to be stuck in the past. As if to emphasise this, Fintan and Martina come across a photograph from the past of a woman who, uncannily, resembles Martina (Madden, 2013: 56–7). Unlike the woman in the photograph, now an eternal still life, Martina lives and breathes and moves on into an unknown future. Fintan’s son, Neil, comments in his conversation with his father about the past and photographs, ‘we tend to think that the past was more interesting than it really was, and my point is that it was more banal than we give it credit for, but also more complicated’ (Madden, 2013: 112–3). The past is familiar to us in its ordinariness; but our own time can also be adjudged to be as complicated and as exceptional as the past may have been. Fintan comes to know this near the end of the novel. He has a vision of the nothingness that will be the future, his own future and that of everybody he now knows: [T]he strangest thing of all is that this sudden knowledge does not perturb him. Instead of being grief-stricken he feels a kind of cosmic gratitude: the life that he has been given! (Madden, 2013: 195–6)

Flux, change, and transience are to be accepted and embraced as the fundamental nature of existence. The stillness of the photographic snapshot is important, not for being a dead end, aesthetically closed off and hermetically sealed, but rather for its ability to catch the attention of the viewer amidst the hustle and bustle of life and prompt meditations on the relationship between past and present. Time Present and Time Past ends with the self-conscious question, ‘Where does it all end?’ It answers the question by saying that this story should end here, in a pub between Dublin and Armagh,

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as ‘[i]t seems to be as good a place as any to conclude’ (Madden, 2013: 220). The arbitrariness of this closing is important, in that it suggests that there is no true ‘end’ to narratives, stories, and novels, and that all endings are a form of pragmatic compromise. The last image of the novel is Martina helping Fintan out of the pub: ‘“Time, please, gentlemen”, she says. “Ding! Ding! Drink up, please! … Time, please! We’d best be getting you home”’ (Madden, 2013: 223–4). The only possible reaction to ‘Time’ is not to ignore or deny it, but rather to acknowledge its centrality and, perhaps, to make fun of it. Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past collectively trace a developing engagement with contemporary life in Ireland and, as an early reviewer of Authenticity stated, they meditate on the nature of ‘what is a life well lived?’ (Shields, 2002). That moral investigation is accompanied by a parallel consideration of art in the modern moment. While, of course, each can be dealt with separately, I would argue that Madden again and again suggests that art and life are inextricably connected, as they reflect and comment on each other. Indeed, it would seem that art is necessarily a means of understanding the ways in which we live now and of coming to appreciate the trials and tribulations of modern existence. Through her use of paintings, acting, and photography in her plots, Madden argues for an engaged art that is always born out of the everyday and the ordinary but aware of how strange and extraordinary that realm may actually be. Through art, her characters come to know themselves and something of the world they live in. In Molly Fox’s Birthday, it is left to the priest, Tom, to articulate the essence of modern art: and she [Molly] said that there’s a kind of truth that can only be expressed through artifice … It was a question of showing something familiar but in a moment outside time; saying, ‘Here’s love, here’s sorrow. Do you recognise them?’ (Madden, 2008: 117)

It is a gentle interaction between author and reader which is envisaged here. Madden’s work asks exactly these questions of her reader and in doing so opens a world of human stories that chart the complexities and the commonplaces of recent Irish life.

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Notes 1 For example, see Anne Haverty’s The Free and Easy 2008), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007), and Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012). 2 On Reading in the Dark, see Hand (2011: 247ff.). 3 Good examples of this are Anne Enright’s The Gathering or Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. For an extended analysis of trauma, see Garratt (2011).

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Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Q.: You were born in Toomebridge (County Antrim) in 1960, into a Catholic family, and you went to convent school there. In previous interviews you have talked about the importance of childhood for the revelation of the spirit of places. Considering the presence of Northern Ireland in your novels, how would you describe your childhood in such a small village? A.: I was actually born in Belfast and grew up not in the village of Toome itself, but in the countryside nearby. It was a very rural area, on the shores of Lough Neagh, and it remains an area to which I am deeply attached. I go back there to see family and friends as often as I can. It’s a place, I think, with a strong sense of community. It’s perhaps not a beautiful area in a dramatic or picturesque way, but it’s atmospheric and it’s a place with a strong identity and an interesting history. The River Bann flows through Toome and it’s the boundary between Counties Antrim and Derry. There’s a famous eel fishery and of course lots of farming activity. My childhood there was quiet and happy and rather protected. Q.: When the Troubles broke out you were only a small child. What memories do you keep of those difficult years? In what ways has this influenced you as a writer? A.: I remember those years very clearly indeed. We were close to my maternal grandmother who lived in Belfast, on the Falls Road, and we visited her frequently the whole way through the Troubles so I remember barricades and road blocks, and of course the military everywhere, bomb scares, things like that. I think the Troubles manifested themselves in a more dramatic way in the cities. In the

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countryside it was more hidden but still frightening. Especially when travelling at night you would be afraid of what the darkness might be hiding. The sound of helicopters was pretty constant. Being stopped at army checkpoints was irritating. Particular moments stand out of course, like Bloody Sunday and the introduction of internment. There was a lot of fear and anger. When I wrote One by One in The Darkness I wanted to bear witness to that time, and to record some of the things I remembered, to describe what it was like growing up as a girl and then a young woman in that society at that time. Q.: You have described your childhood as quiet and recall spending most of your time reading books. You also associate it with memories of a pleasant family of which you are very fond. Family relations and especially those between siblings govern the plots of most of your novels. How much of this is biographical? A.: Surprisingly little! I write very slowly and I think the main reason for that is because so little of the work is based on real life: it takes me a long time to develop characters. I’m interested not just in my own family but in families per se. A family can provide a fundamental core of confidence, security, and love, but a family can also be a toxic place. People can spend their whole lives trying to come to terms with a dysfunctional family. Sometimes children, and by that I mean adult children, give their parents the benefit of the doubt more than the parents deserve. The children want so much for the relationship to work that they’ll justify, or turn a blind eye to, some pretty bad behaviour; that’s something I’ve noticed and it’s very sad. You’re absolutely right, I’m interested in siblings, and one particular permutation is the special relationship there sometimes is between an artist and one of his or her siblings. Vincent and Theo Van Gogh would be a good example, Patrick and Peter Kavanagh, James and Stanislaus Joyce. There can be interdependence, supportiveness, rivalry, tremendous love. When I wrote Authenticity, I wanted to explore this idea through the characters of the painter, Roderic, and his brother Dennis. I think it’s fair to say that I find the family endlessly fascinating. Q.: How did you become a writer? Did you always want to write or was it a sudden decision?

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A.: My mother had been a teacher and she always made sure my sister and I had lots of books, so we were both great readers from an early age. I think my wish to be a writer grew naturally out of that. Throughout my teenage years I wrote a lot, and by the time I left school I was determined that I would be a writer: nothing else would do. I had poems and stories published by the wonderful David Marcus in ‘New Irish Writing’ in the Irish Press while I was still at school, and I won a Hennessy Literary Award while I was at Trinity. Both my parents, particularly my mother, were always supportive of my desire to write, and I’m deeply grateful for that. When parents are obstructive or hostile to the idea I imagine it must suck up a lot of energy that would otherwise go into the work. So I probably progressed relatively quickly in my early years as a writer because I was being endorsed and encouraged at home. Q.: You lived in Northern Ireland until you went to study to Trinity College Dublin. Was that a conscious move to the Republic in order to keep away from the Troubles or did it just happen? A.: Both were important. Trinity and the course of study on offer were attractive, and yes, I was also keen to get away from the North, where the situation was still pretty grim in 1979. Right from the start I was happy in Dublin and enjoyed my time in Trinity, where I made friends for life. Q.: Did your degree in English shape the readings that inform your writing or was it the other way round, that your interest in writing brought you to pursue the academic study of literature? A.: I found the studies for my degree interesting, but I’m not a natural critic. As a writer you’re mining a text in a different way and I didn’t fully understand that at the time. It’s obviously not essential to have a degree in English Literature to be a writer, but for me it was an important grounding. I’m glad to have that sense of the canon, to have had that broad knowledge of the tradition to work on. Q.: After your time in Dublin, you moved to East Anglia to complete an MA in Creative Writing; why did you choose that course? How important was it for your career? Had you drafted by that time any of your early novels?

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A.: As far as I know, the MA in East Anglia was at that time the only course of its kind in either Ireland or the UK. I was taught by Malcolm Bradbury, who set up the course, and by Angela Carter. I will always be grateful to Malcolm for his kindness and support and he was an excellent model as a teacher of Creative Writing too. I wanted to do the MA because I was already working on The Birds of the Innocent Wood when I went there and I felt, correctly as it turned out, that a structured year wholly focused on writing would help me to finish the novel. I was taken on by Faber & Faber shortly after University in East Anglia and they published both Birds and Hidden Symptoms, a novella that I wrote before I went to East Anglia. So yes, the MA did help me to move on to another stage with things. Q.: You then married a poet and you both took to travelling to different countries, including places as diverse as France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, England, the USA, spending about sixteen years of your life living abroad. What significance would you confer on your experiences journeying across Europe? I mean, in what ways have they shaped your vision of art and literature? Do your travels inspire your writing or are they prompted by a search for a voice outside the enclosure of an Irish literary tradition? A.: I should first of all say that I’ve never lived in the States; indeed I’m probably unusual amongst Irish writers because of how little time I’ve spent on the other side of the Atlantic. I’ve only been to the States once, for about a month, and that was more than thirty years ago. It’s not a place with which I feel any particular affinity; I’ve never been drawn to it. To be honest, I’d feel quite ill at ease at the idea of having to go to live there. I do feel profoundly European, and my years on the Continent were enormously important to me, culturally, personally, imaginatively, in every possible way. They helped me become the writer and the person I am. I understand Ireland better for having lived in Europe, and I love Ireland. I would like to think that my work is considered as part of a European tradition, not just as part of an Irish tradition or even a local or regional tradition, and to say that is not to denigrate any of those traditions; they are all of great significance. I didn’t go abroad in the first instance with the idea of looking for a subject nor is that how things essentially developed.

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Q.: The spatial imagery in your fiction is very powerful in that it seeks to attach the self to a place and to family life. Home is also very much a presence that figures prominently but whose construction evades fixed meaning. How do you feel about the ideas of belonging and of domesticity? A.: What do we mean when we say that someone has lost their home? It can mean the loss of a country, a language, a house or apartment, cherished possessions, access to a particular landscape. It can mean the loss of some or even all of these things. Home can include intangible and subtle things, like smells and taste, maybe foods that only taste a certain way when cooked by a certain person in a certain place. So when you start to tease out the meaning in this way you can see how many layers there are to this idea of home. One of the things that interests me is the deep psychic force that resides in any given house or place, and the hold that can have over someone. I try to explore that idea through the characters I write about, for example, the emotional shock Roderic experiences in Authenticity when he goes back to the house where he used to live in Italy. I can use the homes of the characters as a way of showing who they are, and what matters to them. Q.: Your novels are very well crafted; do you plan your plots ahead? How and when do you write? Do you follow a schedule? Do you believe in discipline or do you wait for inspiration? A.: I don’t think of myself as a particularly fluent writer. It usually takes me a long time to develop an idea, to work out what it is I’m actually writing about and to get to know the characters. I think the best way I can describe it is to say that it’s like the opposite of remembering a dream. You can wake up from an astoundingly vivid dream, but when you try to describe it to someone, to translate it into language, it melts away. With writing, on the other hand, what I usually start with is like a hazy, half-remembered dream, but as I continue to work everything becomes clearer and more sharply focused. By the time I’ve finished I can see everything. I like precision and accuracy, in both language and image. I revise a lot until I’m satisfied, until I feel that there’s nothing more I can do. I write longhand, and work out ideas in notebooks before I start to produce text, but of course I eventually transfer work to the computer.

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I don’t think it’s helpful for the work to look too finished at too early a stage. I like the transition between the free, messy handwritten text and the cleaner looking version when I begin to type it out. Something happens at that moment; you can suddenly see what you’ve produced in a slightly different way: see what’s working and what isn’t. I usually print off work and correct by hand, then adjust the electronic version accordingly. When I’m writing I try to get a routine going. In my experience, the old saying, ‘If you neglect the work for a day, it’ll neglect you for a week’, is so true. I like all the paraphernalia around writing, beautiful notebooks and folders and so on. I had a fountain pen that I wrote with for years – it felt more like an extra finger than a pen! – and I was upset when it finally wore out. It started to leak and the cap wouldn’t stay on. I got a new one, and got used to it eventually, but it took a while. Q.: Which are your favourite writers, those to whose works you keep coming back? Which writers do you think have influenced you most both within and outside the Irish literary tradition? Do Marcel Proust or James Joyce deserve a special place on your shelf? A.: This whole question of literary influence is complicated and not, I think, generally well understood. There are conscious and unconscious literary influences, and I suspect that for most writers the latter are stronger than the former. Then there are writers one might greatly admire and read avidly and yet one might feel that nothing much of them seeps into one’s own work; one doesn’t know how to synthesise the work for one’s own ends. Joyce might be an example of this for me. Some writers are important also for the example of the way they conducted their writing lives. Flannery O’Connor is a writer I love in any case, but in her letters you get such an interesting insight into her routine as a writer. Over the course of one’s writing life the significance of particular books and writers changes of course. Proust is enormously important to me and also Henry James. In an Irish context I admire John McGahern for the complete integrity of both the work and the life. A book I am never tired of reading is Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Might I also say that sometimes people see things in your work that you don’t see yourself? Critics sometimes see a similarity between the work of two writers and then construe an influence that simply isn’t there. Sometimes writers get compared to each other and

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indeed yoked together critically because of a shared background, be it gender based, cultural, geographic, or whatever and this becomes a received idea, so that it’s considered to be a fact that X was influenced by Y. This can be problematic, as it’s hard to disclaim or deny without appearing rude, particularly if X has a strong antipathy to the work of Y! And so that supposed influence can harden into a part of one’s literary identity in a way that one doesn’t feel to be at all authentic or true. People do seem to find it hard to see beyond the social realm and into shared imaginative worlds. I feel an enormous imaginative affinity with writers like Proust or Henry James, even though their social worlds are so distant from, even alien to, the world in which I live. Q.: Different forms of visual art, including photography, inform much of your writing. Which type of art do you value most? Do you have a favourite artist or art form? What function do you think visual art has in modern society? A.: Again, these things change over time. I became interested in painting and the visual arts when I was living in Italy and then in France and that fed into the work. I always think of writing as an artisan activity above all. I like making things; I’m interested in crafts as well as arts. I was able to use painting as a metaphor for writing in Authenticity, but when I went to write Molly Fox’s Birthday I struggled a lot, because I didn’t fully appreciate in advance how different acting is to either writing or painting. Acting is much more of a physical activity; it’s being or doing rather than making. It’s literally a performance, rather than making an object. I like looking at photographs. Thinking about the way photography mediates time, which is very unlike how it operates in painting, helped me develop Time Present and Time Past. Q.: In a previous interview, you have affirmed that your favourite literary sub-genre is the novel of ideas. How do you define this type of writing? In terms of form and aesthetics, which is your favourite genre and narrative style? A.: I should say first of all that I have no aptitude at all for abstract thought, so the ideas have to be fully integrated into the fiction. For example, Time Present and Time Past is a reflection on the nature of

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time, in a religious, or even in a mystical way, conscious always of the true meaning of that word. Molly Fox is, amongst other things, about identity, and about how someone might construct a self. Of course the reader should absorb these ideas through the fiction. I suppose what I mean is that I like to read work that is reflective rather than just narrative driven. Again an example or two might be useful at this point, so I’ll suggest The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and various works by Heinrich Böll such as The Clown or Group Portrait With Lady. In terms of favourite narrative styles, I do tend to like big slow-moving works that are maybe even rather static, but that take you deep into their particular worlds, and deeply into the minds of the characters. A writer I suppose I think about more consciously than any other when I’m working is Henry James. I love the way he deals with the psychology of his characters; and I love the way he controls the narrative, with nothing much seeming to happen for a long time, and then there’s a particular incident or revelation that somehow reconfigures for both the reader and the characters everything that has happened up until that point, for example when Lord Mark turns up in Venice in The Wings of the Dove. I admire the way James is able to push things under the surface and yet you can feel the enormous force of what is concealed. Q.: Time and transience, together with memory and its links to identity, lie at the centre of all your novels. How do you feel about the passing of time and about the need of human beings to create memories? A.: We’re back to Proust, I suppose, who is the great artist of time, and I should also mention at this point T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which is an essential work for me. It’s one of the most fundamental human wishes, the desire to be remembered, and with that there’s the wish to somehow overcome the transience of life. We all know that we must die, but we’re all trying constantly to take evading action. Your perspective on time changes as you get older. I remember meeting my maternal great-grandmother when I was about four. She was already an adult, a grown woman, at the end of the nineteenth century, and it’s a strange thought to me now, towards the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, to know that I met her. Those personal links and memories that go so far back

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into historical time can be dizzying to contemplate. The loss of the past and the knowledge that we can’t go back can feel tragic. It can also feel liberating, of course, depending on what’s back there and what one might wish to get away from. The way you can seem to stumble back into the past, the sheer power of memory, all of this seems extraordinary to me. Q.: Objects also play an important role in your novels since they have the capacity to evoke moments from the past and to distil past experiences. Julia, the protagonist of Authenticity, creates art out of disposable things, and her installations challenge conventional assumptions about art. What significance do you confer on objects? A.: I try not to acquire a lot of possessions but the things I do have tend to mean a lot to me. Objects can be a portal to the past. I have all my books from when I was a child, and when I take them down and look at the pictures in them I remember looking at those same images when I was young; but if I didn’t have the actual books I know I wouldn’t be able to recall the images in such detail. The things we choose to have around us, the value we place upon certain things, says something about us. I like the way that an object can become charged with meaning because of the circumstances in which it came into our lives, or because of how we feel about the person who gave it to us. It’s as if energy can be absorbed by an object. Q.: Most of the characters of your novels have to come to terms with trauma and loss, either of a parent during childhood, of a next of kin later in life, or of material things, places, or even unattainable past moments. The psychological exploration of their minds is usually set against a backdrop of contained emotion and repressed memories. Why do you consistently turn to these themes? A.: I am aware that some of the work has a dark side to it, particularly the very early work. I was very young when I was writing those books, and I think one is more emotionally volatile and vulnerable in one’s twenties. I remember Angela Carter remarked somewhere how when she read her own early work she was astonished at how much anger there was in it. I do know that living through the Troubles left its mark upon me. However, I can’t help feeling at times that people exaggerate how dark or bleak my work is; I don’t

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think it’s any more so than the general run of contemporary fiction and possibly a good deal less than most. Time Present and Time Past is about an exceptionally close and happy family, but for some reason that seems to get overlooked! Q.: Even though the world that prevails in your writing is fundamentally female, gender issues are not usually raised in your novels. In Molly Fox’s Birthday, Molly insists on being called an actor, not an actress, because she argues that you would not call a female poet a poetess. For a writer like you, who celebrates femininity, how difficult is it to stand apart from feminist politics? A.: To answer that I’d go back to what I said earlier about abstract thought not being my strongest suit. I find it hard to conceptualise those kinds of ideas independent of particular characters. That distinction between the terms actor and actress felt like a credible one for Molly to make. She is an independent, strong-minded woman, a free spirit. I think I might dispute the idea that the world that prevails in my writing is fundamentally female. There are plenty of male characters: Fintan, who is the main character in Time Present and Time Past; Andrew and Fergus in Molly Fox’s Birthday; Roderic, Dennis, and William in Authenticity – I could go on. A lot of the work is written from the point of view of these men, so I’m always surprised when I hear it said or implied that I only write about women. There must be something about the way I write that suggests this: maybe the focus on the domestic world, the setting, the way a lot of the emotion is internalised. Q.: What do you think of the phenomenon of what has been called the Celtic Tiger novel? Would you see Nothing is Black, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past as critiques of the materialism of the bourgeois class that emerged in Ireland due to sudden prosperity and affluence? Do the concerns of these novels contrast with previous issues raised in The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone, or Authenticity, which thematise the communion with nature and art, and also celebrate isolation and nostalgia? A.: The only one of my novels that I think might conceivably fall under the Celtic Tiger definition is Time Present and Time Past, and

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even that was set at the time it was for pragmatic reasons. I was writing it shortly after the economic crash, and I set it in the recent past because if I was setting it any further back in time I would have to have had a compelling artistic reason for doing so. The changing economic fortunes of Ireland at that period are dealt with in the novel, but they aren’t its raison d’être. In any case, although the Buckleys are a fairly bourgeois family they aren’t given to the rampant consumerism and vulgarity that was the hallmark of the Celtic Tiger era. If I had been primarily dealing with that subject, I would have had to ramp up the excesses to make the point. If I do see a thematic pattern it’s that quite a few of the books are concerned with people who make art – Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Nothing is Black, for example. Remember, also, that I’ve been writing for a very long time now so it’s to be expected that my approach, my views, my style and so on will have changed over the years. Q.: Some critics have pigeonholed you within the realist tradition, which is in a way an oversimplification of the nuances and aesthetic complexities that lie at the core of your non-linear narratives, their self-reflexivity, and intertextual quality. You seem to have a special eye for looking at reality from a myriad of perspectives, offering a rich kaleidoscopic view that reveals things little by little. How do you see your literary output within the context of contemporary Irish literature? A.: I can see why I might be primarily seen within the realist tradition, but I can also see why that definition doesn’t quite cover all the bases. To take up that idea of ‘looking at reality from a myriad of perspectives’ – that’s one of the things I find particularly appealing in fiction, that one can explore the validity of contrasting, or even of conflicting, points of view. In Time Present and Time Past, for example, a lot of the family are at odds with Joan, and yet when you look at things from her perspective, and look at what her life has been, it’s easier to see why she is as she is, and behaves as she does. When you consider her from the point of view of her children, however, you can, I hope, fully understand why Fintan and Martina find her so difficult and exasperating. I think it’s possible, maybe even likely, that my work in the future will engage more and more with the

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non-realist element to which you allude. I’m interested in a strange, slightly visionary element that I feel is present in life if one is open to it. I don’t know if I’m quite explaining it properly here; maybe if I approach it from a different angle, and say that a purely rational approach to things doesn’t seem to me to answer all the questions one might have, that might help. Of course it’s in the nature of what I’m talking about that it can’t be fully explained. Q.: You have always resisted the category of Northern Irish novelist. However, the North is always directly or indirectly present in your writings even if they are set outside Ireland, as is the case with Remembering Light and Stone. Now that we are living in a Europe of indeterminate and challenged political borders, and especially given the divided feelings of the Northern Irish towards the UK after Brexit, how do you see yourself approaching the North in your next novels? A.: I have always felt that the border has been a tragedy for Ireland, and I have always seen Northern Ireland as a kind of political experiment that didn’t and doesn’t work. The terrible history of the place and the divisions that remain to this day are the evidence that I would give to support this view. I was deeply dismayed by the result of the Brexit vote. Even though the people in Northern Ireland voted Remain, the overall result was of course in favour of leaving Europe, and what will actually happen is still uncertain and unclear. And uncertainty and lack of clarity are the last things Northern Ireland needs at the moment. I do not see how further isolation can be a good thing for the society there. The peace remains fragile, I believe, and anything that endangers it is to be deeply regretted. How I might write about the North in the future depends on what happens there and that’s far from clear at the moment. Q.: You are a successful children’s writer. In what ways does writing for children differ from writing for adults? Some people who are close to you have pointed out that there is much more of you in your children’s novels than in the adult’s work. Would you agree with this? Are there inherent links between your literary novels and children’s fiction? A.: When I started to write for children I was amazed, because it was as if I had discovered a part of my mind and my imagination

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that I hadn’t known existed. The work for children is much more narrative-driven than the work for adults. It’s also quite playful and comic, whereas some of the adult work, particularly the early novels, tend to be quite dark. I had a very strong imaginative life when I was small and I think writing for children allows me to tap into that again, which I enjoy very much. In Snake’s Elbows the hero is a pianist and he collects paintings, and cats feature, as they do in Molly Fox, and Authenticity, and Time Present and Time Past, so yes, I suppose there are a few similarities and links. Q.: What are you writing now? Have you planned when your next novel will come out? A.: I am working on something but as usual it’s taking a long time for it to take shape, so it will be quite a while yet before there’s another book. I teach Creative Writing in Trinity College – I have recently been made a Fellow there – and it can be difficult to balance the teaching and the writing. It’s not so much a question of finding time as finding headspace. Teaching is an externalised activity, and writing on the other hand is internalised, contemplative. I still find writing enormously satisfying. In the piece I’m working on at the moment, one particular character seemed to me from the start to be the driving force and the central energy of the text, but as I continue to work that’s changing in a way I hadn’t expected, and some of the other characters are coming to the fore. But that’s often how it goes, so it’s not a problem. I’ll be interested to see how it all works out in the end.

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Bibliography

Works by Deirdre Madden (1986). Hidden Symptoms. London: Faber & Faber. (1988). The Birds of the Innocent Wood. London: Faber & Faber. (1992). Remembering Light and Stone. London: Faber & Faber. (1994). Nothing is Black. London: Faber & Faber. (1996). One by One in the Darkness. London: Faber & Faber. (2002). Authenticity. London: Faber & Faber. (2008). Molly Fox’s Birthday. London: Faber & Faber. (2013). Time Present and Time Past. London: Faber & Faber.

Books for children and other (2001). ‘Looking for home: Time, place, memory: A lecture given at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, Laval University, Québec, May 2001’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 26.2/27.1: 25–33. (2005). Snakes’ Elbows. Illustrated by Tony Ross. London: Orchard. (2007). Thanks for Telling Me, Emily. Illustrated by Tony Ross. London: Orchard. (2012). Jasper and the Green Marvel. Illustrated by Tony Ross. London: Faber & Faber. (ed.) (2015). All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories. London: Faber & Faber.

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Index

Abraham, Nicholas 207 acting and actors 97, 99–101, 141–2, 216, 220–2, 229, 237 see also plays and playwrights ageing 11, 102–15, 168–9 Alexander, Neal 7 animals 147–61, 211–13 see also bird imagery; cats; dogs; owls; tigers anthologies 3–4 architectural imagery 12, 23–4, 202–8, 211–13 art and artists 8–9, 12, 57–8, 60–1, 83–5, 96–101, 103–4, 109–11, 115, 116–18, 121–7, 136, 166, 170, 173–4, 179, 209, 220, 239 see also paintings and painting; photographs and photography; still life Assmann, Aleida 18–20 Attig, Thomas 50 Attridge, Derek 131 Austen, Jane 2, 85 Authenticity 11–13, 83–4, 88–92, 94–7, 99–100, 103, 105–12, 114–30, 165–6, 180, 189, 192–4, 198, 216–19, 222, 229, 232, 235, 237, 239–41, 243 Bach, Johann Sebastian 126, 129 Bachelard, Gaston 182, 197 Balzac, Honoré de 85 Banville, John 215, 218–21

The Newton Letter 218 The Sea 218 baptism 59 Barnes, Fiona 183, 198 Barthes, Roland 20–1, 24–5, 27, 84–5, 117, 168, 173 Bartnik, Ryszard 7 Battersby, Eileen 4, 6 Bauman, Zygmunt 215 bearing witness 35, 37–40, 45, 47–8, 232 Beckett, Mary 6 Beckett, Samuel 219 Belfast 36–7, 40, 51, 67–8 Peace Line 67 Belfast Agreement 7 Benito de la Iglesia, Tamara 6, 35 Benjamin, Walter 18–19, 22, 223 bereavement 20–3, 25, 36, 50–65, 76, 106, 111, 116, 141–4, 191, 203–4, 239 Berger, John 154, 158 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 57 Bettelheim, Bruno 148 Bildungsroman 50, 200 Bion, Wilfred 118 bird imagery 119–20, 123–6, 157–8, 192, 204–6, 208, 213 Birds of the Innocent Wood, The 8, 12, 180, 184–5, 189, 194, 197, 199–209, 213–14, 234, 240 Bloody Friday (1972) 139 Bloody Sunday (1972) 232 Blunt, Alison 181, 183, 185, 195

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Index Böll, Heinrich 238 Bollas, Christopher 118–21, 123, 126, 128–9 Bond, John 106 Bowen, Elizabeth 147, 149, 159 The Good Tiger 147, 153–4 Boym, Svetlana 19, 21, 27 Bradbury, Malcolm 234 Brah, Avtar 181, 190, 193 Brexit 242 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 203 Brontë, Emily 2 Wuthering Heights 204, 208 Brontë sisters 203 Brown, Laura 119 Buck-Morss, Susan 18 Butler, Judith 64 Cahill, Martin 151 Cahill, Susan 215 capitalism 8, 84, 86, 95, 108, 114, 155–6, 159 Carroll, Lewis Through the Looking Glass 150 Carter, Angela 234, 239 Caruth, Cathy 119 Catholic Church 138, 169 Catholicism 9, 33–4, 43, 68, 70–3, 133–4, 136–8, 141, 145, 169–75 see also religion; religious faith Catholics see Northern Ireland cats 147, 151, 154–8, 211–13, 243 Cavell, Stanley 48 Celtic Tiger 8, 12, 18, 26, 92–3, 113, 117, 151, 155, 165–79, 215–29, 240–1 childhood 19, 24–5, 28, 36, 44–7, 69, 73–6, 114, 116–20, 137, 140, 147–50, 154, 160–1, 181, 184, 186, 189–90, 196–8, 221, 231 children’s novels 2, 11, 147–61, 242–3 Civil Rights marches 72–3, 191 Cixous, Hélène 205–6

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Clare, Anthony 108 class, social 66, 69–78, 138, 165–6, 168–9 Cleary, Joe 75 clothes, as signifiers 83, 85, 91–2, 95, 188 Cohen, Richard 40–1, 47 Cole, Thomas 102, 114 colonialism 8, 147, 168 comic stories 147, 243 commemoration 24, 32–48, 140, 143–4, 192 see also memory; remembrance Connolly, Cressida 117 consumerism see materialism Conway, Brian 33 Craig, Patricia 6, 43 Dawson, Graham 17, 132–3, 137–40, 145 Deane, Seamus 219 death 6, 20–1, 23, 25, 37–9, 43, 50–62, 67, 76, 99–100, 105–6, 118, 122, 127–8, 140, 143–4, 170–1, 184, 188, 192–3, 203–8, 214 Defoe, Daniel 86 Derrida, Jacques 202, 225 Dickens, Charles 86 dogs 151–2, 155–6 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 42 Dowling, Robyn 181, 183, 185, 195 Duchet, Claude 92 Dunmore, Helen 17, 224 Dunn, Carly J. 9 East Anglia, University of 233–4 Eliot, George 2 Eliot, T. S. ‘Burnt Norton’ 17, 94 The Four Quartets 238 Ellis, Kate Ferguson 211 Enright, Anne 3, 215–16 Erikson, Erik 104, 107, 114 Erikson, Joan 104 Estévez-Saá, Margarita 8, 116–17

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Europe 165, 179, 234 see also France; Italy European Union 8, 12, 177 family 26–30, 47, 52, 54, 61–2, 67–8, 74, 87, 113, 137, 139, 179, 185–7, 190–1, 195 family secrets 12, 54, 60, 147, 199, 204–5, 207, 214 Felman, Shoshana 37–8, 48 Felski, Rita 131–2, 135, 139, 146 feminism 3, 8–10, 99, 109, 197, 200–2, 240 Field Day anthologies 3–4 Flannery, Eoin 7–8 Flaubert, Gustave 85 Madame Bovary 92 forgetting 3, 18–19, 21, 26, 94, 185 France 5, 210, 234 see also Paris Frank, Arthur W. 132 Freud, Sigmund 109, 118–19, 206 Gaffney, William 104, 113 Gaskell, Elizabeth 86 genera 118–29 gerotranscendence 104 Giacometti, Alberto 188 Gibbons, Luke 176 Gleeson, Sinéad 4 globalisation 8, 176 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 110 Good Friday Agreement 18, 93 Gothic motifs 12, 199–214 female 200–2, 211, 214 origins 201 Graham, Colin 66 Grant, Linda 4 Gullette, Margaret 110 Harpham, Geoffrey 39, 48 Harte, Liam 6, 66 Heaney, Seamus 36–7, 70, 75 North 37 Heidegger, Martin 182, 192 Heidemann, Birte 7 Hennessy Literary Award 233

Hepworth, Mike 106 Hidden Symptoms 1, 6–7, 11, 17, 18, 20–3, 27, 30, 32–3, 35–45, 50–65, 83, 103, 117, 132–6, 143, 145, 180–3, 194, 197, 234 Higgins, Geraldine 5, 7, 53, 55–6, 66–7, 132, 137, 145 Hirsch, Marianne 19, 21 Holocaust 30, 58–9 Holocaust museum 58–9 home, idea of 8, 12, 23–4, 28, 36, 46, 67, 121, 180–98, 205, 235 hooks, bell 192, 197 Hughes, Eamonn 8 Huyssen, Andreas 18 imagetexts 19, 30 Ireland, Republic of 18, 51 economic boom see also Celtic Tiger economic crash 30, 89, 94, 223–4 Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) 102 Irish Press, ‘New Irish Writing’ 1, 233 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 6, 137–9 see also paramilitarism; Provisional IRA Irish Times 3 Italy 5, 21, 23, 42–4, 103, 111, 124, 147, 150, 160, 185–7, 200, 203, 209–10, 234 Jakobson, Roland 86 James, Henry 150, 236, 238 The Wings of the Dove 238 Jasper and the Green Marvel 147, 159 Jeffers, Jennifer 6 journalism 76–7, 138–9 Joyce, James 236 Dubliners 86, 168 Ulysses 36 Jung, Carl 109–10, 113–14

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Index Kearney, Richard 132, 137, 225 Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer 5, 17, 24, 45, 189–90 King, Jeannette 109 Kipling, Rudyard 153 Kirby, Peadar 18 Kirkland, Richard 75, 77 Kristeva, Julia 8, 85, 98, 100 Künstlerroman 2, 11–12, 84, 98, 117, 124, 128–9 Lacan, Jacques 84 LaCapra, Dominick 139 Lanzmann, Charles Shoah 37–8 Laub, Dori 37–8, 48 Legg, Stephen 20 Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin 148 Levinas, Emmanuel 33, 39–40, 42–3, 45, 47 Lispector, Clarice The Passion According to G.H. 205 literary prizes 1, 50, 199, 233 ‘Looking for home’ (lecture) 19, 131, 149, 165, 172, 179 Loyalists 24, 90, 93, 137, 141, 184 Maalouf, Amin 134 McCabe, Patrick 216 McGahern, John 236 The Barracks 105 That They May Face the Rising Sun 106 ‘Wheels’ 113 ‘The Wine Breath’ 113 McGuinness, Frank 10 MacLaverty, Bernard Cal 33–5, 45 MacSharry, Ray 18 Mallett, Shelley 180–1, 185 Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain 238 Marcus, David 1, 233 Margalit, Avishai 32 Marshall, Kate 204 Marston, Sallie Ann 185 Martin, Violet (Martin Ross) 153

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martyrdom 33–4, 38–9, 43 Marx, Karl 202 Massey, Doreen 190, 193 materialism 12, 84–7, 94–8, 240 rejection of 111, 115 Matisse, Henri 110 Mauriac, François 116–17 memorials see commemoration memory 7, 17–31, 133, 147–8, 150, 181, 192 metafiction 5, 180 metaphor 19, 37, 86, 122, 130n1, 133, 183, 195, 212, 237 metonymy 86, 89, 121–2, 129 Michelangelo 57, 110 Miles, Robert 201–2 Miller, Karl 207 mirroring, mirrors 10, 45, 51, 54– 7, 60–1, 63–4, 87–9, 203–5 Mitchell, W. J. T. 19 modernism 2, 86, 168, 220, 224 Moers, Ellen 200–1 Molly Fox’s Birthday 8–9, 11, 83, 86–7, 89–93, 95, 97, 100, 132, 134, 141–5, 180, 184, 193–8, 216, 220–2, 229, 237–8, 240–1, 243 Moody, Harry 105 Morin, Christina 201 Morrissy, Mary 200 motherhood 62, 87, 99, 206 mourning see bereavement Munford, Rebecca 210 music 30, 57, 115, 125–6 National Council for the Elderly 102 National Council on Ageing and Older People 102 nationalism 2, 9, 34, 38, 43, 66, 68, 71, 138, 159 cultural 167 Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís 26 Nora, Pierre 19, 21, 26 Nordic Irish Studies 103 Northern Ireland 51, 242 Catholics in 133–4, 137–8, 141 Protestants in 90, 93, 137, 184

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see also Belfast; peace process, Northern Ireland; Troubles, Northern Ireland nostalgia 19–28, 73–4, 150, 186, 189–90, 192, 197, 240–1 Nothing is Black 8, 11, 83–4, 87–8, 91–2, 94–5, 98–9, 111, 117, 132, 165–79, 188–9, 194, 240–1 Nouwen, Henri 104, 113, 114 novel, role of 48, 57, 84, 86, 88, 96, 103, 114, 135, 138, 140–1 objects 2, 11, 36, 57, 83–101, 116– 23, 129, 147–52, 158–60, 188, 192, 195–7, 226, 239 childhood 116, 120, 149 O’Connor, Flannery 236 Olinder, Britta 8, 117 One by One in the Darkness 6–7, 9, 11, 17, 20, 23–31, 32–3, 35, 37, 44–8, 66–78, 83, 92–3, 103, 112–13, 132, 136–41, 143, 145, 165, 180, 189–92, 197 O’Neill, Margaret 103 Orange Order 134 O’Toole, Fintan 8–9 Owens, Sharon 6 owls 157–8, 213 paintings and painting 34, 60, 84, 96–7, 99, 103, 121, 126–7, 129, 147, 151–2, 157, 159–60, 216, 223, 229, 243 see also still life paramilitarism 35, 141, 143, 151, 184, 221 Paris 112, 141–2, 144, 200, 203, 211, 222 Parker, Michael 5, 6, 50, 66, 74, 116–17, 132, 135, 190, 216 patriarchy 3, 8, 62, 99–100, 108, 114, 202, 206 Patten, Eve 35, 67, 75 Patterson, Christina 5, 30 Patterson, Glenn 70

peace process, Northern Ireland 6–7, 9, 18, 242 Pepys, Samuel 173 photographs and photography 10, 19–22, 25, 27–30, 56, 58, 113, 144, 216, 223, 225–6, 228–9, 237 plays and playwrights 83, 91, 141, 144–5, 180, 220–2 see also acting and actors postmodernism 5, 220 post-nationalism 66 Protestants see Northern Ireland Proust, Marcel 19, 21, 25, 173, 236 Contre Saint-Beuve 150 Provisional IRA 135 see also paramilitarism punctum 21 Radcliffe, Ann 201–2 realism 5, 83–8, 101, 168, 241 reconciliation 6–7, 30, 135, 142, 208 Reid, Christina 69 Reifungsroman 104 religion 33–4, 59, 98, 103, 115, 135–6, 142, 165, 169–72, 174–5, 183, 217, 238 see also Catholicism religious art 179 religious faith 51, 53–4, 62–3, 103, 135, 173, 182 loss of 115, 170–2 Rembrandt 110 Remembering Light and Stone 8, 12, 103, 111, 117, 147–8, 150, 154–60, 180, 186–7, 194, 197, 199–203, 209, 211, 213–14, 240, 242 remembrance 7, 22, 25, 31–48 see also commemoration; memory Richtarik, Marilynn 9, 133 Ricœur, Paul 97 Robinson, Marilynne Housekeeping 236 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature 1, 50

Index

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Rose, Jacqueline 148 Ross, Martin (Violet Martin) 153 Ross, Tony 151, 155, 159 Ruane, Joseph 18 rural life 23–4, 87–8, 93, 106, 137, 158, 165–6, 175–9, 184 Russell, Richard Rankin 7 Said, Edward 110 St Peter, Christine 8, 67 Sarton, May 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul 95 scent 122, 127, 169 Schrage-Früh, Michaela 103 Scott-Maxwell, Florida 105 sectarianism 7, 20, 24, 66, 70–1, 77, 133–5, 138, 142 sectarian violence 2, 20, 33–5, 37–8, 47, 50, 76, 133–4, 142, 145, 182–3, 189 secularism 169–70, 174–5 Segal, Lynne 108, 112 semiotics 85, 98–101 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 202, 221 Sheridan, Louise 8 Shields, Paula 116 short stories 1, 4 Sinn Féin 75, 137, 139 Smyth, Gerry 6 Snakes’ Elbows 147, 151–2, 154–5, 157, 159–61, 243 Snyder, Travis 7 Somerset Maugham Prize 1, 199 Somerville, Edith 147, 149, 153–4, 159 The Story of the Discontented Elephant 147, 153 Sontag, Susan 225–6 spectrality 202–3, 205, 207, 209–10, 213–14 Stendhal 88 Stevenson, Robert Louis 149–50 Treasure Island 150 still life 96, 114, 121–2, 217–18, 223, 228 suicide 109, 118, 185, 187, 207, 212

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symbolism 7, 21, 23, 29, 31, 37– 40, 42, 58–9, 85, 91, 98–9, 108, 182, 195, 199, 204, 214 synecdoche 86 Tallis, Raymond 106 Taylor, Charles 172–5 temporality 17–24, 26–7, 112–13, 137, 238 terrorism 141–2, 222 see also Troubles, Northern Ireland Thanks for Telling Me, Emily 147, 154, 156–7, 159 Thoreau, Henry 106 tigers 147 Time Present and Time Past 4, 7–8, 12, 17, 19, 26–30, 83, 89, 92–3, 101, 113–14, 148, 165, 180, 195–7, 216, 223–9, 237, 240–1, 243 Tóibín, Colm 215 Toomebridge, County Antrim 231 Tornstam, Lars 104, 112 Török, Mária 207 tourism 160, 166–7, 178 trauma 7, 9, 17, 20, 28, 46, 116, 118–19, 121–3, 127, 189, 199, 239 women’s experience of 33, 36 Troubles, Northern Ireland 2, 4–6, 9, 12–13, 28, 32–48, 67–70, 93, 132–46, 182, 191, 221, 231–3, 239 ceasefires 7, 24, 44, 137 legacy 17 representation of 76–7 see also paramilitarism; sectarianism Turner, J. M. W. 124, 129 van Eyck, Jan 60 Vermeer, Johannes Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid 151 Vidler, Anthony 203, 213 Villon, François 27

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violence 135 impact of 7, 24–5, 41, 45, 133 see also sectarian violence; trauma #WakingtheFeminists 3 Watkin, William 35 Waxman, Barbara Frey 104–5 Webber, Andrew 207 White, Jerry 8, 50, 53, 117 White, Padraic 18 Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray 89–90 Wiley, Catherine 183, 198 Williams, Anne 202, 207 Williams, Raymond 176–7

Index Winnicott, Donald 107–9, 118 Wojcik, Pamela Robertson 211 women in Irish and Northern Irish literature 2–3, 9 Women’s Prize for Fiction 1 Woodward, Kathleen 110 Woolf, Virginia 85–6 Mrs Dalloway 224–5 Wordsworth, William 120 World War II 136 writing methods 235–6 Yacavone, Kathrin 22 Yeats, W. B. 110 Young, Iris Marion 192, 197 Zola, Émile 86