Governing the Tongue in Northern Ireland : The Place of Art/The Art of Place [1 ed.] 9781443802222, 9781904303602

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Governing the Tongue in Northern Ireland

Governing the Tongue in Northern Ireland The Place of Art/The Art of Place

By

Shane Alcobia-Murphy

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

Governing the Tongue in Northern Ireland: The Place of Art/The Art of Place, by Shane AlcobiaMurphy This book first published 2005 by Cambridge Scholars Press 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2005 Shane Alcobia-Murphy

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-904303-60-9

For Michael Downes, i.m.

Table of Contents Chapter One “Not Forgotten or Passed Over at the Proper Time”: The Representation of Violent Events in Contemporary Culture..........................................................1 Chapter Two The Government of the Tongue: Art and Conflict in Northern Ireland...............21 Chapter Three “The Free State of Image and Allusion”: The Intersection of Poetry and Politics ..........................................................................................................38 Chapter Four “They Look and Look and Look and Cannot Find You”: Northern Irish Historiographic Metafiction ................................................................................65 Chapter Five Unfinished Narratives: Artistic Representations of Bloody Sunday ...................88 Chapter Six ‘Obsolete and tomb-led as the Boyne’: The Representation of Place in Northern Irish Literature and Visual Art .............................................................99 Chapter Seven The City is a Map of the City: Representations of Belfast’s Narrow Ground...............................................................................................................114 Chapter Eight Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel: Setting the Island Story Straight? .................127 Chapter Nine Safe House: Authenticity, Nostalgia and the Irish House .................................144

INTRODUCTION From 23 January – 6 March 2004, the Derry-born visual artist Willie Doherty exhibited a work entitled Non-Specific Threat at the Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and it has been shown at various other galleries since then.1 The work comprises of a series of large-scale colour photographs (cibachrome prints mounted on plexiglas) and a single-screen video installation. Each photograph depicts the head and upper-torso of a shaven-headed young man wearing a blue denim jacket, black-shirt and silver-coloured neck-chain. Photographed in different poses against nondescript urban settings, he is the non-specific threat: a skinhead, a thug, a gangster, a terrorist. Doherty’s early photo-texts overtly direct the viewer towards a reading of an image through the placement of text onto the photographic image. This technique is what Barthes terms “anchorage”, whereby “the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance”.2 While Non-Specific Threat avoids textual inscription across the images, each carries a different directive sub-title: “Unspeakable Terror”, “Monstrous Depravity”, “Intolerable Devotion”, “Nauseating Barbarity”, “Unforgiving Ruthlessness”, etc. While the viewer can posit his or her own interpretive response in light of each caption, the cibachrome photographs, with their reflective surface framing the viewer’s image within the scenes depicted, insistently raise “the question of how we fill in meanings to images, in the context of the set of accepted ideological responses”.3 The captions are intentionally (mis-)leading: while they propose a narrative, what interests Doherty is “how the viewer completes that narrative and locates [the] images within it”.4 The seven-minute looped video projection features the same man standing motionless inside a dark, deserted warehouse. The camera makes a tight 360q pan around the subject, allowing him to be viewed from every angle. The audio-track appears to be the man’s internal monologue in which “he expresses explicit and veiled threats and attempts to describe the nature of his relationship to the viewer”:5 “I am fictional ... I am the reflection of all your fears ... I am real ... I remind you of someone you know … You can be like me … I am any colour you want me to be … You make me feel real”. In contrast to the image’s inscrutability, the audio-track initiates the parameters by which the “non-specific threat” is to be interpreted: suggestive of an internalised self-image, the monologue affirms a relation between the viewing subject and the object of his gaze, and intimates that the man’s identity is protean, contingent on the narrative constructed for him. The

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staged encounter is an instance of epistemic closure resulting in what Lewis Gordon terms “perverse anonymity”: the man becomes a type, one who exemplifies an identity stemming from the viewer’s presumption of complete knowledge of him.6 In short, the audio-track relates how he was “comprehended”, and, as Emmanuel Levinas argues, “[i]n the word ‘comprehension’ we understand the fact of taking [prendre] and of comprehending [comprendre], that is, the fact of englobing, of appropriating”.7 Since the early 1990’s Doherty’s work has been concerned with how we characterize the often unknown person or persons behind a perceived violent or terrorist threat. Our desire to recognize and scrutinize the ‘face of evil’ is framed by our experience of how different governments and the media have historically represented and continue to define the terrorist. Such attempts to locate and understand a threat or an enemy necessitate the creation of a character who is beyond reason, outside of civilized society and who becomes known to us as a fusion of real and fictional figures.8

The thematics and formal concerns of Non-Specific Threat directly follow on from Doherty’s Northern-Ireland based works Same Difference (Matt’s Gallery, London, 1990) and They’re All the Same (Hatton Art Gallery, Newcastle-uponTyne, 1991). In the former, a photograph taken from a news broadcast featuring Donna Maguire’s face - the so-called “most feared woman in Europe”9 - is projected onto two diagonally opposite corner walls. Two different sequences of words are projected onto each face: “Murderer”/”Volunteer”; “Delirious”/”Daring”; “Impulsive”/”Fearless”; “Savage”/”Angry”. Highlighting the ways in which the media (and governments) manipulate the public’s perception of “terrorists”, the viewer begins to see how their own projection of character onto the image is dependent on the language used to contextualize it.10 In They’re All the Same, Doherty projects a 35mm slide of a newspaper photograph of Nessan Quinlivan’s face11 onto a screen while a monologue is delivered through an audiotrack, spoken by a man with an Irish accent in which he talks about his native landscape as a projection of his character: “The clean sweet air is interrupted only by the lingering aroma of turf smoke. I’m pathetic. The verdant borders of twisting lanes are splattered with blood red fuschia. I’m barbaric. Nowhere is the grass so green or so lush. I’m decent and truthful. It’s in my bones.” As Dan Cameron has argued, the artist here sets up “a linguistic context in which motive and intent become the subject of discourse”12 and, in so doing, invites both empathy with and detached criticism of Quinlivan, offering a critique of the limited terms in which the IRA man has been “framed” within the media. The self-descriptions proffered by the speaking voice (“ruthless and cruel”; “crazy”; “cynical”) may correspond to an internalised self-image stemming from the media’s construction of a strategic alterity; however, the other descriptors (“solid”; “proud and dedicated”;

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“innocent”; “dignified”) act as necessary counterpoints that disallow epistemic closure and beg the question as to why the public must necessarily be protected from the alternative point of view. Self-reflexive, obliquely political, aware of its audience, alive both to the possibilities and limitations of his chosen medium – Doherty’s work is typical of much contemporary Northern Irish art which seeks to respond to the Troubles. In an environment where there has not only been over thirty years of political conflict, sectarian unrest and covert activity by shadowy establishment forces, but also a war of words in which much innocent (and not-so-innocent) ink has been spilled, the creative artist has found that his or her resources have come under severe pressure. What words are available to a writer when there is not even agreement on how to refer to that state (“Northern Ireland”, “the North”, “Ulster, “the six counties”)? How free is he to produce even a short poem when every word will be scrutinised for its political subtext? Must he seek to address a wider audience than his immediate community? Is he compelled to react to the latest atrocity? Must he be aware of his own inculcated prejudices and political affiliations? Must he reveal these overtly in his artwork? Because of these and other related questions, the recent work by Northern Irish writers has been characterised by an inward-looking self-consciousness. It is an art that relays its personal responses in guarded, often coded ways. The art, however, does not simply re-present “events”, and the artist’s emotive response towards them; rather, it calls attention to the manner of their presentation. This is also what we find with visual artworks of this period. The visual artist, too, must contend with an environment in which, due to the oversaturated news-reportage and photo-journalism that has often peddled clichéd imagery, the realist aesthetic has become problematic. Indeed, writing about the insufficiency of photojournalism, newspaper reportage and cinematography when dealing with violence and the products of that violence, Tom Herron states: The body in atrocity is textual and spectral in that the violence marks the body in particular ways that have to transfer through space and time and mark out the “event” of the execution or assassination in question. A certain globalised play of presence and absence is already there: film footage, video clips, long-shot photography are already there, at what is not a primal scene. “Events” take their place in a long and desperate history of images of violence, in which the language is conventional: the body, shot and dumped by the road, the bomb with the warnings phoned through too late, the reactions, the condemnations, the retaliations. These are part of the recognizable vocabularies and image archives of political assassination and its aftermath.13

What Herron terms “recognisable vocabularies” represent satisfying responses for both reporter and artist alike; they are a means of conveying an

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immediate response without having to come to terms with violent “events”. The more complex visual artwork of recent years has come to scrutinise such vocabularies. Governing the Tongue examines how the creation of art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety in the artist regarding his or her artistic role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present an event. The opening chapter looks at the strategies adopted by visual artists and writers from around the world who, when tackling well-documented, controversial violent events, seek to avoid (or critically examine) conventional means of representation and the dangers of what Baudrillard terms “diversion and neutralization”.14 The following chapter takes Northern Ireland as a case study and closely examines how artistic silence and narrative breakdown in texts by Northern Irish writers and visual artists often result from an unwillingness to respond to atrocity due to the need to remain “expertly civil tongued”, from a perception that art lacks efficacy in (what is perceived to be) a cyclical, pre-ordained conflict, and from a sense of being at a disabling temporal, cultural or spatial distance from events. Two further chapters look at the developing self-reflexive forms adopted by Northern Irish writers: while the poets have adopted the “cento”, the quoting text, as the form with which to address the conflict in Northern Ireland, the novelists employ the historiogaphic metafiction, a narrative form which foregrounds the uneasy intersection of history and fiction. Very often what results is an art about art. While poets such as Seamus Heaney may use the words of literary exemplars as authoritative touchstones, at times he overtly questions the efficacy of such a strategy. That explicitness is in direct contrast to the covert nature of Medbh McGuckian’s quoting strategy; constructing poems from existing texts without acknowledgement, she ventriloquises her thoughts through the words of others. Novelists like Seamus Deane and Eoin McNamee attempt to re-present “true” stories, yet the narrative forms that they adopt seem deliberately self-conscious, self-questioning and selfcancelling. The fifth chapter examines how writers and artists have tackled a single event from Northern Irish history – Bloody Sunday (30 January, 1972) – and demonstrates how the artworks are less about the event itself than about its subsequent representation in journalistic texts, official reports, historical accounts and artworks. While the book’s opening half explores the “place of art” in terms of its status and efficacy in a time of violence, the four concluding chapters examine the same question in geo-spatial terms, namely how Northern Irish artists represent that place in a time of violence. Cultural geographers such as Allen Pred, Derek Gregory and David Harvey have long argued that “place” cannot be discussed as an isolated, asocial entity and for the younger Northern Irish poets and visual

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artists whose formative years have coincided with the Troubles their “place” refuses to yield a seemingly unmediated, “natural” significance. Their place is not authentic, organic or rooted; rather, the artists recognise the plural and contingent identities of place and explore the ways in which they are discursively constructed. The book, of course, is not comprehensive, nor is it intended to be. The number of writers (Ciaran Carson, Seamus Deane, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Eoin McNamee, Glenn Patterson), visual artists (Willie Doherty, Rita Donagh, Paul Seawright, Victor Sloan) and filmmakers (Alan Clarke, Paul Greengrass) could easily have been expanded. However, they are representative of a recent trend in Northern Irish art towards the self-reflexive. Many of the chapters in this book are based on the following articles and essays that I have published during the past ten years: “Friel and Heaney: Setting the Island Story Straight?”, New Hibernia Review (Summer, 1996); “‘Don't Mention the War!’: The Trouble(s) in Northern Irish Poetry”, Aesthetics of Violence, ed. Michael Hensen. (Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz, 2001); “The City Is a Map of the City: Representations of Belfast’s Narrow Ground”; Cities on the Margin: On the Margin of Cities: Representation of Urban Space in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, eds. Eric Tabuteau and Philippe LaPlace (Paris: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, 2003); “‘Not Forgotten or Passed Over at the Proper Time’: The Representation of Violent Events in Contemporary Culture’”, Culture, Language and Representation 2 (May, 2005); “Safe House: Authenticity, Nostalgia and the Irish House”, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Contemporary Culture, eds. Gerry Smyth and Joanna Croft (Rodopi, 2006); “Re-reading Five, Ten Times, the Simplest Letters”: Detecting Voices in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian”, Nordic Irish Studies, (Spring, 2006); “The Government of the Tongue: Art and Conflict in Northern Ireland”, for Diverse Voices, eds. Michael Parker and Scott Brewster (Manchester UP, 2006); “‘They Look and Look and Look and Cannot Find You’: Eoin McNamee’s Historiographic Metafictions”, New Hibernia Review (2006). My thanks go to the editors who took such great care in preparing them for publication. Finally, there are a number of people and organisations that need to be acknowledged, as without their help the book could never have come to fruition. I wish to thank Barbara Fennell for granting me departmental leave for a semester this enabled my completion of the book. Thanks are also due to the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS) as they funded several trips to the Special Collections Department at Emory University, as did the Carnegie Trust. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), through the auspices of

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RIISS, sponsored a series of one-day symposia at which the majority of the papers in this work were delivered. Many scholars have given up their time to either read or listen to sections of this book, and I thank the following for all their advice: Patrick Crotty, Steve Dornan, Fidelma Farley, Andrew Gordon, Margaret Maxwell, Liam McIlvanney, Katherine Meffen, Paul Shanks, Daniel Smith, Dan Wall, and George Watson. Finally, huge thanks go to my family for their proofreading skills (all faults are mine, not theirs) and to Cassilda, with love. Shane Alcobia-Murphy August, 2005 1

See http://www.alexanderandbonin.com/exhibitions/doherty/2004/doherty3.html Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana, 1977), 40. 3 Paul O’Brien, “Willie Doherty: Language, Imagery and the Real”, Circa 104 (2003), 53. 4 Willie Doherty, “Like Home”, interview by Joan Rothfuss, No Place (Like Home), Zarina Bhimji et al., (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997), 47. 5 Press release issued by Alexis Canter of the Alexander and Bonin Gallery. 6 Lewis R. Gordon, “A Questioning Body of Laughter and Tears”, Parallax 8.2 (2002), 16. 7 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1961), 70. 8 This passage is contained in the press releases issued by Alexis Canter (Alexander and Bonin Gallery) and by Claudi Friedeli (Galerie Peter Kilchmann). 9 Donna Maguire was arrested at Rosslare and charged with the possession of bomb-making equipment on 12 July, 1989. In February 1990, she was acquitted of these charges. In June she was arrested in Belgium and charged with membership of an illegal organisation and possession of arms. These charges were later dropped. In November, she was extradited to Holland and charged with the killing of two tourists in Roermond. In July, she was acquitted but held on an extradition warrant from Germany (relating to an attack on a British Army barracks in Hanover). All charges were subsequently dropped. She was finally found guilty of charges relating to the bombing of a British Army barracks in Osnabruck, Germany (1989), but was immediately released as she had already served sufficient time in prisons awaiting trial and sentencing. 10 See Willie Doherty, Willie Doherty: False Memory (London: Merrell, 2002), 156. 11 On 7 July 1991, Nessan Quinlivan, a member of the IRA, escaped from Brixton Prison. He later claimed that he was aided in his escape by a prison officer and that it was all part of an MI5 scheme. 12 Dan Cameron, “Partial View: Transgressive Identity in Willie Doherty’s Photographic Installations”, Willie Doherty: Partial View (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1993), n.p. 13 Tom Herron, “The Body’s in the Post: Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Dispersed Body”, Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, eds. Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 205-6. 14 See Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002). 2

CHAPTER ONE “NOT FORGOTTEN OR PASSED OVER AT THE PROPER TIME”: THE REPRESENTATION OF VIOLENT EVENTS IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage. They serve to multiply it to infinity and, at the same time, they are a diversion and a neutralization ….The image consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it and offers it for consumption. Admittedly, it gives it unprecedented impact, but impact as image-event.1

Both the media and artists alike utilise images of violence for a variety of purposes: to objectively document atrocities; to raise awareness of neglected, forgotten or unknown conflicts; to register opposition or mobilise support against the actions of a corrupt regime; to memorialise the dead. However, the effects of such images are less straightforward and far more uncertain. In her recent appraisal of the techniques, public reception and development of photojournalism in Western society, Susan Sontag argues that “[as] objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible”.2 What can result is the vicarious (if not voyeuristic) pleasure of the spectator witnessing the suffering of others. In its objectification of the victim, the image may foster passivity and induce apathy. As Marshal McLuhan once commented in Understanding Media (1964), “[t]he price of eternal vigilance is indifference”.3 Indeed, arguments still rage as to the ethics of such representation: to what extent are photographers and writers intrusive or exploitative in their desire to represent events, and to what extent is it permissible to aestheticise suffering?4 However, Jean Baudrillard’s essay on the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers propounds a far more provocative thesis on the role and impact of imagemaking in modern culture, arguing that, due to the spectacle’s “radicality” and the image’s “irreducibility”,5 interpretation is rendered problematic (if not impossible) on trying retrospectively to impose a meaning on the image. A photograph of a violent atrocity or its aftermath may provoke an emotional response, but journalistic usage of photo-documentation can, conversely, fail to grant access to interpretation and thus serves to induce a numbing indifference towards an event that cannot be comprehended. This chapter looks at the strategies adopted by visual

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artists and writers who, tackling well-documented, controversial violent events, seek to avoid (or critically examine) conventional means of representation and the dangers of what Baudrillard terms “diversion and neutralization”. The genocidal conflict in Rwanda had already received blanket coverage in the world’s media by the time the Chilean photographer Alfredo Jaar visited the refugee camps outside of Kigali and on the Zaire-Rwandan border in the autumn of 1994. Jaar amassed some three thousand photographs in an attempt, as he put it, “to make art out of information most of us would rather ignore”.6 The experience left him with a fundamental distrust of the visual image: not only did the framing, lighting, cropping and editing of the pictorial texts distort reality, for him the texts failed to interpret or provide access to the violence. Describing this failure, Jaar says: For me, what was important was to record everything I saw around me, and to do this as methodically as possible. In these circumstances, a “good photograph” is a picture that comes as close as possible to reality. But the camera never manages to record what your eyes see, or what you feel at the moment. The camera always creates a new reality. I have always been concerned with the disjunction between experience and what can be recorded photographically. In the case of Rwanda, the disjunction was enormous and the tragedy unrepresentable. This is why it was so important for me to speak with people, to record their words, their ideas, their feelings. I discovered that the truth of the tragedy was in the feelings, words, ideas of those people, and not in the pictures.7

What resulted was an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago (1995), ironically entitled Real Pictures. Jaar selected sixty of his photographic images and placed each separately in black linen boxes, on top of which he had silk-screened in white a description of the image inside. These boxes were then arranged into stacks of various shapes and sizes, each reminiscent of a funerary monument.8 Referring to a photograph taken at Ntarama Church situated forty kilometres south of Kigali at which four hundred Tutsis were slaughtered, the text on one box reads: Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, is standing in front of the church. Dressed in modest, worn clothing, her hair is hidden in a faded pink cotton kerchief. She was attending mass in the church when the massacre began. Killed with machetes in front of her eyes were her husband Tito Kahinamura (40), and her two sons Muhoza (10) and Matirigari (7). Somehow, she managed to escape with her daughter Marie-Louise Unumararaunga (12), and hid in a swamp for 3 weeks, only coming out at night for food. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun.9

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The linguistic text provides a situating narrative, at once descriptive, contextual and documentary. It is, in part, a selective chronicle of events prior to the taking of the photograph, outlining details and gestures which the camera cannot but fail to capture. While one could argue that the intentional occlusion of photographic imagery and the consequent prioritising of linguistic text guards against a scopic regime that either aestheticises violence or distorts the real, Jaar seems, rather, to react against media-saturation and the passive consumption of imagery, seeking “to re-engage the viewer, to employ the imagination as an active ingredient”:10 as spectators, we are forced to actively conjure up our own versions of the photographic texts. As David Levi Strauss argues, “[o]ne wanders among these dark monuments as if through a graveyard, reading epitaphs. But in this case, the inscriptions are in memory of images, and of the power that images once had on us”.11 However, despite the obvious care with which Jaar constructs his narratives, their selective nature indicates the flaw in his thinking: any representation of the Rwandan conflict will necessarily fail to provide the viewer with access to the “real”. As Hayden White argues regarding “the modernist event”, “any attempt to provide an objective account of the event, either by breaking it up into a mass of its details or by setting it within its context, must conjure with two circumstances: one is that the number of details identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite; and the other is that the ‘context’ of any singular event is infinitely extensive or at least is not objectively determinable”.12 In part this points to the false premise upon which Baudrillard bases his critique of the “image-event”: although he correctly distinguishes between event and “imageevent”, the latter is never unmediated; rather than “offering” images for our consumption, the event is presented and framed by situated critics working from a particular agenda and within a specific socio-political context. However, this does not mean that Jaar’s art is one of failure. His inner compulsion to scrutinise, judge and lay bare the aftermath of a violence which has a long and seemingly unknowable history leads him time and again to attempt the act of representation. In a later exhibition, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996), Jaar returns to his subject; on this occasion, however, there is no total concession of authority to the linguistic medium. Along a darkened corridor he inscribes a fifteen-foot long single line of text that provides an account of the Rwandan conflict, specifically focusing on what happened at the church in Ntarama. This narrative leads the viewer onwards, framing the exhibit in the conjoining room in which on top of a light table is placed a million photographic slides. Each slide depicts the same image: the eyes of Gutete Emerita. Slide magnifiers are placed at intervals along the light table so that viewers can gaze upon the slides more closely. The

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contextual information prompts the spectator to see the eyes as those of a victim; yet the unswerving gaze demands reciprocity. Are the eyes accusatory? Do they offer a plea for understanding? Do they outstare the world’s indifference? Commenting on the image’s effect, Debra Bricker Balken argues that “[t]he close contact established with the eyes of a witness to a phenomenal crime is meant to mark or imprint our minds with an unforgettable image”.13 This is the artist’s intention: while he himself cannot provide an interpretation either for the violence or for the western world’s reaction, his art can attempt to re-open the debate surrounding a genocidal conflict we would rather forget. The fact that Jaar produces a million slides of the same image may suggest that it functions as a metaphor for the thousands that perished in the full glare of the world’s media, yet the repeated act also intimates the repetition compulsion of someone suffering from latent trauma. This is Freud’s “speaking wound”, indicative of a trauma that has not been fully assimilated; it is “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality that is not otherwise available”.14 It is an open wound for Emerita, Jaar and for all those who participate in the exhibition. Perhaps the best example of an artwork that both critiques the supposed objectivity of photojournalism and self-reflexively foregrounds the limitations of the artist’s own medium is Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977, an exhibition of fifteen oil paintings centring on the deaths of four members of the so-called Baader-Meinhof group. The events upon which the work is based are shrouded in mystery and political intrigue: did Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe each commit suicide, or were they murdered? Of the death of Andreas Baader, for example, the official explanation states that he committed suicide using a gun hidden in the record player in his cell. The account runs as follows: After the making of the suicide pact, he took the pistol out of the record player, and while standing – so as to simulate a fight – he fired two shots, one into his mattress, the other into the cell wall beside the window. Then he picked up the empty cartridges ejected from the pistol and put them beside him. He reloaded the pistol, crouched down on the floor of the cell, and put the barrel of the gun to the nape of his neck. He held the handle with one hand, the barrel with the other, and pressed the trigger with his thumb. The bullet entered his head at the nape of the neck, and came out through his forehead, just above the hairline.15

But that is but one narrative, and by no means the most rational or acceptable. Due to the unorthodox nature both of his incarceration and trial,16 and because of

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unexplained anomalies regarding the entire criminal investigation into his death,17 many commentators have refused to rule out the possibility of foul play. Regarding the night of 17 October 1977, Stefan Aust, in his authoritative account of the Baader-Meinhof Group, concludes that “[e]xactly what happened in the high security section between 11.00 pm and 7.41 am, a period of just under nine hours, will probably never be known; it remains matter for conjecture, speculation and myths”.18 Does Richter’s artwork contribute to this myth-making? Does he present the spectator with a politically-motivated artistic intervention? Are the paintings sensationalist in their graphic depiction of the corpses? Describing his paintings, the artist states: “All the pictures are dull, grey, mostly very blurred, diffuse. Their presence is the horror of the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion. I am not so sure whether the pictures ask anything: they provoke contradictions through their hopelessness and desolation; their lack of partisanship”.19 Such an admission of a lack of “partisanship” and of “hopelessness” has led critics to decry the pessimistic aesthetic that the paintings supposedly embody. Stefan Germer writes: These paintings reveal that painting is dead, incapable of transfiguring events, of giving them sense. … They state pictorially that any attempt at the constituting of meaning via aesthetic means would be not only anachronistic but cynical…. If nothing can be altered, because all representation must necessarily end up asserting the inadequacy of the medium, what is the point of these paintings?20

To answer that question, one only has to look at the paintings and assess the differences between them and the archival photographs upon which they are based. For example, the photographic model for the suite of paintings entitled Dead 1, Dead 2, and Dead 3 is that of Ulrike Meinhof lying dead on the cell floor with the wound on her neck visible to the viewer’s gaze, a forensic shot that was published in Stern (and other magazines) alongside articles which purportedly told her story (and how she came to commit suicide). While the three paintings superficially imitate the photograph’s framing, lighting, and composition, they present the viewer with a subject that cannot be known: dragging his brushes across the stillwet canvas, Richter diffuses the image, making details decidedly unclear. It appears as if Meinhof becomes less knowable as the viewer’s gaze travels between each canvas, the image dissolving and progressively getting smaller. In his short story entitled “Looking at Meinhof”, Don DeLillo captures the effect perfectly when he stages an encounter between two strangers in a gallery looking upon Richter’s paintings.21 The female character stares at the three images

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of Meinhof and muses: “The woman’s reality, the head, the neck, the rope burn, the hair, the facial features, were painted, picture to picture, in nuances of obscurity and pall, a detail clearer here than there, the slurred mouth in one painting appearing nearly natural elsewhere, all of it unsystematic.” The man states bluntly that “[t]hey were terrorists” and that “[t]hey commited suicide” and has difficulty understanding the paintings; the woman is more intuitive, unwilling to dismiss the subjects as having “no meaning” and says: “What they did had meaning. It was wrong but it wasn’t blind and empty. I think the painter’s searching for this. And how did it end the way it did? I think he’s asking this.” It is no accident that Richter uses a predominantly grey palette here: this symbolically liminal shade – neither black nor white – is indicative of an artist seeking to negotiate between the polarized opinions regarding her death. Richter does not abdicate his artistic responsibility by refusing to offer a resolution to the contradictions thrown up by the events depicted. Since the impact of each painting is dependent on its historical context, he provides this through the inclusion of articles and photo-albums centring on the Baader-Meinhof group. The paintings themselves are not to be viewed as documents in the same way as the archival material: they are not photographs. While the paintings may take on some of the qualities of photography – here we have, in Barthes’ terms, “the return of the dead”, the referent being both “spectre” and “spectacle”22 – nevertheless the eidos of the painting is not death. Distinguishing between painting and photography, Robert Storr, the curator of the exhibition on its purchase by the Museum of Modern Art (New York), argues that “[p]ainting, which takes time to make – time indelibly marked in its skin – restores duration to images of death. October 18, 1977 introduces an existential contradiction between painting’s slowness and photography’s speed, between the viewer’s condition, which allows one to spend time, and that of the subject for whom time has ceased to exist”.23 The artwork’s sole political intervention lies in giving the viewer pause for thought, inviting him/her to review and re-engage with the events like the unnamed woman in DeLillo’s short story. For some writers, even to refer to a controversial violent event requires an art that is self-reflexively alive to the difficulties inherent in such an act. In the first of “Three Baroque Meditations”, the English poet Geoffrey Hill asks: “Do words make up the majesty / Of man, and his justice / Between the stones and the void?”24 This is the writer as a self-torturing, morally compromised individual, all too aware of the involved intersection of ethics and aesthetics. It is a theme to which Hill returns obsessively. In “History as Poetry”,25 an ars poetica that prefigures his later call for contemporary poetry to engage in “a memorializing, a memorizing of the dead”,26 the opening two lines conjoin different perspectives

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and moral judgments: “Poetry as salutation; taste/ Of Pentecost's ashen feast.” The reader’s attention is drawn to the dual concern of the first line's final word, its ambiguity heightened by the strategically placed enjambment: “taste” refers to refinement and poetic sensibility; it also refers to a more sensual, earthy activity.” “Pentecost's ashen feast” incorporates a further ambiguity: while the poet receives the gift of tongues to spread the word, what results is purely sterile; the image of Pentecostal fire inextricably links creative inspiration with an all-consuming destructive force. Michael Leddy, referring to the “ash” from King Offa's “noon cigar” in Mercian Hymns, states that “Hill is keenly aware that we speak as historical persons: our words existed before we did and have acquired (and continue to acquire) connotations over which we do not have control: “ash” is not the same word it was before Auschwitz and Hiroshima”.27 What are “the tongue's atrocities” to which the poem refers? In The Force of Poetry, Christopher Ricks argues that “atrocity may get flattened down into the causally ‘atrocious’, or it may get fattened up into that debased form of imagination which is prurience”.28 While the tongue may speak of atrocities, it can also speak atrociously. A poet of Hill’s stature guards against the tongue’s atrocities (improper clichés, unintentional ambiguities, the unwarranted glamour of grammar)29 through what Stephen James terms an “ethical gravity, painstaking probity, and intensely registered moral scruple.” However, as James concedes, Hill’s writing consistently registers “how any poetic claim to high seriousness is confounded by the intransigent nature of language and the inherent duplicities of metaphor”.30 What can result is the poet’s taciturnity, a strict governance of the tongue. In a recent paper entitled “Language, Suffering, and Silence”, Hill examines different aspects of this silence: it does not simply connote poetic impotence, disabling inarticulacy, or “dumb insolence”, but can be a “powerful form of resistance”, a “forensic equivocation – a position that is neither assent nor refusal of assent», and a stoic refusal to write to an extrinsically enforced agenda”.31 Such forensic equivocation is to the fore in “September Song”, Hill’s elegy for a nameless victim of the Holocaust.32 Regarding the concentration camps, Hill states in an interview with Blake Morrison that: “The burden which the writer's conscience must bear is that the horror might become that hideously outrageous thing, a cliché. This is the nightmare, the really blasphemous thing: that those camps could become a mere ‘subject’”.33 This assessment of the difficulties facing the artist approaching the Holocaust as a subject is echoed by numerous cultural critics and Holocaust survivors: Elie Wiesel has said that “Holocaust literature” is a “contradiction in terms”;34 George Steiner has claimed that “the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason”;35 and Theodor Adorno notoriously argued that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”.36 For the latter, art “transfigured and stripped” the Holocaust “of some of its horror

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and with this, injustice is already done to the victims”.37 In Hill’s poem, we witness the poet’s own struggle to express the horror of the event in language. Indeed, the text’s starkly factual epigraph (“born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42”) belies its own declarative intent: firstly, as Ricks rightly argues, one cannot, “without a terrible dehumanized bureaucratic numerateness, say ‘19.6.32’ or ‘24.9.42’”;38 secondly, the author’s use of an orthographic sign - the hyphen - as a disjunctive link summarily reduces the person’s life-experience to two bureaucratically registered temporal nodes, unable or refusing or disinclined either to bear witness or give voice to the victim’s humanity. However, hyphenation has “a double sense of articulation”, “joining what it separates” as well as “separating what it joins”.39 As a line of union, therefore, the hyphen may well intimate a preordained, causal link between the person’s birth (into the Jewish faith) and her eventual deportation. The line may take the form of a memorialising epitaph, yet by cleverly swapping “deported” for the more usual “departed”, Hill implies that this is no natural departure, but a murderous deportation. The italicised statement foreshadows a brutally curtailed and insufficiently detailed obituary memoir, one that mimics the insidious efficiency and inscrutability of the Nazis’ dehumanising discourse. Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time.

The conjunction of racial and sexual overtones in both “undesirable” and “untouchable” is typical of the author’s dense linguistic intricacy (if not ambivalence):40 the victim is both politically and sexually “undesirable” because she is Jewish, but also because she is too young; “untouchable” similarly exploits this duality of sex and caste, yet the negative construction intimates that (physical or sexual) abuse has not been precluded. Hill’s use of the word “proper”, as Jon Silkin says, “brings together the idea of bureaucratically correct ‘as calculated’ by the logistics of the ‘final solution’ and by the particular camp’s timetable”, and “contrasts the idea of the mathematically “correct” with the morally intolerable”.41 The girl is not “passed over” in that she is marked out by selection for death, the pun on “Passover” reminding the reader of a previous genocide.42 One could contend that Hill is here complicit with the oppressors’ dehumanising ethic due to the fact that the victim remains nameless and because of the uncertainty of the lines’ tone. One could even go so far as to say that, in the second statement, Hill pronounces a death sentence (he eliminates its subject). Yet the omission of the name works to avoid sentimentality. Indeed, the dryly objective, laconic tone, the dispassionate register and the morally ambiguous puns may well be repugnant, yet they are intentionally so. Poetic form enacts the thematics of the text. Refuting the infelicitous distinction between theme and content, Hill tells John Haffenden that:

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I would find it hard to disagree with the proposal that form is not only a technical containment, but is possibly also an emotional and ethical containment. In the act of refining technique one is not only refining emotion, one is also constantly defining and redefining one's ethical and moral sensibility. One is constantly confronting and assessing the various kinds of moral and immoral pressures of the world, but all these things happen simultaneously in the act of self-critical decision.43

Hill’s use of language deliberately enacts a denial of agency and responsibility. To convey the reality of the Holocaust as “a systematized, mechanized, and socially organized program”,44 Hill has his speaker adopt what Hannah Arendt has termed the S.S. “objective attitude”45 whereby violence is both understood and described in terms of economy and administration. The text foregrounds the ways in which the Nazis’ coded language rule (Sprachregelung) initiated a “displacement at the levels of both concept and practice of language as a form of disclosure and expression”.46 In the second stanza, for example, we are told: “As estimated, you died”. Yet we are not told by whom or why such an estimation occurs. No-one is seemingly accountable for the death: “Things marched, / sufficient to that end”, the depersonalised subject referring both to the victims shorn of all identity going towards their doom, and to the unspecified forces that govern their fate. When the speaker refers to “Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented / terror, so many routine cries”, the reader is tempted to fill in the omitted (yet implied) repetition of “just” before “so many cries”, where, as Ricks infers, “‘just’ is both the casually murderous ‘Merely’ and the meticulously murderous ‘Precisely’”.47 Conjoining mathematical exactitude with moral rectitude, the pun forces the poet to change tack. Just as Primo Levi discovered that morality inhabits a “grey zone” within the concentration camps,48 and just as Elie Wiesel was confronted with the dissolution of ethical boundaries when faced with the unimaginable atrocities of the Nazis,49 so too does the poem’s speaker come to realise that humanity ceases to function as a concept in a world where the death cries are heard as “just so many routine cries”.50 It is for this reason that he seemingly admits the ineffectual nature of his elegy for the young girl. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true)

The second line’s awkward enjambment and lack of punctuation slows the reading process: how are we to read “it”? Is Hill saying that the elegy itself is verifiably correct, or is it an admission that the text mourns his own death rather than that of the unnamed victim? As a parenthetical remark, disrupting the

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traditional octet-sestet sonnet structure, it is both central and marginal to the text’s concerns (the very ambiguity of its position rendering provisional any reading of the poem). What follows at once situates the speaker at a remove from the camp victim (hence undermining his right to speak on her behalf), yet also links him to her through the image of the fire: September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

The “fires” may be “harmless” to Hill, yet they were not so to the nameless girl; and the admission that the smoke obscures his vision self-reflexively points to the severe limitations of his perspective. The concluding line – “This is plenty. This is more than enough” – seems paradoxical: it suggests the text is sufficient for his purposes, yet also somehow excessive (perhaps over-stepping the mark). The conclusion both affirms and questions his own contention that “the achieved work of art is its own sufficient act of witness”.51 The seemingly overwhelming problem confronting those who write about what is now termed “ethnic cleansing” is how to bear witness to the unimaginable violence. Discussing Zabel Essayan’s memoir, Among the Ruins, a chilling account that chronicles the aftermath of the 1909 pogroms in Armenia, Marc Nichanian explores the instances whereby Essayan foregrounds her inability to delimit, describe or rationalise what she saw: “she recounts how at each moment she is submerged, engulfed by the horrifying misery of the stricken”.52 Essayan, for Nichanian, becomes the modern Antigone, experiencing “the interdiction of mourning” due to a number of factors: firstly, what she sees are the results of “a violence without any assignable meaning”;53 secondly, “the will to extermination”54 cannot be conceptualised or “integrated into any psychological, rational, or psychical explanation whatever”;55 and thirdly, the witness finds it impossible to imagine, and hence identify with, the victims’ experiences. Time and again, as Ezrahi says of artists trying to represent the Holocaust, “the realist’s or the naturalist’s respect for details which comprise the fabric of historical processes is defeated by facts which can hardly be integrated into any pre-existent system of ethics or aesthetics”.56 One solution is to extend (or subvert) the conventions of a genre and to incorporate a knowing, self-reflexive critique of representation into the artwork. Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed two-volume graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,57 constructs a memoir of his father’s (Vladek) experience of the Holocaust within the traditionally low-brow genre of sequential art (the comic),58

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yet avoids its simplifying tendencies; indeed, as Robert Leventhal argues, “[t]he reduction of the players to cats (Nazis), mice (the Jews), pigs (the Poles) and other national stereotypes offers a conscious, intentional miniaturization and reduction, pointing up the process of compression, simplification and devaluation not merely of the Nazi’s practices before and during the Holocaust, but the reduction and simplification present in many ‘responses’ to the Holocaust as well”.59 At one point, Spiegelman allows the anthropomorphising convention to break down and shows the character as humans wearing masks while patting a “real” cat;60 at another, the author-figure meditates on the difficulties of portraying his French wife (as a moose, a poodle, a frog, a mouse or a rabbit).61 Thus, he is alive to difficulties of representation and the dangers therein of creating stereotypes. While the graphic novel’s overt subject matter centres on Vladek’s tale of survival, the text also serves as a meditation on the silence surrounding the Holocaust and the consequential psychological damage this causes. At the beginning of Chapter Two in the second volume the fictional illusion is broken by the self-referential interjection of the author-figure (Art), wearing a mouse-mask, attempting to complete the memoir and unable to do so because of unspecified feelings of depression. The text begins with the line “Time flies …”, yet it is clear that for the author the legacy of the past is both inhibiting and all-pervasive: beneath his desk are the rotting corpses of camp victims surrounded by flies; outside his window is one of the guard-towers from Auschwitz; and the shadows in his room make up a Nazi swastika. We are told that his first volume has been a commercial success (“At least fifteen editions are coming out”), but it is clear that the writing process has not been cathartic and has not yet allowed him to work through his melancholia: not only does he feel guilt at producing life (his wife is pregnant) while so many had died in Auschwitz, but he has also been unable to break the silence left by his mother’s suicide. The statement that “she left no note” acts as a persistent refrain throughout the graphic novel. It appears first in the opening frame of Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History,62 a comic book produced in a different style and incorporated within Maus to create a mise-enabîme structure, allowing the subtext of Art’s search for his mother’s story to emerge and highlighting his own latent trauma. Anja, also a death-camp survivor, committed suicide when Art was twenty years old. In one panel from the alternative comic, Spiegelman neatly conveys the son’s anguish and unresolved feelings of both guilt and anger. The narrow panel, suggesting confinement, deemphasises exterior relations in favour of interior ones through the use of an expressionistic collage of images, (the naked mother lying dead in her bath; a mound of corpses next to a wall inscribed with Nazi graffiti; a younger version of a smiling Art sitting next to his mother who is reading him a story; the mother, her arm tattooed with her camp number, slitting her own wrist; and the older Art

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whose facial expression and deportment conveys an idiomatic gesture of painful recollection), and text (four slogans in bold, capitalised letters, barely contained within the frame: Menopausal depression, Hitler did it, Mommy!, Bitch). Such narrative density expresses the sense of loss and betrayal felt by Art, and his inability to mourn her loss, one that is equated with his own loss of self as he is imprisoned within “The Planet Hell”. While the mother’s life within the camps is represented, her story is incorporated within Vladek’s testimony and voiced by him. The revelation that he had deliberately destroyed her memoir so as to repress the painful events of her suicide and of his own experiences in Auschwitz selfreflexively insists on the aporia within Maus and upon the consequent importance of the recovery of Holocaust testimony. When Art visits his psychoanalyst, Pavel, a survivor of Terezín and Auschwitz, the text presents a key moment when the author-figure, by now infantilised through a willed regression back to childhood due to feelings of inadequacy, cites Beckett’s famous declaration that “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”.63 The following panel is devoid of narrative or dialogue as the pair contemplate the judiciousness of Beckett’s remark, only to refute its import in the following panel: “On the other hand”, says Art, “he SAID it.” The reaffirmation of the artist’s role of breaking the silence surrounding the Holocaust allows the author-figure (both Art and Spiegelman) to conclude Maus. For a poet, as for the graphic novelist, there is both an ethical and an artistic imperative to respond to violence imaginatively. In a graduation address at Queen’s University in 1995, the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley repeated his credo that “[i]n the context of political violence the deployment of words at their most precise and suggestive remains one of the few antidotes to death-dealing dishonesty”.64 Like Hill, Longley seeks to avoid treating the Holocaust as “a mere subject”: The German philosopher Adorno suggested that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz. Perhaps he meant that after the holocaust poetry could not remain the same. In which case I agree with him. But I also believe that if poetry is incapable of approaching so huge and horrible a subject, then there is no future for poetry. A bad poem about the Holocaust will be a crime against the light. So this is dangerous territory. Although there is little we can do imaginatively with the pictures of the piles of bodies, the torture chambers, the gas ovens, we are duty bound to try and work out how we arrived there.65

Longley never shirks from what he regards as the poet’s responsibilities, and avows his belief in the efficacy of the poetic text: the poet, he says, must make “the most complex response that can be made with words to the total experience of living” and, in so doing, he “illuminates and orders it with words”.66 “Orders” does

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not simply connote a sense of containing chaotic violence within a regular metrical scheme; rather, it means to regulate, direct, and to bring into order or submission to lawful authority, namely that of the poet. Indeed, this is what Seamus Heaney famously calls “the jurisdiction of achieved form”.67 Changing the name of an early draft entitled “Photographs” to “The Exhibit”,68 Longley not only refers to a cultural artefact on display (“the pile of spectacles in the Auschwitz museum”), but also invokes the legal meaning, implying that the text is produced as evidence both of “the torments inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis”,69 and of poetry’s governing power. I see them absentmindedly pat their naked bodies Where waistcoat and apron pockets would have been. The grandparents turn back and take an eternity Rummaging in the tangled pile for their spectacles.70 (Longley, 2000: 18)

The changes made to the early drafts demonstrate a meticulous and justly scrupulous intelligence regarding his choice and arrangement of words. While he changes a demonstrative preposition (“this”) to a definite article in “the tangled pile” to allow for a sense of distance, he crucially alters the opening line of the earlier drafts to intimate his presence (he now includes the phrase “I see”), conveying his own act of bearing witness and his imaginative intervention at one and the same time. For the reader, this opening gambit embodies the ambiguity inherent within all testimony: as Derrida reminds us, while “[b]y law, a testimony must not be a work of art or fiction”, nevertheless since it cannot constitute proof, then “there is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction … that is to say, the possibility of literature…”.71 The poet’s opening statement is all the more poignant as the victims themselves are deprived by the Nazis of the power of vision: while they literally cannot see without their spectacles, they also cannot foresee their own death. The Auschwitz exhibition may connote the absence which resulted from the extermination (all that is left is a pile of spectacles), yet Longley’s vision reverses the victims’ dehumanisation, firstly, by remembering them as people within a familial context (“grandparents”) and, secondly, by reconstructing the unbearably affecting moment prior to death when they “pat their naked bodies / Where waistcoat and apron pockets would have been”. By changing “turn around” to “turn back”, the poet intimates a temporal dimension, allowing them to forestall the inevitable. Indeed, by literalising, thereby revivifying, the outworn phrase “spend an eternity”, he presents us with an image of the grandparents held in stasis, almost as if they were revenants returning to reclaim what is theirs. Perhaps the most admirably courageous (and ultimately astute) editorial decision taken by Longley was to change the poem’s format, deleting what was originally the second section:

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Hundreds in broad daylight are waiting to be shot. I pick out one only. Her aging breasts look sore.

While the couplet once again presents a human dimension, the clever ambiguity of “to be shot” (photographed; executed) is deemed inappropriate, and the poet avoids placing himself in the position of the Nazis (“pick out” is too reminiscent of the selection process whereby the Nazis chose those who were to be eliminated in the crematoria). The concluding image, though tender and humanising, is perhaps also uncomfortably voyeuristic. Contemporary texts referring to unspeakable violence often explore silence’s positive and negative potentialities in a self-reflexive manner, often undermining their own literary procedures. One example is James Kelman’s Translated Accounts, a novel that employs intra-textual and other stylistic devices such as a preface, the fictional construct of an editor and multiple, fictional translators to establish a distance in the reader’s mind between the author and what is being said. Kelman ventriloquises, through an ungrammatical yet realistic translatorese, accounts of violence occurring in an unnamed land, and adopts a fragmented, episodic form which eschews narrative coherence. It is a historiographic metafiction, a text about the fictionalizing process of history and the limitations of language to express atrocity. Such a novel belies the mimetic fallacy and apparent objectivity of realism, and typifies the kind of text described by Hayden White which attempts to narrate “the modernist event”. The novel’s concluding section, “it is true”, exemplifies the ambivalence regarding what can or cannot be fully articulated: “I cannot say about a beginning, or beginnings, if there is to be the cause of all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak of then it is of these, if I may speak”.72 Echoing the Beckettian art of failure, Kelman’s speaker experiences a crisis of representation, yet is determined to speak despite an acknowledged lack of narrative coherence. Yet what results is indeed a form of silence: recounted here are not the events per se, but rather a selfreflexive commentary on the determination to speak. Similarly, W. G. Sebald’s lectures collected in On the Natural History of Destruction examine “the way in which memory (individual, collective and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable”.73 Contemplating the rationale behind the selfcensorship and self-imposed silence of post-war German writers regarding the bombing of cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, Sebald argues that, psychologically, such authors instinctively looked away from the ruins and that, artistically, their only possible response was evasion and silence.

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While contemporary writers, at a physical and temporal distance from such events, have directed their gaze at the ruins, their texts adopt an oblique stance, using intertextuality as a means of preserving a distancing objectivity. The opening stanza of Medbh McGuckian’s “The Fortified Song of Flowers”74 displays an initial ambivalence towards the role and efficacy of art: “stained with culture, / we cover the winds with art”. While “stained” and “cover” may have negative connotations, nevertheless culture is said to be protective and strengthening (like staining wood). The “winds” in question are not freshening; here they refer to the devastating fire-storm which resulted from the multiple bombing raids on Dresden during February 1945. A comparison between the poem and David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden,75 a damning indictment of Bomber Command’s policy of general area bombing, reveals the connection: The darkness is not pure, opening its bomb doors (128) marked out for carpet-bombing (120) with blast-proof windows (70) ‘the sudden linking of a number of fires’ (162)

opening its bomb-doors to a carpet of night-offensive bombs devouring the precious air from the blast-proof windows. The sudden linking of a number of fires is golden-bedded into the heat of a path whose sun shall search the grave-hoard.

The destruction wrought by the fire-storm, an event which is the subject of Sebald’s lectures, is described in harrowing detail by Irving: “Crowds of people fleeing for safety had suddenly been seized by the tornado and hurled along whole streets into the seat of the fires; roof gables and furniture that had been stacked on the streets after the first raid were plucked up by the violent winds and tossed into the centre of the burning Inner City”.76 The fact that the poet does not provide an acknowledgement of her literary borrowing is important: without the intertext, the poem can justly be read as a general comment on art’s role in a time of violence, with a specific application to her own place of writing, Belfast. What Heaney terms “tight gag of place” can be lifted by using the words (and example) of others; the poet’s silence, her loss for words, is cured by speaking through other writers. In addition, as she is not an authoritative witness to the atrocities she is describing, she draws on Irving’s monograph which includes harrowing eye-witness accounts. What results is a poem full of exquisite beauty and multi-layered meaning. For example, the bird which is said to “swathe its life-warm / head like a blade being bent / till point and hilt must meet” connotes, firstly, a war-bird (the planes bringing destruction), and secondly, a phoenix rising from the ashes. The

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protective action mirrors that of art. McGuckian borrows from another source, Patricia Lysaght’s The Banshee (1986),77 to describe the other action of this bird: Or else it is taught by the stars these particular placeless dead (p.47) ‘to cry the name’ (p.50) the buried by their song-cloud names, the cry always travels against the stream (p.83)

to cry for the placeless dead, to cry the name, to call though its cry always travels against the stream ….

The banshee (bean sí), the supernatural death-messenger of Irish folklore, proclaims deaths which are imminent. Here the screech of the war-birds flying overhead (literally, the planes passing overhead) herald the death of 135,000 people. Using Lysaght’s monograph on the origins and conventions of the banshee, McGuckian imposes an Irish context, conveys a degree of fatalism to the attack, and helps an Irish audience understand the dread which Dresden’s population must have felt on hearing the unexpected bombing squadrons overhead. Yet the poem acts as a “prayer”, signifying the love for those “hearing / your name inexplicably called out”;78 rather than “saying nothing”, art can provide succour, and in so doing succeeds in achieving the “memorializing and memorizing of the dead” which Geoffrey Hill has called for. In conclusion, contemporary writers and visual artists endeavour to represent violence in complex, indirect ways, at once alive to the insufficiencies of their craft, but not dictated or bowed by them. Jaar, Richter and Spiegelman, while taking as their thematic focus the effects and violent aftermath of conflict - the Rwandan genocide; terrorism in Germany during the 1970s; the Northern Irish Troubles; the Holocaust – each of them is forced to incorporate a critique of their respective means of representation. Form itself becomes subject to the artist’s gaze. However, such self-reflexivity functions not as a denial of meaning, nor as an adherence to an apolitical postmodern aesthetic; rather, the foregrounding of formal strategies - the lighting, framing, cropping, and editing of an image – encourages the viewer to adopt a more critical approach to the “image-event”, to view it within its specific socio-political context and to regard it as an ideologically driven construct. Writers such as Hill, Longley and McGuckian share with the visual artists a need to weigh up their ethical and artistic responsibilities with care, and to strive to counter the narcotic banality induced by the “image-event”. In each case there is an awareness of their position as artists at a remove from conflict and a marked reluctance to represent the pain of others. Yet while silence is the common trope, neither the poets nor their subjects are silenced. McGuckian and

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Hill may avoid speaking in a direct lyrical voice (one through an intertextual ventriloquism, the other through the adoption of personae who speak with riddling ambiguity), yet they share Longley’s belief that the artist is “duty-bound” to imaginatively examine how and why violent events occur, and to contest the idea that the «image-event» is not, to use Baudrillard’s term, “irreducible”. 1

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), 27. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 88. 3 Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), n.p. 4 See Peter Conrad, “Should We Have Looked Away?” Observer, 12 September 2004: 1-2. 5 Baudrillard, 30. 6 Alfredo Jaar in A. Foerstner, “Africa’s Holocaust”, Chicago Tribune, 19 February 1995: 27. 7 Jaar, “Representation of Violence, Violence of Representation”, interview by R. Gallo, Trans 3.4: 57. 8 See Jaar, Lament of the Images (Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1999), 25-26. 9 Jaar, Let There Be Light: The Rawandan Project: 1994-1998 (Barcelona: Actar, 1998), n.p. 10 Derbra Bricker Balken, “Alfredo Jaar: Lament of the Images” in Jaar (1999), 93. 11 David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), 93. 12 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event”, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 22. 13 Balken, 39. 14 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. 15 Stefan Aust, The Baadar-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. A. Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 537. 16 The counter-intelligence services installed microphones in Stammheim prison; a new law was passed to allow a trial to continue in the absence of the defendants; the judge, Dr Prinzing, was removed from his position due to illegal actions prejudicial to the trial. See Aust, 299-303, 330-4, 384-7. 17 Inconsistencies in the forensic evidence noted by Dr Roland Hoffmann, scientific advisor to the Federal Criminal Investigation Office, were suppressed, as was the report by the Criminal Office. See Aust, 546-8. 18 Aust, 536. 19 Gerhard Richter, “Notes for a Press Conference, November-December 1989”, Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, ed. H. Obrist (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 175. 20 Stefan Germer, “Unbidden Memories”, 18 Oktober 1977 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Anthony D’Offray Gallery, 1989), 7. 21 Don DeLillo, “Looking at Meinhof”, Guardian 17 August 2002: 27-9. 22 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 9. 2

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Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 17, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 103-4. 24 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1985), 89. 25 Hill, Collected Poems, 84. 26 Hill, “Language, Suffering, and Silence”, Literary Imagination 1.2 (1999): 254. 27 Michael Leddy, “An Approach to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns”, Poetics 7.2 (1986): 34. 28 Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 285. 29 Hill has argued that “[i]t is the precise detail of word or rhythm, which carries the ethical burden; it is technique, rightly understood, which provides the true point of departure for inspiration.” See Hill, “Preface to the Penguin Edition”, Brand: A Version for the Stage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996) x. 30 Stephen James, “Geoffrey Hill and the Rhetoric of Violence”, Essays in Criticism 53.1 (2003), 33. 31 Hill, “Language, Suffering and Silence”, 240-5. 32 Hill, Collected Poems, 67. 33 Hill, “Under Judgement”, interview with Blake Morrison, New Statesman 8 February 1980: 213. 34 Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, trans M. Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1978), 197. 35 George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 123. 36 Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society”, Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, trans. S. Weber and S. Weber Nicholsen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 162. 37 S. D. Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 53. 38 Ricks, 302. 39 P. Kamuf, “Singular Sense, Second Hand”, Sensual Reading: New Approaches to Reading in its Relations to the Senses, eds. Michael Syrotinski and Ian Maclachlan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 316. 40 Jon Silkin, “War and Pity”, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work, ed. Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 120-1. 41 Silkin, 121. 42 S. T. Glynn, “‘Biting Nothings to the Bone’: The Exemplary Failure of Geoffrey Hill”, English 36 (1987): 239. 43 Hill in John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber, 1981), 87. 44 Ezrahi, 1. 45 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Faber, 1963), 63. 46 B. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 84. 47 Ricks, 298. 48 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Ro. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 2003), 22-51.

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Wiesel, Night, trans. S. Rodway (London: Penguin, 1981), 77-9. W. S. Milne, An Introduction to Geoffrey Hill (London: Bellew, 1998), 84-5. 51 Hill, “Language, Suffering, and Silence”, 254. 52 Marc Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning”, Loss, eds. D. L. Eng and D. Kaazanjian (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), 101. 53 Nichanian, 114. 54 Nichanian, 115. 55 Nichanian, 116. 56 Ezrahi, 3. 57 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (London: Penguin, 2003). 58 See R. Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon, 1996), 182, and S. McCloud, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (New York: First Perennial, 2000), 29. 59 R. S. Leventhal, “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Working-through the Trauma of the Holocaust”, http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html. 60 Spiegelman, 204. 61 Spiegelman, 171-2. 62 Spiegelman, 105. 63 Spiegelman, 205. 64 Michael Longley, “Graduation Address”, transcript in the Michael Longley Papers, MSS 744, Special Collection, R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Box 35, Folder 23. 65 Longley, “A Few Thoughts about the Ghetto”, Michael Longley Papers, MSS 744, Special Collection, R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Box 38, Folder 15. 66 Longley, “Definition of Poetry”, Michael Longley Papers, MSS 744, Special Collection, R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Box 35, Folder 11. 67 Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), 92. 68 Longley, Drafts of “The Exhibit”, Michael Longley Papers, MSS 744, Special Collection, R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Box 26, Folder 25. 69 Longley, Draft of Cenotaph of Snow, Michael Longley Papers, MSS 744, Special Collection, R. W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Box 35, Folder 7. 70 Longley, “The Exhibit”, The Weather in Japan (London: Cape, 2000), 18. 71 Jacques Derrida, “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony”, The Instant of My Death & Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 43. 72 James Kelman, Translated Accounts (London: Secker and Warburg, 2001), 322. 73 W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. A. Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 79. 74 Medbh McGuckian, “The Fortified Song of Flowers”, The Face of the Earth (Meath: Gallery Press, 2002), 37. 75 David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London: William Kimber, 1963). Irving’s text is on the left, McGuckian’s on the right. 76 Irving, 162. 77 Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (Dublin: Glendale Press, 1986). Lysaght’s text is on the left, McGuckian’s on the right. 50

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The phrase is taken from Lysaght (37) and again refers to the call of the death-messenger.

CHAPTER TWO THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE: ART AND CONFLICT IN NORTHERN IRELAND In this chapter I want to examine how the activity of writing in a time of violence brings about an anxiety in the author regarding his or her artistic role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present an event, the legitimacy and rationale of which depends on one’s political point of view. More specifically, I want to take Northern Ireland as a case study and closely examine how artistic silence and narrative breakdown in texts by Northern Irish writers and visual artists often result from an unwillingness to respond to atrocity due to the need to remain “expertly civil tongued”,1 from a perception that art lacks efficacy in (what is perceived to be) a cyclical, pre-ordained conflict, and from a sense of being at a disabling temporal, cultural or spatial distance from events. Writing about ‘the modernist event’, these writers encounter the limitations placed on the artist by his medium: the anxiety of the writer or artist brought on by a failure of the linguistic or visual medium to re-present the materiality of violent events; the difficulties in mediating between competing, often mutually exclusive, discourses of the State and the Terrorist, and the necessarily self-reflexive strategies adopted by the artist to foreground the cliché, the stereotype and the empty sign. A tension emerges between what Seamus Heaney calls the text’s desire “to answer back with its clear tongue when the world gets muddied and bloodied”2 and the need for it “to understand its place and placing, even if it is a poem of total harmony, total beauty, and apparently total innocence”.3 “What do I say when they wheel out their dead?” asks the speaker in Heaney’s poem “Stump”: “I’m cauterized, a black stump of home”.4 In “Midnight”, a poem by the same author, “The tongue’s / Leashed in my throat”.5 As we shall see, the formal strategies adopted by writers such as Eoin McNamee and Medbh McGuckian, and by visual artists such as Willie Doherty, Rita Donagh and Paul Seawright, all implicate the viewer in the construction of narratives about ‘The Troubles’. Yet this is neither an abdication of artistic responsibility on their part nor an unwillingness to bear witness due to qualms of voyeuristic prurience. What each work deliberately highlights is the disjunction between event and artefact, the dangers of an aestheticisation of conflict and the pressing need to counteract the narcotic banality and simplicity of media stereotypes, sleepwalking as they do “[t]he line between panic and formulae”.6

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On 6 December 2002 the Ridiculusmus Theatre Group staged the aptly named production Say Nothing at London’s Pit Theatre. The two-man play defies paraphrase. It is a hilariously cyclical seventy-minute tour de force, a satire on the so-called Peace Process, the lack of progress of which it encapsulates both thematically and stylistically. Kevin, a peace studies graduate, has moved to Derry to work in conflict resolution, running conferences entitled “Hands Across the Barricades” and encouraging cultural diversity amongst the populace. Dishearteningly, what he meets head-on is prejudice, leading to what can be interpreted as his gradual mental collapse. The play emphasizes the lack of communication during the Peace Talks in two key ways: visually, by having the two characters remain within a suitcase full of grass (an emblem of how two fractious communities cling to a differing, yet similarly outmoded sense of place, unwilling to move on); and thematically, by including cyclical motifs in the conversations. None of the depicted characters actually listens to his interlocutor; hence the conversations go round and round, saying nothing. The play’s title is another example of repetition as it is an intertextual allusion, revisiting Seamus Heaney’s “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”, a poem which establishes a tension between speech and silence: The famous Northern reticence, the tight gag of place And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing Where to be saved you only must save face And whatever you say, you say nothing

Heaney’s poem, like Say Nothing, emphasizes empty rhetoric, hypocrisy and self-protective reticence. It also focuses on the pressures brought to bear upon the linguistic medium in a time of crisis. The poetic speaker rails against …the jottings and analyses Of politicians and newspapermen Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas And protest to gelignite and Sten, Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’, ‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘provisional wing’, ‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.

Complex analysis is the first casualty; quotation marks isolate the already redundant clichés of journalistic shorthand. Must the artist engage in a very public response to the Troubles, and in what form? Must it (or even can it) avoid the conventional terms? Responding to such questions in “Viking Dublin: Trial

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Pieces”, Heaney depicts the figure of the artist as Hamlet, “pinioned by ghosts and affections”.7 As Francis Barker has argued in The Culture of Violence, Hamlet’s problem lies in “the difficulty of telling in both the interleaved senses of colloquial speech: that it is difficult to know, and difficult to narrate”.8 In the Northern Irish context, the speaker is left “dithering, blabbering” because of his awareness of inherited atavism, the unwillingness towards partisanship and a frustrated sense that the conflict is, as he later states in “The Marching Season”, “scripted from the start”.9 In “Mycenae Lookout”, the speaker feels his “tongue / Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck”; he is the liminal figure, “in-between-times”, struck dumb due to competing claims on his loyalty.10 The enforced silence which results from being in a liminal position is explored in a beautifully crafted prize-winning poem, “Minerva”, by the young Armagh-born poet Conor Carville.11 Made up of eight short couplets, the enigmatic text, written in the style of his literary exemplar Paul Muldoon, centres on an act of violence committed on the border during the IRA ceasefire: Multiply, divide, join the dots of the I to this, to that: to the pointillist flypast of swifts; to Warrenpoint, to Poyntzpass, to all points in between us; to a country road with its empty sounds hooplah of cuckoo, the doves' pow-wow, where a man lays low in cahoots with the owl wearing his head the other way around.

Carville does not assign blame, nor does he agonise over his own poetic responsibilities vis-à-vis the representation of the ‘Troubles’. Instead, the thematic focus is on the condition of being “in-between”, and this is reinforced by the

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poem’s formal devices: the opposition between the sounds (the diphthong [ai] and the short, lax vowel [i]; the bilabial and alveolar plosives), the named geographical signifiers (Warrenpoint; Poyntzpass), the proliferation of hyphens, and the selfreflexive enjambements (one is forced to “join” the second and third lines; one must “fly past” the gap to join the fourth and fifth lines), all indicate liminality. Asked about the title’s significance, Carville says: Minerva is the goddess of wisdom of course, and the reference is to Hegel's 'The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk', which as far as I know is usually taken to mean that wisdom or historical knowledge is possible only after the event. I don't know whether 'dusk' is an accurate or adequate translation, but to me it renders the whole phrase rather more ambiguous than this gloss would have it, dusk being between day and night, and partaking of both, rather than being subsequent to day in any absolute sense. So I suppose one could re-read the sentence as saying (and I'm indulging here in reader-response of a fairly cavalier kind) that knowledge is possible only at such liminal points. This is supposed to tally with the siting of the poem near the border, the doubleness of the Janus type figure at the end, and the fact that the poem was written during the strange hiatus of the first ceasefire.12

The stated intention presents a positive take on the borderline mindset: rather than an entrenched, defensive outlook, Carville suggests that being in-between facilitates a Janus-like perspective, the ability to empathise with “the other side”. However, while such a reinterpretation of Hegel’s pessimistically narrow view that one can only be wise after the event indicates a hopeful outlook for the Northern Irish peace process, the sounds mentioned in the poem suggest treachery: while “hooplah” is indicative of celebration, it is the cuckoo (usurper of other birds’ nests) who is celebrating; also, the word can mean ‘wasted effort’. The doves’ “pow-wow”, while symbolic of peace, brings to mind the broken treaty discussions between the U.S. Government and the Native American tribes. The “empty sounds” may well indicate peacefulness, but the term itself connotes ‘a lack of substance’. The owl’s wisdom is symbolized by its ability to be Janus-like, yet there is something unseemly about being “in cahoots” (a clever pun) with the man who is “lying low”: while the anagram ‘low’ designates a connection to the ‘owl,’ the phrase points to mendacity. In any case, the human being cannot see both sides like the owl: a dead man is not all-seeing. Carville’s text, therefore, straddles two very different outlooks on “the strange hiatus of the first ceasefire” and has not bowed to the prevailing pressure to view it simply in positive terms. His approach to art epitomises what Heaney terms “the government of the tongue”: it is a restrictive obligation to “concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality”; yet it is also a liberating manifesto allowing the poet to submit to “the jurisdiction of achieved form”, with poetry “as its own vindicating force”.13 The tension between the two can be disabling. To restate the dilemma using the poet’s earlier formulation, is it possible “to encompass the

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perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity”?14 In Formations of Violence, Allen Feldman argues that political violence is “a genre of emplotted action”. “Narrativity”, he contends, “can be invested in material artefacts and relations that have a storytelling capacity of their own”. Drawing on the theories of Paul Ricoeur, Paul Veyne and Hayden White, Feldman disrupts the conventional distinction between event and narration: “The event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated. The event is action organized by culturally situated meanings”.15 In a later article on the signifying practices of punishment beatings, he writes that violence is “a writing on the body. Violence is deployed not only as a vehicle for memory, but for the fashioning of sites, terrains and textures – wounds of remembrance”. The varied means of punishment beatings constitute a form of writing on the body, a corpus inscribed with a specific message: The manner in which pain and trauma are precisely applied to the body in a hierarchical series of somatic intrusions, that vector the body into stratified terrains, reveals the resurgence of a moral economy of memory. The body as the material and visual bearer of history, of juridical record, is evidenced in the semantic variations that organize the act of kneecapping – the language of the weapon, the agent of punition, the precise site of wounding.16

However, while Alex Houen in Terrorism and Modern Literature agrees with Feldman’s gesturing towards the “performativity of violence”, he takes issue with the attempt to describe political violence as “narrative blocs” since textualisation occludes its physical reality.17 One artist in particular, Derry-born Willie Doherty, responds to both the performative and narrative dimensions of Northern Irish punishment killings by creating texts which, while silent, are complexly self-reflexive and engage the viewer’s own understanding of the conflict. Doherty’s photographic dyptich entitled Small Acts of Deception 1 (1997) at first seems enigmatic, eschewing contextualising detail save for the enigmatic title. It deliberately refrains from presenting the images within an overt interpretative framework: there is no accompanying explanatory text, no biographical details of its subject, no precise geographical co-ordinates. Nevertheless, within the context of his previous work the viewer is led to assume a connection with Northern Ireland.18 On the left-hand side of the exhibition space the viewer sees a photograph of a car parked in front of a house; the picture is taken at night, with the flash obscuring the number-plate. Adjacent is a photograph of a body lying on the ground; only one of the bound hands and part of a leg are framed within the photograph. The latter is an already

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mediated image: it is a photograph of what appears to be a video-still. A comparison with footage from BBC 1’s Panorma documentary on the IRA (11 July 2003) suggests that the body is that of Francis Hegarty, a suspected IRA informer who was shot by the Republicans on 25 May 1986. The title helps to confirm this,19 yet the viewer who is unaware of the dead man’s identity is left to surmise exactly what acts of deception have been committed, to whom, to what end, and with what effect. In light of the work’s subject, is the designation “small” ironic? How can we judge the scale of the implied deception? Commenting on the titles allocated to each of his works, Doherty contended that “[t]hey propose a narrative, and I’m interested in how the viewer completes that narrative and locates these images within it”.20 As Paul O’Brien rightly contends, therefore, Doherty’s oeuvre consistently raises “the question of how we fill in meanings to images, in the context of the set of accepted ideological responses”.21 The viewer may well be fully informed about how the “performative discourse of the body” operates for punishment killings, how it is part of what Feldman calls “a theatrical substantiation and ritualization of paramilitary power on the street”;22 or he may encounter the work in ignorance or even prejudice, ideologically pre-disposed against making distinctions between the different kinds of killings in Northern Ireland. Indeed, as Elmer Kennedy-Andrews argues regarding the reception of “terrorist” acts: For the humanistic, bourgeois narrative to maintain its hegemonic control, political violence can be understood only as outside the law, disruptive, discontinuous, unavailable for narration. By representing violence as irrational outrage, anarchy unleashed, the history of domination is made to appear as a legitimate process of civilisation.23

Crucially, however, the artwork’s form not only engages the viewer’s attention by withholding a coherent narrative and by featuring images taken from oblique angles, but it also implicates him within the hermeneutic process. The shiny surface of cibachrome prints reflect back the viewer’s image, situating him within the picture’s frame: “[t]heir high-gloss reflective surfaces have a mirror-like quality, which insists on the presence of the viewer before them, repelling the viewer’s desire to ‘enter’ their imaginary spaces. Paradoxically, they would only be clear where a viewer does not exist”.24 The viewer’s gaze is returned as he formulates a narrative and thus may be forced into considering how he came to his conclusions. While repetition and silence in a Northern Irish text often suggests a pessimistic outlook regarding the perceived eternal nature of the conflict and the inability of the artist to meaningfully intervene, with Doherty’s single-projection video installation entitled Sometimes I Imagine It’s My Turn (1998) these motifs

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are deliberately employed so as to question how narratives concerning violent killings are constructed. Panning across waste ground, the camera comes upon a figure lying face down on the ground. Then, as the exhibition catalogue outlines: This establishing shot is quickly followed by a sequence of tracking shots that take us closer and closer to the figure, whose identity is never disclosed. The continuity of this sequence is interrupted by close-up shots of the undergrowth and by short inserts of hand-held footage of the same scene. The growing sense of unease is further heightened by the intrusion of rapid inserts of inserts of television footage, suggesting a link between the subject of the video and actual news coverage.25

No commentary is provided, no narrative clues as to the figure’s identity or to what has happened to him. The video lasts for three minutes, after which time it is repeated since the projection is on a loop. During each replayed sequence, the viewer looks anew at every detail, trying to answer each unresolved question. What is the link between the different kinds of footage? Why does the camera linger on the body and why is it shot from different heights and angles? What terms do we find ourselves using for the figure (‘victim,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘volunteer,’ ‘member of the public’) and why? To a certain extent, the film’s silence is matched by our own. To understand Doherty’s intent, one can usefully establish a comparison with Alan Clarke’s film Elephant (1989) which also employs the key motifs of silence and repetition. The viewer bears witness to a series of sectarian killings in the disused factories and deserted waste grounds of Belfast. Shot by means of a roving steadicam, we follow killers and victims alike on their journeys through the city without the aid of a situating commentary; it is up to us to articulate the lacunae in the narratives as the camera provides lingering close-ups of each victim’s body and killer's hand pulling the trigger. The film lasts for thirty-seven minutes, during which there are eighteen murder sequences each shot following “a specific structural pattern” described by Michael Walsh as follows: Most sequences begin with a long take that serves as an establishing shot and tracks either the killer or the victim onto the killing ground …. These Steadicam takes are all at least thirty seconds long, with some lasting as long as two and a half minutes, and the locations always either deserted or actually derelict; we see only killers, victims and occasional victim’s friends, who for obvious reasons flee. By contrast, each segment pivots on a flurry of shots lasting less than a second – a medium close up of the killer, a close-up of the weapon, often a shot of the victim falling, sometimes more shots of the weapon being emptied into the prostrate body. Each segment then concludes with further long takes which follow the killer’s departure and return to a merciless inspection of he unmoving body; these shots of corpses last between twenty and twenty-five seconds. Some segments

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Governing the Tongue slightly vary the basic regime, but the essential impression is one of thoroughgoing regularity.26

The killings’ unrelenting nature and the lack of narrative contextualisation could represent, as Walsh reminds us, “a pitiless demonstration of what the conflict in the six counties really amounts to, suggesting that for all the history, politics and ideology of Ireland, the stark reality is that anonymous men drive or walk up to other men’s front doors or places of work and shoot them down”.27 Indeed, in his monograph on Northern Irish film Brian McIlroy reads the film in this way, arguing that Clarke’s “‘Steadicam aesthetic’” provides an affinity with “the murderers” and presents the viewer with a view of the Troubles as “monstrous”.28 That which is “monstrous” is beyond comprehension: it is alien, barbaric and cannot be expressed in language. As such, McIlroy’s conclusion typifies the reaction to a Northern Irish atrocity and highlights the inability of language to either faithfully re-present the killing or encapsulate the resulting grief. In a paper entitled “The Spectacle of Terrorism”, Richard Kirkland argues that “it has been the traditional role of language in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist atrocity to present itself as unable to capture the overwhelming materiality of the event itself. What, so the argument runs, can words offer in the face of such violence? Understood as such, every terrorist outrage becomes unspeakable”.29 However, Kirkland’s paper brilliantly focuses our attention on a different kind of silence, touched on above by Kennedy-Andrews: the occlusion of the terrorist narrative by the British media and by State institutions. By avoiding a situating commentary, Kirkland argues, Clarke forces the viewer to work out a narrative for himself. This emphasis on silence and the highly stylised approach to representing the violence are explained by Andrea Grunert as follows: Clarke's stylistic approach underlines the supposition that durational factors generate thoughts which could be integrated in the emotional response in which affective and cognitive factors tend to reinforce each other. The emotional responses created by his films are linked to the symbolic production of meaning and the way they problematize and evaluate violence. Without explaining the motivations of the characters or the reasons of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the films and the spectatorial engagement they encourage help us, the viewers, to face and to understand the nature and mechanisms of individual and collective violence.30

As viewers, we are not encouraged to simply take one point of view. Countering McIlroy’s interpretation of the “Steadicam aesthetic”, Kirkland rightly contends that Clarke’s use of the Steadicam “gestures towards the implication of the subject that is the classical role of ‘point of view’ while hinting that this interpellation is ultimately conditional, that we can, and will, range beyond our own perspectives as necessary”.

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That one’s point of view is neither omniscient nor free from ideological predisposition is acknowledged by Willie Doherty’s latest installation, the Turnerprize nominated Re-run (2002), a looped, thirty-second two-screen projection which covers much of the same themes as the works of Clarke, Carville and the Ridiculusmus theatre group. On one screen, the viewer watches a man running across Craigavon Bridge, which crosses the River Foyle and which links the mainly Catholic, Nationalist west bank to the mainly Protestant, Unionist east bank. The man is running towards us yet never reaches his destination. The tape is both silent and looped, suggesting a similar unending circularity as Say Nothing. On a second screen, facing the first, we see the man running away from us across the same bridge; again, never reaching his destination. So, as the spectator cannot see both images at the same time (hence suggesting different perspectives), and since Craigavon Bridge can be viewed as a symbolic locus of sectarian division, one could be tempted to equate the artist’s vision with the pessimistic, nonprogressive outlook of Say Nothing. However, as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev argues, “[n]o binary vision of the world emerges here … since the editing of the loops is made up of a subtle montage of more than forty short sequences of different takes on the figure – wide shots, mid-shots and close ups”.31 The work is turned in on itself, but it is not a conventional allegory of the Troubles as an irresolvable conflict; rather, it is a self-reflexive artwork which places its emphasis on the process of mediation, insistently emphasizing its visual conventions through repetition, foregrounding its own construction of this scene. Contemporary Northern Irish texts eschew definitive statements; they foreground multiple, often conflicting perspectives, and demonstrate how individual responses are conditioned by socio-political discursive formations. Since forty years of media coverage has resulted in journalistic shorthand and a proliferation of clichés about the violence, it is little wonder that this has become the critical focus of much artwork.32 For example, Rita Donagh, a Staffordshireborn artist, responded to ways in which the Sunday Times reported and photographed the Talbot Street bombing on 19 May 1974. One work from this series, Aftermath, includes a newspaper photograph of people milling about a corpse which has been covered up and shielded from the public gaze. Below this she has drawn an extension of this scene, enlarging (and thus foregrounding) the image of the hidden body. What conceals the person’s identity in her drawing are newspaper pages, (a motif also included in Newspaper Vendor, Evening Newspapers and Talbot Street, 1974), the text of which is comprised of meaningless phrases used to indicate the shape of the story waiting to be written. In the catalogue for Donagh’s retrospective, Sarat Maharaj convincingly argues that the Talbot Street series shows “[h]ow issues are ‘covered by’ the media, the notion

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of ‘news coverage’, is set off against the idea that personal facts, painful moments of loss, grieving and shattering of individual lives, tend to get covered up in the interests of a larger story which has to be told …”33 If a picture tells a thousand stories, which one is ‘true’? Can reportage, whether photographic or linguistic, ever represent the event? Can it explain the rationale behind an atrocity, and its consequences for all those involved? It is important to note, however, that Donagh’s work self-reflexively calls attention to the failure of representation in her own work. The artwork draws the viewer in, inviting an engagement with the scene’s anonymity, to fill in the missing narrative. If, as David Morrison suggests, “[v]iolence … draws its meaning only from the totality of the situation within which it occurs and from the meanings that people give to the act within the known structures of its occurrence”,34 then the viewer will necessarily fail in his attempt to fully understand the violence being represented. The most striking visual arts exhibition to tackle the media coverage of killings in Northern Ireland is Paul Seawright’s so-called Sectarian Murder series (1988).35 Seawright presents fifteen photographs taken at sites of various sectarian murders (or the location at which the bodies have been dumped) from the early 1970s. As reviewers point out, the angle and lighting of each shot suggests the recreation of a crime scene, a forensic re-examination of a past murder. Each colour C-type print is accompanied by a short text culled from newspaper reportage at the time, and this “ties them down irrevocably to a place, a sub-culture and a value system of violence”.36 Yet the narrative provided is always insufficient. For example, the text for “Monday 3rd July 1972” reads: “The man had left home to buy some drink; he was found later on waste ground nearby. He had been badly beaten and it seems he had been tied to a chair with barbed wire before being shot through the head”. Victim and killer alike remain anonymous. Why does Seawright occlude what the reports include, namely that John O’Hanlon, a twenty-eight yearold Catholic was killed by the Ulster Volunteer Force on this site (Twickenham Street, Shankill)? A comparison with Saadat Hasan Manto’s brief vignettes written in the aftermath of the 1947 holocaust in Pakistan suggests one answer. Manto’s accounts are devoid of specific references to the participants’ identities. Muslim and Hindu remain interchangeable; what is investigated is a general culture of violence. “Resting Time” is typical in its short, bleakly comic approach: “He is not dead. There is still some life left in him” “I can’t. I am really exhausted”.37

The grotesque humour lies in the casual way Manto notes the exchange; therein resides the horror, as we suspect that the anonymous interlocutor’s tiredness has come about from his part in other killings. The episodic form of his collection, devoid of linear narrative, is perfect for depicting the ‘modernist event.’ Like

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Seawright’s photographs, each verbal sketch invites a seemingly undirected response. Yet there is an implied judgement in both their works. The photograph for 3rd July 1972 shows an empty waste ground: taken from a low angle: the foreground is a blurred image of earth, bricks and discarded bottles, while the background is sharply defined, showing a wall, the surrounding buildings and a security service notice (a masked terrorist holding a gun is pictured next to an accompanying text, “You can help to stop it – now”). While one cannot “help stop it” as the crime has already taken place, by moving beyond a simplistic religious paradigm and by examining the social factors which create a culture of violence can prevent an escalation of conflict. Yet throughout Seawright’s work there is a lingering sense of the artist being unable to re-present the violence that has occurred, and this comes to the fore in his latest photographic exhibition entitled Hidden.38 Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to respond to the war in Afganistan, Seawright travelled there in June 2002 under the auspices of the UN, Landmine Action and the HALO Trust. What resulted was a series of monochromatic, bleached-out photographs depicting a depopulated landscape. Employing what Mark Durden terms “a poetics of absence”, Seawright refrains from the conventions of media reportage: the images of the desert landscape, marked by explosions and littered with shellcasings, act effectively as “a protective screen, a poetic filter from a violent reality which cannot find adequate representation”.39 The silence and absence are not only symbolic of artistic unease at representing a conflict which one has little knowledge of, it also counters Orientalist assumptions and sensationalist reportage. The photographs allow room for the viewer’s imagination, and in this regard he is explicitly drawing on Alfredo Jaar’s treatment of the Rawanda genocide in 1994. Both artists are aware that the viewer, confronted by images of beauty in the context of war, will not only populate them with memories and associations drawn from the media saturation of the event, but will also begin to question and assess the role of art in a time of violence. Jaar’s Field, Road, Cloud (1997), for example, presents three large cibachrome prints which at first appear to have little reference to genocidal conflict; however, each print has a small black and white drawing accompanying it which helps place the image, giving its location. The field is a tea field, emptied of its workers; the road leads to a church where more than five hundred Tutsis were slaughtered; and the image of a single cloud in a lucent blue sky is juxtaposed with the black and white drawing reminding the viewer that beneath the cloud formation there is a mound of bodies.40 As with Seawright’s Sectarian Murder series, Jaar requires the narrative dimension to ground his work which ultimately suggests a distrust of the photographic image. As Balken argues, “while photography has been set up or totalized (at least by news agencies and the press) as a purveyor of truth … its a priori claim to objectivity robs the

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imagination of aesthetic transformation and emotional engagement”.41 While Jaar and Seawright may rely on a narrative dimension, many Northern Irish writers have begun to distrust language as a medium of representation. When Eoin Mcnamee’s novel Resurrection Man, a fictional account of the killings perpetrated by the so-called Shankhill Butchers, was made into a film,42 the critics were somewhat cool in their reception. While admiring its “satanically-vicious violence”, he disliked “the film’s stylishness”.43 Both Michael Dwyer and Gary Mitchell concurred, the former arguing that it “bordered on the voyeuristic”, the latter being abhorred by its “abundance of bloody, mindless violence and stylish still-frame holds on frenzied idiots”.44 The critics missed the point entirely: the stylized filming of violence, the slick editing, freeze frames, slow motion and jump-cuts all make the audience aware of an aestheticised violence. Rather than a glorification of violence, the director presents a filmic critique of it. In this regard, the misguided reception of the film matches the later misreadings of McNamee’s text. Glenn Patterson, a fellow Northern Irish novelist and contemporary of McNamee, has been scathing in his criticism of the way in which McNamee approaches the topic of the Shankill Butchers: I don't like Resurrection Man. In fact it is one of the few books I've ever reviewed and I was really angry about it. What I didn't like about the book was stylistic. . . . [B]ecause of the way the book is written, and there's some very fine writing in it, when the characters speak it is quite obvious that the descriptions of the murders are all in a language that I don't believe is available to those characters as he has them speak. Therefore, what I get is Eoin McNamee writing very florid descriptions of murders. There's something of the horror and strange beauty of violence. Violence is not strangely beautiful.45

Equally scathing, the critic Richard Haslam states in a recent article that: “every aesthetic is encoded with a potential ethic: the obligation to do justice, not violence, to one's subject. In Resurrection Man, however, the unglamorous ethic is missing. Sublime abstractions displace concrete atrocities; the pose obscures the corpse”.46 But we are meant to linger on this corpse; our attention is time and again focused on the pose. When Patterson says that the characters are speaking in a language he does not believe in, that is pointing to the real thematic focus of the novel: the scepticism regarding the novelistic medium to represent violence and to respond to the Troubles. McNamee’s text is a metafiction, a novel about the crisis of novelistic representation and avoids the unwanted designation of “Troubles trash”47 through its self-reflexivity and intertextual use of differing genres. The author employs five key strategies to foreground his own intense unease with the linguistic medium. Firstly, McNamee uses a plot element – the

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severing of a victim’s tongue – to state overtly his main thematic concern, namely that language as it currently exists cannot adequately represent the violence perpetrated by the Shankill Butchers: “The root of the tongue had been severed. New languages would have to be invented” (16). Secondly, McNamee directly refers to the sensational reportage and mediocre thrillers produced during the worst years of the Troubles: The violence had started to produce its own official literature. Mainly hardbacks, with the emphasis on the visual. Photographs of bombs at the moment of detonation, riot scenes, men in balaclavas displaying heavy machine-guns, burnt out vehicles, moments of numbness and shock. There was the inevitable photograph of the civilian victim. (92)

By laying bare the conventions for the reader, McNamee is able to establish the genres that he seeks to avoid in his own text. Thirdly, he insistently establishes a connection between language and violence in a series of macabre similes. For example, looking at photographs of cadavers, one of the characters remarks upon the wounds, “the marks regular, like the script of some phantom tongue used to record inventions that might be found on the lips of those about to die” (197). Similarly, when one of the main protagonists, Ryan, looks upon the corpse of Darkie Larch, he notes how “his torso was incised with small cuts meticulously executed and his head was bent to his chest as though there were something written there he could read, words in a severe tongue” (213). Each time the author attempts to establish a connection between language and violence, the reader not only notices his recourse to simile (“like”; “as though”), but also that the narrator can never read what the incisions say. Linked to this is the fourth strategy, namely the way he depicts each character in search of a language: just as the author fails to find a way of representing violence, his own characters suffer a linguistic crisis. Heather's attraction to Victor is partly based on her desire for this new language: “He looked like he might think in another language. She wondered if he might be an Arab. She had read somewhere that Arabs like plump women and she imagined him discussing the plumpness of women in a strange and cruelly shaped alphabet” (42). Ryan wants “to hear an invented language of sex, its expressions of forgetfulness and terror” (24). Coppinger sits in his parked car, “chanting names until it seemed that the recitation was an end in itself, a means of fathoming the forces at work. As if the knowledge they were looking for was concealed in the names themselves” (34-5). Finally, the narrator plays with different genres throughout the novel and is never able to settle into any of them. Two critics in particular, Gerry Smyth and Nuala Johnson, convincingly argue that the incongruous multiplicity of the novel’s languages - discourses of the psychological treatise, crime thriller and film noir - points towards “the suspicion that language cannot adequately circumscribe motive and communicate meaning for politically

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charged and savagely executed violence in the city of Belfast”.48 Indeed, the reader bears witness to the author’s unwillingness (and inability) to frame his take within a single genre. Although the characters themselves articulate a sense of dislocation — “the state of civil unrest had made them feel obsolete, abandoned on the perimeter of a sprawling technology of ruin” (83) — it is important to note that their alienation stems from a dissatisfaction with their linguistic resources. While Elmer Kennedy-Andrews correctly argues that the novel’s events become textualised (newspaper reportage, anecdotal accounts), and that narration displaces the real into the mediated (that which is re-presented),49 nevertheless the underlying emphasis of Resurrection Man is on the distorting nature of this representation and its ultimate failure to either encompass the primal scene of violence or explain its socio-political cause. The novel’s key motif is, in fact, silence. One key scene epitomizes this failure of representation. When Victor is in prison and seeks revenge on a fellow inmate, he goes to his cell and forces him to write a confession by holding his wrist: When he had finished Victor had difficulty in reading it. The letters did not seem to bear any relationship to others he had seen. At first glance they did not appear to belong to any known language, but were something called up out of months of solitary confinement. It was a language of seclusion: plaintive, elegiac, lost. (103)

Here we have a character who cannot read the words he himself has dictated. It is fitting that Victor’s final act in this scene is to smother the inmate by placing a pillow over his face (the latter had already admitted that “I can’t mind the words no more”). The writer and visual artist find themselves compelled to ‘govern the tongue’ in three crucial circumstances: firstly, when their role as artists is under question, when they contemplate their objectivity and effectiveness; secondly, when the linguistic and photographic media either becomes debased through the prevalence of clichés, or when they find themselves using discourses which are considered to be beyond the pale (republican nationalism; the discourse of the terrorist); thirdly, when there is a severe crisis of representation (through the intrinsic failure of language to represent the actuality of violence, through psychological self-censorship, or through the artist’s feeling that he or she lacks authority). However, contemporary artists from Northern Ireland, and those like Alan Clarke and Rita Donagh who are responding to the conflict in this area, tend not to end up as some angst-ridden Hamlet, “dithering and blathering”. While their artwork tends toward the self-reflexive, using intertextuality and other formal strategies which foreground an artwork’s principles of construction, they are not self-enclosed. When speaking of atrocities, they do not speak atrociously; when saying nothing, their silence is golden.

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35

Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”, North (London: Faber, 1975), 57. Heaney, “Us as in Versus: Poetry and the World”, When Hope and History Rhyme: The NUI, Galway, Millennium Lecture Series (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 50. 3 Heaney, Talking with Poets, ed. Harry Thomas (New York: Handsell Books, 2002), 47. 4 Heaney, “Stump”, Wintering Out (London: Faber, 1972), 41. 5 Heaney, “Midnight”, Wintering Out, 46. 6 Heaney, “The Mud Vision”, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987), 48. 7 Heaney, “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces”, North (London: Faber, 1975), 23. 8 Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993), 36-7. 9 Heaney, “The Marching Season”, Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001), 54. 10 Heaney, “Mycenae Lookout”, The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), 29. 11 Conor Carville, “Minerva”, Poetry Ireland Review 52 (Spring, 1997): 5. 12 Carville, email to the author, 7 July 1999. 13 Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), 101, 92. 14 Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), 56-7. 15 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14. 16 Feldman, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice, Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities”, Radical History 85 (2003), 65. 17 Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 244-5. 18 The work formed part of Doherty’s retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 31 October 2002 – 2 March 2003. See Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, eds., Willie Doherty: False Memory (London: Merrell, 2002), 144. 19 It has been alleged that the informer was lured back to Ireland on false promises by Martin McGuinness and that he was subsequently shot. One other person allegedly involved in all of this was Freddie Scappaticci, who may or may not have been a British agent as well. So many deceptions … 20 Willie Doherty, “Like Home”, interview by Joan Rothfuss, No Place (Like Home), Zarina Bhimji et al., (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997), 47. 21 Paul O’Brien, “Willie Doherty: Language, Imagery and the Real”, Circa 104 (2003), 53. 22 Feldman, “Retaliate and Punish: Political Violence as Form and Memory in Northern Ireland”, Éire-Ireland (Summer, 1998), 196, 207. 23 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (de)constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 12. 24 Brian Hand, “Swerved in Naught”, Circa 76 (1996): 22. 25 Christov-Bakargiev and Mac Giolla Léith, 158. 26 Michael Walsh, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Coming to Terms with Northern Ireland in the 1980s and the 1990s”, British Cinema, Past and Present, eds. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 294-95. 27 Walsh, 296. 28 Brian McIlroy, Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, (Richmond: Steveston Press, 2001), 128. 2

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29 Paper delivered by Richard Kirkland, “Terrorism and Spectacle in Northern Irish Films: The Case of Alan Clarke’s Elephant”, 5 March 2002, Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen. 30 Andrea Grunert “Emotion and Cognition: About Some Key-Figures in Films by Alan Clarke”, http://www.artbrain.org/journal2/grunert.html 31 Christov-Bakargiev, “A Fallible Gaze: The Art of Willie Doherty”, False Memory, 15-6. 32 See Shane Murphy, “Don’t Mention the War: The Trouble(s) in Northern Irish Poetry”, The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence, eds. Michel Hensen and Annette Pankratz (Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz, 2001), 89-102. 33 Sarat Maharaj, “Rita Donagh: Towards a Map of Her Artwork”, 197419841994: Paintings and Drawings (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1995), 15. 34 David E. Morrison, “The Idea of Violence”, Violence in Factual Television: Annual Review, ed. Andrea Millwood Hargrave (London: John Libbey, 1993), 125. 35 See Paul Seawright, Paul Seawright (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2000), 17-27. 36 Liam Kelly, Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland (Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1996), 28. 37 Saadat Hasan Manto, A Wet Afternoon: Stories, Sketches, Reminiscences, trans. Khalid Hasan (Islamabad: Alhamra, 2001), 433. 38 Paul Seawright, Hidden (London: Imperial War Museum, 2003). 39 Mark Durden, “‘The Poetics of Absence’: Photography in the ‘Aftermath’ of War”, Hidden (London: The Imperial War Museum, 2003), n.p. 40 See Alfredo Jaar, Lament of the Images, ed. Debra Bricker Balken (Massachusetts: MIT, 1999). 41 Balken, “Alfredo Jaar: Lament of the Images”, Lament of the Images, 14. 42 Eoin McNamee, Resurrection Man (London: Picador, 1994). McNamee wrote the screenplay for the film which was directed by Mark Evans (1998). References to the novel are included in the text. 43 Kevin Barry, Irish Times, 13 February 1998. 44 Michael Dwyer, Irish Times, 20 February 1998; Gary Mitchell, Irish Times, 27 February 1998. 45 Glenn Patterson, “Nothing Has to Die”, interview by Richard Mills, Northern Narratives, ed. Bill Lazenbatt, Writing Ulster 6 (1999), 119. 46 Richard Haslam, “‘The Pose Arranged and Lingered Over’: Visualizing the ‘Troubles’”, Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed. Liam Harte and Michael Parker (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 208. 47 See Eve Patten, “Fiction in Conflict: Northern Ireland’s Prodigal Novelists”, Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1995), 128-30. 48 Johnson 724. See also Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 123. 49 See Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, “Antic dispositions in Some Recent Irish Fiction”, Last Before America: Irish and American Writing, eds. Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), 134-36.

CHAPTER THREE “THE FREE STATE OF IMAGE AND ALLUSION”: THE INTERSECTION OF POETRY AND POLITICS Much has been written already on the Northern Irish reticence, about how the poets talk of politics “in coded ways”,1 how they have “generated elaborate circumlocutions or forms of doublespeak”,2 thus producing work which is “oblique, unpresumptuous, and sometimes reticently unforthcoming”.3 This has been thematized in the poetic texts themselves since the early seventies. Witness, for example, Paul Muldoon’s “Hedgehog”, his symbol for the taciturn poet, “giv[ing] nothing / Away, keeping itself to itself”,4 or Seamus Heaney’s explicit reminder in “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” that “Smoke-signals are loudmouthed compared with us”.5 Although more recent poetry does at times manifest similar self-reflexive anxieties concerning both poetic responsibility and the writer’s place in a time of violence, nevertheless this reticence has become more complexly implicated in the formal construction of the poems themselves. In what follows, I will focus upon Northern Irish centos – texts that employ quotations and allusions, poems that exist as bricolages – and will explore the rationale behind the deployment of their familiar ghosts. Contrasting the work of Seamus Heaney with that of Medbh McGuckian, this chapter examines the very different ways in which these two authors engage with political subject matter in their work through the (often self-conscious) inclusion of quotations. Must a writer engage with political events? Must he or she act as a spokesperson, as a conduit for the feelings of a community? What are the arguments (ethical, political or aesthetic) which can be made by or for the artist to sanction his or her remaining aloof from both social strife and the calls of a community to represent them? A related question arises if the writer decides to respond in some way to political events: can he or she take a position? Is it possible to remain objective? Perhaps the poet Michael Longley has put it best when he said that “[t]hough the poet’s first duty must be to his imagination, he has other obligations - and not just as a citizen. He would be inhuman if he did not respond to tragic events in his own community, and a poor artist if he did not seek to endorse that response imaginatively . . . In the context of political violence the deployment of words at their most precise and suggestive remains one of the few antidotes to death-dealing dishonesty”.6 While this might be so, what form are

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these words to take? In light of the sectarian marches, in light of the nightly disturbances at Drumcree, in light of residential segregation and the so-called peace lines, in light of the enforced relocation of entire families, in light of those infamous atrocities - Omagh, Enniskillen, Canary Warf - in light of all of these, what poetic techniques is the writer to adopt: irony, analogy, parody, grim realism, obliquity? As Yeats and Seamus Heaney have asked: “how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”7 This question, posed by Heaney in the preface to Preoccupations, his first collection of prose, has troubled not only the Nobel Laureate himself, but also the subsequent generation of Northern Irish poets, who hold Heaney as both their precursor and contemporary. As Paul Muldoon states in his recent Clarendon Lectures entitled To Ireland, I, “it does seem that Irish writers again and again find themselves challenged by the violent juxtaposition of the concepts of ‘Ireland’ and ‘I’. Irish writers have a tendency to interpose themselves between the two, like that narrow-shouldered comma in the general title of this series of talks, wither to bring them closer together, or to force them further apart. It’s as if they feel obliged to extend the notion of being a ‘medium’ to becoming a ‘mediator’”.8 The questions raised by both Heaney and Muldoon involve very different, complex issues, including: firstly, the poet’s own conception of poeisis, and its role in society (what power does it have to “make things happen”?); secondly, the ethics of poetry’s intersection with politics; and thirdly, the specific nature of a poet’s relationship with his or her cultural inheritance. In other words, what is the place of writing, where “place” is both location and status? Poets like Heaney have embedded self-reflexive critical asides into their work, acknowledging the pressure on words as well as their insufficiency. While much of his work from Wintering Out to Station Island focuses on the intersection of poetry and politics, it is a body of work that is painfully self-aware, centring on the poet’s own vacillation between the poles of this dialectic, and considers the (in)adequacy of art to make things happen. It is a poetry “rooted in a weltering, wellingtoned solipsism which could only enter a public world by dividing itself”9 and clearly bears traces of “a vacillation between the wish to perfect his art and the obligation to speak for his community”.10 The main question which his poetry from 1972-84 poses is, as Brian Cosgrove has cogently argued, “what is the appropriate stance, in the face of recent political events, for the Northern Irish writer from a nationalist or Catholic background?”11 By examining Heaney’s interviews and early prose writings, one can clearly perceive an unsettling uncertainty and deep-rooted anxiety as regards his role as poet. In the early seventies Heaney wrote to Frank Kersnowski that living

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amidst the violence of Belfast “has awakened me to the fact that a writer must be conscious that he is a political creature, even though he may eschew political subject matter”.12 In his interviews prior to the publication of Station Island (1984) Heaney vacillates over whether or not a political stance should be taken in his own poetry. He fears that “the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes”.13 In an interview with Stewart McBride, he admits frankly that “I have written poems which are explicit” but that “a part of me says, ‘Forget that.’” The function of great poetry, he concludes, “is to rejoice and show us possible riches of the spirit. I can do that writing about a leaf. Forget Belfast. Get me to the leaf”.14 In other interviews, Heaney stresses the strictly non-political side of his nature: in two interviews with Seamus Deane he has said categorically that “I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political”15 and that “I am not really a political thinker”.16 He reiterated to Frank Kinahan that he was indeed “torpid in politics”17 and to Monie Begley that “I’m not really political, and I can’t think politically”.18 Yet In a 1983 interview with Francis Clines, Heaney admitted that he was torn between the urge to speak out on public matters and the urge to remain silent: “There is the Heaney side, very intelligent, but with a belief in the authenticity of the unspoken . . . and my mother’s side, the McCanns, very much devoted to argumentation, discourse”.19 From the evidence of these interviews, then, the poet is clearly torn between two impulses: the first is to respond directly to the political situation, to act as spokesperson for his community; the second is to remain true to his poetic sensibility.20 Heaney has argued that when a problem seems insurmountable, it can best be dealt with from an enabling distance. In “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream”, he posits his own take on Shelley’s famous meditation on the poet’s role, portraying Archimedes as the artist-figure: Archimedes thought he could move the world if he could find the right place to position his lever. Billy Hunter said Tarzan shook the world when he jumped down out of a tree. I sink my crowbar in a chink I know under the masonry of state and statute, I wing on a creeper of secrets into the Bastille. . . .21

In his prose collection The Place of Writing, Heaney develops this idea more fully. Using the concept of the lever and the scientific principle of moments, he contends that “what is intractable when wrestled with at close quarters becomes tractable when addressed from a distance. The longer the lever, in fact, the less force is necessary to move the mass and get the work going”.22 The poet has a “need to

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raise historical experience to a symbolic power, the need to move personal force through an aesthetic distance”;23 in this way, the poet defamiliarises and displaces the actual world by maintaining a tangential relation with it. Pinioned by ghosts when writing about Northern Ireland, Heaney often achieves the necessary distance by turning to artistic exemplars from outside of Northern Ireland, especially those who have outfaced similar problems as himself. Writing about what he terms Heaney’s “rhetoric of tribute”, Neil Corcoran argues convincingly that “[i]t is a rhetoric which deliberately compounds a moral and an aesthetic judgement”; “it implies”, he contends, “that the poet’s life as well as his work (or the quality of the life, with its gestures and alignments, as it can be read out of the work), is in some sense accountable, available to scrutiny, proposed as pattern and imitation”.24 When citing approvingly from the work of others, or when alluding to their artistic praxis, Heaney not only seeks their auctoritas, but also measures his own work against theirs. By constructing an artistic pantheon – a “self-referential intimacy” – he creates “a bolstering imaginative system of self-instruction, self-declaration, self-evaluation, and selfrebuke”.25 In what follows, I will argue that there is as much “self-rebuke” as there is “self-instruction”, and that Heaney’s recourse to a discourse of exemplarity is not always a resolving one, nor one of unqualified self-approval. In an article on the pottery of Sonja Landweer, a Dutch migrant who settled in Ireland having lived through the bombing and subsequent occupation of Holland by the Germans during the Second World War, Heaney marvels at how her work “has been invested with inner hopes and blessings, insists on its own individuality, its own space, stands free and declares itself simply and irrefutably as a work of art”.26 Remembering that Heaney himself has stated that poets often interpret past exemplars in light of their own conception of art - “when poets turn to the great masters of the past,” he says, “they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be a reflection of their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and procedures”27 – one wonders the extent to which this is also true of how the poet construes the work of his contemporaries. It is no coincidence that Heaney’s assessment of Landweer’s art corresponds fully to his own conception of art’s ultimate fidelity to its own laws: “poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and promise of the artistic event”.28 Indeed, in his 1996 collection The Spirit Level, the poet incorporates Landweer’s metaphor for artistic creation - “It is bringing down the sun”29 - in a poem dedicated to her: Night after night instead, in the Netherlands,

42

Governing the Tongue You watched the bombers kill; then, heaven-sent, Came backlit from the fire through war and wartime And ever after, every blessed time, Through glazes of fired quartz and iron and lime. And if glazes, as you say, bring down the sun, Your potter’s wheel is bringing up the earth. Hosannah ex infernos. Burning wells.30

In this ekphrastic text, one that compares poetry and sculpture - “Then I entered a strongroom of vocabulary / Where words like urns that had come through the fire / Stood in their bone-dry alcoves next a kiln” – Heaney is able to draw strength from Landweer’s artistic experience and can thus confidently affirm the revivifying potential of art. The analogical relationship between the glazing process and the incendiary bombing implies a necessary (yet redemptive) process of suffering, one endorsed by the poet whose work has been produced during the Troubles. Yet exemplars have not always been so freely cited by Heaney in his poems, nor has he so readily asserted the adequacy of art in a time of political strife. In “Sandstone Keepsake”31 Heaney self-consciously ponders his role as a poet in society and is ambivalent regarding the consequences of disengaging from the Troubles, wondering whether such a position of deliberate estrangement is possible. The symbolic importance of the speaker’s geographical location – in Co. Donegal, at the north-eastern tip of the Irish Republic – is crucial as it positions him not only at a physical remove from Northern Ireland, but also, given that he is looking out over Lough Foyle at the Magilligan internment camp, at a distance from those of the nationalist community imprisoned by the British. The poetic speaker’s first action is to retrieve the “reliably dense and bricky” sandstone and “clasp it and throw it from hand to hand.” The stone is no mere keepsake, however, as it embodies a key tension within the poet’s own psyche: on the one hand it is a natural object, free from political implication; on the other, it represents the possibility of violent action, with Heaney pictured yet again as that biblical underdog, David, belligerent and unbowed, “his gift like a slingstone / Whirled for the desperate”.32 The sandstone’s colour is “chalky russet”; when placed underwater it undergoes a metamorphosis and has “a hint of contusion”. The inference of violence is made more apparent when the stone metaphorically seems to become “A stone from Phlegethon”. However, the Dantean allusion - Inferno, Canto XII – is constantly undermined by the poet’s stated equivocation over its precise applicability. Because it is asked as a question – “A stone from Phlegethon, / bloodied on the bed of hell’s hot river?” – both the status and force of the poet’s analogy remain uncertain.

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The poem continues with another allusive simile: “Evening frost and the salt water / made my hand smoke, as if I’d plucked the heart / that damned Guy de Montfort to the boiling flood”. This is a reference to Guy de Montfort who was condemned to Phlegethon for avenging the death of his father by killing Henry, son of Richard, the Duke of Cornwall and nephew of Henry III, in a church at Viterbo. Although the poet undermines the comparison between de Montfort’s heart and the “chalky russet / solidified gourd” with a hasty interjection – “but not really” – his subsequent qualification – “though I remembered / his victim’s heart in its casket, long venerated” – leaves the reader in some doubt as to the allusion’s political valency. Since Heaney appears to depict himself as “one of the venerators” at the end of the poem, the reader begins to appreciate the extent to which the corrective pressures of the political world impinge on what he asserts is his “free state of image and allusion”. As Barbara Hardy remarks, “[v]eneration is made political and contemplation is implicated in history. The ‘free’ image is bound to history by association with a national and military memorial to a victim of sacrilegious revenge”.33 Alan Robinson regards this veneration as acknowledging “an unconscious complicity between himself and the ‘criminal’ spirit”.34 Similarly, Mary Kinzie suggests that what he venerates “is precisely Guy de Montfort and the impulse ‘to set times wrong or right,’ whether in history or in verse”.35 In contrast, Deborah Tall has argued that he alludes to the Inferno to convict himself of virtual connivance with the British, portraying himself as a beachcomber in sight of a camp for IRA prisoners, luxuriating in a ‘free state of image and allusion’, a self-imposed exile from the Northern strife, resident of the so-called Irish ‘Free State’ (the Republic), an aesthete ‘not about to set times wrong or right’.36

However, Heaney does not adhere to either of these extreme positions in the poem. The Dantean analogy can be interpreted either way: it seems to keep the poet at a remove, yet the images of violence weaken such a confident assertion of distance. Heaney maintains a position of constant vacillation by deconstructing his own allusion. The use of colloquial phrases - “but not really”, “Anyhow” - diminish the status of his Dantean allusion. The reference to “my free state of image and allusion” is equally ambivalent: the poet may well assume the right and ability to inhabit a poetic world free from political implication, yet the “free state” alludes implicitly to the Irish Free State, suggesting a nationalist (and therefore political) resonance in his poetry. The final description with which Heaney presents the reader is equally ambiguous: the poet is

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swooped on, then dropped by trained binoculars: a silhouette not worth bothering about, out for the evening in scarf and waders and not about to set times wrong or right, stooping along, one of the venerators.

Many critics take the view that the poet is here “of no significance in the harsh world he inhabits”37 and that the lines signify “Heaney’s recognition of the diminution of his ability and, perhaps, will to act in the Northern crisis”.38 Such an interpretation is too limited because it ascribes a position to Heaney which he is unable to uphold. In fact, the poet cleverly juxtaposes two conflicting points of view: the lines themselves could be narrated from the perspective of the authorities, to whom the poet appears as a marginal figure, “a silhouette not worth bothering about”; yet the lines also read as if it were Heaney himself who believed that he was, unlike Hamlet, not “about to set times wrong or right.” However, the action of “stooping” is not necessarily one of veneration. After all, he is stooping to retrieve a “sandstone keepsake”, a signifier whose meaning is indeterminate: a natural object without political connotation; an object which could be used in violent protest; the poem of that name which in itself is ambiguous regarding its “free state of image and allusion”. While citation invokes the authority of an exemplar, Heaney often feels the need to question the recourse to quotation and to distrust the authority it might afford. In “Away from it all” Heaney cites from Czeslaw Milosz’s The Native Realm in an effort to explain his inability to reconcile the desire to respond to public events while at the same time remaining true to the demands of poetic form: I was stretched motionless between contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history.39

Here, any gravitation towards the political realm is rejected since poetry’s linguistic nature means that it can make nothing happen; flight from this realm is also discounted since the poet goes in fear of abstraction. Although one would expect the poet to at least gain some comfort from the fact that Milosz had struggled with this dilemma before him, the supposed affinity, as well as the shared feelings of guilt and inadequacy, are all undermined since the quotation is said to “arise like rehearsed alibis”. The self-reflexive rebuke is made all the more poignant given the Northern Irish poet’s unease with Milosz’s formulation: “Actively? What do you mean?”

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In two further poems from the same collection, the act of quotation results in further instances of self-condemnation. The ghost of his second cousin, Colum McCartney, the victim of a sectarian killing and the subject of an elegy in Heaney’s 1979 collection Field Work, returns in section VIII of “Station Island” to berate the poet for having drawn “‘the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio / and saccharined my death with morning dew’”.40 As in “Away from it All”, quotation is here akin to evasion; however, while the poet stands accused of evading the brutal, murderous reality, he is also said to do violence to his subject through an inappropriate invocation of a literary exemplar. In “The Loaning”, Heaney is similarly aware of his responsibilities as a poet and the painful memories that he can reawaken in his verse. Citing from Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno, he alludes to an encounter between Dante and Pierro delle Vigne, the statesman who was imprisoned for treason against Frederick II and who subsequently committed suicide: When you are tired or terrified your voice slips back into its old first place and makes the sound your shades make there … When Dante snapped a twig in the bleeding wood a voice sighed out of the blood that bubbled up like sap at the end of green sticks on fires. At the click of a cell lock somewhere now the interrogator steels his introibo, the light motes blaze, a blood-red cigarette startles the shades, screeching and beseeching.

The “bleeding wood” is an apt metaphor for delle Vigne’s open wound, the memories and inner torment which cannot be quelled. While the quotation infers a degree of culpability on Dante’s part in this suffering, it also undermines the supposed freedom of Heaney’s “state of image and allusion”. As Gareth Reeves has persuasively argued, The snapping of the twig in ‘The Loaning’ signals the poet’s apprehension of involvement, of oracular possession, that the state of image and allusion is out of his control. ‘Freedom’ has turned into its opposite, into possession, into being taken over, importuned. And it is significant that in Inferno 13 Dante is unambiguously informed by Virgil that by snapping the twig he, Dante, renews again the pain of the shade who has entered the tree, thus making the poet an accessory in the shade’s torture.41

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There are two inter-related issues which trouble the poet in “The Loaning”: firstly, the slipping back to the “old first place” – in the sense of a lapsus, signifying a lack of control; and secondly, the unintended meanings and contexts which may be occasioned by the invocation of a familiar shade. However, his more recent work celebrates the muse’s possession of the poet (or the irruption of unconscious forces). In an essay written for Amnesty International about the rationale behind his translation of one of Horace’s Odes, he writes that “the indispensable poem” will “possess a soothsaying force, as if it were an oracle delivered unexpectedly and irresistibly”.42 His translation, which can be regarded as a modified and interpretive quotation as it constitutes “a fair register of the sense and emotional import of the original, while operating as some kind of answer to what has happened in our own times”,43 was written in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Reacting to the general feelings of fear, awe and uncertainty following the terrorist assault, he remembered lines from Horace’s ode: “Valet ima summis / mutare et insignem attenuat deus” (“the god has power to change the highest things to/for the lowest”). Feeling the need to respond to the awful public atrocity, Heaney’s voice “slips back into its old first place” and gives way to the influence of one of his shades, Horace. There are no qualms about doing violence to his subject in the poem since the sudden irruption of thunder and lightning in the original - “[Jupiter] galloped his thunder-cart and his horses / Across a clear blue sky” – becomes an apt corollary for the destruction visited upon New York and its deadly aftermath: “Stealth bombers pummelling the fastness of Afghanistan, shock and awe loosed from the night skies over Iraq”.44 Translation and literary allusion are rarely a means of escapism for Heaney. In a Northern Irish context, the relation set up with a prior text allows the poet to establish an analogy, an analogue for the present Troubles, a comparative framework. “Mycenae Lookout”45 is a clear example of this. In the revised version of his excellent study on Heaney, Neil Corcoran states that “‘Mycenae Lookout’ is written for the self, and in the mode of meditative version-translation, a literary gloss; but its self-intrication makes it the clearest instance yet in Heaney’s work of the way literary texts, and notably classical literary texts, operate for this poet as analogue and figurative projection, where the measuring of present and past things brings emotions, impressions and attitudes into new clarity”.46 The poem is based on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, a play dealing with the return home of King Agamemnon after the Siege of Troy. In his absence, his wife Clytemnestra has had an affair with Aegisthus, and both plot the death of the King. In the original play, the watchman has a minor role, but in “Mycenae Lookout”, Heaney places him centre-stage as a figure of the poet himself. The poem replays familiar themes: the poetic speaker as observer, unable to respond:

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And then the ox would lurch against the gong And deaden it and I would feel my tongue Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck, Trampled and rattled, running piss and muck, All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire, A victory beacon in an abattoir . . . .

He is caught in the middle with divided loyalties: loyal to his master, but also to his mistress; he sees that the King has been victorious in Troy, but fears for his safety at home (“hence the “victory beacon in an abattoir”). The poet, too, can do nothing to stop the violence — he too is “balanced between destiny and dread”. What he can do is encapsulate and convey the violence in iambic couplets. The formal metrics contain the violence, the rhymed couplets make everything seem inevitable (because they are couplets, you anticipate the next end-line rhyme). This is the poet as vatic seer, involved but also detached — seeing both sides. He conflates Clytemnestra’s sexual ecstasy with the battle cries of Greek warriors: Up on my elbows, head back, shutting out The agony of Clytemnestra’s love-shout That rose through the palace like the yell of troops Hurled by King Agamemnon from the ships.

Perhaps the most disturbing depiction of violence in Heaney’s work occurs in the second section of “Mycenae Lookout”, entitled “Cassandra”. Cassandra is the woman cursed with foresight who was abducted from Troy by King Agamemnon. The section is again narrated by the Watchman who discounts all notions of safe detachment: No such thing as innocent bystanding. Her soiled vest, her little breasts, her clipped, devastated, scabbed punk head, the clear-eyed famine gawk — she looked camp-fucked

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and simple.

The violence of this section - her rape and the impending death of Agamemnon which Cassandra foresees - is conveyed by the short-lined rhyming tercets; the Watchman is so eager to get out the lines that there are awkward enjambments, run-on-lines. But much of the power of this section comes from the fact that it refers back to a previous poem by Heaney, “Punishment” (North), in which Heaney’s speaker condemns his own silence when a girl is publicly tarred and feathered by the IRA for dating a British soldier. In that poem the speaker connives “in civilised outrage”. In “Cassandra”, he reiterates the point that, even for a poet, there is “No such thing / as innocent / bystanding”. The poet is involved in the conflict whether he likes it or not. Critics railed against “Punishment” and criticised it on several accounts: that it was deterministic; that it dehistoricised the Northern Irish conflict; that it was pornographic, with the poet as a voyeur; that it absolved the poet from involvement in the scene. No such accusations could be made about the revised version. Here, he undermines the safe position of the watching chorus. As Sarah Broom argues in a recent article, in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon the Chorus is “the very incarnation of the civilized bystander, outwardly sympathetic to the victim, condemning violence in shocked tones, obstinately refusing to believe all the prophecies and signs which indicate that violence will happen, and completely unable or unwilling to do anything about it once they do believe it”.47 Heaney undermines their calm - “No such thing as innocent”. There is no aestheticisation of violence here and no “free state of image and allusion” as Heaney problematises the gaze of the onlookers, implicating them in the rape, hinting at their own desire to rape her. This conscious interrogation of the poetic gaze was missed by the critics when looking at “Punishment”, and this forced the poet to make it far more explicit in the later poem. Whereas much of Heaney’s poetry is self-reflexive, overtly commenting on (and agonising over) its own status as the purveyor of poetic truth, and foregrounds the citation of literary exemplars, the work of his Northern Irish contemporary Medbh McGuckian seems to avoid commenting on the Troubles and her ghostly familiars are nowhere to be seen. Indeed, reviewers perceive a deliberate silence at the heart of her poetry. Constructing ungrammatical, syntactically inventive and hermetic verses, she is, in Kate Daniels’s phrase, “the wielder of non-linear, surrealistic pieces”.48 Inherently private (autobiographical) subject matter and stylistic experimentation conjoin, it is argued, to produce uncommunicative texts, a body of work constituting a “literary ‘autism’”,49 a “folly-studded aesthetic”;50 in short, ars gratia artis. The work, then, appears to inhabit “a free state of image and allusion”. A recent review by Fionola Meredith is

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typical both in the reductive nature of its commentary and in its refusal to move beyond a surface analysis: the poetry is said to be “self-absorbed and swooning in the opulence and density of its own multivalent sounds”; the poems are “esoteric reveries”, while her words are said to be “arbitrarily chosen, or at least the product of a heavily veiled internal logic”.51 To a certain extent, recent interviews which usefully provide an insight into her creative praxis could potentially fuel such gross misreadings of her oeuvre. To Sawnie Morris the poet confided that: I would have a hoard of words that I liked at the time. I’d have gathered them like a squirrel, a little parcel of gems. It’s just like making a necklace. I pick and sort and thread and it would normally fall into place fairly quickly. There’s a certain amount of leg-work – looking for rhymes, moving the words around a bit to get them in some sort of logical. Yet the mind is elsewhere, though.52

This should not be taken to mean that her poetic texts are the result of arbitrary arrangements of words, nor that they stem from unconscious promptings; we do not, as one critic has it, “hear the unmediated unconscious” in her work.53 As I will argue, the mind is most certainly there at the time of writing. As the poet herself states in a diary entry (1969): “I want to use language, not study it or how others use it. I want it alive in my mind”.54 Yet the idiosyncratic nature of her poetic language often masks (but ultimately is a by-product of) the meticulously arranged hidden voices in her texts which allow her to refer to issues of public violence and sectarianism. A researcher consulting McGuckian’s papers kept at the Special Collections at Emory University will come across dozens of sheets of paper covered with rows of hand-written phrases and sentences. These are often catalogued as “Notes”, or more simply as “Miscellaneous”. The sheets are, in fact, her word-hoard, a record of the words and thoughts which touched her upon reading various books (though which texts are never indicated). The sheets are also, more crucially, the templates from which she creates her poetic texts. It is here that her voice slips back into that of her shades. What I have discovered is that each of her poems is an assemblage of inter-cut excerpts from memoirs, biographies and books of history. Unlike Heaney, McGuckian does not make it easy for the reader to identify the familiar ghosts present in each poetic text and for this reason it seems critics sometimes dismiss her work as mere “esoteric reveries”. For example, when Heaney chooses to write about the Irish patriot Michael Collins and the tragedy of his death, he openly names Collins, and supplies the relevant contextual details within his text: Michael Collins, ambushed at Beal na Blath,

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At the Pass of Flowers, the Blossom Gap, his won Bloom-drifted, softed-Avernus mouth ….55

Heaney also refers directly to his source material: “This has been told and retold / By his biographer”. When McGuckian engages with the same material - Collins’ role in the Irish civil war politics of the 1920s - she refrains from naming her subject directly and there is little indication that her poem, “The Truciler”,56 is a collage of phrases taken from Tim Pat Coogan’s Michael Collins: A Biography:57 the ‘Trucileers’ (311)

The Truciler

And McPeake cleaning the briars off of the top of the ditch (420) The bullet apparently drives not only particles of bone but also an air pocket before it (418) the pair went back to Dublin at a ‘four miles an hour walk’ (138) an hour walk’ (138)

The bullet cleared the briars off the top of the ditch, drove particles of his bone at a four miles per hour walk, to rejoin a road like a swine with a tusk which has grown into the head. like a swine with a tusk which has grown round into the head.

[P]riceless manuscripts … floated over the city (332) Firstly, the election, which made Craig the Six Counties’ first Prime Minister … had the more important long-term result of definitely and unmistakeably releasing the scent of Partition into the Irish electoral air. (212) ‘That,’ said he, ‘is me, in the straitjacket of the Republic.’ (231)

Within minutes of that noontide priceless manuscripts floated over the city, releasing the scent of partition, and the stray light in the straitjacket of the Republic paid out the head money of his soul.

Chronologically, the poem works backwards, beginning with a description of the death on 22 August 1922 of Michael Collins, leader of the proTreaty faction during the civil war and head of the Free State Army (‘Trucileers’). We follow the bullet’s trajectory as it passes inexorably through his head, its speed linked to a different journey, a friendly, though perilous “four miles an hour walk” across Dublin with Liam Deasy, a leading figure in the Cork IRA, the organization which ultimately sealed his fate. Here, McGuckian intimates the tragic nature of Collins’s death: as the Volunteers’ Director of Intelligence during the guerilla insurgency of 1919-1921, Collins trained those who would later oppose him after the Treaty was signed with Lloyd George; the weapon used against the British (“tusk”) becomes self-defeating for Collins (“grown round inside his own head”). With the temporal deixis in the second stanza’s opening line, McGuckian blurs

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cause and effect by conflating three distinct elements which led up to, but were not a result of, Collins’s death: firstly, an act of cultural vandalism, the destruction of irreplaceable manuscripts at the Public Records Office in Dublin’s Four Courts, many dating from the twelfth-century, perpetrated by anti-Treaty forces after they were forced to surrender on 30 June 1922; secondly, a political event, the election of Sir James Craig as the first Prime Minister of the Six Counties, which made partition an irrevocable electoral issue; and thirdly, a bargaining position, De Valera’s plan of External Association, which Collins brought to the negotiating table and which failed to keep him out of what his nemesis termed “the straitjacket of the Republic.” McGuckian’s lines dwell on the political fall-out rather than their specific causes, establishing an apparent tension between freedom and restriction: the limitations of “straitjacket” and “partition” are picked up later by the “dwelling house” that “is always/ locked” and the “towels / framed all round the railings”; parallel to this is the bullet clearing the briars and the released scent, both as destructive as the enclosed tusk “which has grown round into the head.” It is open to speculation as to whether McGuckian considers Collins to be a tragic figure manipulated by De Valera into a no-win situation. Although the speaker addresses Collins in Churchill’s derogatory terms, she does so ironically: Churchill, who was coming to view Collins as a‘corner boy in excelsis’ (365) [W]ith towels framed all around the railings to show they were on pleasure bent (219) ‘Ireland is yours for the taking. Take it.’ (320)

Corner boy in excelsis, with towels framed all round the railings, Ireland is yours: take it.

With the aid of Tim Pat Coogan’s detailed and sympathetic biography, McGuckian invokes the spirit of Collins in the final lines without rancour or criticism. “The Truciler” is just one in a series of poems in Drawing Ballerinas (2001) that gives voice to those who took part in events leading up to the Easter Rising and who were subsequently imprisoned by the British government. Since these prisoners were deprived of voice, agency and legitimacy, her texts seek to offer redress and allow them to speak again within the body of her texts. “The Moses Room”58 celebrates the life of Roger Casement, the diplomat who worked for the British Consular Service and who championed the cause of the oppressed in the Congo and in the Putamayo, but who was executed for treason when he was caught shipping arms on behalf of the Irish rebels in 1916. The text uses quotations from two biographies: Brian Inglis’ Roger Casement and Roger Sawyer’s Casement: The Flawed Hero.59 The title refers to a room, “decorated with scenes from the life of Moses”, in The Savoy, Denham, Buckinghamshire, the country house owned by two of his friends, Richard and May Morten. Roger Sawyer tells

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of how Casement regarded the Moses Room as “the nearest thing to a place of his own which he had in England” (50). The location is emblematic of the tension within Casement regarding his political loyalties. Sawyer states that this English country house “exerted the greatest pressures on the embryonic separatist”: witnessing at first hand “English traditional hospitality at its best” (50), Casement was at this time beginning to work on behalf of those who suffered from British colonial pressure nearer to home, a course which would lead him into direct opposition with his Unionist friends. That the subject of the poem is Casement becomes obvious in the second stanza’s mention of “the only entry in my ‘Who’s Who’ / not carried forward into ‘Who was Who’”. The once celebrated consul had fallen so far from grace in the British public’s eye following his trial and the rumours surrounding the existence of his “black diaries” which detailed his homosexual encounters, that, as Sawyer records, “his is the only entry in Who’s Who which has not been carried forward to Who Was Who after death” (Sawyer, 142). The stanza paints a condensed, though accurate, picture of Casement as an urbane, courteous man, but one prone to flights of intense emotion: the man who lunched with me And the gossip of all the girls in London (Sawyer, 109) who danced there was the man who lunched he wore silver where the with me in London, who wore silver diplomat wore gold (Sawyer, 53) where a diplomat wears gold. Like a swarm Mine … will be found to have of bees let loose upon visitors, he suddenly A wasp in it (Sawyer, 112) swept the flowers off the table, as if He suddenly swept all the flowers a secret wasp had sawn at his finger … off the table (Inglis, 163) He had secretly sawn away at his finger (Sawyer, 128)

The social position occupied by Casement was certainly somewhat ambiguous in that his income was not that of a diplomat and so, as Sawyer states, “he wore silver where a diplomat wore gold” (53); yet as an overseas consul his duties and social status were very much that of a member of the diplomatic corps. However, the tension within Casement had far less to do with social status and more to do with political loyalty. Although his occupation aligned him to British governmental policy, his views on Irish politics and Home Rule were decidedly antiestablishment. Indeed, writing from Denham about Ulster, he states: “‘Mine [his pen], when it comes to Ulster will be found to have a wasp in it’” (Sawyer, 112). McGuckian conjoins this image of Casement’s waspish venom being directed towards Protestant intransigence on the so-called “Irish Question” with two related tropes culled from the biographies: the “swarm of bees let loose upon visitors” and

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the sweeping of the flowers from the table both suggest the opposite of consular decorum and symbolise his rejection of official policy regarding Ireland. The poem begins with the speaker as a vigilant spectator, one who wishes for the opportunity to seek redress or to re-visit a well-worn argument: who had a weather eye (Inglis, 75); I who have eyed the weather constantly eyed constantly (Inglis, 164) and wanted to call the sea back from its bed … called the sea back from its bed (Inglis, 244)

McGuckian’s reading of his life is then depicted in the poem as a journey upon a road, one likened to “an invert, a woman”. Here she is quoting from a memorandum written by Ernley Blackwell, the legal adviser to the Home Office, which relates his assessment of Casement following a reading of the black diaries: “he seems to have completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy and from a pervert has become an invert – a woman, or pathic, who derives his satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use him” (Inglis, 360). In its new context, however, the image betrays no moral judgement and the writer is had felt compelled to follow it to the end (Inglis, 14) ‘for R’s sake’ (Inglis, 36)

… compelled to follow it to the end, for R’s sake …

There is a sense in which McGuckian’s engagement with Casement’s life acts as a rebuke to those who turned their back on Casement and who failed to regard him as a worthy patriot because of his sexual orientation. Addressing an unnamed interlocutor in the third stanza, the speaker states: The notorious ledger entry of You who have changed the name 13 May has four underlinings, of your third son, with four underlinings using at least two different and two different pens, because his name pens (Sawyer, 138) meant a sum paid by a bridegroom a sum paid by a bridegroom for for a bride, reverse the name of ‘Kingstown’. the bride (Sawyer, 10) a dowry in reverse (Sawyer, 10) born on the edge of Kingstown (Sawyer, 1)

That command to “reverse the name of ‘Kingstown’” is later echoed by “Ireland is yours: take it” in the poem about Collins, both lines suggesting that the nationalist vision of the rebels has been (partially) fulfilled.

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An often forgotten and neglected participant of the 1916 rising is Thomas Ashe, and his imprisonment and martyrdom are central to the thematic concerns of “Black Raven on Cream-coloured Background”.60 Ashe, born on 12 January 1885, was an accomplished teacher, a Gaelic language enthusiast, and a Sinn Féin activist. He was also the President of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Arrested in 1917 under the Defence of the Realm Act for a speech made in Longford, he went on hunger strike with his comrades in Mountjoy Jail demanding to be treated as ‘prisoners of war’.61 On 25 September of that year, he died due to “clumsily administered forcible feeding”.62 The source text that McGuckian extensively quotes from throughout her poem is Sean O’Luing’s biography of Ashe, I Die in A Good Cause.63 Her title immediately grounds the narrative within the context of his life, referring as it does to the Black Raven Pipe Band of Lusk, of which Ashe was the leader and which had, as its standard, “a great black raven on a cream-coloured background” (O’Luing, 9). The opening line, the deceptively brutal “I too was sorry that he was not shot”, cites Ashe’s own later reaction to his court-martial following the Easter Rising: “Later, on release, he said he was sorry he was not shot, as never again would he be so spiritually prepared” (O’Luing, 91). The importance of knowing the source text here cannot be overestimated: not only does it properly contextualise the poem’s narrative, it also provides a rationale for the speaker’s attitude. Far from being cruel or vindictive, the tone is compassionate, acknowledging Ashe’s own patriotism and, with tragic hindsight, wishes that he be spared the awful suffering which was to follow in the years to come. “I think I really know you … Of course I had seven years To study you. … Still, I think you Were different every day” (31) He was already a generation old at Thomas Ashe’s birth. A generation more and their paths would converge dramatically. (14)

Tired is not what I am, but I think really did not know him, having seven years to study him, still, he was different every day. He was already a generation old – a generation more, our paths would converge.

The second stanza juxtaposes two quotations: the first is a statement by his friend and colleague, Mary Monks, an assistant teacher in Corduff who wrote to Ashe on 5 May 1917 expressing her admiration (and perhaps incomprehension) regarding his enigmatic personality; the second is O’Luing’s statement linking Ashe to “the advance guard Irish Revolution”, Henry Hammond Wilson, who was sentenced in 1883 to life imprisonment (O’Luing, 14). Yet the poem’s novelty lies in the way the poetic speaker adopts these sentiments: she is the one who is now studying Ashe, trying to comprehend and evaluate his actions; it is she who recognises that, given a generation, their own paths would have converged.

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But he had to be given up for lost so we would be a little scared all the time by the unloved government, its small excoriations, its semi-lunar depressions, its bells tied up and muffled.

Much of this stanza is not taken from O’Luing’s study.64 The tone is that of a morality tale, resignedly stating that his death was necessarily exemplary, bearing witness to the unrestrained violence of State forces. This prefigures the ways in which the body became a cite of conflict during the 1981 hunger strike, how, in Allen Feldman’s words, “[t]he bodily interior of the inmate was detached from his control and transferred to the skeletal machinery of administration”.65 The three attributes of “the unloved government” are all associated with the manner and circumstances in which Ashe was killed. The medical report submitted by Professor MacWeeney details the wounds found on Ashe as a result of the forcible feeding administered by Dr. William Lowe: “… in the neck, near the Adam’s apple, a number of small oval shaped excoriations; on the prominence of the thyroid another small excoriation …. Beyond the thyroid cartilage a semilunar depression such as would be caused by pressure of a thumbnail …” (O’Luing, 174, my emphasis). The third detail refers to the refusal of the warders to answer the prisoners’ calls to be let out of their cells for exercise: “The bells [outside the cell doors] were then tied up and muffled” (O’Luing, 159). The pattern of imagery relates to the poem’s predominant dialectic of silencing and giving voice. While the title refers to the creativity of the Black Raven pipe band, the epigraph, referring to the composer Thomas Weelkes, details the silencing of the nightingale by the “sparrow hawk,” holding him “in wicked jail.” Similarly, Ashe the injuries are to Ashe’s throat and lungs, literally silencing him. For the poet, it is the Muse who “takes care of” Ashe, so primitively crushed”, who “freshens” rather than “stifles” his “most mobile mouth”. It would be reductive to suggest that McGuckian’s text functions as a mere paraphrase of O’Luing’s biography; while the latter is essential for contextualisation, to insist on a strict adherence to its linear narrative would negate the poiesis, the genuine poetic making inherent in her stitching together of phrases. At times, one could apply Adorno’s praise of Balzac to the Northern Irish poet: “it is as though every sentence of [her] industrious pen were constructing a bridge into the unknown”.66 In the following stanzas, the effect of her conjunction of selected quotations is transformative: I waited till to-day to get back

Though it would take a ship

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messages. I can’t write them in full to hold all the messages, I only half-read for as Minnie said it would take a by hearsay all the other names ship to hold them all. of the fields; how finishing his last field, finishing off his last field (43) he then cut all the flowers in bloom He then cut all the flowers in bloom in the school garden (79) in the school garden. The allied fields The allied fields of folklore, kept tryst with the grass being cut history, Hagiography and from under my fingers by bullets. Brehon Laws (18) He had invented a lamp with his last At Turvey Castle … Hugh O’Neill look at the earth, to send the first leaf on, … kept tryst with Mabel Bagnel (26) walled in by himself, and fit for idling, ‘the grass being cut from fit for restraint in handcuffs, waist belt, under my fingers with the muffs or jacket in splints. bullets’ (84) ‘I have invented … a lamp suitable for motor-bikes and motor cars’ (100) ‘Give my love to all my friends and send the first leaf on to Father’ (109) “‘Sept. 17th. Thomas Ashe. Idling’” (155) “‘I hearby certify that I have examined prisoner 873 (Thomas Ashe), and I find him fit for close confinement, fir for scale punishment No.1 and 2, also deprivation of mattress, fit for restraint in handcuffs, waist belt, muffs, restraint jacket or jacket in splints’” (156).

In the original context, Ashe’s cutting of the flowers is a sacrificial act, presenting an altar-offering prior to the Easter Rising; however, by linking them with “all the other names”, McGuckian suggests the waste and sacrifice of all the lives lost during that fateful week (including many of the pupils he inspired in his role as educator). Hence, the repetition of “field” changes the initial meaning from ‘an area of study’ to ‘battlefield’, one where the “tryst” is much less romantic. Once again the strand of imagery emphasises communication: while earlier in the poem the “tapers” are “quenched”, his martyrdom constitutes “a lamp” to light the way for others (the “messages” and “first leaf” are all missives to be read by others). Repeating the dry phrase used by the authorities (“fit for”), the poet turns it against them, highlighting the severity of his punishment.67 Unlike Heaney’s often tentative use of intertextuality, McGuckian’s incorporation of quotations into her work betrays no anxiety; indeed, where Heaney may baulk at using an allusion drawn from literature and question its applicability, McGuckian’s idiosyncratic texts unhesitatingly draw from, and are utterly dependent on, a wide-range of exemplars and apply them to a Northern Irish context. For example, like her poem “A Fortified Song of Flowers” (see Chapter 1), the opening stanza of “A Deserted Landing Stage on the Rhine”68 cites from

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David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden to establish its initial context. Just as Irving’s text tried to “has “tried to reconstruct the attack [the bombing of Dresden], minute by minute, throughout the fourteen hours and ten minutes”,69 McGuckian’s text reflects upon the devastation of war from a distance: thematically, by concentrating on the harsh conditions in pre- and post-war Germany; formally, by using the voice of an authoritative literary exemplar. However, the main source for her poem is not Irving’s text, but rather Stephen Spender’s memoir entitled The Thirties and After:70 I have tried to reconstruct the attack, minute by minute, throughout the fourteen hours and ten minutes (Irving, 9)

Minute by minute throughout those fourteen hours and ten minutes, I remembered again your water’s beating yellow dimness,

I remember again the water, the flowing line of the hills, the rich harvest quality of Germany (109) . . . surrounded by running waters which wash away the humid stinging scent of Bonn. (148) and now that at least four names crowd on to me … (111). they had an air of having lost everything. (109)

your flowing hill-line the humid stinging scent of any one field browning out Germany’s harvest quality. Now that at least four names crowd on to me, with an air of having lost everything . . . .

The early juxtaposition of the two sources is important as the reminder of what was due to happen in Dresden undermines the idyllic reminiscences (“flowing hill line”; “Germany’s harvest quality”), and renders ironic the almost wistful, casual tone (“I remembered again”). McGuckian also manipulates the excerpts from Spender to achieve a similar effect: the “browning out” calls to mind not only the effects of hot weather on the land, but also the far more deadly rise to power of the Brownshirts; the time of writing (“Now that at least four names …”) implies a retrospective account written when the German populace had indeed “lost everything.” What follows is not only a contrast between the “great-hearted” city and its ruined state (“the phosphorescence of rotten wood”), but also an insight into how people, so used to war, begin to cope with peace: The roofless half of Bonn (146) The museum of Europe becomes more and more open (172) Ten years after the war, Germany was full of peace, it dripped with peace, we swam in peace, no one knew what

. . . I see how you enter into a love of the roofless half of Bonn, Europe’s museum dripping with peace, so we swam in peace, and no-one knew what to do with all that peace.

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to do with all the German peace (105) And everyone was poor, and no-one “Everyone was beautiful, and gentle, was smart, and there was no sin. everyone was poor, no one was smart. . . . Sometimes they let one down, sometimes the poorer folk stole, for example, but there was no Sin.” (105)

McGuckian juxtaposes excerpts from Spender’s account of the forties and the late twenties. The “peace” is an uneasy, superficial one, acknowledged as such by Spender even as he describes in a lyrical tone how, ten years after the First World War, “Germany was full of peace, it dripped with peace” (105). Her tone is obviously ironic. Although included in a recent collection, the poem was written in the autumn of 1998,71 a time of great tension in Northern Ireland. In August of that year, the Real IRA planted a car bomb in Omagh, killing twenty-nine people; this constituted the single deadliest atrocity of the Troubles. In September, while Sinn Féin declared that violence was to be a thing of the past, the issue of decommissioning still remained a stumbling block to the peace process. In October, an RUC officer, Frank O’Reilly, died due to injuries caused by a loyalist bomb in Portadown. The “peace” in post-ceasefire Northern Ireland was, therefore, as superficial and uneasy as that which prevailed in Germany throughout the early years after both the First and Second World Wars. This explains how McGuckian empathises so strongly with Spender towards the end of her poem: it has been blown away now (105) It has been blown away Every German can readily explain him- or herself in terms of What as we explained ourselves under We Have Been Through (106) What We Have Been Through, or discussing we discussed love in music (112) love in music – Your Apollonian Rhine That is an Apollonian with its destroyed bridges over it Germany (124) The Rhine with the destroyed as though it were unfolded from my own flesh. bridges over it (134-5) as though it were unfolded from my own flesh (126)

Both writers are describing a post-conflict mindset, how people begin to come to terms with violence’s legacy: they invent stories, myths, rationalise that which is almost unthinkable. It is unclear whether McGuckian views this as a positive development. Explaining “ourselves under / What We Have Been Through” entails the construction of fiction:72 does amnesty really require amnesia, and does art (“love in music”) soothe or smother painful memories? What is clear is that her skilful use of intertexts allows her to speak authoritatively about the impact of violence and to break the silence surrounding the unreal “peace”.

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Having implicitly argued for the vital importance of locating the intertextual relations in McGuckian’s work - as without them the link to Collins, Ashe, Casement and the other shades would be overlooked - it must be conceded that tracing the sources can be extremely time-consuming. However, there have been moments when the author has provided invaluable extra-textual clues. On 28 July 1999, McGuckian sent me a copy of a recently completed poem entitled “Scotch Argus on Jerusalem Sage”73 on which there was a handwritten note: “Obviously this put the butterfly book through its paces!”74 An analysis of the poem’s lexis suggests three different intertexts are being cited: He hutches down where grass begins to pipe into the stem, wings locked on the plant, the rest of him trying to open. As termovisual a target as all three bridges on the Danube: the bite out of his wings by a bramble loop, a crater on the walking path, flight of cars in waves replaced by gestures, he purifies the smell of burned jasmine though his uranium pleated body.

Clearly, one of the sources for the opening stanzas is a monograph on lepidopterology, as admitted in the letter; however, the language used for the similes (“termovisual” [sic], “target”, “three bridges on the Danube”, “uranium”) suggests a journalistic source. Contextualising the poem, one must remember that it was written during the Serbian conflict. On 1st April 1999, the United States Air Force deployed B1 bombers and destroyed the bridge over the Danube at Novi Sad; on April 3rd, they targeted the remaining two bridges, effectively cutting off the city and crippling its infrastructure. The poem does not seek to debate the ethics of a specific conflict; rather, the Scotch Argues becomes a symbol for the violence and punishment meted out on the weak or vanquished. This supposition is corroborated by the third intertext, hinted at in a further letter from the author: “[The poem] was about how butterflies mate and react to rain but also how 3 executees before the 1746 were made to wear their grave-clothes beneath their kilts”.75 The clue lies in the date which signifies, at least for any academic based in Scotland, the Battle of Culloden. In fact, the third stanza cites from John Prebble’s Mutiny,76 an absorbing study of the many revolts which took place amongst the Highland Regiments during the mid-to-late eighteenth century: men in fine geranium coats

Aged red that absorbs final sharpness, his fine geranium coat flows from his shoulders,

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with gold and blue cuffs (68) videlicet lashes woven through each day, their plaids flowing from their and the jade shroud he wears beneath, shoulders like dark wings (71) a rudder of veined protection. one thousand lashes … videlicet 200 each time (80) each wearing a shroud beneath his belted plaid (82)

Once the mutiny by the 43rd Highland Regiment, which began in May 1743 after the Review on Finchley Common, was put down, all prisoners were sentenced to death. However, a general pardon was issued and they were subsequently exiled to the colonies in America. There were four exceptions, and it these to which McGuckian refers. On 18 July 1743, three mutineers, Samuel Macpherson, Malcolm Macpherson and Farquhar Shaw, were executed by firing-squad for their part in the mutiny, each wearing their death shroud underneath their belted plaid. A fourth, Patrick MacGregor, was sentenced to “1000 lashes with a cat-of-nine-tails upon his bare back at five different times, videlicet 200 each time” (Prebble, 80). The initial comparison to the butterfly can be traced to way the dark plaids were worn by the mutineers, “flowing from their shoulders like dark wings” (Prebble, 80). The Scotch Argus is thus fragile, short-lived, his resplendent red colour the mark of punishment. It is the juxtaposition of the interexts, recalling two very different conflicts, in conjunction with the depiction of both the butterfly’s beauty and its frailty, which allows the reader to interpret the poem as an oblique plea on behalf of the victims of war. The quotations transplanted from source texts carry an intentional meaning for McGuckian and are not arbitrary. Speaking to Helen Blakeman she reveals: “I like to find a word living in a context and then pull it out of its context. It’s like they are growing in a garden and I pull them out of the garden and put them into my garden, and yet I hope they take with them some of their original soil, wherever I got them….”77 This activity of transplantation results in a wonderfully poetic use of language. The relation between the quoting and quoted texts is paramount; indeed, as Marjorie Garber argues (paraphrasing Walter Benjamin), “[t]o quote a text is to break into it, to ‘tear’ something out of it, to become a ‘thought fragment’ and thus a focus for critical attention”.78 While it cannot be denied that her veiled use of quotation makes it difficult for to work out the intertextual relations being set up within each text, this does not mean that her work is any the less intelligent, engaged or coherent than that of Seamus Heaney. Patrick Grant has recently stated that “the future of McGuckian’s work as a whole might well depend on whether or not the critical consensus is that she provides mainly alluring enigmas … or that there is a key to these enigmas, releasing a

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coherence that readers find illuminating and not just arbitrary”.79 This chapter has gone some way to provide that key. 1 Bernard O’Donoghue, “‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’: Poetry and Complexity”, Stand Magazine vol. 34 (Spring, 1993): 17. 2 Joe Cleary, “‘Fork-Tongued on the Border Bit’: Partition and the Politics of Form in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict”, South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 95 (Winter, 1996): 227. 3 Neil Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 142. 4 Paul Muldoon, “Hedgehog”, New Weather (Faber, second edition 1994), 27. 5 Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”, North (Faber, 1975), 59. 6 Michael Longley, “Poetry”, Causeway: The Arts in Ulster, ed. Longley (Belfast: The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 1971), 95-109. 7 Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-78 (London: Faber, 1980), 33. 8 Muldoon, To Ireland, I: Clarendon Lectures in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 36. 9 Lachlan Mackinnon, “A Responsibility to Self”, Times Literary Supplement, 7 June 1991: 28. 10 Paul Scott Stanfield, “Facing North Again: Polyphony, Contention”, Éire-Ireland 23.4 (1988): 133. 11 Brian Cosgrove, “Inner Freedom and Political Obligation: Seamus Heaney and the Claims of Irish Nationalism”, Studies 79 (1990): 268. 12 Heaney quoted in Frank Kersnowski, The Outsiders: Poets of Contemporary Ireland (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1975), 148. 13 Heaney, “Bard of the Irish Soul”, interview by Jack Kroll and Rosemary Brady, Newsweek 97 (February, 1981): 68. 14 Heaney, “Bard of the Bogs”, Christian Science Monitor interview by Stewart McBride, 29 September 1983: B2. 15 Heaney, “Talk with Seamus Heaney”, interview by Seamus Deane, New York Times Book Review 2 December 1979: 48. 16 Heaney, “Unhappy and at Home”, interview by Seamus Deane, Crane Bag 1.1 (1977): 62. 17 Heaney, “Artists on Art: An Interview with Seamus Heaney”, interview by Frank Kinahan, Critical Inquiry 8.3 (Spring, 1982): 409. 18 Heaney, interview by Monie Begley, Rambles in Ireland (Old Greenwich, Conn.: DevinAdair, 1977): 168. 19 Heaney, “Poet of the Bogs”, interview by Francis X. Clines, New York Times Magazine 13 March 1983: 104. 20 See Heaney, interview by James Randall, 7-8. 21 Heaney, “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream”, North (London: Faber, 1975), 56. 22 Heaney, The Place of Writing (Georgia, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 46-7. 23 Heaney, The Place of Writing, 55. 24 Neil Corcoran, “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary”, The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 118. 25 Corcoran, “Seamus Heaney and the Art of the Exemplary”, 119. 26 Heaney, “The Nerves in Leaf,” Ireland of the Welcomes 31.2 (March-April, 1982): 20.

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Heaney, “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet”, Irish University Review 15.1 (1985): 5. 28 Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings (London: Faber, 1988), 101. 29 Heaney, “The Nerves in Leaf”, 19. 30 Heaney, “To a Dutch Potter in Ireland”, The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), 3. 31 Heaney, “Sandstone Keepsake”, Station Island (London: Faber, 1984), 20. 32 Heaney, “Exposure”, North, 72. 33 Barbara Hardy, “Meeting the Myth”, The Art of Seamus Heaney, ed. Tony Curtis (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1994), 162. 34 Robinson, 135. 35 Mary Kinzie, “Deeper than Declared: On Seamus Heaney”, Salmagundi (Fall, 1988), 36. 36 Deborah Tall, “Damned for Looking Back”, Partisan Review 53.3 (Summer, 1986): 479. 37 Seamus Deane, “A Noble, Startling Achievement”, Irish Literary Supplement (Spring, 1985): 1. 38 Conor Johnston, “Seamus Heaney, Sweeney, and Station Island”, Éire-Ireland 22.2 (Summer, 1987): 75. 39 Heaney, “Away from it All”, Station Island, 16. 40 Heaney, “Station Island”, Station Island, 83. 41 Gareth Reeves, “‘The Dark Wood of the Larynx’: Heaney and Dante”, English Studies in Translation: Papers from the ESSE Inaugural Conference, eds. Robert Clark and Piero Boitani (London: Routledge, 1993), 266. 42 Heaney, Anything Can Happen,” Anything Can Happen: A Poem and Essay by Seamus Heaney with Translations in Support of Art for Amnesty (Dublin: Townhouse, 2004), 13. 43 Heaney, “Anything Can Happen”, 19. 44 Heaney, “Anything Can Happen”, 18. 45 Heaney, “Mycenae Lookout”, The Spirit Level, 29-37. 46 Corcoran, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 1998), 200. 47 Sarah Broom, “Returning to Myth: From North to ‘Mycenae Lookout’”, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 24.1: 62. 48 Kate Daniels, “Ireland’s Best”, Southern Review 35.2 (Spring, 1999): 387. 49 Mary O’Donnell, “Responsibility and Narcosis”, Poetry Ireland Review 35 (Summer, 1992): 111. 50 Andrew Elliott, Review of Venus and the Rain, Linen Hall Review 1.3 (Autumn, 1984): 20. 51 Fionola Meredith, “Like Reading in the Dark”, Fortnight (February, 2003): 25. 52 McGuckian, “Under the North Window”, Interview by Sawnie Morris, Kenyon Review 23.3-4 (2001): 71. 53 Kimberly S. Bohman, “Borders or Frontiers: Gender Roles and Gender Politics in McGuckian’s Unconscious Realm”, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 1.1 (March, 1996): 120.

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McGuckian, “Rescuers and White Cloaks: Diary, 1968-69”, My Self, My Muse: Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art, ed. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 151. 55 Heaney, “The Loose Box”, Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001), 16. 56 McGuckian, “The Truciler”, Drawing Ballerinas (Meath: Gallery Press, 2001), 33. 57 Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins: A Biography (London: Arrow, 1991). References cited to the left of McGuckian’s text (emphasis added). 58 McGuckian, “The Moses Room”, Drawing Ballerinas, 23-4. 59 Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973) and Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero (London: Routledge, 1984). 60 McGuckian, “Black Raven on Cream-coloured Background”, Drawing Ballerinas (Meath: Gallery Press, 2001), 30-1. 61 See Robert Kee, The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 606-07. 62 Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (London: Arrow Books, 1993), 100. 63 Sean O’Luing, I Die in a Good Cause: A Study of Thomas Ashe, Idealist and Revolutionary (Kerry: Anvil Books, 1970). Referred to hereafter within the text. 64 Indeed, much of stanzas 1, 3, 4 and 8 come from an entirely different source. This is not unusual in a McGuckian poem. For example, in “A Deserted Landing Stage on the Rhine” McGuckian borrows from both Stephen Spender’s The Thirties and After and David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden, both narratives conjoining to present an analysis of the destructive forces unleashed during wartime. 65 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 174. 66 Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (new York: Columbia UP, 1991), 122. 67 In a previous poem, “Monody for Aghas”, Drawing Ballerinas, 27-9, McGuckian graphically delineates the way in which Ashe was force-fed (the title referring to Michael Collins’s funeral oration at Ashe’s graveside). 68 McGuckian, “A Deserted Landing Stage on the Rhine”, Had I a Thousand Lives , 99-100. 69 Irving, 9. Irving says his book attempts to reconstruct the bombing “minute by minute.” 70 Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People, 1933-75 (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1978). 71 McGuckian sent me a copy of this poem on 2 November 1998. It was first published in The Shop 1 (Autumn-Winter, 1999): 24-5. 72 See Spender 105-6. 73 McGuckian, “Scotch Argus on Jerusalem Sage”, Irish Review 25 (1999-2000): 117. The poem was subsequently collected in Had I a Thousand Lives (Meath: Gallery Press, 2003), 64. 74 McGuckian, letter to the author, 28 July 1999. 75 McGuckian, letter to the author, 2 August 1999. 76 John Prebble, Mutiny: Highland Regiments in Revolt, 1743-1804 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975).

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McGuckian, interview by Blakeman, 67. Marjorie Garber, Quotation Marks (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2. 79 Patrick Grant, Literature, Rhetoric and Violence in Northern Ireland, 1968-98 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 94. 78

CHAPTER FOUR “THEY LOOK AND LOOK AND LOOK AND CANNOT FIND YOU”: NORTHERN IRISH HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION On an ethico-political level, the historian in constructing a narrative must tentatively negotiate between the related imperatives to remember and to forget; that is, to avoid an intransigent, melancholic obsession with the past - what Kevin Whelan terms “the entropy of the traumatic version of memory”1 - yet equally avoid the destruction or erosion of “traces”.2 Attempting to tell the ‘Irish story’, the historian, by locating, collating and carefully analysing the primary material - be it statistical data, oral or written testimony, census data or other archival material becomes “a witness, who provides testimony: his ethical position depends on trust, trust in the word of another. This trust in testimony, in the expressive function of language, in the moral power of narrative, enables an ‘ethics of discourse’”.3 Yet such a position becomes problematic for a number of reasons: firstly, as Derrida has persuasively argued, all testimony, however heart-felt and ‘truthful’, is ghosted by the possibility of fiction;4 secondly, one cannot provide a full, objective account of an event given that “the number of details identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite”;5 and thirdly, any such account will be shaped by a specific ideological framework since, as George Steiner has contended, “[t]he landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance, is stylized and differently coded by different cultures”.6 Indeed, Irish history has been differently constructed according to the political or theoretical purview of its author, its narrative structure changing according to the specific model adopted (Plutarchan, mythic or rememorative; nationalist, revisionist or post-revisionist).7 In After Babel, George argues that: We have no total history, no history which could be defined as objectively real because it contained the literal sum of past life. To remember everything is a condition of madness. We remember culturally, as we do individually, by conventions of emphasis, foreshadowing, omission. The landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance, is stylized and differently coded by different cultures.8

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In Irish historiography, Steiner’s “condition of madness” takes the form of a fixation on the past with the belief that everything has been predetermined. Indeed, if some commentators are to be believed, the past is alive and well and living in Ireland. “To the Irish,” says A.T.Q. Stewart, “all history is applied history and the past is simply a convenient quarry which provides ammunition to use against enemies in the present”.9 He is not alone in arguing this. Summarising Oliver MacDonagh’s analysis of the “Irish habit of historical thought”, Joep Leerssen declares that “[i]n nineteenth-century historical consciousness, bygones are anything but bygones, and the past continues to carry an immediate ideological relevance for current attitudes and current affairs”.10 However suggestive these and other examples are of the enduring influence of the past on present consciousness, one cannot avoid suspecting that all this dredging up of historical parallels and apparent repetitions is nothing more than an attempt to create an ideologically driven teleological reading. As Alvin Jackson asserts, “a fundamental aspect of the Irish tragedy is that the past is continually and ritually sacrificed to a caricature of the present. Threads are plucked from both past and present, and woven into a smothering ideological blanket of a uniform green, or orange. A monochrome history deceives only a minority, but it is the few, purblind zealots who have sculpted so much of our environment”.11 This is true of much Irish nationalist historical writing, as is suggested by Terry Eagleton’s humorous send-up of its myth-making procedures in Saints and Scholars. No stranger to the subtle machinations of Irish historiography, Eagleton’s description of Thomas MacDonagh’s execution at the novel’s conclusion depicts an approach to history which ignores documented evidence and enters into the realm of myth: “As the rifles were raised he was already fading, dwindling, fragments of his body flaking away to leave only an image beneath. When the bullets reached him he would disappear entirely into myth, his body nothing but a piece of language, the first cry of the new republic”.12 Events as officially known and recorded are ignored; after all, as the narrator says, “history does not always get the facts in the most aesthetically pleasing pattern”.13 Eagleton’s parodic attempt to “blast him out of the dreary continuum of history into a different place altogether”14 has much in common with Brian Friel’s Field Day play Making History, which provides a similar metacommentary on nationalist historiography. Intending to write a biography of Hugh O’Neill, Archbishop Lombard declares: “But are truth and falsity the best criteria? I don’t know. Maybe when my turn comes my first responsibility will be to tell the best possible narrative. Isn’t that what history is, a kind of story-telling”.15 What he means by “the best possible narrative” is clarified later when he tells Hugh that “You lost a battle — that has to be said. But the telling of it can still be a triumph”.16

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What this chapter examines is the way in which two Northern Irish novelists – Seamus Deane and Eoin McNamee – focus on the “telling” of the tale, how they construct texts centring on the fictionalising process of history. The works analysed here can be described as “historiographic metafictions”, texts which disrupt the seamlessness of the join between world and text. As Linda Hutcheon has argued, historiographic metafiction “underlines the realization that ‘the past is not an ‘it’ in the sense of an objectified entity that may either be neutrally represented in and for itself or projectively reprocessed in terms of our narrowly ‘presentist’ interests’”.17 Such texts do not, of course, deny that certain events happened; rather, they probelmatise their subsequent representation. Eve Patten has identified the predominant genre of Northern Irish fiction as “Troubles-trash”, the unsophisticated fiction set in contemporary Northern Ireland: Since the beginning of the current phase of conflict in Northern Ireland in 1969 fiction set in he Troubles has become one of the region’s few growth industries. With an element of tongue-in-cheek, Belfast’s Linenhall library devotes an entire section to what has become a cult phenomenon in which hardened terrorists race across flat-roofed buildings and blow up sidewalks, misguided idealists die for Erin and lovers are caught in the crossfire”.18

While such stereotypes have no place in Seamus Deane’s novel Reading the Dark,19 one could be tempted to view the novel’s representation of history and violence as similarly enclosive and fated. As Eamonn Hughes argues in his review “Belfastards and Derriers”: “It is …, fittingly for a Derry novel, a stiflingly enclosed world and the action never strays beyond the confines of the family; indeed, the places of the novel are held together not by the street-plan of the city nor by the topography of the north-west but by a web of family relations”.20 Similarly, Eagleton in his New Statesman Review warned of possible wilful misreadings on the part of Deane’s enemies: “reading this novel one can already hear the grinding of literary Unionist knives. Isn’t this just the sort of nostalgic, superstitious, violence-ridden stuff one would expect from a Bogside bard?”21 Here, the reviewers would argue that violence begets violence in an unrelenting narrative of revenge: Neil McLaughlin is supposedly killed by the policeman Billy Mahon, who in turn is thrown over the parapet of Craigavon Bridge by the narrator’s grandfather. All events in this novel, and their effects on its protagonists, stem from the consequence of these killings and from Uncle Eddie’s execution, mistaken as he is for an IRA informer.

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In her monograph on The Irish Novel Jennifer Jeffers outlines how all things connect in this intricately woven familial history: “His parents’ marriage, his mother’s relationship with Katie, and their entire family history is embroiled and trapped by the past that will not go away”.22 Each event has a precedent and a consequence. For example, the treatment meted out by Sergeant Burke in the episode entitled “Pistol”, dated May 1952, is inextricably linked to the family’s association with the IRA, a fact which we learn only much later when Burke visits the mother in December 1957. The way Burke sets up the narrator as an informer, having him seen to be telling on Willie Barr and his mates, is a deliberate reenactment of how Eddie was similarly set up by the police. When his mother hears of how the narrator, in her words, went “running to those vermin” (RD, 101), she exclaims: “God alone knows why this sort of thing keeps happening. Is it a curse?” (RD, 101). The novel suggests that there is no escape; the past will inexorably be repeated. Indeed, in the section entitled “Katie’s Story”, Katie tells of how the McLaughlin family are “devil-haunted”: “It’s a curse a family can never shake off. Maybe it’s something terrible in the family history, some terrible deed that was done in the past, and it just spreads and it spreads down the generations like a shout down that tunnel, the secret passage, in the walls of Grianan, that echoes and echoes and never really stops. It’s held in those walls forever” (RD, 66). Reviewers of the novel were quick to pick up on this sense of tragedy and inescapable fate, of how the past has an over-arching effect on the present. Kathy O’Shaughnessy, in her review in the Daily Telegraph, states that: “The portrait of a present dominated by the past stands as an unforced metaphor for Ireland as a whole”.23 The legacy of the past is inescapable. John O’Mahony’s review for the Financial Times argues that the book’s presentation of Northern Irish life provides the reader with “a startling insight into the buried loyalties and the raw, seething grievances of Ireland’s fractured Northern province.” Focusing in particular on the section entitled “Roses”, O’Mahony reads this episode as emblematic of the inescapable interpenetration of the past with the present: “In a futile effort to uproot the family curse – the hereditary mark of the IRA informer – Deane’s young protagonist desecrates his father’s rosebed, hacking away at the bushes with a pick axe. In retaliation, the father concretes over the garden, hoping to smother the past. But history cannot be so easily silenced. ‘Walking on that concreted patch where the bushes had been,’ says Deane’s boy-narrator, ‘was like walking on hot ground below which voices and roses were burning, burning”.24 Even more importantly, however, these words are repeated by the narrator’s mother later in May 1953, and this is symptomatic of how the pressure of the past is bearing down upon her. The psychosomatic effects are made clear by the narrator’s opening description: “My mother moved as though there were pounds of pressure bearing down on her; and when she sat, it was as though the pressured reversed itself and began to build up

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inside her and feint at her mouth and hands, making them twitch” (RD, 139). Finally, analysing the novel’s concluding chapter, Julia Neuberger’s review for the Sunday Tribune highlights the narrator’s inability to achieve reconciliation with his mother: “The father dies, without it all being known. And she [the mother], who had a stroke and is now rendered speechless, carries on watching, thinking of old horrors as new ones come to take their place – or are merely continuations of the old. She can speak no more, but there is still sighing in the house, and no reconciliation”.25 The sense of enclosure here is emphasised by a number of key features. Firstly, the mother is “sealed in her silence” and, as the narrator says, “I was to seal it all in too” (RD, 230); the curse is to pass along the family line. This motif is repeated throughout the novel: “inside the thick-walled secret passage” at Grianan, the narrator imagines he “could hear the breathing of the sleeping Fianna waiting for the trumpet call that would bring them to life again for the last battle …” (RD, 57). Here we have the overarching influence of the past and a sense of fracture, an unfulfilled destiny. Secondly, the mother and father are pictured “entrapped in the noise from outside and in the propaganda noise of the television, inside” (RD, 231). This image of entrapment is important as it suggests that the outbreak of the Troubles is due to partition (Billy Mahon and Neil McLaughlin are killed during the IRA’s campaign after the border has been established). Finally, we are told at the novel’s conclusion that “[i]n the hallway I heard a sigh and looked back to the lobby window” (RD, 233). The image acts as a book-end, in that it repeats the text’s opening scene on the stairs, with a ghost standing between Mother and son. The intense enclosive atmosphere, therefore, is emphasised by the novel’s setting (the house), the depiction of the society’s occluded narratives, the mother’s aphonia and the novel’s circular structure. However, I would argue that Deane’s text is far too self-conscious about its narrative limitations to be construed as “Troubles Trash”; rather, it is a narrative about the inability to re-present history, the inability to tell one’s own story. As Eoin Flannery has argued, the reader is constantly “alerted to the semiautobiographical content by the disjointed, yet intimately woven, diary-like narrative”. While “the dates at the beginning of each chapter suggest a narrative thread”, their “episodic, seemingly random, sequence problematises any assumption of an integrated narrative process”: The structure amplifies the sense in which these are the decisive moments of revelation or obfuscation. Simultaneously, however, it re-emphasises the obvious conclusion that the narrative is compromised by omissions and gaps; Deane’s own story, as much as it relates to his family, is fundamentally incomplete. Like all

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They Look and Look and Look historical or personal narratives, the text is prone to the vagaries of narrative selectivity, elision and imaginative remembrance.26

The novel is about the act of reading and writing. It is, as Kennedy-Andrews argues, a tale “about the way a narrative is composed out of diverse materials – folklore, rumour, overheard conversation, a child’s partial understanding of the mysterious adult world around him. And it is a story of the suppressions, omissions, withholdings and evasions that are part of the narrative process: the text of this family history is also a ‘field of the disappeared’”.27 The novel’s title calls attention to different modes of reading and understanding (in the dark and about dark subject matter). In the section entitled “Reading in the Dark”, the reader witnesses the way in which the narrator is introduced to different kinds of fiction: the generic romantic nationalist tale, The Shan Van Vocht, is contrasted with “the model essay”, written in a realistic style, one that tells “the truth” (RD, 21). Not only are there times in the novel when the narrator highlights the fact that a storyteller must be selective when forming his narrative - “I had the sense of something still held back, something more than she knew, something Grandfather had cut out” (RD, 127) – but he also acknowledges the provisionality of the tale, the way in which any single account can be revised (RD, 117). In the act of telling his own story, the narrator ponders the reliability of it, enumerates the unresolved questions and acknowledges the fallibility of his memory (RD, 182-3). Indeed, the formal technique of ellipsis indicates to the reader that Reading in the Dark is neither a complete nor completed narrative (RD, 166). The text, then, is a historiographic metafiction or, to use Catherine Belsey’s term, an interrogative text: it draws upon devices that “distance the reader through exposure of the creative processes, thus challenging ‘realism’ not only through a deliberate lack of closure but through representation of competing and contradictory discourses. These challenge the reader to interrogate events and ideologies”.28 The opening chapter’s emphasis on silence, secrecy and aporia is typical of the novel’s narrative procedure. The “clear, plain silence” of the first sentence emphases a lack of communication and stasis; the liminal position occupied by the narrator – “on the stairs” – indicates a halted progression, a state of being inbetween levels of understanding. The pattern of the lino covering the staircase has been “polished away to the point where it had the look of a faint memory”; the palimpsest impresses upon us the importance of the past, yet we can never be sure why as the memory is “faint”. There is a clear demarcation between inside and outside – “the sky always hung in the window frame” – again symptomatic of a liminal position. While the “frame” suggests order and control, it also implies constriction. The mother’s opening command – “Don’t move” – again suggests an enforced stasis, symptomatic of the way in which the parent actively frustrates the

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narrator’s desire to reveal the family’s history (her position higher up on the stairs symbolises her greater understanding at that point in the narrative). The chapter’s final image of his mother sitting on the floor and staring “into the redness locked behind the bars of the range” indicates the active repression of the tale. What lies between mother and son, of course, is the “shadow”, the ghost of Uncle Eddie, and this notion of the phantasmal is crucial to any understanding of why the text is about the inability of telling one’s history. Uncle Eddie is phantasmal in three different, yet related, ways. Within the narrative, the phantasmal is related to the psychological effect on the narrator upon hearing the family’s secret: “The first effect is to make everything phantasmal. Everything you thought was secure and actual has now become almost ghostly and haunting, and yet at the same time, the very moment it becomes that, it becomes super-real: it is the reality that puts the quotidian, one that you thought was secure, out of court”.29 Yet it is also linked to the “uncanny”, or the return of the repressed: the spectral Eddie is a manifestation of the psychological repression of the family story. The third way in which Eddie is phantasmal relates to his status within the narrative: he occupies a liminal position. As a supposed police informer, he is always in-between and cannot be incorporated within the (nationalist) family tale, nor yet can he be incorporated within the loyalist “national” story. This liminality impacts on the narrator’s ability to complete his narrative; as Farquharson states, Eddie’s “very intangibility” becomes “emblematic of a novel invested in articulating indeterminacy, destabilization of meaning, and the ambiguity of knowledge”.30 Why cannot the unnamed narrator in Reading in the Dark construct a story which is not phantasmal? The act of telling one’s own story is a political act, one which asserts control over the content and means of representation. Indeed, Deane has argued in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing that autobiography and “life-writing” has a crucial importance in Irish literary history, arguing that it is “one of the obsessive marks of cultures that have been impelled to inquire into the legitimacy of their own existence by the presence of another culture that is forever foreign and forever intimate”.31 Such an act of self-definition would counter the limiting ways in which the Irish subject has previously been constructed as “phantasmal” or “phantasmagoric”. In Strange Country, Deane argues that colonialism was discursively justified in advance by those who regarded the colony as savage and other, with “reality” being “restored to the phantasmal country only through the introduction into it of threat kind of civic stability which is characteristically British”; however, the early auto-exoticising nationalist response equally transformed the territory into a phantasmal space, constructing it discursively as “mysterious”, “unreal” and culturally “exceptional”.32 Both narratives defined, and trapped, the Irish subject as phantasmagoric. Deane’s unnamed narrator fares little better due to the

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liminal/phantasmal nature of Eddie. As Flannery correctly states, he is “inassimilable within the dominant state discourse, but equally he is alien to the counter-hegemonic discourse of reactionary nationalism due to his perceived betrayal. His phantasmal or nomadic presence is accentuated by his inability to be represented or integrated within either of the ‘accepted’ narratives, and thus, Eddie’s is an occluded memory”.33 It is for this reason that the text takes the form of the historiographic metafiction, a novel marked by aporias, inconclusiveness and self-reflexivity, one that contemplates the intricate relationship between history and fiction. Where Deane’s text is by definition subjective and provisional, Eoin McNamee’s The Blue Tango34 seems at first glance objective and conclusive as it takes as its subject an infamous real-life crime, one solved several decades ago. The text centres on the actual events surrounding the grisly murder of Patricia Curran, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Northern Ireland’s Attorney General, Judge Lancelot Curran. Shortly after 2 a.m. on 13 November 1952, Patricia’s body was discovered by her brother Desmond lying in the shrubbery adjacent to the driveway leading to the family home in Whiteabbey, Co. Antrim. Her body had abrasions to the neck, two facial wounds caused by a blunt object and a total of thirty-seven stab wounds, eight of which on their own were serious enough to have caused death. Iain Hay Gordon, an army conscript, was convicted of the crime on 7 March 1953, with the jury returning a special verdict under the Trial and Lunatics Act (1883): he was deemed guilty of the charge levelled against him, but insane at the time the act was committed. Having served seven years imprisonment in a mental institution, Gordon was released and ever since had protested his innocence. On 23 June 1999, the BBC aired a documentary directed by Bruce Batten which brought to light police documents which had remained secret for forty-five years, implicating the victim’s parents and suggesting that Gordon was indeed innocent of the murder. The new evidence, summarised here by Guardian journalist John Mullin, is worth quoting at some length: Lancelot Curran, the victim’s father, an ex-Unionist MP and attorney general, first called Whiteabbey police station at 1.45 a.m. on November 13. He reported his daughter missing. Judge Curran, later an appeal court judge, told the police his daughter had left Belfast, six miles to the south, on the 5 p.m. bus. He calmly declined the constable’s offer to come to the house. His wife made a second call five minutes later. Doris Curran was hysterical, and begged the constable to come immediately. PC Edward Rutherford quickly arrived on his bicycle, and Judge Curran greeted him in the driveway of the family home, set in 10 acres. His son, Desmond, 26, a barrister, then shouted from the woods that he had found his sister. It was 2 a.m. The papers, unearthed by journalist John Linklater under new disclosure rules, throw light on the third call, by Judge Curran to John Steel, his

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daughter’s friend. Judge Curran cited Steel as the source of information about the bus he gave to police at 1.45 a.m. He put the call to Mr Steel at between 1.10 a.m. and 1.35 a.m. But Mr Steel and his parents were convinced Judge Curran’s call was between 2.05 a.m. and 2.10 a.m. If the Steel family was correct, Miss Curran’s body had already been discovered. So why would Judge Curran need information on her whereabouts? If Mr Steel was not Judge Curran’s source about the 5 p.m. bus, it followed that Miss Curran was. That indicated she had returned home before she was killed.35

Other inconsistencies and irregularities also emerged. Desmond claimed his sister was still alive when he found her, though her body was, in fact, already advanced in rigor mortis. The crime scene was thus disturbed and the body moved to the family doctor’s surgery. Despite the severity of the stab wounds, little blood was discovered at the site and Patricia’s cap, handbag and portfolio were found ten yards away neatly stacked; they were all dry, despite the rain that had been falling. The family was not interviewed until four days after the murder, and Judge Curran would not consent to the house being searched until a week after the crime. When Lord Chief Justice Carswell delivered his findings in the Court of Appeal on 20 December 2000, the original verdict was found to be unsafe on two specific counts. Firstly, he took issue with the means by which Gordon’s confession was extracted, stating that “it came to be accepted doctrine that oppressive conduct or oppressive circumstances which induce the making of a statement will prevent it from being regarded as voluntary as surely as promises and threats will do. The burden accordingly rests upon the Crown to exclude the operation of any oppression along with that of promise and threats as a causative factor in the making of the statement which it seeks to have admitted”.36 When Gordon was interviewed on the morning of 15 January 1953, he had been questioned at length regarding his sexual proclivities, and the fear that his homosexuality would be revealed led him to make a false confession. The officer in charge of the investigation, Chief Superintendent John Capstick, had argued at the time that: “I had to make the boy tell me the truth about this private life and most secret thoughts. Only then could I begin to believe him when he began to tell the truth about the death of Patricia Curran. I hated to use what might well seem to some like ruthless measures”.37 The second key point which led to the overturning of the conviction was the admission that key evidence had been withheld, particularly a report by Dr Hanley on the psychological state of Gordon which argued “that the appellant was psychologically vulnerable to making a coerced internalised false confession”. Had the additional information been made available to the presiding Judge, Carswell concludes, “he would have felt impelled to reject the confession as inadmissible”.38

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From the opening paragraph of McNamee’s novel it would appear as if he intends to write a highly detailed realistic narrative, a re-presentation of both the Curran murder and the subsequent investigation: At 2.20 in the morning of 13 November 1952, the body of nineteen-year-old Patricia Curran was carried into the surgery belonging to the family doctor. Following a preliminary examination Dr Kenneth Wilson concluded that she had been the victim of an accidental shooting because of the pattern of the wounds. In fact a subsequent postmortem revealed that she had been stabbed thirty-seven times. While waiting for RUC detectives to travel to his surgery in the village of Whiteabbey, five miles from Belfast, Dr Wilson estimated that Patricia Curran had been dead for not less than four hours. (BT, v)

Here, the naming of the actual participants and location, the close attention to the minutiae of the case and the insistence on correct chronology, all create the impression of meticulous research on McNamee’s part. Indeed, the idea that The Blue Tango might constitute a corrective (albeit novelistic) account of the initial police investigation is implied by the narrator’s interjection: “In fact”. Yet the prefatory chapter becomes increasingly self-reflexive, with the characters and narrator dwelling not on the events themselves, but on their existence as narrative constructions. The murder investigation is textualised; it becomes a “narrative” (BT, vii). Capstick is said to recognize “the shape of a case like this, its classical texture” (BT, vi). When Gordon’s confession is first broached, the narrator does not present it for the reader’s perusal; instead, we are given a textual analysis, a commentary on its lexis and the way its construction is said to anticipate its audience. The narrator, hinting at the novel’s own mise-en-abîme structure, estimates that it is nothing but a fiction: “The language of the statement is notable for the use of procedural mannerisms. The text itself is constructed in such a way as to anticipate and deflect legal challenge. There are factual omissions, issues are skirted, obvious lines of questioning are not developed. It is a fake confession, a fiction couched in the mocking language of death” (BT, vii). For those who know the details of the Curran case, McNamee’s novel could be viewed as being complicit in this elision of crucial facts: no mention is made of the eye witnesses’ positive identification which firmly placed Gordon at the crime scene; her boyfriend’s recorded doubt regarding the time of Judge Curran’s phone call is omitted; the narrator is silent about the administration of sodium thiopentone in a failed attempt to restore Gordon’s memories of the fateful night; and important forensic evidence such as the bloodstains found on Gordon’s tie, trouser pocket and glove is elided from the novelistic treatment. One wonders why McNamee states that Patricia was studying art, when in fact she planned a career in social work, and why he completely writes out her second brother,

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Michael.39 Due to McNamee’s evidently comprehensive knowledge of the case, one can discount the presumption that the author has simply nodded; rather, the omissions are deliberate and are designed to make us aware of narrative choices being made. Such narrative techniques – narrative ellipsis and falsification of the historical record - are typical postmodern devices. As Linda Hutcheon writes with regard to historiographic metafictions, “certain known historical details are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error”.40 Symptomatic of McNamee’s fascination with the nature of textual production is the way in which he provides the reader with his first glimpse of Patricia Curran when she was alive. She is presented as a text; or rather, as two differing photographic constructs: In the first one she is looking away from the camera, turning into a profile, and you can see the haughty line of her jaw, a look of dark amusement in her eyes, and her lips are parted as though about to utter a caustic and worldly remark. But she is turning into profile, towards another perspective, and there is little more to be learned from that picture. She reveals nothing of the independent nature. The reputed promiscuity. In the second photograph she is looking directly at the camera. She is wearing pearls and a formal cowl-neck dress. The photograph is badly lit so that her eyes are underexposed and can barely be seen. Her cheeks are slightly dimpled and the mouth downturned at the corners but it is the eyes that hold you. Her face is dominated by the shadow of them. You are drawn to the mesmeric void. (BT, vii-viii).

The narrator conveys not only the generic quality of both texts – we are told that “[b]oth are professional portraits” (BT, vii) – he alludes to the ways in which the first has been read and, as his gaze lingers upon the pose and the lighting, he offers a corrective reading: Curran is said to display none of her “reputed promiscuity”. At the same time, the reader begins to notice (and place under suspicion) the narrator’s own penchant for reading into the text: the first image causes occasion to judge and moralize upon Curran’s character (“haughty”; “caustic”; “worldly”). The means by which the narrator reads his subject perhaps displays a will to place her within a narrative, to locate and define her as a character. His reaction to the second image – and implicitly our own, given the usage of the second person – represents a contradictory position: the image reveals nothing about her; instead, it draws us into “the mesmeric void”, something to be filled by our own desire to know (and to construct) her history. Similarly, the concluding sentences of this prefatory chapter calls attention to the process of literary re-construction: “The

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narrator’s voice falls away into conjecture. Her slaughter has been told but not the motive for it, and the face of her killer remains hidden. The narrator’s voice falls away into hypothesis and surmise” (BT, ix). Like Deane’s novel, The Blue Tango “shows fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured”,41 foregrounding what Hutcheon terms “the politics of human agency”.42 Patricia Curran is not presented as having an authentic subjectivity; rather, she becomes a depthless simulacra, “the eviscerated subject, a mere ghost of its former self”.43 McNamee disrupts our sense of her as having a stable, singular subjectivity by providing multiple (and contrary) perspectives on her “character”: she becomes a cipher in other people’s narratives. We are told that, after her death, “the papers described Patricia as an outgoing, independent girl” (BT, 5); letters sent to Inspector Albert McConnell reveal that “Patricia frequented bars in Amelia Street and other places. They stated that she had been involved with three married men in the previous year…. The letters stated that Patricia at the time of her death was suffering from the condition of nymphomania, which the letters described in technical terms as a deviant condition of female heat” (BT, 5). However, the housekeeper maintains that “Patricia seemed a nice, well-brought up girl” (BT, 15), and Gordon repeatedly seeks to counter the media’s presentation of her as a “lascivious figure”, “the gaunt and sex-haunted woman that had been created through the press” (BT, 67). Such examples certainly exemplify Hutcheon’s neat summation that “[f]acts are events to which we have given meaning” and that “[d]ifferent historical perspectives therefore derive different facts from the same events”.44 Indeed, the text underpins McNamee’s belief that “it’s almost impossible to find out what happened”: “There is no objective reality to it,” he argues. “In fact, the whole thing is almost in the grounds of fiction itself. I think, because so much has been thrown up around the case, it makes it impossible to penetrate it”.45 However, the myriad perspectives are not included simply to suggest either a modernist sense of the complexity of the self or the fallibility of people’s perception, but to highlight the process by which people are discursively placed within narratives of our own making: “This was the woman that people wanted, dressed in black, her face pale and desirous. This was the woman that posterity demanded. Gordon would try to explain that this was not the woman that he met” (BT, 32). Here, within the genre of historiographic metafiction, our attention is focused not on the facts, but on “the very process of turning events into facts through the interpretation of archival evidence”; this is shown to be “a process of turning the traces of the past … into historical representation”.46 McNamee’s text is overlaid with a meta-commentary, one that repeatedly focuses our attention on the process by which characters select, shape, elide and

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elaborate upon details that ultimately conform to a pre-conceived narrative. Writing of the Belfast Telegraph, which featured the murder case on its front page for twenty-six successive issues, the narrator remarks that: “There was something that Patricia alone could provide. There was an image they required from her: A lone figure standing at the dark entrance to The Glen, the face unseen. They were impelled towards this mystery. They needed to picture the scene” (BT, 7). Capstick is shown to formulate his responses in light of a pre-conceived narrative structure: “He was experienced in dealing with the press and was capable of projecting the sense of hard-eyed melodrama in an imperfect world that was required by the press” (BT, 160). Looking retrospectively at the Gordon family’s statements, the narrator reveals that “they seem invented, a construct put in place to serve the elaborate mechanisms of Patricia’s murder” (BT, 64-5). This final example has particular significance as it constitutes a prime instance of McNamee’s foregrounding of narrative codes. The narrator analyses the statements, discerning threads of a gothic romance: “There is a fated nineteenth-century quality to their lives. Many aspects of their personalities seem overly vivid, their actions prone to exaggeration. The dark house at the end of the damp overgrown avenue, setting for a lurid tale of morbid erotics, madness and primogeniture” (BT, 65). The actions of Patricia Curran are generically pre-determined; or rather, in retrospect, her life history is made to conform to a narrative framework, infused with the themes, motifs and structure of a gothic tale. The narrator self-reflexively comments on this within the novel, saying that “[t]he setting seems to be put in place for a cautionary tale”: “You perceive The Glen itself as a malevolent presence” (BT, 199). Having characterized his subject within the specific genre, and having established that others have done likewise, McNamee makes the reader complicit in this act only to stop us short with the following proviso: “the sense of brooding seems slightly overdone. The heightened menace belongs to a Victorian drama of domineering fathers and pale daughters with unnaturally bright eyes. A tale of stifling values, the suppression of desire, the madwoman in the attic” (BT, 199). The apparent contradiction in the way the narrative both inscribes and undercuts its own codes is typically postmodern. Writing about postmodern narrative photography, Linda Hutcheon states that we see therein “the same doubled urge, ironically playing with conventions in order to turn the apparent veracity of photography against itself”. Analysing the work of Duane Michaels, she argues that his photographs are “self-consciously composed, fictionalised, and manipulated”, but that the images themselves “nevertheless also function as seemingly transparent/documentary representations within a temporal framework”. In other words, there is a “contradictory conjunction” here “of the self-reflexive and the documentary”: postmodern works, including fiction, “foreground the narrative codes and their ... desire for closure as well as for the order usually

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implied by systematic plot structure”; hence, there is “an urge to foreground, by means of contradiction, the paradox of the desire for and the suspicion of narrative mastery - and master narratives”.47 McNamee’s text notably embodies such doubleness. Alex Clark, in his Guardian review of The Blue Tango, rather misses the point when he takes the author to task for his “tendency to over-egg the pudding, loading the novel with signs, symbols and a seemingly irresistible portentousness”: It might be authorial projection, or simply the fallout from a half-developed theme, but his suggestion that the characters are prone to a certain self consciousness is revealing. Fathers made anxious for their daughters’ safety are “alert to the noirish possibilities of the situation”, a character is struck by “something contrived about the atmosphere of the house”, and a morgue attendant’s voice “is laden with portents and comic doom”. It is as if the author himself is wrestling with problems of dramatisation and truth, and with his own responsibilities to both art and life, but has simply travelled too far along the road to come clean.48

Correctly adverting to the novel’s underlying thematic concern with the problem of how to re-present the “real”, Clark fails to credit the author’s ingenuity at presenting the issue, namely through the disquieting spectacle of having characters based on real personages self-reflexively frame their actions within narrative codes. Hence, through free indirect discourse, the morgue attendant is shown succumbing “to the drama of questioning” (BT, 21), and Gordon, while fantasising about meeting his “real” mother, “knew there was a structure to such things. The exchange of letters, the meeting at a neutral venue. The mother a softvoiced housewife with worn hands” (BT, 29). Here the author shows his hand and stresses the fictionalising process: while re-presenting historical events he has the participants dwell upon the narratives in which their actions are to be framed. Not only does McNamee insistently declare the fictive nature of his text in a work that attempts to “‘de-doxify’ any sense of the seamlessness of the join between the natural and the cultural, the world and the text”,49 he also suggests that real events are discursively constructed. For example, having internalised the guilt projected onto him, Gordon compliantly adheres to the strict protocols that govern a courtroom drama: “Gordon realised that even the spectator in the court had a role to play. He composed his features to express devotion to the stern upholding of values, the punishment of wrongdoing” (BT, 46). It is with the recurrence of The Blue Tango’s most pervasive trope, the photograph, that we witness the clearest and most succinct example of McNamee’s foregrounding of doubleness with regard to the desire and suspicion of narrative mastery. “To photograph,” as Susan Sontag argues, “is to appropriate the thing

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photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, power”.50 As a “narrowly selective transparency”, the photograph can record, furnish evidence and incriminate.51 It is this evidential function to which McNamee alludes when he has Capstick refer to a photograph taken of Gordon, depicting him at a passing-out parade prior to his posting to the Edenmore RAF base. Capstick uses the photographic text as proof of Gordon’s supposed moral degeneracy; commenting to the newspaper reporters in the Europa Hotel on the “apparent difference between Gordon and the other boys in the picture”, he points out “The weakness of the mouth. The pallid features of the known homosexual” (BT, 8). As with the narrator’s reading of the two Curran photographs, Capstick retrospectively reads into the text what he already knows concerning Gordon’s sexuality. But the reader may well question this presumption of a complete knowledge about the individual: to what extent can the photograph be used as evidence? The contention that “[y]ou can easily detect a homosexual in a photograph” (BT, 8) is entirely spurious and says more about cultural stereotyping and the viewer’s ideological standpoint than it does about Iain Hay Gordon. Questioning such a manner of interpreting a photograph, Sontag states that: Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.52

However, it is important to note that the narrator does not overtly render Capstick’s pronouncements as in any way problematic. Indeed, the narrator continually presents photography as furnishing a transparent view of the world. For example, the narrator’s omniscience is not self-reflexively qualified when interpreting the photograph of the Curran family at Portrush: “Desmond is holding something back as though he knows to distrust the counterfeit world of tender nostalgia that the photograph placed them in, the ersatz mid-century wash of regret and innocence lost” (BT, 34). Yet the reader may wonder at how the family can be both familiar and ‘other’: “the children seem dark-skinned, exotic”. The description hints at an unknowable alterity. Similarly, phrases such as “seem” and “as though” undermine the assertion of full transparency. Perhaps the most complex example, due to its ambivalence, is that of a photograph of Gordon walking into court on the first day of the trial: Like everyone else involved in the events surrounding the murder, he seems to be aware of the camera. His face is pale and his jaw is set. It is a nervy face. You can

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Here the narrator again presumes to read the text as evidential: it allows him to psychoanalyse Gordon and it provides seemingly definitive proof of his guilt. But the narrator immediately censures this critical reflex by stating that “[p]hotographs are untrustworthy” (BT, 188). Such a surprising admission at once undercuts the previous omniscient narratorial gaze and forces us to question what may, in fact, have been a strategic manipulation by the media of what came to be viewed as an iconic image. This device of re-appropriating an existing representation, loaded with pre-existing meaning, is what Hutcheon terms a “postmodern complicitous critique” whereby the artist, “while exploiting the power of familiar images, also de-naturalizes them, makes visible the concealed mechanisms which work to make them seem transparent, and brings to the fore their politics, that is to say, the interests in which they operate and the power they wield.”53 McNamee’s narrative practice is clearly analogous to the methodology employed by the Derry-born visual artist Willie Doherty in works such as SameDifference, They’re All the Same and Non-Specific Threat (see Introduction) and it is little wonder that the novelist uses one of Doherty’s cibachrome photographs (Incident, 1993) to adorn the cover of his latest novel, The Ultras.54 The image is that of an abandoned, burnt-out car at the side of an unnamed country road. The title, alluding to an unspecific occurrence, is unforthcoming; the image becomes the site of our own imaginative projections, the reflective surface again framing us within the depicted scene. McNamee’s text features a similar photograph made to serve the same function. Clyde Knox, an MI6 operative, takes “a photograph from a folder” and places it in front of him: “The photograph showed a cratered country road. An armoured Cortina lay on its side several yards away. There was a sense of aftermath, of dazed survivors” (U, 40). Belying its evidential nature, the photograph serves as the locus of Knox’s speculation. The novel repeatedly portrays the futility of the characters’ attempts to read photographs for clues to ostensibly piece together a historical narrative, namely the life and death of Captain Robert Nairac. Nairac, a liaison officer between the RUC Special Branch and the SAS, was abducted from the Three Steps Inn at Drumintee on the night of 14 May 1977. Two days later, the Provisional IRA issued a statement claiming they had

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“arrested” and “executed” him after interrogation.55 No body has ever been found and his exact fate has never been determined, although a former IRA operative has claimed that his body was put through the mincer at a meat processing plant.56 Despite having been posthumously awarded the George Cross, much controversy has surrounded Nairac’s activities in Northern Ireland: two “whistleblowers”, Colin Wallace, a former Army information officer, and Fred Holroyd, a former intelligence liaison officer, both alleged that Nairac had been in some way involved in both the execution of a 27-year old IRA volunteer, John Francis Green, and the Miami Showband massacre.57 McNamee’s novel is manifestly based on substantial historical research and he has trawled through the same material as Nairac’s biographer, John Parker, and journalists such as Martin Dillon, yet he never comes close to the truth about his quarry. As the author stated in interview: “One interesting thing here is that you would expect to acquire some intimacy with your subject, but Nairac resisted enquiry and intimacy. At the end of the book I adapted Nietsche’s dictum that when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Substitute void for abyss and you have the way I felt about Robert Nairac”.58 Such a pessimistic conclusion is echoed by one of the novel’s characters, Lorna, who attempts to empathise with Nairac by constructing a narrative around his photograph: “I can’t help thinking about Robert I look at his photograph I look into his eyes. I can’t see anything there. Maybe that is the meaning of the word ultra. That you are ultra secret and do not give anything away no matter what. That they look and look and look and cannot find you” (U, 255). McNamee’a text is again a historiographic metafiction, with many of The Blue Tango’s postmodern narrative devices prominently in evidence such as multiple perspectives, deliberate historical inaccuracies, and non-linearity. The ultimate inscrutability of his subject is most obviously conveyed through the redeployment of the photographic trope. In one instance, Blair Agnew, an author figure compiling a dossier on Nairac, gazes at a photograph taken in the Ardoyne area of Belfast three month’s prior to Nairac’s death and published in the Irish Times: Robert is standing in the middle of a group of children. He is wearing a flak jacket and battledress. The insignia on his beret is indistinct. Robert is half-turned towards the camera. The badly broken nose is clearly visible. It is hard to fix his expression. The caption to the photograph describes him as talking to children in the Ardoyne area of Belfast. It is possible the circumstances of the photograph are contrived. You get the impression that Robert is aware of the camera. He is not looking at any of the children or teenagers who surrounded him. There is the impression of a man who had struck a pose for the cameras. At a distance he

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They Look and Look and Look appears to be smiling, an effect suggested by the slightly undershot jaw. On closer examination, he is not smiling. The caption states that the photograph had been taken three months before Robert’s death, but his hair, underneath the beret, is neatly cut. Other accounts said that in the last months of his life Robert grew his hair long as cover. The caption implies that the children and Robert had been engaging in conversation, but closer examination revealed that the children had their attention focused on events in the background…. The photograph was rife with ambiguity. If you framed Robert’s face and moved in on it, the print becomes pixilated, the image unresolved, the emulsion scratched and dulled. But it seems that he was lost in thought and that it is not a good thought. He appears to be engaged in a kind of vehement reverie. The eyes are black and hard, and there seems to be an anger there, ire that seems to transcend time and place. (U, 106-07).

The narrator’s account is descriptive, his gaze analytic. A belief in the transparency of the photographic image may well underpin his desire for narrative mastery, yet it is tempered by a profound scepticism regarding the accuracy of its caption constructing as it does a conciliatory narrative - and of its supposed date of production. The narrator implicitly directs the reader to view the actual image since he is unable to determine its meaning: it is “rife with ambiguity”, “unresolved”, each reading dependent on perspective.59 Yet an archival search reveals another dimension, namely that McNamee is here subtly adverting to the failures of recorded history. The narrator’s critique is exposed as misleading: all but one of the children looks at Nairac. By laying bare the interrelation between history and fiction, the text functions as a counterpoint to those who claim to have created a composite picture of Nairac through narratives based on unsubstantiated rumour, governmental misinformation, biased testimony and authorial conjecture masked as rational assessment. Unlike Parker or Dillon, McNamee’s third person narrator openly foregrounds his lack of omniscience: “Intelligence sources suggest that he knew he was in trouble and was attempting to destroy vital documentation. Or that he was making contact with an asset in the toilets. Or that he thought he might be able to climb from the toilet window” (U, 4). The narrator does not presume to resolve the discrepancy between the alternative versions offered regarding Nairac’s activities in the Three Steps Inn. What is remarkable about The Ultras, however, is the way in which its style shifts between realism based on verifiable fact - “We know that Robert had a brother who died when he was fourteen. We know that he had two sisters. We know that his family has made many attempts to have his body returned to them”

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(U, 6) – and a densely vague, paranoiac narrative style that calls attention to ambiguity: You had a sense of a shadowy apparatus being brought into play, opening the whole episode to levels of meaning, giving structure to the dread that people felt, the shifting unease. The night along the border full of tec whisper, microwaves in the air around the hilltop listening posts, the antennae, the unexplained structures. (U, 13)

Such a style is comparable to Don DelIllo’s Underworld, described by James Wood as “neurotically webbed – not surprising, perhaps, for a novel which seems to believe that ‘everything is connected’”.60 In The Ultras we witness the construction of those webs: “He liked the studied grimness of their checkpoints. There was a poetry pf harshly lit installations, conscripts in ill-fitting uniforms. There were complex listening devices, overtones of peasant brutality. It was important to cultivate levels of intrigue” (U, 25). The texture of McNamee’s prose is itself an exemplary instance of “studied grimness” which, for Woods, would indicate a crucial failure of his fiction: “Why is political paranoia so bad for the novel?” he asks when analysing DeLillo’s Underworld. “In part because it is a mysticism facing a form that naturally repels it. Paranoia has an unlicensed freedom which outraces fiction, whose formal task is to establish a licensed freedom. At a simple level, this can be seen in DeLillo’s language, which is so often richly exact. Yet when DeLillo writes about secrets, about hidden plots and political viruses, his language becomes a thick scrabble. It sickens into vagueness”.61 There is a tension here between realism’s striving towards exact, concrete description, and the shadowy elusiveness of paranoia: as Woods states, “[t]he book acts like realism, but feels like hallucination”.62 The volubility and coarse expressiveness of paranoiac fiction run counter to the inherently subtle machinations of realism: The very form of fiction is in tension with political paranoia, and paranoia will always tend toward an explicitness of form. Paranoia, by its nature, has to be expressed. It is an odd paradox of paranoia that all its attention is towards what is hidden., but it exists only when it is given coarse voice. In fiction there is no such thing as a quiet paranoid; the neurosis is essentially voluble. Fiction exists the other way round. Fiction’s attention is toward what is tangible; yet it exists most effectively when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meaning most strongly as it passes, as it disappears …”63

What is distinctive about The Ultras, however, is its insistent presentation of how paranoia is both established and carefully cultivated. A tension emerges between

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the fastidiously structured employment of paranoia and its resultant chaotic effect: “it was important to have inter-agency rivalry, people working in layers, laying false trails for each other. Groups of highly trained men stumbling across each other at night. Knox knew that confusion was important. A sense of unstable government was vital to good intelligence work. You wanted there to be shifting patterns, shadowy allegiances, overtones of corruption and sexual scandal” (U, 36). As in Resurrection Man, the dissemination of propaganda and strategies of misinformation are employed for political effect, steering the public perception of the Northern Irish Troubles: In January 1972 Knox came to Erskine’s office in the corridor. He was looking for a way to spread unease in the civilian population. He felt that they had settled into low-intensity urban warfare, random house searches, arbitrary arrests. He felt that their fears needed to be awakened on a deeper level. He thought that there was a complacency abroad. Acts of brutality were referred to on the evening news as senseless and people drew solace from this, random death stripped of meaning. There was a duty to return depth and resonance to the situation. He wanted the civilians to fall victim to premonitory dreads. (U, 61)

This extract is typical of McNamee’s insistent foregrounding of analysis, appraisal, and decipherment and the way in which paranoia creates a hypersensitivity to signs, the feverish impulse to discern connections. With both The Blue Tango and The Ultras the reader is impelled to make such connections due to the texts’ non-linear structures and the obliquity of the prose, yet the simultaneous inscription and subversion of realism’s narrative conventions insistently problematise the author’s re-presentation of historical events. McNamee’s texts, therefore, are not anti-representational; rather, they insist that the story-telling “is not presented as a privatized form of experience but as asserting a communicational bond between the teller and the told within a context that is historical, social, and political, as well as intertextual”.64 What we see is always through a glass darkly. 1

Kevin Whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial Memory”, Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), 93. 2 Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting”, Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 10. 3 Whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation”, 108. 4 Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29-30. 5 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event”, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 22.

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George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: OUP, 1976), 29. 7 See Whelan, “Between Filiation and Affiliation”, 96 and Luke Gibbons, “The Global Cure?: History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger”, Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, eds. Peadar Kearby at al. (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 90-1. 8 Steiner, 29. 9 A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: The Roots of Conflict in Ulster (London: Faber, 1989), 16. 10 Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the 19th Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 9. 11 Alvin Jackson, Ireland, 1798-1998: Politics and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 120-1. 12 Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars (London: Verso, 1987), 145. 13 Eagleton, Saints and Scholars, 10. 14 Eagleton, Saints and Scholars, 10. 15 Brian Friel, Making History (London: Faber, 1989), 8. 16 Friel, 65. 17 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 57. 18 Eve Patten, “Fiction in Conflict: Northern Ireland’s Prodigal Novelists,” Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Ian Bell, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 128. 19 Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996). Hereafter cited in text as RD. 20 Eamonn Hughes, “Belfastards and Derriers”, Irish Review 20 (Winter-Spring, 1997): 153. 21 Terry Eagleton, “The Bogside Bard”, New Statesman Review, 30 August 1996. Online article at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_n4299_v125/ai_18655981, consulted 18 May 2005. 22 Jennifer M. Jeffers, The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 126. 23 Kathy O’Shaughnessy, “More Legends of the Auld Sods”, Daily Telegraph, 21 September 1996: A8: 24 John O’Mahony, “A Touch of the Irish”, Financial Times, 21 September 1996: n.p. 25 Julia Neuberger, “The Magic World of Irish Legend”, Sunday Tribune , 18 August 1996: n.p. 26 Eoin Flannery, “Reading in the Light of Reading in the Dark”, Irish Studies Review 11.1 (2003): 74. 27 Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (De)constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 217. 28 Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 2002), 45. 29 Deane in Carol Rumens, “Reading Deane”, Fortnight (July-August, 1997): 30. 30 Danine Farquharson, “Resisting Genre and Type”, Northern Narratives, ed. Bill Lazenbatt, Writing Ulster 6 (1999), 90. 31 Deane, “Autobiography and Memoirs, 1890-1988”, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Deane, vol. 3 (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 380.

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32 Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 18, 94. 33 Flannery, 78. 34 Eoin McNamee, The Blue Tango (London: Faber, 2001). Subsequent references are cited in the text as BT. 35 John Mullin, “Papers Cast Doubt on Notorious Ulster Murder”, Guardian 22 June 1999. 36 Lord Chief Justice Carswell, “The Queen v Iain Hay Gordon”, 20 December 2000, http://www.courtsni.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/0CA9F5DF-7795-47F3-B27E8DFF91ACDD57/0/j_j_CARC3298.htm, p.36, consulted 25 April 2005. 37 John Capstick, Given in Evidence (London: John Long, 1960), 32. 38 Carswell, 39. 39 I am indebted to Carrie Taylor for pointing out these two details. 40 Hutcheon, ‘“The Pastime of Past Time”: Fiction, History, Historiographical Metafiction’, Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, eds. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (London: Leicester University Press: 1996), 483. 41 Hutcheon, “‘The Pastime of Past Time’”, 488. 42 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 11-12. 43 Catriona O’Reilly, “Purple Murder,” Dublin Review 8 (Autumn, 2002): 61. 44 Hutcheon, Politics, 57. 45 McNamee, “The Double Life of Eoin McNamee”, interview by Xenia Poole, The Irish World, 7 February 2003: 15. 46 Hutcheon, Politics, 57. 47 Hutcheon, Politics, 63-4. 48 Alex Clark, “Murder, He Wrote”, Guardian 28 July 2001: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/crime/0,,528282,00.html 49 Hutcheon, Politics, 53. 50 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1978), 4. 51 Sontag, On Photography, 5-6. 52 Sontag, On Photography, 23. 53 Hutcheon, Politics, 44. 54 McNamee, The Ultras (London: Faber, 2004). Referred to hereafter in text as U. 55 Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Arrow, 1991), 172. 56 Eamon Collins, Killing Rage (London: Granta, 1997), 140-2. 57 These allegations are detailed in both Dillon’s The Dirty War (188-208) and John Parker’s biography of Nairac, The Death of a Hero: Captain Robert Nairac, GC and the Undercover War in Northern Ireland (London: Metro, 1999), 69-133. 58 McNamee, interview by Peter Wild, Bookmunch, online reviews, http://www.bookmunch.co.uk/view.php?id=1378. Consulted on 9 May 2005. 59 McNamee’s meditation on the photograph is prompted by the way it is dealt with in Death of a Hero: although Parker reproduces it in context (figure 20 shows how it appeared in the Irish Times), the book-jacket features an enlarged, pixilated version. 60 James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 214. 61 Wood, 214.

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Wood, 224. Wood, 220. 64 Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism, 51. 63

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CHAPTER FIVE UNFINISHED NARRATIVES: ARTISTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF BLOODY SUNDAY We look for clues – fragments of information, photographs taken more than twenty-six years ago, newspaper articles and reports. It’s a search to reconstruct, to remember details over lost time …”1

Announcing the establishment of a fresh Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday under the Tribunal of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921, following on from the flawed Widgery Inquiry of 1972, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that its remit was “to establish the truth about what happened on that day, so far as that can be achieved at 26 years’ distance”.2 Reiterating this statement of intent in his opening address on 3 April 1998, Lord Saville of Newdigate confirmed that the Inquiry’s duty and object was “to seek the truth about what happened on Bloody Sunday” and that he intended “to carry out that duty with fairness, thoroughness, and impartiality”.3 After 434 days of evidence and 16 million spoken words,4 Christopher Clarke, Counsel to the Inquiry, delivered his closing statement, and in so doing he echoed the previous pronouncements, stressing the need to uncover the truth “however complex, painful or unacceptable to whomsoever that truth might be”.5 However, the revelation that, “[d]espite an inquiry lasting more than seven years at an estimated ultimate cost of £155m it was not known which Parachute Regiment soldiers had carried out the majority of the shootings in Derry in January 1972”,6 begs the question: to what extent can the truth about Bloody Sunday ever be known? Added to the necessarily disparate and fragmentary nature of the information, and the necessity to re-construct and re-member the body of evidence after so much time has passed, the Inquiry had to contend with the intensely mediated nature of the event itself. As Luke Gibbons states, “[t]he visibility of so many other cameras in photographs of the dead and the wounded on Bloody Sunday holds out the prospect not of a complete or comprehensive picture, but of an endless proliferation of perspectives – indeed, of the impossibility of eliminating perspectives (in the sense of particular, selective angles of vision) in the first place”.7 Gibbons is here applying Hayden White’s theory regarding “the modernist event” whereby any attempt to provide an objective account of the event, either by breaking it into a mass of its details or by setting it within its context, must conjure with two

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circumstances: one is that the number of details identifiable in any singular event is potentially infinite; and the other is that the ‘context’ of any singular event is infinitely extensive or at least is not objectively determinable.8

For White, the concept of the “event as an object of a specifically scientific kind of knowledge” has been dismantled, as has the notion of the “story”.9 While for such theorists as Richard Kearney, the transition from “nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated” is vital in conferring a “narrative identity”,10 the revolution in (post-)modern representational theories and practices undercut the stability of linearity, objectivity, omniscience and realism. How is one to tell the story of Bloody Sunday? This chapter explores the ways in which a number of artists - the visual artists Philip Napier and Willie Doherty, film-maker Paul Greengrass, and playwrights Brian Friel and Dave Duggan – problematize the notion of “truth” with regards to Bloody Sunday by foregrounding the myriad perspectives and discursive formations which underpin its narrative constructions. Philip Napier’s work entitled Gauge was commissioned by the Orchard Gallery and was presented both as an installation at the Gallery and as a sitespecific temporary display at a disused house in Glenfada Park in the Bogside area of Derry. The project addresses the need to formulate a response to violence and was, as the exhibition catalogue informs us, “conceived against a backdrop of sustained calls for apology from the British Government for the events of Bloody Sunday”.11 The project attempts to “gauge” this apology, to measure the degree to which it is both sufficient and acceptable. As Liam Kelly, the former director of the Orchard Gallery, argues, Napier demonstrates here his continuing interest in “the ramifications of language – its emotional, psychographic charges”.12 The work consists of fourteen speakers and a suspended public address system that relayed a continuous “apology”, which is in turn measured by the weighing scales attached to the speakers. It becomes increasingly difficult to interpret both the intention and sincerity behind the haunting voice that repeatedly says, “I’m sorry . . . I really am sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I apologize”. The exhibition visitor is left asking: ‘Why should one apologize?’; ‘how should one say sorry?’; ‘is it enough just to say sorry?’; ‘exactly who should say sorry?’; ‘are phrases of contrition sufficient responses to the act of killing fourteen people?’ As the curator of the exhibition explains, “[t]he work evolved as a proposition that language alone cannot be adequate; indeed that no measure of language can be enough because it is always contextual and conditional”.13 Given that the story of Bloody Sunday has not been adequately told, an apology from any quarter may be both vacuous and premature. Language itself is found wanting here, unable to bring the grieving process to a close.

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The events of Bloody Sunday were a profound formative influence on the Derry-born visual artist Willie Doherty: It’s an event that to some extent is still unresolved, a piece of unfinished business. But what was significant about the experience for me was that I was an accidental eyewitness; I had grown up with the belief that what I saw on television news and what I read in the newspapers was in some way related to the truth. After Bloody Sunday, it became clear to me that what I had seen on TV and what I had read in the newspapers didn’t in fact bear any relationship to what I had seen happen myself. So it was an experience that politicised me to some extent about how what was happening around me was being managed.14

What interests Doherty is the contingent nature of the experience and the ways in which the events were discursively constructed by the media. His own work often highlights such contingency and implicates the viewer in the formation of narratives about violent events. His cibachrome photographs, with their reflective surfaces framing the viewer’s image within the scenes depicted, raise “the question of how we fill in meanings to images, in the context of the set of accepted ideological responses”.15 His early photo-texts used to overtly direct the viewer towards a reading of an image through the placement of text on the photographic image. This technique is what Barthes terms “anchorage”, whereby “the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance”.16 Yet the textual inscriptions rarely tell the whole story; rather, they propose the narrative and what interests Doherty is “how the viewer completes that narrative and locates [the] images within it”.17 In his work which takes Bloody Sunday as its primary thematic concern, Doherty makes use of multiple screens and audio-feeds in order to foreground the inherent difficulties in representing and formulating a response to the events of that day. In his multi-media installation entitled 30 January 1972 (1993), Doherty bears witness to the atrocities yet does not seek to encapsulate the events within a singular narrative. As the exhibition catalogue tells us, “[t]he work does not attempt to add to the existing body of evidence but is more concerned with the process by which significant events are remembered and passed on through eyewitness accounts and first hand experience, alongside mediated and other second-hand imagery”.18 The installation has both a visual and an auditive dimension: slide images are projected onto both sides of a screen, disallowing the viewer’s ability to see the images at the same time; four audio tracks are played simultaneously, creating a multi-layered version of the same event. What we hear are personal reminiscences and eye-witness accounts. While the audio-track

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initially appears to convey a linear narrative, this impression is soon undercut as the speaker begins to repeat himself; subsequently, there is the introduction of other, competing voices, blocking out the sense of the first account. The installation constitutes a self-reflexive response on the artist’s behalf; it points to the impossibility of finding a single version to encompass the multiple dimensions of the horrors that occurred on Bloody Sunday. The work acknowledges the political and religious biases and divisions within the community as well as the different agendas at both local and governmental level. As the listener hears layer upon layer of text and subtext - “people talked about how the skies were even crying . . . the only image I have about Bloody Sunday is that the people were innocent . . . Ah . . . It was tragic” - one comes to the conclusion that, due to the vicissitudes of memory and the traumatic nature of the event, both words and images may provide insufficient responses. Doherty returned to this theme with an exhibition at the Ormeau Baths Gallery entitled Double Take (2001). The exhibition, comprised of a video installation and a series of black-and-white digitally scanned photographs, “came out of this sense of unease that most people feel about the Inquiry, this idea of a search for this objective truth, that there is this thing, this truth which can be found, can be achieved, and if we can get there it’ll automatically be some kind of closure. That notion of a search for truth and closure against the unreliability of human experience, and memory”.19 The title of the video installation, How It Was, seems to imply the possibility of re-staging an event, of providing an accurate, objective account; yet such a comforting impression is undermined by the piece itself. Two synchronized seven-minute looped video sequences are projected simultaneously onto two freestanding screens, while a soundtrack (voiced by three actors) is relayed through four speakers. Although both sequences are comprised of the exact same series of shots, they are shown in reverse order with only one point at which the sequences converge. The viewer is unsure as to what exactly has happened: the three actors (two male, one female) present the action, while the voiceovers indicate doubt about the re-staging: “I was there, and I have doubts”. Echoing Hayden White’s concept of the modernist event, Dave Duggan, the script-writer for Doherty’s film, explained the uncertainty contained within the piece by contrasting it with other cultural representations of Bloody Sunday which attempt to reach a shared narrative of the event: “My own interests are about seeing a multiplicity of narratives. An event will occur and there could be so many different tellings of it, mediated by people’s different experiences of it and also their different memories of it”.20 Contrary to the positivist assertiveness of the title How It Was, the title accorded to each of the accompanying photographs depicting the disused garage, its tools and work surfaces – I Was There and I Have Doubts – stresses the inability of achieving an agreed reconstruction of the events which

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took place therein. Presented with such a repository of memory, namely the documents detailing the aftermath of an undefined event, the viewer is called on to recreate past action through the activity of his associative memory and affective imagination. Yet the texts themselves resist the presumption of a realistic representation; as Daniel Jewesbury argues, “[t]he photographs are scanned and printed digitally, in such a way that their high contrast is exaggerated by low resolution. Doherty reintroduces into the supposedly transparent, immediate realm of digital imaging a layer of mediation and affect. The photographs become intentional mistranslations, further obscuring the event which their locations are supposed to contain, to convey”.21 The same indeterminacy evidenced in the script of Doherty’s How It Was can be seen in Duggan’s play Scenes from an Inquiry (2002), which has as its subtitle “A Theatrical Evocation of the Saville Inquiry”,22 and which premiered on the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Comprising of a series of fourteen separate scenes in which the Counsel and Judge question different witnesses, the work repeatedly counters the apparent objectivity of the legal discourse and sophisticated technological apparatus employed by the Inquiry with the more personal language and subjective recollections of those called to bear witness. Counsel: (to the technicians) Can we have map M104.3 on the screen? Thank you. (to witness) You said you were near the junction of William Street and Rossville Street? Did the shot come from the east of this position? Witness: The sun rises in the east. I know it comes up over the park and the river and, if there’s no fog, we see it. Counsel: Quite. Witness: Then it rises above the city, crosses The Diamond and heads out the river before vanishing behind low hills. Counsel: In the west? Witness: Between Creggan and Killea. Your map doesn’t stretch over the ground. It doesn’t contour into the spaces, the hollows, the crevices and humps that make the city.

In “Scene No.1: A Cartography”, the two-dimensional cartographic representation of the Bogside, employed to facilitate an accurate reconstruction of events, is not commensurate with the witness’ more phenomenological mode of recall. While the Counsel repeatedly calls on the witness to refer back to the map in order to establish his exact location on the day, the witness retorts with the pointed rebuke: “Memory cannot be flattened out by pointing. It has dimensions in time and space. Your maps are for spreading on big tables and neat screens. Your maps have no depth. No mind. No fear. No blood”. Not only does such a rejoinder heighten the tension implicit within the play between objective and subjective narrative

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constructions, it also calls to mind the precarious nature of any testimony that is used to establish the “truth”. As Jacques Derrida eloquently demonstrates in Demeure, “testimony” is always haunted by the possibility of fiction: When a testifying witness, whether or not he is explicitly under oath, without being able or obligated to prove anything, appeals to the faith of the other by engaging himself to tell the truth – no judge will accept that he should shirk his responsibility ironically by declaring or insinuating: what I am telling you here retains the status of literary fiction. And yet, if the testimonial is by law irreducible to the fictional, there is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of literature …. If this possibility that it seems to prohibit were effectively excluded, if testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony.23

The witness can only tell the truth as he sees it, from his own limited perspective. While the Judge can construct an official account based on the apparent merits of the totality of the submissions, that final “objective” narrative will always be ghosted by the possibility of fiction. In “Scene No.5: A Library” Duggan further problematizes the truth quotient of eye-witness accounts delivered subsequent to the events as he implies that the experiential can become overlaid by oral and textual narratives, subsequently giving rise to “False Memory Syndrome”: Counsel: I put it to you that you don’t remember any of this. I put it to you that you read all this in a book. Witness: I read all the books. All the articles. Counsel: And they influenced you so that you can’t tell the difference now between what you know and what you remember. Witness: I have a shelf in the back room. It used to have weans’ books on it, but they’re all grown up. I put me own books there now. McCann’s. Mullan’s. Bishop Daly’s. The Insight Team. Videos too. Docudramas. TV films. Jimmy McGovern. Jimmy Nesbitt. A shelf full.

While the indication here of the sheer volume of material available on Bloody Sunday intimates both the unresolved state of affairs following Bloody Sunday and the stalled grieving process, due in part to the cynical whitewash that was the Widgery Tribunal, nevertheless it also foregrounds the incipient confusion with, if not replacement of, the primary experience with the secondary. An individual may have witnessed some of the happenings of Bloody Sunday and have formed an initial narrative of the day’s events, but after such a passage of time this version may have become overlaid with those of other interested parties: the propagandist

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“certainties” and establishment counter-claims espoused from the political soapbox; anecdotal accounts and folk memory; novelistic treatments; journalistic exposés; academic treatises; filmic recreations. Indeed, Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson, in their prologue to their near-exhaustive study Those Are Real Bullets, Aren’t They? call into question the reliability and usefulness of eye-witness interviews: “The memory plays tricks; events can be erased, or embellished. The civilian eyewitnesses now remember things – sometimes quite startling things – they had not put into their original statements, and they cannot recall other events they initially described”.24 The inherent danger of the relativistic, fragmentary approach adopted by Napier, Doherty and Duggan, foregrounding both the absence of a coherent narrative and the lack of closure, is that the artistic praxis lays itself open to the accusations of being ineffectual and apolitical. Yet Jewesbury rightly dismisses any (potential) critique that such work “denies the material nature of political struggle, that it simply involves peddling the endless, self-serving deferral of all meaning, and that it represents the ultimate disempowerment of the ‘end of history’, and thus of politics”; rather, as he argues, the clear assertion “of the existence of indeterminacy is not the same as a denial of meaning”.25 The artworks do not present a wearied or apathetic stance regarding Bloody Sunday, nor do they deny the physical and psychological damage visited upon all those involved. On the contrary, each artist is alive to the socio-political necessity of revisiting Bloody Sunday and their search for “truth” is achieved whilst acknowledging that it is framed within specific discursive practices. For example, in “Scene No.7: A Bestiary”, the testimony of Duggan’s witness is couched in quasi-folkloric, biblical language: Witness: They came in armoured vehicles and got down on one knee, half-bird, with luminous feathers, half reptile, with gangerous scales. And they looked at us. “Don’t look back,” I shouted, but some did and they were felled by the glares. Counsel: Some of the language is a bit too colourful. I mean how can we ever get to the truth of it?

The Counsel struggles to understand the witness and is reluctant to accept the testimony as reliable as it is not phrased within the language of empirical fact; yet by rendering invalid the terms within which the testimony is presented, the Inquiry is severely limiting its ability to comprehend the psychological effects of that day on the Derry citizens.

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Perhaps the earliest instance of such an artistic reaction to Bloody Sunday was Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City (1973).26 Several early reviewers described it as a thinly veiled allegory of the events surrounding the anti-internment march of 30 January 1972 from Creggan to the Guildhall Square. Described as “a brutally ironic analogy to Bloody Sunday”,27 the play purportedly “confronts the implications of the British Government’s failure to apply the Rule of Law to the Executive in Northern Ireland”.28 On a purely surface reading, the text seems to uphold the anti-British sentiment perceived by the critics:29 the Judge is described in the stage-directions as being “a quick fussy man with a testy manner” (SP, 107); he is seen to ask leading questions (SP, 109, 140-1); and he is made utter the selfcondemnatory and heavily ironic phrase, “this tribunal of inquiry is in no sense a court of justice” (SP, 109). Judge: It is essentially a fact-finding exercise; and our concern and our only concern is with the period of time when these three people came together, seized possession of a civic building, and openly defied the security forces. (SP, 109)

The Judge’s opening statements are clearly inappropriate for a judicial inquiry as they pre-ordain its findings by limiting the possible conclusions: the facts “may indicate that the deceased were callous terrorists who had planned to seize the Guildhall weeks before the events of February 10th; or the facts may indicate that the misguided scheme occurred to them on that very day while they listened to revolutionary speeches” (SP, 109-10). Far more incriminating for the critics was the Judge’s summary of his conclusions since they echoed the findings of the controversial Widgery Report which exempted the British paratroopers from any blame in the Bloody Sunday affair; the “detailed findings of this tribunal” (SP, 168) were made to seem highly suspect by the play’s events. However, the more perceptive critics saw beyond the surface propagandist (nationalist) messages; in fact, as Gerald Fitzgibbon notes, “in its contemporary and local context the play was naturally interpreted as an exposure of the process by which political powers, through the law, give their particular fiction the authority of historical ‘fact..’”30 The play is now more widely accepted as a historiographic metafiction, a critical examination of how the past (as a narrative) is constituted. Juxtaposed with the events as experienced and articulated by the three marchers – Lily, Michael and Skinner – are the distortive narratives of various other “witnesses”, as well as those of the variously involved institutions (the Chruch, the media, the army, the judiciary). Therefore, as Claire - cogently argues, the audience witnesses history being altered by its interpreters even at its inception.31 By juxtaposing the scientific jargon of Dr Winbourne and Professor Cuppley (SP, 161-2) with O’Kelly’s journalistic clichés

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(SP, 126, 167), the priest’s rhetoric (SP, 124, 155), the soldier’s idiom (SP, 117) and Dodds’s formulaic expressions (SP, 110-1, 135, 163), The Freedom of the City becomes, in essence, “a schematized model of various reactions to the events.”32 There is, however, a crucial tension at the heart of the play: on the one hand, the dramatic style is naturalistic, allowing the audience to empathise with the three marchers and to accept their version of events over those on the outside; on the other hand, Friel employs a Brechtian alienation effect - particularly in the scene when the dead marchers come back to life and in the monologues delivered by Dodds - to enable the audience to put their own interpretation under scrutiny. By disallowing an empathetic engagement with the actors at such junctures, Friel creates an opportunity whereby “audiences can adopt a superior and informed attitude to their moment which otherwise would obliterate their intellectual independence through assumptions as to the naturalness and inevitability of their situation”.33 We come to see the play not as a historical text but as a play; the action, “interrupted, alienated, by such techniques as commentary, reflection, official inquiry and direct audience address”,34 forces the audience to realise, as Gerald Fitzgibbon argues, that they are “witnessing not ‘the fact’ but a skilful fiction”.35 In so doing, Friel puts his own artistic representation of the event into the dock. A similar, salutary tension lies at the heart of my final example: Paul Greengrass’ filmic representation Bloody Sunday (2002). As a drama-documentary, the text struggles with the liminal, hyphenated status of that genre. As a documentary, the film presents four interleaved narratives, incorporating (as in Friel’s text) different ways in which the same event is discursively framed: the narratives of Gerard Donaghy, Soldier 027, Brigadier Patrick MacLellan and Ivan Cooper, MP. The filmic style presents a realistic depiction of the events surrounding Bloody Sunday (the preparations for the march; the press conferences; the march itself and its aftermath): the occasional lack of focus, the unsteady camera, the movement between different groups - the conversations are ‘overheard’ as we often join the conversations mid-flow - and the rapid fades, all heighten the verisimilitude, suggesting that the camera is on the scene, recording the events for posterity. Yet the viewer is acutely aware that this is a drama as the events are incorporated within a neat book-ended structure, foregrounding the manner in which they have been shaped and framed by Greengrass: the film begins and ends with a panoramic shot of Derry, and with two different press conferences, each time comparing the nationalist position with that of the British establishment; the soundtrack contrasts the use of the bodhrán with the military drum; and the events are framed at the beginning and at the conclusion by the romantic sub-plot, namely the relationship between Donaghy and his Protestant girlfriend (hence the film too neatly counterpoints the end of the Civil Rights movement with the end of

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the relationship). Indeed, reviewing the film for the Observer, Kathryn Flett found herself resisting the film’s own artfulness: “throughout Bloody Sunday I wrestled with the sense of having been very skillfully manipulated. Even if this was as close to the truth of the events as we shall ever see in the context of a drama (and one strongly suspects that it is), these grainy faux-news images also have the power to superimpose themselves over reality to create a powerful cinematic version of False Memory Syndrome”.36 As a documentary, the filmic representation seems authoritative in its meticulous staging of the events (based in part on actual footage shot on the day); as a drama, the text is inherently provisional and selective, and the camera’s gaze is presented as partial and limited (we do not witness the actual shootings). This tension can be seen in Greengrass’ own verdict on the film: “We had told the truth – or at least the truth as this group of individuals saw it”.37 The visual and literary texts analysed in this chapter demonstrate a keen awareness of their own limitations and of how they ideologically frame the events of Bloody Sunday. The “truth” propounded in each case is partial and subjective with each text questioning the very possibility of representing the “modernist event”. When he comes to write his final report, Lord Saville would do well to heed the lessons learned by the likes of Napier, Doherty, Duggan, Friel and Greengrass. A shared narrative is possible, but it must be alive to the subjective nature of perception and to the ways in which different discourses change the nature of the event itself. 1

Trisha Ziff, “The Outsider”, Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday 1972, ed. Ziff (Michigan: Smart Art Press, 1997), 21. 2 Prime Minister’s statement in the House of Commons (29 January 1998) recorded on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry website: http://www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org.uk 3 http://library.thinkquest.org/18666/newinquiry/opening/openingstate.htm 4 Angelique Chrisfaris, “Gaps, Contradiction and the Pain of Truth”, Guardian 24 November 2004. 5 Christopher Clarke’s closing address, 22 November 2004, recorded on the Bloody Sunday Inquiry website. 6 Staff and agencies, “Questions Remain, Says Bloody Sunday Lawyer”, Guardian 22 November 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/bloodysunday/article/0,2763,1357094,00.html 7 Luke Gibbons, “History without the Talking Cure: Bloody Sunday as ‘Modern Event’”, Hidden Truths, ed. Ziff, 103. 8 Hayden White, “The Modernist Event”, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 22. 9 White, 22-3. 10 Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), 3. 11 Tom McEvilley, “Philip Napier, Gauge”, exhibition catalogue, (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1998), 16. 12 Liam Kelly, “Talking to the Streets”, Zivot Umjetnosti 70.37 (2003), 68.

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McEvilley, 15. Willie Doherty, interview by Joan Rothfuss, No Place (like Home), ed. Richard Flood (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997), 42. 15 Paul O’Brien, “Willie Doherty: Language, Imagery and the Real”, Circa 104 (2003), 53. 16 Roland Barthes, Image Music Tex, trans Stephen Heath, (London: Fontana, 1977), 40. 17 Willie Doherty, “Like Home”, interview by Joan Rothfuss, No Place (Like Home), Zarina Bhimji et al., (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997), 47. 18 Willie Doherty, Same Old Story, (London: Matt’s Gallery, 1993), 16. 19 Willie Doherty, “‘Perhaps’ Is Practically a Lie”, interview with Willie Doherty and Dave Duggan by Declan Sheehan, Circa 99 (Spring, 2002), 18. 20 Dave Duggan, interview by Sheehan, 18. 21 Daniel Jewesbury, “Walter’s Garage [A Set of Tools]”, How It Was (Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery, 2001), part 2, section VI. 22 Dave Duggan, Scenes from an Inquiry: A Theatrical Evocation of the Saville Inquiry (Sole Purpose Productions, 2002). 23 Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 29-30. 24 Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson, Those Are Real Bullets, Aren’t They?: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 30 January 1972 (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 6. 25 Jewesbury, part 1, section VII. 26 Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City, Selected Plays (London: Faber, 1984). Cited hereafter in text as SP. 27 Brian McAvera, “Brian Friel: Attuned to Catholic Experience”, Fortnight 215 (March, 1985): 20. See also Mary Manning, “Review of Freedom of the City”, Hibernia 2 March 1973: 28. 28 Ulick O’Connor, Brian Friel: Crisis and Commitment, the Writer and Northern Ireland (Dublin: ELO Press, 1989), 10. 29 See O’Connor, 14. 30 Gerald Fitzgibbon, “Garnering the Facts: Unreliable Narrators in Some Plays of Brian Friel”, Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature, eds. Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), 58. 31 See Claire Gleitman, “Negotiating History, Negotiating Myth: Friel among His Contemporaries”, Brian Friel: A Casebook, ed. William Kerwin (New York: Garland Press, 1997), 227-41. 32 George O’Brien, Brian Friel (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1989), 79. 33 David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 145. 34 Winkler, 27-8. 35 Fitzgibbon, 61. 36 Kathryn Flett, “The Art of Darkness”, Observer 27 January 2002, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,639962,00.html 37 Paul Greengrass, “Preface”, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday by Don Mullan (Dublin: Merlin, 2002), xx. 14

CHAPTER SIX ‘OBSOLETE AND TOMB-LED AS THE BOYNE’: THE REPRESENTATION OF PLACE IN NORTHERN IRISH LITERATURE AND VISUAL ART In a lecture delivered in the Ulster Museum in 1977, Seamus Heaney stated that “the landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities”; rather than remaining beyond either human perception or cognition, the poet affirms that “our imaginations assent to the stimulus of the names, our sense of place is enhanced, our sense of ourselves as inhabitants not just of a geographical country but of a country of the mind is cemented”.1 In poems such as “Anahorish” and “Broagh”, Heaney asserts his ability to read the ‘earth writing’. In the latter poem, he sees that: the black O in Broagh its low tattoo among the windy boortrees and rhubarb-blades ended almost suddenly, like that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage.2

The equation here between land and language grounds the poet, securing an inclusive, cross-community and non-sectarian sense of identity for those living in the area. (The corollary of this, of course, is that the placename acts as shibboleth, denying access to those who cannot pronounce the final “gh”.) In “Anahorish”, the poet dwells on the sound of the placename: Anahorish, soft gradient of consonant, vowel-meadow, after-image of lamps swung through the yards on winter evenings.3

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What he discerns is a Gaelic undermusic, securing for him an imagined Irish, precolonial, preoccupation of territory. The writer is an observer and, to a certain extent, composes as if he were passively allowing his sense of place to be formed by the landscape. However, it is the poet who has actively framed this moral landscape,4 and his imagination has not “given assent” to anything; informed by an ethnic nationalism that is discernibly “racy o’ the soil”, he constructs a meaning for this topography, stopping the historical clock prior to the ‘English’ invasion. What Heaney’s poetic text fails to acknowledge is the contrived ‘nature’ of this scene. This approach to place can be contrasted with that of the Northern Irish artist Mick O’Kelly, whose 1987 diptych Allegories of Geography, consisting of two black and white photo-texts of rural landscapes shrouded in mist, frustrates the penetrative gaze of the observer and self-reflexively calls attention to the discursive practices involved when locution intersects with location. Underneath each photograph O’Kelly places a single word (“Soil”/“Property”), and each is flanked by two groups of three words, all referring to ways of describing or representing place.5 Unlike Heaney’s poem, the phototexts do not deny the impress of human agency upon the landscape; rather, they foreground the idea that the semantics of place depend upon administrative, political and historical considerations, each of which infers different structures of power. Indeed, geographers such as Allen Pred, Derek Gregory and David Harvey6 have long argued that ‘place’ cannot be discussed as an isolated, asocial entity. Noting the centrality of ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘landscape’ to the geographical lexicon and imagination, Brian Jarvis in Postmodern Cartographies rightly dismisses the belief that each constitutes a static object instead of “an ongoing process, a spatial praxis”. “Spaces are,” he argues, “not simply the passive backdrop to significant sociohistorical action, rather they are a vital product and determinant of that action”.7 Too often in Irish Studies, such an insight has been supplanted by the Romantic conception of landscape; in recent years, however, this has not been the case. In his catalogue essay regarding the representation of landscape in the epoch-defining exhibition A New Tradition, John Hutchinson stated bluntly that “the fixed boundaries between man and his environment have been eroded”.8 In this article, I want to argue that for the younger Northern Irish poets and visual artists (such as O’Kelly) whose formative years have coincided with the Troubles, the landscape refuses to yield a seemingly unmediated significance. The artists and writers maintain a belief in a constructivist approach to place rather than one which yields a sense of authentic, organic, rootedness. Identity is contingent and not a given.

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The truth of Hutchinson’s critical commentary is exemplified by the early phototexts of the Derry-born artist Willie Doherty. His diptych of black and white photographs entitled Stone upon Stone (1986), for example, presents two views of the River Foyle, Derry, one from the east bank, the other from the west bank. On the former is inscribed the words “This We Will Maintain” in royal blue lettering; on the latter is written the Republican slogan “Tiocfaidh Ár Lá” in nationalist green. Juxtaposing image and text, the artist counters the notion that the beautifully shot landscape is either “natural” or “authentic”; both sites are areas of contestation, with the grim affirmation from the Loyalist side that they shall maintain their power base on the east bank being answered by an equally assured threat from the other side that they will have their day. What is actually photographed are some very apolitical rocks, soil, reeds and water; yet the title Stone by Stone inscribed across both photographs initiates a counter-reading, suggesting that territory can be (temporarily) possessed through the construction of an impressive heritage. Although, as many critics have pointed out, the two phototexts are always placed in a corridor so that they are opposite each other,9 the author’s stated intention belies the (by now) critical commonplace that the viewer cannot see both sides at the same time. Referring to his spatial arrangement, Doherty pointedly remarks that it does “not so much force the viewer to take a position but more a case of presenting the viewer with a number of options, so it was about making a choice where I always felt in fact there wasn’t a choice but the work proposed that it was possible to look at something from two positions simultaneously”.10 The viewer’s gaze may equally ratify the territorial claims of both factions, yet s/he must also acknowledge that the way in which place is constructed (by conflicting historical narratives) undermines the supposed authenticity of their claims. More importantly, as Jean Fisher has pointed out, the work also suggests that “both sides are trapped in the same symbolic structure to their mutual detriment”.11 In his multi-media installation True Nature (The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 7-18 April 1999),12 Doherty continues his critique of how ideologies of place are ideologically constructed. Interspersed throughout the darkened gallery space are 10-foot screens, positioned at different angles. From five simultaneous front-and-back video projections, images of what can only be described as “picturesque” depictions of landscape are beamed onto the screens. As a counterpoint to these representations of an unchanging, static landscape, he juxtaposes them with images of urban streets and the backyards of suburbia. At the same time, multiple soundtracks are fed through speakers, providing the listener with fragments from interviews conducted with Irish-Americans. The viewer/listener is not simply offered competing versions of Irishness; s/he begins to understand how identity is formed and how it functions in different contexts:

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nostalgic reminiscence; unconscious denial of modernity; utopic construction of an unchanging and unchanged place from a frustrated sense of postmodernity and global capitalism; embattled sectarianism; the inherent pull of elsewhere. Place is here seen in terms of what Doreen Massey calls “networks of social relations”; the relationship between a person and place is no longer considered “authentic”; place is “a particular, unique, point of intersection” of “social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus”.13 As a consequence of the Northern Irish artists’ recognition that romantic conventions have in the past been mobilized around a quasi-Heideggarian sense of ‘place’ to construct a rooted, nationalist discourse, there has been a gradual shift away from the rural landscape towards the city as the favoured locus of artistic representation. As Liam Kelly argues in The City as Art, what interests the artist is “the power of its dynamic and psychic apparatus — its layered values, social and political meanings and encodings”.14 This emphasis on “layered values” is crucial; as in Doherty’s Stone upon Stone, emphasis is placed on process and change, on competing political ideologies and the ways by which place is used to embody them. Indeed, Belfast artists like Michael Minnis portray the resultant dislocations caused by the ideologically-inspired violence. In “Street Index” he uses an ordnance survey map and a street directory to reconstruct an area destroyed during the ongoing Troubles. In an act of remembrance, he paints the area on reflective aluminium and inscribes the names of the former occupants across it. The viewer’s image intertwines with the work, forcing him to reflect upon the city in flux and on the place-dependent ideologies that are destroying it. A similar development has occurred in literature. Due in part to what Aaron Kelly terms “the polysemous fabric of urban space”, the city acts as “an alternative narrative, or producer and repository of transgressive narratives and histories, to the nation and its fugitive pastoralism”.15 In The Star Factory, a textual collage of narrative forms (part-memoir, part-historiographical metafiction, partshaggy-dog story), Ciaran Carson presents Belfast as a narrative which is an inverse of pastoral conservatism. Playing on the word “story”, he depicts the city as a narrative of itself; at once disclosing and cryptic, the tale delays (and perhaps even denies) closure: “Had their basic modules been alphabet bricks, I could have seen them building lapidary sentences and paragraphs, as the storeyed houses became emboldened by their hyphenated, skyward narrative, and entered the ongoing, fractious epic that is Belfast”.16 Here, Belfast is represented as neither a relic nor a museum piece; instead, market-led urban development is shown to coexist with the emblems of tribalism. This accords well with the actual changing architectural pattern of the city and with the other signs of economic expansion. William Neill, describing how “new consumerist icons [are] trying to blot out the

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array of divisive images painted on the gable walls of housing estates”, argues persuasively that “[a] post-modern, consumerist kaleidoscope of images floats uncomfortably on top of the brutalism of terrorist-proof buildings and the symbolism of the past. It is a condition of visual schizophrenia”.17 Writers like Carson textualise the landscape and its features, focusing attention both on their role as plot device and as a symbol of history in flux. In “Queen’s Gambit” we are led down “a valley of broken alphabet”; the streets “are a bad photostat grey”, and Republican slogans (“The Provos Are Fighting For You. Remember It. Brits Out”) co-exist with commercial advertisements (“Wilkinson Sword razor blades”).18 In his earlier poem “Night Patrol,” Carson explicitly clashes old with new, employing a diachronic rather than a synchronic gaze: 19 But the whole Victorian creamy façade has been tossed off To show the inner-city tubing: cables, sewers, a snarl of Portakabins, Soft-porn shops and carry-outs.20

It may be true, as Colin Graham argues in his critical introduction to John Davies’s photographic project entitled Metropoli, that when cities change “they create and multiply nostalgias”;21 however, Carson’s work does not wallow in nostalgia and, like Davies’s black-and-white photographs of tarpaulined buildings sited next to older structures, it initiates a diachronic gaze, presenting the city as a palimpsest. Northern Irish writers and artists are doing more than simply undermining the stable narratives of ‘place’; their work functions as intense and recondite explorations of the power relations that inhere within these narratives. It has been comprehensively documented how Belfast’s political divisions and territorial disputes have had a profound effect on urban planning. In Formations of Violence, a comprehensive study of the effects of conflict upon the body in Northern Ireland, Allan Feldman contends that urban development in Belfast has prompted a behaviour pattern known as cognitive mapping: “The proliferation of interfaces, the barricading, and the influx of refugee populations organized the ethnically homogeneous areas into sanctuary spaces, or at least generated idealized sanctuary constructs that functioned as mental maps for local people”.22 The erection of steel gates, army checkpoints and peace lines lead one to contemplate, with David Brett, the ways in which “the Housing Executive may have turned the sociologist’s concept of ‘defensible space’ into the policing convenience of ‘containable space’”.23 The priority of security considerations has meant that in certain Catholic housing projects the footpaths have had to be laid with foundations and width sufficient to bear army personnel carriers; similarly, houses constructed near police stations have no windows directly facing them. Hence, the buildings themselves, Belfast’s architecture, exerts a controlling influence over the populace.

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One artist who explicitly engages with such psychological effects is Padraig McCann. Cryptbrick (1993) is a twenty-foot high red brick tower with two filing cabinet drawers embedded in the installation near the top. The particular architecture — a defensive structure24 — displays not only the need for protection (indicated by the innumerable bullet-holes perforating its surface), but also incarnates both the inviolable authority of those on the inside as well as its sheer inaccessibility to those on the outside. The relationship between the two is symbiotic: protection for government officials and secrecy of information (suggested by the placement of the drawers) are both necessary due to internecine civil strife; yet the remoteness of power breeds a sense of alienation which is itself a catalyst for violence. The work’s title carries the dual connotation of crypt and cryptic: self-entombment, it suggests, can result from a deliberate policy of removing power from the populace. That the work has specific relevance to Belfast (centre of Northern Irish bureaucracy) is suggested by the use of brick. "Belfast is built on sleech," Ciaran Carson reminds us, "and is built of sleech, metamorphosed into brick, the city consuming its source as the brickfields themselves were built upon" (Belfast Confetti, 72). The cyclicality described by McCann is, therefore, obliquely embodied by the material itself. Often incorporated within contemporary Northern Irish art is both a reflection of and a reaction to what Feldman terms a “scopic regime,” that is, the specific techniques and agendas of political visualization.25 Texts register the ways by which both the paramilitaries and State forces utilize forms of optical surveillance to establish privileged vantage-points and put people in their place. As Feldman argues, visual appropriation is therefore “a metonym for dominance over others: power lies in the totalizing, engorged gaze over the politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as exposure to this penetration” (“Violence” 29). Belfast becomes a panopticon. Witness, for example, the “blank watchtowers” of Tom Paulin’s “Surveillances,” the “vision blocks of APCs” and "the 2B298 surveillance radar” of Carson’s “Intelligence,” and the UDR patrol and check-point of Muldoon’s “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”.26 Willie Doherty’s cibachrome print Critical Distance (1997), taken from an Army lookout post in Derry, and his thirty minute real-time video surveillance installation Black Spot (Angeles Gallery, 1997), recorded from the same position, both give the exhibition visitor access to and experience of the security forces’ hidden, invasive and curiously voyeuristic gaze. Perhaps a more famous example is his 1993 video installation The Only Good One Is a Dead One (1993) consisting of two thirty minute videos, with the images projected at right angles to each other: the first video is shot from inside a

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moving car travelling along a dark country road; the other is an urban scene recorded from inside a parked car, also at night. Two simultaneous audio tracks play continuously: one relays the sound of a car as it drives; the other is a monologue delivered by a young man describing both his own fear of assassination and his intent to ambush someone else. The work engenders the same frightful uneasiness as Victor Sloan’s Moving Windows series of photographs (1985), each of which are taken from inside a moving car. The viewer is positioned within the vehicle and we find ourselves almost preternaturally alert since our gaze in some of the photographs is directed simultaneously through the front and side windows as well as at the side-mirror. Doherty’s installation is more complex, however, since it places us as victim and assassin at one and the same time, and calls attention to the cinematic discourses which inform not only the presentation of Doherty’s work but also the way by which we habitually experience the Troubles (via the media): “As my assassin jumps out in front of me everything starts to happen in slow motion, I can see him raise his gun and I can’t do a thing. I see the same scene shot from different angles”.27 In a theoretically astute assessment of Doherty’s work, Jean Fisher concludes that, for Doherty, "‘Place’ is not simply a named topographical entity”; rather, “[i]t is a position from which [one] see[s] and [is] seen: a relation that is both specular and spatial, and which produces an image of [oneself] through the Other of [one’s] gaze”.28 Doherty’s work maps the relations between self and Other, demonstrating how one’s sense of place and identity is dependent on social, political, psychical and historical narratives, none of which are necessarily fixed or pre-determined. While the heightened threat of surveillance regulates to a certain extent the citizen’s behaviour and forces him to know his place intimately, it is but a hidden manifestation of a more general principle regarding the possession and anxious maintenance of territory in Northern Ireland, of which murals, graffiti and parades are the more visible signs. To reinforce territorial boundaries, alternative networks of signs have emerged, subverting the official system of street names, parking lines, etc., and the artists and writers register this in their work. For example, in one of Paul Graham’s photographs — No. 4, Shankill Road (1985) — we can see how the date ‘1690’, painted in orange, is juxtaposed with a traffic ramp. While the ramp has been installed by the authorities to impede paramilitary operations in the area, the date signifies faith in an altogether different protector, namely the spirit of seventeenth-century Protestant resilience. Such graffiti is not of the same order as the ordinary ‘tag’: although one could argue that they are both “the marginalia of corporate tribalism,” Belfast graffiti is not simply “a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph”.29 As the art critic Declan McGonagle notes, graffiti, painted kerbstones, bunting and large-scale murals “are markers not only in the material, territorial sense but also of political possession

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and assertion. The accumulative effect of these images, their power, is to force a viewer to recognize that nothing is innocent, not even colours. Everything is emblematic”.30 For instance, Ciaran Carson, describing one piece of graffiti, writes: “15.vi.87. NY underground-style mural has just appeared on a wall at the back of Gallaher’s on N. Queen St. Heavy smell of tobacco, snuff. The GPO image of Cuchullain features”.31 Revising this for his prose essay “Schoolboys and Idlers of Pompeii”, he provides an astute commentary on graffiti’s function: the writing is, he says, a “coded, articulated, multi-coloured spray-gunned alphabet” (Belfast Confetti, 52). While “alphabet” indicates a structured language, “coded” refers to its transgressive nature, intelligible to those in the know. The walls become a battleground for competing slogans, answering the taunts written elsewhere. As Liam Kelly states, “In a city like Belfast, words are painted on walls only to be dispossessed and answered on other walls, in other words. Words interrogate the wall. They insinuate themselves into the wall structure like shades”.32 During the Unionist marching season, these shades break cover and walk the streets, marking territory in a pre-ordained fashion. The majority of the marches are, of course, positive expressions of Orangeism, a celebration of one aspect of Protestant culture; yet despite the benign picture that Ruth Dudley Edwards paints in her willfully blind account of the Loyal Institutions, The Faithful Tribe,33 some of the more contentious parades self-consciously conflate marching routes with ancestral roots, mobilizing what Neil Jarman terms “social memories.” Remembrance here is an active process and is not to be confused with written historical narrative; memories are “a medium for understanding the past, [they] are a part of the wider cultural practices that are continually being adapted and rephrased to meet the needs of the present.”34 In times of political crisis in Northern Ireland, the march functions as a visible reassurance to the Protestant community. Aidan Dunne explains it thus: “The periodic re-enactment of a ritualized fear, or of the ritualized banishment of a notional fear, is a defence against an unknowable, unpredictable and uncontrollable future”.35 Marching through what is known as a “Catholic area” — itself an overtly political (and inaccurate) turn-of-phrase designed to assert control over place — the procession, in full regalia, with banners, kick-the-pope bands and paramilitary emblems, belligerently declares ‘This we will maintain.’ Contemporary poets tend to emphasize both the ineluctable nature of the parades, as well as the grim implacability of the marchers, walking into history in the shadow of their ancestors. Tom Paulin’s “Drumcree Four” presents an Orangeman guldering through a megaphone, dressed in“that bible uniform / pressed by what his father stuck / to”;36 “The Musicians’ Union” by Adrian Rice depicts the bandsmen tattooed “With slogans and symbols for today and tomorrow

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/ From the tattoo-template of their forefathers’ skin”;37 and Seamus Heaney’s “The Marching Season” has the speaker unable to stave off impending conflict because everything has been “scripted from the start”.38 A critique of the sense of place propounded by the marchers is also offered in Victor Sloan’s series of photographs of the Orange parades in Derry entitled Walls. The artist’s personal engagement is evident from his working methods. Sloan scratches the 35-mm negatives with a pin or a razor-blade and paints onto them with black ink. He then works directly on the surface of the prints with toners, bleach and paint. In this way, he avoids a strictly mimetic representation of the marches; instead, his deliberate alterations convey a range of emotions, from frustration and anger, to bewilderment and resignation. Magazine Gate, Derry is a snapshot of an Orange Order parade passing through Magazine Gate; Sloan has scratched over the banners and has defaced most of the marchers, circling the road-sign “No Entry”. In Ferryquay Gate, Derry, he has scratched a portcullis over the main entryway, as if preventing the marchers from walking through the city. Even more topical is a recent photograph from his Portadown (2000) series, simply entitled Road, Drumcree, Portadown. In itself, it registers the material effects of conflict on the road (a section of which is photographed from just above its surface); however, the physical scars are emblematic of the continuing psycho-social wounds caused by political disputes over the parade which occurs on the Sunday prior to July 12, and runs from Portadown town centre via Cocrain Way to Drumcree church and then back into the town centre via the Garvaghy Road. Issues such as rights-of-way, traditional marching routes, segregation of the community, and competing political ideologies concerning the governance of territory, are all central to the competing discourses of ‘place’ which are registered obliquely by artists like Sloan. .

The Ulsterman carries the map of this religious geography in his mind almost from birth. He knows which villages, which roads and streets, are Catholic, or Protestant, or ‘mixed’. It not only tells him where he can, or cannot, wave an Irish tricolour or wear his Orange sash, but imposes on him a complex behaviour pattern and a special way of looking at political problems.39

If marching routes, graffiti and murals are all ways of knowing one’s place, then perhaps the most influential is the cartographic map, whether cognitive or textual. Deploying images of maps in their work, visual artists confront the apparent determinism surrounding urban experience in Northern Ireland. Jack Packenham’s Your Move,40 for example, depicts a paramilitary Council in session, with five figures seated around a table looking at what appears to be a cross between a street map and a board game. The black crosses inscribed on different houses represent legitimate or possible targets, while the shamrock emblem represents a safe-house. (If the paramilitaries are Loyalist the shamrock could

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indicate the intended target.) Although there is an element of chance involved (depending on the roll of a die), those marked for execution are doomed. Packenham’s painting suggests that mapping streets according to religious or political affiliation allows a mentality to develop which treats lives like game counters. Hinting that this psychology is restrictive and self-defeating, Packenham does not allow the figures (who have all been injured by conflict) to see the outside world: the room’s only window is bricked up. Peter Neill’s Rosebud41 is a photowork employing similar iconography, namely a Monopoly• game board upon which (toy) knives, guns and bombs are arranged. Neill’s Rosebud is no Wellesian icon of childhood happiness; rather, the streets lined with implements of war represent targets of a fictional IRA terrorist campaign on the "mainland" — the English version of Monopoly• is used. Although equally complex in his use of maps, Chris Wilson’s critique of Belfast’s sectarian geography is not as unremittingly bleak. This is not the case, however, with Untitled (1985), an early work whose simplistic spatial arrangement provides a stark moral. Describing this work, Angela Kingston states that “window-less houses and a severe looking church were drawn onto sections cut from street maps of Belfast, dramatizing the profound influence that experiences of family and religion have on feelings of territory and identity”.42 The clear division between two groups of houses (arranged like pews in a church) refer implicitly to the divided communities in Belfast, and the overarching dominance of the church gives undue importance to religion as a source of conflict. In an interview with Deirdre O’Connell, Wilson refutes the imputation of crude political commentary: “It was more a perspectival thing where the density at the centre of the map would become like an horizon line, the wider parts of the map would be closer to you. It was a much more formal thing than saying, well, I want to have the central aisle like the dividing line between the Falls and the Shankill. It’s not that literal”.43 Yet formal arrangement is less oblique and complex in comparison to his later work in which the integral image of the map “acts as an intrusive questioning device, plotting moral and territorial shifts”.44 In October Light (1986), for instance, uses light and shade to greater effect, creating an ambivalence regarding sectarian geography. The artist again uses a street map, but this time it covers the interior of a church. Beams of light streaming through the window cast two different shapes on the street map: a religious cross and shadows resembling bars on a prison window. The uncertainty surrounding religion’s influence on Belfast — nurturing or imprisoning? — continues in From The Growth of the Soil (1989), a mixed media composition depicting the growth of trees inside a deserted church: . . . this time there is sustenance, if only because the roots have forced themselves below the floorboards. Leaves have fallen from the trees and more have blown in

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from outside: a humus is beginning to form and perhaps the trees will break through the church roof one day. . . . The church is not, however, so casually expendable: its arched structures are like the branches of the trees, and made from the same fabric, after all.45

The spreading branches blend in with the street maps, illuminated by the light coming through the church windows. The picture presents a tension between an identity which is fixed (sectarian geography, secure within the confines of the church), and one which is open to change. In spite of the persistence of determinism as a thematic concern, it has not gone unchallenged by Northern Irish poets. Map-making is not employed for mimesis or as a guarantor of fixity; rather, what is exposed are the power relations which inhere within cartographic discourse and its powerlessness in the face of flux. Employing cartographic discourse in their work allows the artists and writers to undermine the seeming determinism of sectarian cognitive mapping. They realize (perhaps intuitively) what cultural geographers have increasingly come to accept: firstly, that a map is not an objective text, mimetically representing a territory; secondly, a map constructs the world rather than simply reproduces it the knowledge which it embodies is socially constructed;46 thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, a map can be redrawn in any number of ways and can symbolize change rather than fixity.47 In Gerald Dawe’s “Refugees”, for example, the speaker pointedly demonstrates the disjunction between real time and cartographic inscription: The map you drew on a napkin was Old Europe — the rough edges, borders; the spaces, countries. Up above, the hotel purred with delight. Happy tourists rolled home to their breezy bedrooms. The sea lapped over black volcanic shores and all about us the hills stood vigilant.48

The dialectic set up between the flux of modernity (“the hotel purred with delight,” “Happy tourists rolled home”) and the constancy of nature (“the hills stood vigilant”) is subsequently disrupted: “black volcanic shores” intimate future volatility. Maps, therefore, cannot hope to represent in perpetuity even this apparently unchanging topography. Underlining the temporal flux which hampers cartography’s mimetic procedures, the poem also indicates, in a diametrically opposed manner to A.T.Q. Stewart, the futility of using cartography to explain the historical roots of current conflict — “You see, the Slavs were forever struggling / against the Central Powers”. The arguments which the interlocutor puts forward, even if true, are beside the point: his vision of determinism does nothing to help the

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“wasted army” that call “for air and food and shelter.” Similarly, Kerry Hardie’s “We Change the Map” considers the contingency of mapmaking: This new map, unrolled, smoothed, seems innocent as the one we have discarded, impersonal as the clocks in rows along the upper border, showing time-zones. The colours are pale and clear, the contours crisp, decisive, keeping order. The new names, lettered firmly, lie quite still within the boundaries that the wars spill over. It is the times. 49

The map at first seems objective; it is “innocent” and “impersonal”. It presents a coherent and lasting overview of a territory: the contours keep order; the letters are firm and “lie quite still”. But the repetition of the verb “to lie” later in the poem intimates that this impression is incorrect; the map is unable to withstand “the times”. In a letter dated 14th July 2000, she says that: “I wrote ‘We Change the Map’ during the break-up of the Balkans, when each day seemed to bring some new change to countries and borders that had appeared stable for no other reason than that they had been as they were for as long as I could remember. It became literally necessary to buy a new world-map to replace the one we had been using”. The poet rejects the distanced, god-like and seemingly objective vantage point for one which is provisional yet intimately connected to a locality (“The mole’s view”). I want to conclude with an example of a poet resisting the State’s gaze and redrawing the map of Ireland in her work. In “The Gregory Quarter Acre Clause”, an as yet unpublished poem written for and sent to the cultural geographer, Kevin Whelan,50 Medbh McGuckian conflates different time-frames to demonstrate how the British forces have persistently attempted to impose control over the territory of Ireland: The fourteen-pointed star bells out in the air stretching across my mouth. It is a resonantly English overking that has almost kissed away my necked bowl.

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Chained to me like a spoon, my decayed thatch, it is the island behind my island . . . .

In the opening stanzas, the security force’s helicopter surveying territory becomes for the speaker an unwelcome fixed point; registering the bodily effects of the overly familiar scopic regime (“stretching across my mouth”), she then becomes a “necked bowl”, an artifact to be gazed upon. This image is crucial as it is taken from Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, edited by Kevin Whelan, F.H. A Alen and Matthew Stout,51 a text which argues from the outset that landscape is social and cultural rather than ‘natural’. McGuckian has also taken the title from an essay by Whelan which is included in the Atlas. The “Gregory Quarter Acre Clause” was, so Whelan argues, a clearance charter which in part established “a clean Irish slate on which the new English values could be legibly inscribed, deleting the chaotic scrawl which the Irish had scribbled all over their dishevelled landscape” (Atlas 90). This is the colonial view which ignores, as Bill Ashcroft argues, “the place, the environment, as simply the empty stage on which the theatre of history is enacted.” By substantially citing phrases from Whelan’s essay, she employs his thesis that the “island behind my island” (Atlas 67) has sought to mould an English sense of place through surveillance and economic measures. Yet she suggests that this is “Obsolete and tomb-led as the Boyne” (cited from Atlas 36). Towards the end of the poem, McGuckian cites a revealing geographical term from the Atlas: “cropmarks” (50). Here, she views the landscape as a palimpsest in which the boundaries and land settlement patterns of the past are exposed. The palimpsest, as Ashcroft states in Post-colonial Transformation, “defines a process by which place may be re-appropriated from the tropes of boundary, map and seeing itself”.52 By looking at the evolution of settlement patterns, McGuckian’s own palimpsestic rewriting of the Atlas (the original text can be seen through the poet’s text) shows how the view of place held by the Orange Order and the British (regarding borders and marching routes) are each ephemeral, culturally defined narratives. The map, as all of the younger writers and artists discussed above would agree, can be redrawn; landscape is cultural and not, as Heaney has it, “sacramental”. 1

Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), 132. Heaney, “Broagh”, Wintering Out (London: Faber, 1972), 27. 3 Heaney, “Anahorish”, Wintering Out, 16. 4 See also Heaney’s description of this landscape in Preoccupations, 36. 5 “Soil” (Field, Territory, Displacement; Domain, Region, Horizon); “Property” (Divide, Frontier, Boundary; Watershed, Landscape, Map). 6 See Derek Gregory, Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity”, Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Culture, eds. 2

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Jon Bird et al (London: Routledge, 1993), 3-29, and Allan Pred, “Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74.2 (1984): 279-97. 7 Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 6-7. 8 John Hutchinson, “The Nature of Landscape,” A New Tradition: Irish Art of the Eighties (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1990), 37. See also Brian Graham, “The Imagining of Place: Representation and Identity in Contemporary Ireland”, In Search of Ireland, ed. Graham (London: Routledge, 1997), 192-212. 9 See Ian Hunt, “Familiar and Unknowable: Works by Willie Doherty”, Willie Doherty: Somewhere Else (London: Tate Gallery, 1998), 44. 10 Willie Doherty, interview by Tim Maul, http://www.jca-online.com/doherty.html 11 Jean Fisher, “Seeing Beyond the Pale: The Photographic Works of Willie Doherty”, Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1990), n.p. 12 See http://www.artpapers.org/23_4/chicago.htm 13 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 154. 14 Liam Kelly, “Editorial Notes”, The City as Art: Interrogating the Polis, ed. Kelly (Belfast: A.I.C.A., 1994), 2. 15 Aaron Kelly, “‘New Languages Would Have to Be Invented’: Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man”, Cartography: The City (November, 2000): 6. 16 Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997), 126. 17 William Neill, “Imaging Belfast”, Circa 63 (Spring, 1993): 34, 35. 18 Carson, “Queen’s Gambit”, Belfast Confetti (Meath: Gallery Press, 1989), 33-40. 19 See Peter Barry, Contemporary British Poetry and the City (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 225. 20 Carson, “Night Patrol”, The Irish for No (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987), 34. 21 Colin Graham, “Metropoli”, Source 26 (Spring, 2001): 8. 22 Allan Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 35. 23 David Brett, “Historicism and Modernity: New Building in Belfast”, Circa 56 (MarchApril, 1991), 32. 24 See Liam Kelly Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland (Kinsale: Gandon, 1996), 69-71. 25 Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror”, Public Culture 10.1 (1997), 30. 26 See Tom Paulin, “Surveillances”, The Strange Museum (London: Faber, 1980), p.6; Ciaran Carson, “Intelligence”, Belfast Confetti 78; Paul Muldoon, “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants”, Poems 1968-1998 (London: Faber, 2001), 132. 27 Doherty, Willie Doherty (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1993), n.p. 28 Fisher, n.p. 29 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta, 1997), 1. 30 Declan McGonagle, “Troubled Land”, Troubled Land: The Social Landscape of Northern Ireland (London, Grey Editions, 1987), n.p. 31 Carson, Box 6, Folder 2, Notebook 8, Special Collections, The Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

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Liam Kelly, Thinking Long 59. Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Faithful Tribe (London: Harper Collins, 1999). 34 Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 4-5. 35 Aidan Dunne, “A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan’s Photographic Work,” Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980-2000 (Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery and Orchard Gallery, 2001), 76. 36 Paulin, “Drumcree Four”, The Wind Dog (London: Faber, 1999), 73. 37 Adrian Rice, “The Musicians’ Union”, The Mason’s Tongue (Newry: Abbey Press, 1999), 18. 38 Heaney, “The Marching Season”, Electric Light (London: Faber, 2001), 54. 39 A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: The Roots of Conflict in Ulster 1977 (London: Gregg Revivals, 1989), 181. 40 See Jack Packenham in Jack Packenham, Works 1975-1989 (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1990), 10. 41 See McAvera, Art, Politics and Ireland (Dublin: Open Air, 1990), 98. 42 Angela Kingston, Chris Wilson: From the Growth of the Soil (Belfast: Arts Council Gallery, 1989), n.p. 43 Chris Wilson, interview by Deirdre O’Connell, Two Generation of Northern Irish Sculptors: A Series of Interviews (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1985), 5. 44 Liam Kelly, Thinking Long, 33. 45 Kingston, n.p. 46 See Denis Cosgrove, “Introduction”, Mappings, ed. Cosgrove (London: Reaktion, 1999), 18. 47 Indeed, the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition use the street map of the area to show how the demographics have changed over the years and use this to counter the Orange Order’s “sense of place”. See http://www.garvaghyroad.org/ 48 Gerald Dawe, “Refugees”, Heart of Hearts (Meath: Gallery Press, 1995), 33. 49 Kerry Hardie, ”We Change the Map”, A Furious Place (Meath: Gallery Press, 1996), 13. 50 Kevin Whelan kindly sent me this poem on 23 April 1999. 51 See F.H.A Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout, Atlas of the Irish Landscape (Cork: Cork UP, 1997), 33. Hereafter cited in text as Atlas. 52 Bill Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), 156. 33

CHAPTER SEVEN THE CITY IS A MAP OF THE CITY: REPRESENTATIONS OF BELFAST’S NARROW GROUND Cognitive mapping is, as Gerry Smyth explains in his recent exposition of the geospatial dynamics within Irish culture, “the process whereby the subject comes to an impressionistic sense of her/his location in relation to a range of unevenly empowered environments”.1 In literary and visual treatments of Belfast as a contested territory, the mapping and naming of place often functions not only as an index of how locality and history are wedded together, thereby providing a rationale for the Ulster conflict (“[u]nless you know exactly who lives where, and why, much of it does not make sense”2), it forecloses and predetermines discourses of identity. Family history and religious affiliation can dictate one's socio-political allegiance, which in turn determines where one can and cannot reside. Residential segregation, due to a combination of religious intolerance, class difference and paramilitary violence,3 spawns a heightened sense of place. As the Belfast writer Ciaran Carson says, “You have to constantly think of the map because there are lines past which you will not go. They're not on the street, they're in your mind, but that doesn't make them less real”.4 Focusing on two novels in particular, Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own,5 but drawing on prose memoirs, other novels and visual artworks for comparative purposes, this chapter will contend that much recent Northern Irish fiction and visual artworks adopt an alternative sociogeographical model, one which propounds a provisional rather than a strictly deterministic outlook, one akin to the theoretical framework delineated by Doreen Massey whereby place is described as being “formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location”.6 The identities of place are, she argues, “inevitably unfixed. They are unfixed in part precisely because the social relations out of which they are constructed are themselves by their very nature dynamic and changing”.7 It is this relational approach, analysing how urban location constructs and is constructed by people in society, that both radically revises and contests A.T.Q. Stewart’s depiction of Northern Ireland as a fixed, narrow ground.

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Political violence being the preeminent thematic concern of most Northern Irish fiction, it comes as little surprise that, as recent critical surveys have shown, the dominant genre has been that of the thriller and crime narrative,8 the ideology and enclosive form of which present Northern Ireland as “a fated place, doomed to inevitable and enduring violence”.9 However, such a worldview is not limited to the thriller since cognitive mapping, delimiting space and identity within fixed co-ordinates, recurs in narratives such as Sam McAughtry's Belfast, a childhood reminiscence conveying a strong sense of segregation from and ignorance about those “who kicked with the left foot” (Catholics): “The Border in those days was the New Lodge Road. My purpose in making the old safari into Comanche territory was, I must confess, in order to shoot the line to an audience who didn't know I was doing it”.10 Similarly, Danny Morrison's novel West Belfast describes the dangers involved in crossing into “foreign territory”,11 this time a Protestant estate. Characters, therefore, place themselves in the world by erecting what Brian Graham terms “a myth of terrirory,” a narrative crucial to the establishment and legitimation of their identity.12 With sectarian segregation, addresses become loaded with incipient meaning, none of which can be gleaned from a travel guide or ordnance survey map. Carson's prose memoir “Question Time” provides a vivid example of the cognitive mapping required to survive in West Belfast. Because he was seen coming to the Falls Road via the Shankill Road, he was stopped by the local militia and interrogated. A detailed account of West Belfast's geography was demanded, even of streets which were no longer present: “The map is pieced together bit by bit. I am this map which they examine, checking it for error, hesitation, accuracy; a map which no longer refers to the present world, but to a history, these vanished streets; a map which is this moment, this interrogation, my replies”.13 In the absence of a name or address, more cunning methods of placing strangers have been devised. The most well-known strategy, described by Anthony Buckley and Mary Kenney, exploits the distinction between the way a Catholic usually pronounces a as “ah” and h as “haitch” and the Protestant “ay” and “aitch”: “In the 1970s (and no doubt sometimes today), this phenomenon provided a useful rule of thumb for gangs of youths, who used it to decide whether a passer-by should be beaten up”.14 More complex shibboleths are often in evidence in Northern Irish fiction. In Morrison's novel, for example, a group of young Catholics out climbing are accosted by a rival gang: “They knew that people called Protestants lived in New Barnsley, even heard of a neighbour or two referred to as Protestants or ‘converts’, but had no social intercourse or contact with them and so they were a little afraid”. A tribal shibboleth — “Whadda ya call the pope?” — is demanded to ascertain the group's religious affiliation: “Stevie was expecting a denigrating

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remark though Tommy had suddenly read the situation and realised they were Catholics, they were all Catholics”.15 Such encoded cultural references, or what Allen Feldman calls “the imaginary and projected images of embodied ethnicity and body politics”,16 defensively legitimize one’s sense of identity, yet offer little way out of the strict binary opposition which demarcates place as either Catholic or Protestant. By employing a fixed, immutable sectarian geography, the inferred socio-political ideology underpinning the novelistic treatment of Belfast uncritically depicts the Troubles as “a cyclical, iterative conflict between two tribal monoliths”.17 However, such strict identarian binarisms are avoided in writing which reorientates urban space as a locus for the ephemeral and the contingent. Reflecting on life in Belfast, Brian Keenan states that: For some reason, all these fractured images seemed to echo my own thinking about the Belfast I knew. The language of the learning centre, the primitive evangelism of the street preacher, the idiomatic words on the mural and finally the unheard words of the old women — the city's fragmented nature, the nonconnectedness of its idea.18

Most striking is his focus on the city's languages, its innumerable narratives: “The language of the learning centre”, “primitive evangelism”, “idiomatic words”, “unheard words”. Yet despite their diverse and fragmented nature, one is left with the feeling that nothing changes: “these fractured images” are a legacy from his past. A similar duality occurs in Robert McLiam Wilson's celebrated “Belfast novel”, Eureka Street. Midway through this text, experiential as opposed to empirical history comes to the fore in a meditative, self-reflective chapter: And sometimes, late at night, when most asleep, as now, the city seems to pause and sigh. It seems to exhale that narrative, to give off like the stored ground-heat of a summer day. On such nights, you might cross a city street and for a few golden minutes there are no cars and the very hum of distant traffic fades and you look at the material around you, the pavements and street-lamps and windows, and if you listen gently, you might hear the ghosts of stories whispered.19

Belfast is a built-up city, a living being and a narrative all in one. As in Keenan’s account of urban existence, the city's surfaces are brimful of histories; yet the activity (story-telling) is not all one-way since the narrator lays equal emphasis on the inscriptive practices of Belfast’s citizens. “The city's surface is thick with its living citizens,” he muses, “its earth is richly sown with its many dead. The city is a repository of narratives, stories. Present tense, past tense or future. The city is a novel” (ES, 215). Depicting the city as a novel associates it with a teleological,

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enclosive narrative, one with a definitive beginning, middle and an end: “The citizenry cannot fail to write there. Their testimony is involuntary and complete” (ES, 216). By inadvertently hinting at closure, it could be argued that the narrator negates the intended relativism. Towards the end of the chapter, however, he specifically focuses on the ongoing process of inscription: “Sleeping cities and sleeping citizens alike await upon events, they attend upon narrative. They are stopped in station. They soon move on, they soon start again” (ES, 216). Less emphasis is placed on the city as a “repository” or a “novel”: in Belfast, he says, “in all cities, it is always present tense and all the streets are Poetry Streets” (ES, 217). Eoin McNamee’s debut novel, Resurrection Man, appears, at first, to adhere to A.T.Q. Stewart’s deterministic theory of the narrow ground by demarcating space according to an implacable sectarian geography, the initiatory knowledge of which promises to accord its central characters a privileged, objective overview of the causes and patterns of conflict. Above Ryan's desk is “a cellophane-wrapped ordnance map of the city” on which he, the journalist, marks out locations of sectarian assassinations: There were lines on the map too, indicating rivers, areas which had been demolished, suggested escape routes following a bomb, zones of conflict, boundaries, divisions within the heart. Ryan drew a new one on the map almost every day. An evolution had been going on in there over the past three years, a withdrawing behind the lines. He thought he could learn something by keeping a record of encroachments and retreats. He was trying to develop the knowledge that the inhabitants of the city had. The sense of territory that guided them through hundreds of streets. That feeling for the anxious shift in population. (RM, 13)

On the one hand, both the “encroachments and retreats” and “anxious shift in population” suggest that urban life is diverse and fragmentary; on the other hand, the “evolution” and prevailing “sense of territory” hint that sociological patterns have been predetermined. The novel mediates between these two antithetical standpoints, intimating that change disrupts the apparent fixity. Central to this theme is the image of the map, by which McNamee demonstrates the dangers and ultimate inadequacy of sectarian mapping. The bookcover for the 1995 paperback edition is symptomatic of how the characters look upon the city: a Belfast street-map covers the shadowy, out-offocus head of a man, over which shards of glass point towards (or emanate from) the figure's right eye. The image draws on the in-depth cognitive mapping of the terrorist, a manner of thinking which is both necessary for, and results from sectarian conflict. Indeed, the novel's other main protagonist, Victor, a militant

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(psychotic) Loyalist, can find his way through the city blindfold: “Big Ivan reckoned that he mapped the city with smells, moving along them like a surveyor along sightlines. Willie thought of pigeons homing. Migrations moving to some enchanted and magnetic precision” (RM, 26). With this mentality, everything must be meticulously controlled. It is vital for the terrorist, we are told, that on news reports “a victim’s age, religion and the exact location of the hit be given precisely. Errors were subversive. They denied sectarian and geographic certainties” (RM, 17). Commenting on news reportage and army surveillance, one character states: “There's a new vocabulary. Acceptable levels of violence, seven-day detention orders, the men of violence. It’s like the whole thing’s under control now. More than that, it’s being ordered” (RM, 156). McNamee’s narrative suggests otherwise: the violence becomes dependent on “random structures” (RM, 21) and Victor ultimately loses his innate sense of place: But sometimes on one of these runs he would say, where are we? He sounded surprised as if he had suddenly discovered that the streets were not the simple things he had taken them for, a network to be easily memorized and navigated. They had become untrustworthy, concerned with unfamiliar destinations, no longer adaptable to your own purposes. . . . More detail was required — people moved, discarded their occupations, emigrated, got lost. Whole streets were erased, expunged from the records, fading into the curtailed memory of the elderly . . . (RM, 163)

McNamee’s narrative is alive to Belfast’s ever-changing urban topography. What Victor cannot cope with are the specific changes which irreparably alter his perception of the city: “A lot of the housing and port buildings had been demolished. He closed his eyes and recalled with difficulty street after street peopled through the wavering salvage of memory; characters closed in their incomplete histories” (RM, 134). Crucially, however, this inability to map conflict with any degree of certainty constitutes part of the novel’s meta-narrative. As Nuala Johnson astutely observes, “McNamee successfully reveals the constraints on authorial intention to construct and control a cartographic image of the city”.20 The authorial distrust of the supposed panoptic objectivity of cartographic discourse is foregrounded not only by his characters’ inability to achieve a coherent sense of place, but also by the privileging of two interlinked themes. Firstly, McNamee explores the State’s visualisation of territory and the (unreliable) optics of surveillance. As in Morrison’s West Belfast, characters find themselves questioned by the state police in an effort to ascertain their identity; yet unlike that text, Resurrection Man disrupts strict oppositions between us/them by focusing on the inadequacy of tribal/state shibboleths. Whereas the ‘narrow ground’ thesis provides an

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unchanging, predetermined set of co-ordinates, McNamee foregrounds a more unsettling contingency, one which cartography and surveillance both fail to account for: “One of the soldiers asked for their names and addresses and their destination. The others crouched in doorways scanning the rooftops, their faces doubtful, as if the buildings themselves, the form and structure of the city, were untrustworthy, possessed of a dubious topography which required constant surveillance” (RM, 84). The urban environment itself demands (yet ultimately resists) the State’s totalizing surveillance apparatus. McNamee is here following the example set by Ciaran Carson in his prose piece “Intelligence”.21 This text later appeared alongside a series of photographs by Paul Seawright22 depicting various aspects of police life in Northern Ireland. Both text and photographs detail aspects of covert surveillance: We are all being watched through peep-holes, one-way mirrors, security cameras, talked about on walkie-talkies, car’phones, Pye Pocketfones; and as this helicopter chainsaws overhead, I pull back the curtains down here in the terraces to watch its pencil-beam of light flick through the card-index - I see the moon and the moon sees me, this 30,000,000 candlepower gimbal-mounted Nitesun by which the operator can observe undetected, with his infra-red goggles and an IR filter on the light-source.23

Carson’s description compliments Seawright’s work as they both convey a deep understanding of the complex relations between power and surveillance. In one photograph, a member of the RUC is pictured listening to something coming through an earpiece: A message, orders, a taped conversation? What is significant is the angle from which the shot is taken (above and from behind): ‘Who is watching whom?’ the viewer asks. A photograph depicting wire grilles covering the outside of the police station begs a similar question as to who really has control. Deflating the sense of order created by the RUC’s impressive array of gadgetry, Carson points to “the glitches and gremlins and bugs” that “keep foulingup, seething out from the hardware, the dense entangled circuitry of back streets, while the tape is spooling and drooling over alphanumeric strings and random-riot situations”.24 The anxiety aroused by the lack of a stable panoptic viewpoint is linked to a second key thematic concern in Resurrection Man: the failure to articulate or control the roots of conflict. McNamee establishes the map as just one of the novel’s many inadequate linguistic constructs. Two critics, in particular, Gerry

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Smyth and Nuala Johnson, convincingly argue that the incongruous multiplicity of the novel’s languages (filmic discourse, psychological treatise, gangster clichés) points towards “the suspicion that language cannot adequately circumscribe motive and communicate meaning for politically charged and savagely executed violence in the city of Belfast”.25 “The root of the tongue,” both literally and figuratively, “had been severed. New languages would have to be invented” (RM, 16). Although the characters themselves articulate a sense of dislocation — “the state of civil unrest had made them feel obsolete, abandoned on the perimeter of a sprawling technology of ruin” (RM, 83) — it is important to note that their alienation stems from a dissatisfaction with their linguistic resources: Coppinger said that he was experiencing a new species of information. Paramilitary organizations operating under cover names. Politicians issued ambiguous statements of condemnation. In court unidentified witnesses gave evidence from behind screens. The facts were equivocal and it had become impossible to pin down responsibility. (RM, 83)

While Elmer Kennedy-Andrews correctly argues that such events in the novel become textualized (newspaper reportage, anecdotal accounts), and that narration displaces the real into the mediated (that which is re-presented),26 nevertheless the underlying emphasis of Resurrection Man is on the distortive nature of this representation and its ultimate failure to either encompass the primal scene of violence or explain its socio-political cause. Indeed, the author explicitly and self-consciously depicts the ultimate failure of cartographic discourse (as a language) to situate and explain this violence. When Ryan stares at his map, he realizes that “the lines and circles … proposed something beyond the capacity of maps. His markings were like the structure of a language. He expected to hear its guttural sound being pronounced on the streets. He imagined being addressed in it. It would be arcane, full of sorrow, menacing” (RM, 13). The “arcane” nature of this structure is suggestive of Stewart’s essentially unchanging narrow ground; yet it displays a hermetic inscrutability, and McNamee intimates that one’s sense of place here is dependent more on a subjective projection than any historical determinism. Later in the novel, Ryan picks up a street directory and imagines his partner, Coppinger, “bent over this one as if the lamentation of he city was encrypted in its narration of streetnames and dead inhabitants and lost occupations” (RM, 220). This bears comparison with recent artworks by the visual artist Michael Minnis, who paints sections of Belfast street maps onto aluminium sheets. In both Letter/Omitted Space and Street Index (1993),27 the artist compels the viewer to recognise his position as a situated observer by having his reflection stare back from the surface

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of the map as he attempts to construct the history of the streets (the map is overlaid with the names and occupations of its former inhabitants). Determining one’s sense of place here is less reliant on a pre-existing pattern than on the imaginative projections of the observer; yet what McNamee points towards is the observer’s ultimate inability to uncover or express in language the roots of conflict. Such a theme is recurrent in recent Northern Irish art. In the title story of Blánaid McKinney’s collection of short stories Big Mouth,28 for example, the narrator, a Belfast-born linguist, attempts to achieve equilibrium by residing within the “[s]tern, lapidary sentences, total functionality and a formal, divine polish” of Latin (BM, 118), in contrast to “the chesty rhetoric” (BM, 117) and uncontrollable “gallant jabber” (BM, 119) of the terrorists: “But I knew that underneath their casual brutalism and forlorn whining was a big fucking gap, a huge hole, a hectoring emptiness that screamed the truth as them …” (BM, 123). Yet as in Resurrection Man and Elephant, the onlooker is left without a language which can either explain the rationale behind political violence or grant a definitive, stable perspective: “My past is an encyclopaedia of banished unwhisperables” (BM, 123). In contrast to the silence at the heart of McNamee’s text is the contention of Glenn Patterson’s revisionary novel Burning Your Own that there have been too many words. This claim is articulated during a parodic auction by one the central protagonists, Francy, a politically non-aligned Catholic teenager inhabiting a marginal location (the dump): “Sick to death of always having to take someone else’s word for it? Then solve all your problems when you become the proud owner of this very attractive dictionary. Words upon words – every one of you’ll ever need and a few more besides – taken apart and listed individually for you to put together again, how you please, in the comfort of your own home.” (BYO, 244)

The ostensible function of this character is to deconstruct tribal shibboleths and mythologies, offering alternative versions of names and locally accepted lore. Contradicting the official history of Derrybeg Chapel (BYO, 216) and the story of Sammy Slipper’s dog (BYO, 228-30), he demonstrates that the boundaries between history and myth are fluid and that narrative construction is far from innocent. Seeing through tribal ideology which dictates a destructively oppositional identarian discourse, Francy articulates the rationale behind his refusal to fight against his so-called Protestant enemy: “‘That’s when it hit me: all these years, they’d been filling our heads with that much shit, it was starting to get in our eyes. We were seeing things; seeing big men when we weren’t any sort of men at all – just two wee lads squabbling over a dump and a frigging bonfire’” (BYO, 208).

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With Rabelasian excess, he undercuts the sectarian contentiousness of the name of Malachy Martin (the novel’s other central protagonist, a Protestant adolescent whose name is a source of conflict between his parents), and provides a substitutive nomenclature: “Malarkey, Malakos, Malcontent … Malentendu, Malevolent, Malfeasance, Malformation, Malfunction […] Malice, Malign, Malignant … Malingering, Malison, Malleable, Malemaroking Martin – hereinafter, Mal du Siècle, Malkin the Ill, The Great Malacophilous …” (BYO, 63)

Unlike the novels of Morrison and McNamee, Patterson’s text presents an alternative to ‘embodied ethnicity’; Francy accepts Mal as an individual, and does not define him in sectarian terms. The novel’s form (a bildungsroman) allows Patterson to explore the pressures and narratives which act on an adolescent in Northern Ireland, compelling him to affiliate with the tribe to secure his identity. The text charts the education and gradual coming of age of Malachy Martin, a ten-year-old boy belonging to a Protestant family who have recently moved into Belfast's Larkview Estate. Although much of what we see in the novel is presented from Mal's perspective, the text consistently calls attention to his limited point of view: on page 10 we are told that while the gang are discussing Francy Hagan, a young Catholic boy whom he later befriends, Mal has trouble understanding the conversation: “If Mal had been older he might have had words for it. Instead he looked on, trying to account for their actions, as though they were characters in a film he had missed the start of it”. On the following page, we are told that this feeling of inadequacy is not an isolated instance: "he didn't always understand everything when they talked like that, and he was afraid of being embarrassed if he was asked a question” (BYO, 11). The novel traces Mal's education and the broadening of his perspective, the viewpoint he has on the world. Apart from the individual self, there are three (spatial) centres to which Mal finds himself attached, and these centres entail differing affiliations, rules and codes of behaviour and provide him with differing world views. The first is the home or familial base, the symbol of which is the heavy brass bowel with an intricate, hand-beaten design that rests “[i]n the centre of the table” (BYO, 25). A wedding present, it stands as an uneasy barometer of the state of family relations: “the slightest bump of the table set it clattering” (BYO, 25). At a particular moment of crisis, he witnesses his mother spinning the bowl furiously: “It drummed and rattled and bobbled on the table's varnished surface and Mal watched, jaw slack in amazement, as her long, bony fingers flicked the intricately patterned sides,

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sending it faster, faster, faster . . . . She clamped both hands on the bowl, bringing it to an abrupt halt, and looked up, eyes drained of expression” (BYO, 35). This scene is repeated later after the usual quarrel about Mal's name: the father leaves and Mal hears “the brass bowl … spinning, drumming on the dinette table” (BYO, 70). The quarrels themselves follow an inevitable pattern: “There had been another argument at breakfast”, we are told on the opening age, “Or, rather, the same old arguments were revived and repeated. mal glided through the tortuous twists and turns, shifting as easily as his parents from point to unconnected point, all the time anticipating the inevitable descent into namecalling: his names” (BYO, 3). The argument then “becomes a fight” with the too-familiar finale (BYO, 3). The inevitability and the cyclicality of the arguments match the bowl’s spinning, but also mirror the inevitable and cyclical social ritual of the Eleventh Night bonfire, a second centre around which Mal revolves. Collecting wood and guarding the centre-pole allow Mal to feel part of the community, to cast off his deep-seated feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. And yet, as Gerry Smyth argues, “[t]he downside of communitarian ideology is the curtailment of individual freedom. . . . Mal is losing his capacity for childish wonder as he gradually becomes socialised into the contradictions of adulthood and the dull, unquestioned, inflexible certainties of sectarian identity”.29 The bonfire, however, is associated with destruction rather than communitarian wellbeing; as Francy argues, “‘We're a shocking lot for burning things’”. Berating the Protestant crowd, Francy yells: “‘Youse never knew — what to waste — and what the fuck — to keep’” (BYO, 246). Such observations are expounded from the book's third centre, the alternative space of the dump. The dump represents a utopia or dystopia, depending on which way you look at it. Either way, society's rules do not apply there: “‘Lesson number . . . whatever: their rules . . . stop at the fence’” (BYO, 61). In the dump, Francy provides an a version of theology, or at least a parody of one: “‘In the beginning was the dump’”. The novel's opening sentence plays on the Biblical allusion, completing the parody when, at the conclusion of his history of how the dump came into being, he says “‘And on the last day ….’” The dump is an alternative centre, providing a disorientating perspective for Mal. On page 3 we learn that “the world could seem a very different place from the world into which he walked that morning …”. Later, we are told that “Beyond the dump, across the grass, a solid mass of redbrick walled in his vision. Roofs merged in strange teetering formations, half-houses, quarterhouses were grafted on to the sides of others, filling every gap, blinding every alley and driveway. He lived there, but he did not recognise this place, could not reconcile the jumble with the neatly hedged rows he walked through day to day” (BYO, 14). This is a consistent feature of the dump: it turns the centre into the periphery and vice-versa. As Gerry Smyth astutely points out, in this ‘Other space’,

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“the oppositionalism endemic to the outside world is replaced by a sort of archaeological imagination interested in the traces and layers of other stories to be found beneath and throughout the currently dominant sectarian story”.30 It is from this centre that Francy articulates alternative versions of history. Crucial to the novel’s thematic focus on alternative perspectives is the use made of maps. Looking at a painting done by his cousin Alex, we are told (from Mal’s perspective) that it was “dreadful: bright random swirls of unmixed yellows, reds and blues, and in the centre a tiny square of black, under which were written the words: You Are Here”. This, according to the cousin, is “‘a world map’” (BYO, 126). Undermining the idea that maps objectively reflect the world, Alex's “world map” is not a mimetic representation; rather, it is the expression of her desire for order in the midst of chaos, as if a map could securely locate an individual. It also suggests a more universal perspective than the strictly local one advanced by Mal’s other cousin, Cathy, who maintained that it was “‘a street map’” (BYO, 126). A second map is drawn when the extended family is out at a restaurant, celebrating the Uncle's good fortune at securing a contract as well as the father's new job: Facing him, Alex scored shapes on the tablecloth with the handle of her teaspoon. “That another world map?” Mal asked her. “No,” she said, ‘it’s Ireland.’ Ireland; the world: Alex’s maps were pretty much of a piece to Mal’s eyes: none of them bore the slightest resemblance to what they claimed to be. He watched as she continued her moody scratchings. “Looks more like a pig, if you ask me.” “Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow,” Alex loured. “That’s what it’s meant to be: ‘the old sow that eats her farrow.’” (BYO, 149)

As a counterpoint to the political discussion going on in the background, Alex’s conceptual map alludes to Stephen Dedalus’s infamous claim that Irish nationalism is a self-defeating, all-consuming ideology; it interrogates, rather than reaffirms, the sectarian cognitive mindset. The novel’s conclusion, however, does not offer such an optimistic or questioning deterritorialization; rather, it marks the beginning of direct rule by Westminster, and the surveillance of territory by the army: “An armoured car, the first seen in Larkview, slowed and parked by the roadside beyond the grass. Two soldiers got out, nursing heavy rifles, and called a policeman to them. Then all three pored over a map spread on the armoured car’s bonnet. One of the soldiers drew lines in pencil, the other took off his tin hat and scratched his head” (BYO, 249). Novels such as Resurrection Man and Burning Your Own explore the intersection of politics and place, laying bare the form and function of sectarian

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cognitive mapping, and delineate the psychological consequences of such a mindset. They undermine the supposed objectivity and controlling force of mapping by demonstrating the contingent nature of urban existence and by demonstrating the ways in which alternative maps emerge. The texts are not, however, utopic in their examination of the ideological impositions implicit in mapmaking; rather, they work as creative analogues to recent theories of decolonization which warn against simply replacing one map with another. As Gerry Smyth argues (quoting from Geoff King’s Mapping Reality): We cannot do without maps/names; but instead of replicating the old systems of thought, the goal should be “[a] new, deconstructive reading of the existing map … in which the arbitrary status of the existing boundaries is apparent”. The postcolonial map/name, in other words, must forgo the traditional claims on “truth” and attempt instead to express both the historical contingency and the ontological hybridity of space ….31

In Patterson’s text, all three centres self-destruct: the marriage breaks up (though not irreparably) and the bowl is discarded (BYO, 84); the “weight of the sides, the devouring intensity of the inner ball of flame” proved “too much for the improvised centrepole and the bonfire caved in” (BYO, 92); and alternative centre, the dump, is blown up at the end, with Francy resting, literally, “in pieces” (BYO, 249). In Resurrection Man, Ryan fails in his attempt to gain a panoptic overview of the conflict, and Victor Kelly remains deluded in his sense of self-control right up to the moment at which he is shot dead. However, what distinguishes these narratives from texts such as Danny Morrison’s West Belfast is the attempt to problematize the idea of ‘the narrow ground’ and to at least articulate a sense of contingency. 1

Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 40. Stewart, 56. 3 See F.W. Boal, “Territoriality and Class: A Study of Two Residential Areas in Belfast”, Irish Geography 6.3 (1971), 229-48, John Darby, Intimidation and the Control of Conflict in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), 58-9, and John Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 33-6. 4 Ciaran Carson, “It’s Not So Much About as of Belfast”, interview by Arminta Wallace, Irish Times 13 October 1990: Weekend 2. 5 Eoin McNamee, Resurrection Man (London: Picador, 1995) and Glenn Patterson, Burning Your Own (London: Minerva, 1993). References cited hereafter in text as RM and BYO, respectively. 6 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 168. 7 Massey, 169. 8 See Eamonn Hughes, “Fiction”, Stepping Stones: The Arts in Ulster, 1971-2001, eds. Mark Carruthers and Stephen Dodds (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), 79-80 and Eve Patten, 2

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“Fiction in Conflict: Northern Ireland’s Prodigal Novelists”, Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1995), 128-30. 9 Hughes, 80. See also Aaron Kelly, “‘Ordered Dreams’: Ideology and Utopia in the ‘Troubles’ Thriller”, Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 11 (2000), 141-47. 10 Sam McAughtry, “The Eucharistic Congress”, Belfast (Dublin: Ward River Press, 1981), 87. 11 Danny Morrison, West Belfast (Cork: Mercier Press, 1990), 9. 12 Brian J. Graham, “No Place of the Mind: Contested Protestant Representations of Ulster”, Ecumene 1.3 (July, 1994): 257. 13 Ciaran Carson, “Question Time”, Belfast Confetti (Meath: Gallery Press, 1989), 63. 14 Anthony D. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney, Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Drama in Northern Ireland (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 7-8. 15 Morrison, 18, 19. 16 Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror”, Public Culture 10.1 (1997): 34. 17 Aaron Kelly, “New Languages Would Have to Be Invented’: Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man”, Cartography: The City (November, 2000): 6. 18 Brian Keenan, “A Hostage to History”, Guardian 21 December 1996: 1. 19 Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street (London: Secker and Warburg, 1996), 216. References cited hereafter in text as ES. 20 Nuala C. Johnson, “The Cartographies of Violence: Belfast’s Resurrection Man”, Environment and Planning: Society and Space 17.6 (1999): 730. 21 Carson, “Intelligence”, Belfast Confetti, 78-82. 22 Paul Seawright, Inside Information: Photographs 1988-1995 (London: The Photographers' Gallery, 1995). 23 Carson, “Intelligence”, 78. 24 Carson, “Intelligence”, 79. 25 Johnson, 724. See also Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 123. 26 See Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, “Antic dispositions in Some Recent Irish Fiction”, Last Before America: Irish and American Writing, eds. Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), 134-36. 27 See Michael Minnis, Letter/Omitted Space in Liam Kelly, Language, Cartography and Power (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1996), 53 and Street Index in Liam Kelly, Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland (Kinsale: Gandon Editions, 1996), 73. 28 Blánaid McKinney, “Big Mouth”, Big Mouth (London: Phoenix, 2000), 115-25. References hereafter cited in text as BM. 29 Smyth, The Novel and the Nation, 127. 30 Smyth, The Novel and the Nation, 127. 31 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, 45.

CHAPTER EIGHT SEAMUS HEANEY AND BRIAN FRIEL: SETTING THE ISLAND STORY STRAIGHT? Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney employ cartographic discourse not simply as the textual representation of a physical landscape, but as a technology of power.1 The concepts of two theorists, Graham Huggan and J.B. Harley, provide a critical frame for their work. Harley, especially, uses the methodologies of Foucault and Derrida to deconstruct the belief that cartography is an objective discipline. Revealing the encoded ideological presumptions behind map-making, Harley isolates the power structures which this activity helps institutionalize. “Maps,” he states, “are ineluctably a cultural system. Cartography has never been an autonomous and hermetic mode of knowledge, nor is it ever above the politics of knowledge”.2 Rejecting the reflectionist or mimetic model of cartography,3 Harley concludes that one should begin to deconstruct the map “by challenging its assumed autonomy as a mode of representation”. Graham Huggan takes this one step further. Stressing the map’s textual nature, he demonstrates how “the reinscription, enclosure and hierarchization of space, provides an analogue for the acquisition, management and reinforcement of colonial power”.4 Deconstruction of map-making enables one to see clearly how the coloniser’s inscription of placenames and territorial boundaries establishes a structural base for sociopolitical institutions, thus delegitimizing the previous forms of government and territorial ownership.5 This emphasis on deconstruction and demytholgization accords with the Field Day project of exposing systems, traditions and ideologies as human constructions. Seamus Deane, a director of Field Day, stated that a “system is comprehensible. It has a center, it is understandable and — if it is oppressive — is subject to analysis and is, therefore, subject to dismantling”.6 Both Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel have been closely associated with the Field Day organization and the emphasis in both Friel’s Translations7 and Heaney’s presentation of a series of theoretical locations in The Haw Lantern8 is on the demythologization of “the belief in the originary essence, agency or condition” at the heart of Irish nationalism which “hold[s] in custody the accompanying visions of literature and politics”.9 Ridding themselves of restrictive inherited ideologies, both writers

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endeavour to “set ‘the island story straight’” (HL, 11). Yet, while the collusion of language systems in the colonial project is revealed, such a negative and deterministic view of language is reversed by both writers with the recognition that such free-play facilitates the re-mythologizing project of the artist. The metaphor of the map heralds a counter-movement, namely a hermeneutics of affirmation.10 As Huggan states, if the map is conceived as a “rhizomatic (‘open’) rather than a falsely homogenous (‘closed’) construct, the emphasis then shifts from de- to reconstruction, from mapbreaking to mapmaking”.11 Brian Friel foregrounds meaning systems and acts of interpretation in his introductory play for the Field Day Theatre Company, Translations (1980). Basing his play upon the topological surveys of Thomas Frederick Colby and the Royal Engineers during the first half of the nineteenth century, Friel investigates “the socio-cultural role of language in the historical evolution of a community”.12 The play’s reviews, however, focused primarily on the political implications of Friel’s use of language and failed to discern both the play’s dual concern with demythologization and remythologization, and its inherent double-structure which refuses to sustain any single doctrinaire position. Lauded as “a national classic”,13 “a culmination in his dramatic career”,14 and “a watershed in Irish theatrical history”,15 Translations was seen to address in a positive and enabling manner “the questions of identity, allegiance and national birthright which have been revivified in the continuing crisis”.16 Louder and more hostile critics decried it, however, as “dangerous”, “dishonest”,17 perceiving it to be “a vigorous example of corrective propaganda”18 which “transposes Cromwellian notions into a nineteenth century framework”.19 Thus, Brian Friel is seen as producing some form of post-colonial mythology by those who received the play favourably, and as giving credence to traditional nationalist myths by those who so rashly dismissed it. Only the like-minded Seamus Heaney appears to have struck the correct balance when he so astutely isolated the central core of the play in his review; in Translations Friel had diagnosed “the need we have to create enabling myths of ourselves and the danger we run if we too credulously trust to the sufficiency of these myths”.20 Friel’s critique of the empowering strategies of colonial discourse takes the form of a deliberate foregrounding of mapmaking. The play’s Ordnance Survey is undertaken, as Captain Lancey explains, “so that the military authorities will be equipped with up-to-date and accurate information on every corner of the Empire” (T, 31). The significance of his marking and translation of placenames, therefore, goes far beyond an innocent geographical purpose. As Ronald Rollins

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surmises, the survey is designed specifically to achieve two main objectives: “to disassociate the Irish from their past and to control their future, a control deliberately linked to the immediate transformation of Irish topography and to the future educational process, especially the use of language”.21 By instigating the Anglicization of the original Gaelic place-names, the ordnance survey highlights their ideological importance: changing them in the course of mapmaking effectively acts as a dispossession of both land and culture. To understand this, one must recognize that placenames not only have an immediate referent, they also “make a condensed or elliptical remark about the place, a description, a claim of ownership, a historical anecdote, even a joke or a curse on it”.22 This intimate connection between place and language - as enshrined in the Irish lore of places known as dinnsheanchas - is severed once the Gaelic name is replaced by an English equivalent. As George O’Brien states, the linguistic differences between English and Gaelic are more than simply phonological, etymological or lexical: “Language does not merely exist as a self-contained linguistic enterprise. It exists, rather more familiarly, as a network of cultural encodings, a tissue of inter-related namings, and of cognitive assumptions made on the basis of acquaintance with those names.23 In Translations, this is reflected in Yolland’s conviction that their cartographical project is inherently “an eviction of sorts”, that “something is being eroded” (T, 43). Clearly, the change of placename entails the loss of unique cultural and historical associations. However, it also results in the dislocation of the Irish native, as shown when Owen turns on his father and pointedly questions his ability to find his way within the new system: Owen: Do you know where the priest lives? Hugh: At Lis na Muc, over near . . . Owen: No, he doesn’t. Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has become Swinefort. Now turning the pages of the Name-Book — a page per name.) And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn’t at Poll na gCaorach — it’s at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way? (T, 42)

Friel also demonstrates that another disturbing corollary of Captain Lancey’s survey is the linguistic encoding of colonial dominance, when language acting as a constant reminder of both the cultural dispossession and the shift in power differentials between coloniser and colonised. When Captain Lancey forces Owen to re-translate the placenames in Act III, the list of names read out by Captain Lancey acts as an index of his power and ascendancy over the land and confirms Yolland’s fears, since the catalogue effectively becomes an eviction roster. Here the names “Swinefort . . . Burnfoot . . . Dromduff . . . Whiteplains” (T,

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62) re-enact “the master/slave relationship” and bring this “hierarchical relationship to mind every time the newly instituted place name is articulated”.24 This laying bare of colonial strategies, as symbolized by the procedure of mapmaking, does not, however, denote a desire on Friel’s part to regress to a utopian Gaelic past, as some of his detractors have suggested; rather, it simply underscores the remnants of colonialism in Irish culture so as to highlight a situation in which “contemporary Ireland is caught between an old, eroded Irish past which no longer signifies and English words which can’t”.25 In a scene which echoes Owen’s earlier confrontation with his father, Hugh distances himself from James’s adherence to myth and stresses the virtues of a readiness to change: Owen: I know where I live. Hugh: James thinks he knows too. I look at James and three thoughts occur to me: A — that it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. James has ceased to make that discrimination. . . . B — we must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilize. (T, 66)

Translations does not, after all, call for the Gaelicization of Irish placenames again. In fact, as Christopher Murray demonstrates in his recent study of twentiethcentury Irish drama, Friel was appalled at some of the claims which were being made for his play as regards language and national identity, and was subsequently “determined to demolish a sentimental rhetoric rendering sacred all that belonged to tradition”.26 Although Brian Friel employs George Steiner’s thesis that there is an essential privacy in language which cannot be translated27 in order to emphasise the detrimental effect of colonialism on Irish culture, his de-constructive approach leads to one which is re-constructive. Friel adopts the stance taken by two of his former Field Day co-directors, Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney: having explored the colonial implications of using the English language, they embrace HibernoEnglish as an enabling alternative, one exclusive to the Irish. Colonial heritage is provisionally accepted in order to transform it. As Friel stated in an interview with Paddy Agnew: These are formative influences on our lives and there is no possibility of our escaping this. We must accept this. But we must make this primary recognition which we must never lose sight of: that there is a foreigness in this literature; it is the literature of a different race.28

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In this way, Friel’s Translations adopts a strategy similar to that proposed by Richard Kearney. Advocating “an on-going dialectic between our being-effectedby-the-past and our projection of a history yet-to-be made”,29 Kearney cautions against a blind adherence to tradition, and recommends a re-writing of myth as “a subversion of origins and identities, a catalyst of disruption and difference”.30 By foregrounding the decentered nature of the language system, whereby the one signified (place) can have several signifiers (names), Friel in effect transforms the map from a fixed entity into a fluid representation of possible worlds. In the words of Graham Huggan, The map no longer features as a visual paradigm for the ontological anxiety arising from frustrated attempts to define a national culture, but rather as a locus of productive dis-similarity where the provisional connections of cartography suggest an ongoing perceptual transformation which in turn stresses the transitional nature of post-colonial discourse.31

The clearest instance of this procedure in Translations may be found in Act II, Scene I, when Hugh exclaims that “words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen . . that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . fact” (T, 43). As both Richard Kearney and F. C. McGrath have noted, the source for this statement is George Steiner’s After Babel (1975): Words seem to go dead under the weight of sanctified usage; the frequency and sclerotic force of clichés, of unexamined similes, of worn tropes increases. Instead of acting as a living membrane, grammar and vocabulary become a barrier to new feeling. A civilization is imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches . . . the landscape of fact.32

What no critic appears to have shown, however, is that Hugh’s scepticism towards “truths immemorially posited” (T, 42) is linked to Steiner’s championing of flux and creativity as the true core of language. In After Babel, Steiner states that “every speech act has a potential of invention, a capacity to initiate, sketch, or construct ‘anti-matter’ . . . In fact, this poesis or dialectic of counter-statement is even more complex, because the ‘reality’ which we oppose or set aside is very largely a linguistic product”.33 Language, therefore, constructs and conceptualizes the world, enabling us to “build fictions of alterity”. As Steiner claims, “We have histories of massacre and deception, but none of metaphor. . . . Such figures (i.e.

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metaphors) are new mappings of the world, they reorganize our habitation of reality”.34 Brian Friel does not accept uncritically Steiner’s notion of creative translation between languages. Owen’s mouthing of Steiner’s dictum that “‘Uncertainty in meaning is incipient poetry’” (T, 32) must be tempered by Manus’s scathing retort that “There was nothing uncertain about what Lancey said: it’s a bloody military operation” (T, 32). Nevertheless, change as a principle must be engaged with, as the play’s dilapidated setting demonstrates; Owen’s nostalgia that “Nothing’s changed! Not a thing! (sniffs) Even that smell — that’s the same smell this place always had” (T, 27) is undermined as the smell changes during the play, becoming “the sweet smell” (T, 63) of both destruction and a foreshadowing of the Famine. The notion that the Irish can “endure around truths immemorially posited” (T, 42) is exploded, and it is Hiberno-English, rather than Gaelic, which is in the end posited as the “rich language . . . full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception — a syntax opulent with tomorrows” (T, 42). Hugh’s determination to make the English words “our new home” (T, 66) is tentative, however, and reflects the uncertain, self-regarding approach of the play. “I will provide you with the available words and the available grammar,” Hugh explains to Máire, “[b]ut will that help you to interpret between privacies? I have no idea. But it’s all we have. I have no idea at all” (T, 67). By deliberately employing a double structure, Translations presents its expressive content and self-reflexively comments on it. For instance, Hugh’s propositions are rendered problematic as he delivers them while inebriated, and the “thousand [linguistic] baptisms” (T, 45) which act as an analogue for the creative aspect of language are put into question when Nellie Ruadh’s baby dies (T, 64). The play oscillates between two instances of silence — the autism of Sarah and the post-verbal lovescene between Yolland and Máire — and makes a virtue of not choosing between them: In the event of autism, the speech-battle between child and master can reach a grim finality. Surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile reality, the autistic child breaks off verbal contact. She seems to choose silence to shield her identity but even more, perhaps, to destroy his imagined enemy. (Steiner, 36)

On the one hand, Friel presents us with Sarah’s autism, a negative correlative of colonialism, a Cathleen Ní Houlihan “struck dumb by the shock of modernity”.35 On the other hand we have the silent exchange between Yolland and Máire,

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symbolically enacting Steiner’s theory of “linguistic exogamy”,36 and prefiguring the image of cross-fertilization of seeds in Making History,37 a symbol of integration between the Irish and the English. Even the reconstructive impulse is questioned as Yolland’s father, “born in 1789 — the very day the Bastille fell,” supposedly “inherited a new world”, one in which “there were no longer any frontier’s to man’s potential” (T, 40), and yet he, in the end, becomes “the perfect colonial servant” (T, 39), enforcing rather than questioning mapmaking. This deconstructive and decolonizing instinct can, to a certain extent, explain his setting up, with Stephen Rea, of Field Day. The stated aim of this organization is to re-examine the cultural and historical situation of Ireland, both North and South: “Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which have become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation”.38 The company adopted the concept of the “Fifth Province”, first put forward by the literary journal, Crane Bag, whose editors stated in the first issue that The obvious impotence of the various political attempts to unite the four geographical provinces would seem to warrant another kind of solution, another kind of unity, one which would incorporate the “fifth” province. This province, this place, this center, is not a political or geographical position, it is more like a disposition.39

This is a notion with which Seamus Heaney is in full agreement: after the first meeting of the Field Day Board of Directors, he commented that “we believed that we could create a space in which we would try to redefine what being Irish meant in the context of what happened in the North”.40 He reiterated this in the preface to The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, and signalled his support for the concept of the Fifth Province when he praised the “‘excavation of unactualized spaces within the reader, which is the work of constituting the fifth province’”.41 Such a place can be brought into being by the poet’s re-sacrilizing the landscape, allowing himself “an inner freedom”, since he is able to transform external circumstances into “a shimmer of inner reality”.42 Heaney reinscribes borders in the country of the mind: for him, “map-making becomes a metaphor of the visual and the literal”; poems are both maps “of the interior landscape or of the public world”.43 He, therefore, adopts a position outlined by Tom Paulin in “A Written Answer”: the poet “designs a fictionary universe / which has its own laws and isn’t quite / the same as this place that we call real.” If, as Seamus Deane claims, “imperial systems are about mapping, about geography, about stabilising, about

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characterising people within fixed limits”,44 then there must equally be a recognition that “maps enable one to move beyond borders and to break free from fatalism into a realm of fluidity and change”.45 Heaney began to explore this idea of an inner landscape as early as “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream” in which he presents Archimedes who “thought he could move the world if he could / find the right place to position his lever”.46 In his prose collection The Place of Writing (1989), Heaney develops this idea by imagining “the Irish writer as a latter-day Archimedes, who places his fulcrum on native soil and then from a distance (like Joyce) or close by (like Yeats) works a lever in order to raise the actual ‘place of writing’ into the symbolic ‘place of writing’”.47 This concept of the lever is expressed by Heaney in terms of the principle of moments and, in effect, is his way of maintaining a critical distance from actual events: [W]e can begin to consider how important the length of the arm of the lever is when it comes to the actual business of moving a world. This takes us back to another basic school-book principle of science, the principle of moments, the principle in operation when the claw hammer draws out the nail or the crow-bar dislodges the boulder. In each case, what is intractable when wrestled with at close quarters becomes tractable when addressed from a distance The longer the lever, in fact, the less force is necessary to move the mass and get the work going.48

This is “a metaphoric extension of the scientific definition of work” (PW, 20), the lever representing the poet’s imagination. Heaney fulfills two of Joyce’s injunctions from “Station Island” (1984): he has now managed to both “keep at a tangent” and fill his element “with signatures on your own frequency”49 because, in the fully realized poet, “what Simone Weil perceived as the necessary principle of counter-weighting or redress will be inscribed in the poet’s imaginative signature”.50 Owing Heaney’s “need to raise historical experience to a symbolic power, the need to move personal force through an aesthetic distance” (PW, 55), the poet defamiliarizes and displaces the actual world by maintaining a tangential relation to it. Place is treated both critically and imaginatively: In the case of poetry, the distance moved through is that which separates the historically and topographically situated place from the written place, the mass moved is one aspect of the writer’s historical/biographical experience, and each becomes a factor of the other in the achieved work. The work of art, in other words, involves raising the historical record to a different power. (PW, 36)

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Heaney here describes “how topographical place could become written place” (PW, 36), and how “the poetic imagination in its strongest manifestation imposes its vision upon a place rather than accept a vision from it” (PW, 20). This represents a radical inversion of his previous position in relation to place outlined in Preoccupations, whereby the “sense of place” affected the poet: “Landscape,” Heaney proposes, “was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities”.51 He recognised the way in which “our imaginations assent to the stimulus of names” and that “our sense of ourselves as inhabitants not just of a geographical country but of the country of the mind is cemented” (P, 132). Place influences the mind, not vice versa. With this “fully empowered imagination” the poet can create a mental space, a “sacramental site, an outward sign of an inner grace” (PW 25, 24), “a country of the mind” (PW, 21), “a fortified space” (PW, 35), “a placeless heaven” (GT, 50). In The Government of the Tongue, Heaney’s assessment of Kavanagh’s later aesthetic of place embodies his own: When he writes about places now, they are luminous spaces within his mind. They have been evacuated of their status as background, as documentary geography, and exist instead as transfigured images, sites where the mind projects its own force. In this later poetry, place is included within the horizon of Kavanagh’s mind rather than the other way around. The country he visits is inside himself. (GT, 5)

This is a perfect description of Heaney’s Fifth Province, and it receives poetic form in the parable poems of The Haw Lantern. In these, he foregrounds meaning systems and the act of interpretation so as to parody the activities of unscrupulous historians and, in effect, rewrite the island story for himself. As Stan Smith has pointed out, Heaney “deconstruct[s] those blarney-laden tales of nativity, decentering and redefining a self-regarding Irishness”.52 Rather than engaging in a nationalist and unitary agenda, Heaney decolonizes the mind, defamiliarizes inherited beliefs in order to affirm a belief in the transcendent, the numinous. Like Friel, he creates a double-structure in his work, at once expressive and critical, as a means of decolonization. He told Richard Kearney that “of course it’s correct politically to be on the side of decolonizing your mind, and liberating yourself, realising that your consciousness has been to some extent created politically by big, totalizing ideas”.53 “Parable Island” moves the physical reality of Ireland onto “the plane of cryptic map, a text studded with ambiguous conventional signs”,54 as in these lines: “One school thinks a post-hole in an ancient floor / stands first of all for a pupil in an iris. / The other thinks a post-hole is a post-hole” (HL, 11). Ireland

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becomes “Parable Island”, observed with “the clinical tone of a socioanthropologist re-visiting old territory and seeing it as neutrally foreign, an island to be studied like any other”.55 The failure to arrive at a definitive interpretation for the “stylized eye-shapes” problematizes the connection between land, linguistic sign and identity. Alan Robinson rightly shows that the endless attempts, in Heaney’s phrase, “gloss the glosses” are “presented indulgently as a futile mise en abyme: stability can never be achieved, Heaney suggests, for the dynamics of ideological conflict will always lead one emergent social formation to seek to undermine the established hegemony through a subversive reading of that order’s historiographical legitimacy”.56 The significance of this failure of interpretation of “the original story” has repercussions for the constant attempts of “the subversives and collaborators” who, “always vying with a fierce possessiveness,” aim “to set ‘the island story’ straight”: The “rules” of cartography, both those which function overtly in the systematic organization of the map and those which are implied in the empowering methods of its production, are duly discovered to pertain to a desire for control expressed by the power-group or groups responsible for the articulation of the map. This desire, however, is controverted by insufficiencies both within the assembled structure and, by implication, within its controlling agency, which is discovered to have laid false claim to the fixity of its own origins and to the coherence of the system it orients and organizes.57

Plurality of perspectives is enshrined in Heaney’s notion of the Fifth Province which is a “point where all the names converge / underneath the mountain and where (some day) / they are going to start to mine the ore of truth”. Contrary to the demythologization of inherited beliefs which, while apparently undermining any “original story”, sometimes provides a nationalist remythologization, Heaney’s “Parable Island” “playfully considers the conflicting traditions of exegesis that transform the country into a palimpsest of competing nomenclatures that record the successive impact of generations of would-be colonists and cartographers”.58 Although misguided interpretations of the Fifth Province have conveniently posited it as a physical location,59 the uncertainty concerning the name and location of the centre highlights rather than curtails the existence of multiple traditions: The occupiers call it Cape Basalt. The Sun’s Headstone, say farmers in the east. Drunken westerners call it The Orphan’s Tit. (HL, 10)

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The poet refrains from deciding between these traditions: opinion is divided as to legitimacy of the “inland border”, whether “they are an occupied nation”, and whether the country is, in fact, “an island”. Consequently, “Parable Island” foregrounds the act of interpretation in order to stress the “slippery relativism of all (mytho)graphic attempts to reduce society and the environment to discursive control”.60 Now archaeologists begin to gloss the glosses. To one school, the stone circles are pure symbol; to another, assembly spots or hut foundations. (HL, 11)

Missionary scribes, archaeologists, subversives and collaborators - all aim to “mine the ore of truth”; the attempt, however, is undermined by the diffusion of the “single note” into “early manuscripts”, then into “recurrent glosses”. Heaney humorously sends-up nationalist pretensions of a one true tradition by referring to the “one-eyed all creator”, a reference to the Citizen, one of the unreliable narrators of chapter twelve of Joyce’s Ulysses. In the rationalists’ determination to unify the “shifting names” and remove the border, subjective interpretation is shown to supersede objective fact and history shown to serve their own ideological purposes. Elin Ap Hywel is only partially correct when he says that “instead of a dichotomy which is capable of being incorporated within a reworking, here differences range freely in a world where unity dissolves in the aboriginal past”.61 It is true that, unlike Heaney’s earlier poems, “Parable Island” does not pose a simple dichotomy between two traditions; however, Heaney quite clearly problematizes the very notion of “aboriginal unity” itself since every stable centre — “the mountain, the one bell-tower — becomes dematerialized into an original “idea” which in turn is reduced to “recurrent glosses”. Heaney questions interpretative authority by stressing the linguistic nature of meaning itself. Focusing on the process of analogy-making, “Parable Island” offers “a metanarrative in the parable-making act itself”, foregrounding in the very notion of parable “the gratuitous and deliberate drawing of analogies between one narrative and another”.62 The procedures and claims to objectivity of some revisionist historians are also parodied by Heaney: the missionary scribes are “those old revisionists” who ridiculously “derive / the word island from roots in eye and land”. History is portrayed as made up of a variety of narratives, all of a subjective nature. The myth held by “the elders” of “boat-journeys and havens” is undercut by their belief in the story of the man who took to his bed, it seems, and died convinced

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Heaney universalizes the situation by not specifying the exact name or location of this “Parable Island”. In this way, readers are made aware that many other cultures have the same dialectical variation within their history. The image of the island disappearing by aggrandizement mocks those who refuse to accept cultural diversity by claiming that an influx of other traditions would lead to the demise of their own. The locus of Heaney’s Fifth Province is the boundary between the real and the imaginary, a “placeless heaven” from which he can affirm his trust in his own art. Vision is a prerequisite for committed action. This echoes the main thrust of another of Heaney’s parable poems, “The Disappearing Island” (HL, 50), which “privileges the oneiric over the actual” (PW, 55), granting poetry the power of liberation. He provides the background to the poem in The Place of Writing and emphasizes the precarious boundary between the actual and the visionary: [t]he double-take of that last line . . . . the speaker who had the experience of his island does not know the value he is to assign to it and treads the tightrope of his uncertainty in a line that stretches between two opposing truths. First, everything that seemed to happen there was hallucination, unreliably subjective, self deluding even, and therefore not to be credited; and second, precisely because the experience was self-born and possessed the eerie lucidity of dream-vision, its unique aura transcends the banal reliabilities of the usual and commands the assent of awakened imagination. (PW, 54-5)

By embracing the land “in extremis”, St Brendan comes to believe in “vision”.63 This mirrors Friel’s play Wonderful Tennessee which also features a “spectral, floating island that appeared out of the fog”.64 The vision of the island gives the monks “‘nostalgia for the numinous . . . without having to reconvert the mundane into the mythic’”.65 However, far from representing an uncritical celebration of the poet’s art, Heaney advocates a creative principle of flux and uncertainty, a mapmaking procedure similar to Friel’s and Steiner’s, whereby positions and dispositions are formulated and then critically examined: history becomes a poeisis. This element of uncertainty is a vital component of Heaney’s own creative procedure. For him, Poetry . . . is arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase. . . . [I]n the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as

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pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves. . . . Poetry is more a threshold than a path, one constantly approached and constantly departed from, at which reader and writer undergo in their different ways the experience of being at the same time summoned and released. (GT, 108)

This echoes his definition of poetry given in Heaney’s Field Day play The Cure at Troy whereby poetry is said to operate on the borderline, “always in between / What you would like to happen and what will”,66 a borderline which has come to signify an internal geographical location, a border within the country of the mind which he describes in “From the Frontier of Writing” (HL, 6). John Desmond describes that mental country: The word ‘From’ signifies a message delivered from the imagined place in the mind from which the poet views the events of history. Yet, its prepositional status also suggests movement and a provisional status also suggests movement and a provisional, contingent fix on events -- the poet forced to re-engage and define this historical moment without being trapped as an artist within it.67

Although Heaney transforms the literal border checkpoint into “the frontier of writing”, Desmond correctly shows that the poet maintains a connection with the real world through his “pure interrogation”. “Arraigned yet freed”, the poet affirms the lyrical potential of writing to affect society. In his final Oxford lecture, titled “Frontiers of Writing”, Heaney demonstrates that this intimate connection between external and internal place also applies to a community’s view of its history and identity: [T]he whole population are adepts in the mystery of living in two places at one time. Like all human beings, of course, they would prefer to live in one, but in the meantime they make do with a constructed destination, an interim place whose foundations straddle the areas of self-division, a place of resolved contradiction, beyond confusion. A place, to slightly misquote Yeats, that does not exist, a place that is but a dream, since this promised land of durable coherence and perpetual homecoming is not somewhere that is ultimately attainable by constitutional reform or territorial integration.68

The interaction between memory and imagination becomes the crucial factor in decolonizing the mind: whereas false memory “sends the quester into the land of self-deception, into the limbo of meaningless invention”, true memory “gives access to the dancing place, the point of eternal renewal and confident departure”.69 In such a formulation, Heaney encapsulates the dual focus of the critical mind, both backward and forward looking, comprising elements of both

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the real and the imaginary. Heaney’s phrase “dancing place” alludes to the conclusion of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), which portrays a memory “more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory”.70 This belief in the numinous as a non-crippling nostalgic interaction with real life is more fully developed in Friel’s Molly Sweeney (1994), which ends with the female protagonist stating that Anyhow my borderline country is where I live now. I’m at home there. Well . . . at ease there. It certainly doesn’t worry me that what I think I see may be fantasy or indeed what I take to be imagined may very well be real . . . . Real — imagined — fact — fiction — fantasy — reality — there it seems to be. And it seems to be alright.71

In contrast to James in Translations, who ceased to make the distinction between “the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us” and the “images of the past embodied in language” (T, 66), Molly defines her “borderline” as the Fifth Province from which both Friel and Heaney believe that “everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality and re-enter the whole country of Ireland imaginatively, but not necessarily constitutionally, by the northern point of the quincunx”.72 In this way, a resolution to the social, political and historical intricacies of a divided Ireland can tentatively be approached by means of a cartographical discourse rooted on the frontier of writing. Fail in this, then we shall fossilize, “imprisoned within the linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . . fact” (T, 43). 1

See Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection”, Ariel 20.4 (October, 1989): 115-31 and Catherine Nash, “Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland”, Feminist Review 44 (Summer, 1993): 39-57. 2 See especially J.B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”, Writing World: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Represntation of Landscape, eds. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan, (London: Routledge,1992), 231-47 and “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82.3 (1993): 522-42. 3 See Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 103. 4 Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map”, 115. 5 J.B. Harley, “Rereading”, 522-3. 6 Seamus Deane, “Canon Fodder: Literary Mythologies in Ireland”, Styles of Belonging: The Cultural Identities of Ulster eds. Jean Lundy and Aodán Mac Póilin (Belfast: Lagan Press, 1992), 30. 7 Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber, 1981). Referred to hereafter in text as T.

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Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987). Referred to hereafter in text as HL. 9 Seamus Deane, “General Introduction”, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol 1 (Derry: Field Day, 1991), xxv. 10 Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), 269-82. 11 Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map”, 126. 12 Kearney, Transitions, 132. 13 Irving Wardle, “Review of Translations”, Times 13 May 1981: 11. 14 Seamus Deane, Introduction, Selected Plays: Brian Friel (London: Faber, 1984), 22. 15 Michael Sheridan, “Friel Play a Watershed in Irish Theatre”, Irish Press 23 September 1980: 3. 16 Alan Peacock, “Translating the Past: Friel, Greece and Rome”, The Achievement of Brian Friel ed. Peacock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), 121. 17 Lynda Henderson, “A Dangerous Translation”, Fortnight 235 (March, 1986): 24. 18 James Fenton, “Ireland: Destruction of an Idyll”, Sunday Times 28 September 1980: 40. 19 Brian McAvera, “Brian Friel: Attuned to Catholic Experience”, Fortnight 215 (March, 1985): 20. 20 Heaney, “English and Irish”, Times Higher Educational Supplement 24 October 1980: 1199. 21 Ronald Rollins, “Friel’s Translations: The Ritual of Naming”, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 11.1 (June, 1985): 36. 22 Tim Robinson, “Listening to the Landscape”, Irish Review 14 (Autumn, 1993): 25. 23 George O’Brien, Brian Friel (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1989), 105-6. 24 Collin Meissner, “Words between Worlds: The Irish Language, the English Army, and the Violence of Translation in Brian Friel’s Translations”, Colby Quarterly 28.3 (September, 1992): 170. 25 Meissner, 173. 26 Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 213. 27 See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1-50. 28 Friel, “‘Talking to Ourselves’: Brian Friel Talks to Paddy Agnew”, interview by Paddy Agnew, Magill 4.3 (December, 1980): 60. 29 Kearney, “Between Tradition and Utopia: The Hermeneutical Problem of Myth”, On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 56. 30 Kearney, “Myth and Motherland”, Ireland’s Field Day (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 42. 31 Huggan, 124. 32 Steiner, 22. 33 Steiner, 238. 34 Steiner, 23. 35 See Heaney, “English and Irish”: “It is as if some symbolic figure of Ireland from an eighteenth-century vision poem, the one who once confidently called herself Cathleen Ni

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Houlihan, has been struck dumb by the shock of modernity. Friel’s work, not just here but in his fourteen preceding plays, constitutes a powerful therapy, a set of imaginative exercises that gives her the chance to know and say herself properly to herself again” (1199). 36 Steiner, 242. 37 Friel, Making History (London: Faber, 1987), 21-2. 38 Preface, Ireland’s Field Day (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), vii. 39 Mark Patrick Hederman, Editorial, Crane Bag 1.1 (1977), n.p. 40 Heaney, quoted by Mary Holland, programme for The Cure at Troy Derry, Guildhall, 1 October 1990. 41 Heaney, Preface The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies Vol. I (Blackwater Press, 1982), i. 42 Heaney The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988) 14, 10. Referred to hereafter in text as GT. 43 Pine, Brian Friel: “The writer is not concerned only with `reproducing’ the real. What he does is to perceive, below the line of the map he draws the contours of another world. And from the interaction between the land as he perceives it to be and the land as he knows it can be, someone from outside, the ‘reader’ of the map, watches and aids the emergence and the meaning of the map” (31). 44 Seamus Dane, “Canon Fodder”, 28. 45 Eamonn Hughes, Introduction, Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland 1960-1990 (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1991), 9. 46 Heaney, “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream”, North (London: Faber, 1975), 56. 47 Henry Hart, “Seamus Heaney’s Places of Writing”, Contemporary Literature 31.3 (1990): 387. 48 Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1989), 46-7. Referred to hereafter in text as PW. 49 Heaney, “Station Island,” Station Island (London: Faber, 1984), 93, 94. 50 Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 6-7. 51 Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), 132. Referred to hereafter in text as P. 52 Stan Smith, “The Distance Between: Seamus Heaney,” The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland Ed. Neil Corcoran (Dufour: Seren Books, 1992), 46. 53 Heaney, “Between North and South: Poetic Detours”, Interview by Richard Kearney, Visions of Europe: Conversations on the Legacy and Future of Europe (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1992), 83. 54 Andrew Waterman, “‘The Best Way is Always Through’”, Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1992), 34. 55 David Annwyn, “‘The Distance Within’: Nationalism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney”, Poetry Wales 23.2-3 (1988): 49. 56 Alan Robinson, “Seamus Heaney: The Free State of Image and Allusion”, Instabilities in British Poetry (London: MacMillan, 1988), 154. 57 Huggan, 119-20. 58 Robinson, 153.

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Edna Longley, for instance, claims that the “locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration”. See her “Belfast Notes”, London Review of Books 14.1 9 January 1992: 21. 60 Robinson, 253-4. 61 Elin Ap Hywel, “Diogenes in Doubt: Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern”, Text and Context 3 (Autumn, 1988): 137. 62 Stan Smith, “The Distance between: Seamus Heaney”, The Chosen Ground: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland ed. Neil Corcoran (Dufour: Seren Books, 1992), 46. 63 “The voice that speaks in it is informed by a memory of what transpired when St. Brendan the Navigator landed with his monks on a barren but nonetheless welcome island in the western ocean. For them, it was a place of refuge, a locus of penitential discipline and potentially a home where they might settle for good. Yet after their first night of respite on its shores, the island turned over, revealed itself as a wakened sea-monster and promptly disappeared into the waves” (PW 54). 64 Friel, Wonderful Tennessee (Meath: Gallery Press, 1993), 29. Heaney subsequently wrote a poetical treatment of Berna’s story concerning the Holy House of Loreto (WT, 56-7) in “Remembered Columns”, The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), 45. 65 Anthony Gardener quoted in Jocelyn Clarke, “Maybe it’s Wonderful, Maybe Not”, Sunday Tribune 11 July 1983: B6. 66 Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (London: Faber, 1990), 2. 67 John F. Desmond, “Allegories of Dual Citizenship: Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern”, Éire-Ireland 27.2 (1992): 66. 68 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing”, Bullán 1.1 (Spring, 1994): 3-4. 69 Heaney, “For Liberation: Brian Friel and the Use of Memory”, The Achievement of Brian Friel ed. Alan Peacock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), 240. 70 Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber, 1990), 71. 71 Friel, Molly Sweeney (Meath: Gallery Press, 1994), 67. 72 Heaney, “Frontiers of Writing”, 14.

CHAPTER NINE SAFE HOUSE: AUTHENTICITY, NOSTALGIA AND THE IRISH HOUSE The house is the primary unit of measurement and point of reference for a spatial politics, a human scale which determines the nature of our relationship to the immediate environment and beyond that to the culture as a whole. ‘Where do you live?’ figures amongst the key questions which momentarily arrest the narratives of identity, how we answer determining our place within a grid of co-ordinates which plot social subjectivity.1

Rachel Whiteread’s controversial Turner Prize-winning cement cast of the inside of a three-floor terraced Victorian house on Grove Road in the London borough of Hackney (1993) presented to the viewing public mummified space and, in the words of the artist, “fucked up everybody’s perception of their home, their houses, their domestic life, and their ‘safe’ places”.2 While “home” may imply familiarity, involving as it does a set of affective relationships which ground our sense of identity, Whiteread’s memorialising artefact enacted a defamiliarisation, focusing on the physicality of the walls, door frames and roof, revealing “a life-size, negative mirror image of the intangible, air-filled spaces that were once inhabited”.3 The private domestic sphere we normally associate with “home” became an exhibition space for the public gaze. Crucially, the exhibit disrupted social timespace by solidifying the living space of the house, thus creating a conceptual paradox: while House suggested the silencing of the house’s past and the preservation of traces of its former life-patterns, nevertheless, the sculpture was also a living space, arousing debates centring on nostalgia, the degeneration of the East End of London, and the impact of local planning decisions. As James Lingwood argues, House was “both a closed architectural form and an open memorial; at one and the same time hermetic and implacable, but also able to absorb all those individual thoughts, feelings and memories projected onto it”.4 In contrast to the inhibiting discourses (nationalism, tourism) which seek to fix the meaning of ‘place’ in order to create singular, fixed identities with recourse to an essential, internalised moment, the time-space of House necessitated a radical reconceptualisation, one akin to Doreen Massey’s re-definition of “place”. The

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singularity of place, she argues, is “formed out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location”; the identity of place is, therefore, “always formed by the juxtaposition and co-presence there of particular sets of social relations, and by the effects which that juxtaposition and co-presence produce”.5 Open to the public’s gaze and devoid of all Coventry Patmore’s “angels”, Whiteread’s House belied the initial impulse to view it as dead space. As Massey herself argues, “House emphasizes - indeed it throws in our faces - the fact that its meaning always has to be interpreted; that there was never any simple “authenticity”; that the meaning(s) of home are always open to contestation”.6 In 1993, nostalgia for departed Victorian values co-mingled with the rise of the British National Party and an increased disparity between rich and poor (Canary Wharf loomed to the south of the exhibit). The self-same re-evaluation of ‘home’ took place in the Republic of Ireland during the 1990s, a period in which the country “reinvented itself”.7 This second coming8 was inaugurated by the birth of that infamous rough beast, the Celtic Tiger: its avid embrace of globalization and informational capitalism initiated a decided paradigm shift, with a cultural discourse that prioritised “individualism, entrepreneurship, mobility, flexibility, innovation” displacing “earlier discourses prioritising national development, national identity, family, selfsacrifice, self-sufficiency and nationalism”.9 The relationship between self and state, and the related notion of ‘Irish identity’, all underwent a marked change, each stage of which can be traced in the publications of Ireland’s foremost cultural commentator, Fintan O’Toole. In The Ex-Isle of Erin, as a “placeless consumer”, he experiences a defensive nostalgia for a distinctive Irishness;10 in The Lie of the Land, he wholeheartedly adopts the transformative potential inherent in globalization, noting how “cultural distinctiveness lies not in any fixed inherited tradition but in the particular way that it reacts to an overload of global stimuli”;11 finally, in After the Ball, he demythologises the Celtic Tiger myth of prosperity and concludes that Ireland “is not exceptional” in its experience of globalization.12 The emphasis in this last publication shares with other recent analyses a concentration on how economic disparity, fostered by a market economy, impacts upon cultural identity.13 During an economic boom characterised by both an increasingly high level of owner occupation and rising house prices due to rapid increased disposable income, immigration, low direct taxation, low mortgage interest rates and increased investor activity, the “house” figured prominently as a thematic concern in the Arts. Negative equity and unaffordable house prices brought a new dimension to spatial politics and the question of plotting one’s “social subjectivity”. In September 1998 Beat Klein and Henrijke Kühne took part in the

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Artists’ Work Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and began assembling an installation entitled Property, an expanding metropolis made up of photographs of buildings offered for sale taken each week from the Property Supplement of the Irish Times. Each ‘house’ was glued on cardboard, “put together in a stand-up rectangular system”.14 When this floor-mounted complex of photographic imagery was shown at the gallery’s Unblinking Eye exhibition (18 September 2002 - 16 February 2003), a spectator could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled across some Lilliputian dystopia; even with the accorded panoptic viewpoint, she/he would discern little pattern in either scale or arrangement of the miniature urban sprawl. The work’s title, focusing on ownership and contractual agreement, intimates a concern with housing at the most basic level: “economically, buildings provide for investment, store capital, create work, house activities, occupy land, provide opportunities for rent”.15 Indeed, the Property Review, a quarterly analysing mortgage lending trends, property completion targets and interest rate outlook, used the work to illustrate the cover of their June issue in 2003. The sheer multitude of properties available for procurement shown by the exhibit seemingly belies the shortage of social housing in Ireland and the devastating impact upon the populace of soaring house prices, namely the displacement to the ever-widening commuter belts, unmanageable debt, and homelessness. Yet a work focusing on the house as a material object cannot avoid the complex meanings bound up in the relation between the built form and its social environment. As the urban theorist Anthony King argues: [Socially, buildings] support relationships, provide shelter, express social divisions, permit hierarchies, house institutions, enable the expression of status and authority, embody property relations; spatially, they establish place, define distance, enclose space, differentiate area; culturally, they store sentiment, symbolize meaning, express identity; politically, they symbolize power, represent authority, become an arena for conflict, or a political resource.16

Although every house in Property is connected, the space is eerily depopulated and the layout suggests the very opposite of social cohesion: the high density of housing and the manner in which the work “defines distance, encloses space, and differentiates area” suggests a lack of what Oscar Newman terms “defensible space”17 and, consequently, indicates the potential for urban crime and social alienation. However, the most insistent critical appraisal is reserved for the cultural level. Referring to the material used in its construction, Catherine Marshall, the exhibition’s curator, commented that the work “gives a playful yet critical insight into a formative moment in the property boom in Dublin in 1998”.18 The humour is compounded by the tone of the accompanying collected letters. With its mix of

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precise technical jargon and disingenuous euphemism, one such example offers a parody of estate agent discourse: Oozing potential and retaining its original pebble-dash, red-brick, Howth stone and Victorian Tudor-style architect-designed bay-window frontage, this sensitively restored high density development in its quiet terraced enclave, well located on a busy thoroughfare, has truly stunning cosy corners, an abundance of character and burglar alarms. (Órla Dukes, 29 October 1998)

The eclecticism of architectural styles bespeaks a postmodern aesthetic where the lines between irony, innovation and bad taste become unclear. The sheer vibrancy and eccentricity of this new European city functions in a manner similar to all such urban conglomerations: “The cities represent themselves, accumulating a mass of vital imageries from the fluid matter of memory, nostalgia, evocation, and suturing that index of scars into the projection of the contemporary moment, the present and the presence of the city in its immediacy and urgency”.19 Yet there is little sense of suture here; rather, it points towards nostalgia for more coherent, indigenous, local forms. The myriad colours, designs and sizes of Property’s structures foregrounds the rationale for the current backlash against globalization. Indeed, the emphasis on, and implied distaste for, non-indigenous design is shared by Anne Marie Hourihane’s contemporaneous caustic appraisal of Celtic Tiger Ireland’s housing developments. Describing the Carrickmines Wood development with its “Japanese-style pond” and nomenclature taken from the Irish literary canon (implying an unintentional artistic hierarchy: “The Shaw” is cheaper than either “The Joyce” or “The Kavanagh”), she says, “it could be a holiday village in southern Spain or perhaps Florida”.20 The kaleidoscopic, if not chaotic, vista presented by Property, allied to the unplanned, claustrophobic proximity of each building to the next in its quasi-medieval layout (the city plan is decidedly preHaussmann), reinforces critiques such as Hourihane’s. While the demise of de Valera’s dream of an inward-looking, economically self-sufficient, and culturally distinct nation is epitomized by Property’s plurality of styles, other works, such as Vona Groarke’s poetry collection Other People’s Houses, betray a nostalgic longing for communal identification. In “Open House”,21 the speaker may have “all the aplomb of the propertied classes”, yet becoming a householder is here akin to being condemned to solitary confinement: “This neighbourly interface is forestalled / by the containing gesture of four straight walls”. The material reality of the building “breeze blocks, plaster, paint, insulation” - evokes shelter and security, but it is that of the penitentiary and, ultimately, of the crypt: “seventy-six ideal homes / laid out with the stature so many tombs” (the full rhyme with ‘homes’ undercuts any notion of the domestic idyll). The work encapsulates what Wendy Wheeler terms

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“postmodern nostalgia”, namely, “the desire for communal identification”; nostalgia, she argues, “turns us toward the idea of the individual as non-alienated, as knowing and being known by others in the commonality of the community which is identified as ‘home’”.22 It is remarkable, however, that such a yearning for communal identification due to the standardising effects of globalization is not so pronounced in Irish culture. Theorising the impact of change on European cities, Stephen Barber argues that “each living city carries the implication of its own flattening into shards of memory” and, consequently, “the speed of its transformation must make it yearn for its cities to fall away and pass into the limbo of ecstatic nostalgia”.23 In contrast, such transformations in Ireland have caused artists to question the validity of cultural norms, to sceptically re-examine that which is deemed ‘authentic’. In his project Irelantis (1999), for example, Sean Hillen presents the viewer with hyper-real images of Ireland, collages of spliced together spaces reminiscent of different eras. This Ireland is “everywhere and nowhere”;24 Irelantis is “a world where all borders - political, cultural and psychological - are permeable”.25 The Oracle at O’Connell St. Bridge places contemporary skyscrapers (L.A. Towers) in the same cityscape as sixties Dublin, with Delphic columns in the foreground. At work here is what Fred Davis terms reflexive nostalgia […] the person does more than sentimentalise some past and censure, if only implicitly, some present. In perhaps an inchoate through nevertheless psychologically active fashion he or she summons to feeling and thought certain empirically oriented questions concerning the truth, accuracy, completeness, or representativeness of the nostalgic claim. Was it really that way?26

A clue to the artist’s intention comes from the material used: the apocalyptic image of the sky is taken from a John Hinde postcard, an image that belongs to the discourse of tourism, promoting a ‘real’ Ireland, but whose colouring is patently unreal. The Ireland that is being “lost” through globalization may be presented as “authentic”, but Hillen’s images embrace the paradox outlined by recent postcolonial theorists: to forge a nation, one must create a national consciousness and to do so requires a national, authentic art; yet this can only be constructed.27 Authenticity is not a pre-existent quality; it is contextual and strategic. The Ireland projected by Hinde is as mythical as Irelantis. Hillen continued this critique in one of his images for the Focail project (2003). Géaga Ginealaigh - The Branches of Ancestry is a poster that depicts a “fairy landscape” at Lough Gur, Co. Limerick. Through the branches in the foreground, the viewer sees a five-storey whitewashed thatched cottage: while the title may emphasise the importance of the Irish language and cultural heritage, the image suggests a

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moving with the times. Although indigenous architecture is here incorporated into a modern design, the scene is unreal, that of a fairy-tale. A more complex meditation on “the instability of our relationships to home, place and memory” is Brigid McLeer’s visual arts project, Collapsing Here.28 McLeer is an Irish artist living in London, and her work explores the concept “being at home” and the extent to which she may be displaced, part of a diasporic community that is not quite Irish. The version in Circa (1998)29 combines text and images (of the interior and exterior of a glass house, of the sea, of landscape), each of which move in relation to each other. The “glasshouse” is a perfect emblem with which to explore and represent that which is interior and exterior, evoking the interactions and interstices between that which we deem public and that which we guardedly affirm as private. The transparent glass is a metaphor for unmediated representation, an assertion of our ability to represent; yet this is offset by the changes of perspective, focus and scale employed by McLeer. Moving to England instigated a reassessment of her identity and the project highlights the difficulties of both fixing and representing the notion of ‘here’: “Here on an island of doors without houses, without insides or outsides, without openings or closings - my home (m’anim) is a bridge ever crossing”. Playing on the signifier that identifies her (“Brigid”), she attempts to bridge the gap between the Irish and English versions of herself; yet by emphasising the paradoxical nature of deixis (“pointing”), namely that which fixes and contextualises, yet also only gestures towards, the project cannot define ‘Here’ in singular terms. The motifs of journeying, of crossing or inhabiting a liminal space, of moving outwards to confront “the other”, allows the artist to actively reconfigure her place in the world rather than be passively defined by place: “I used to be a place. A territory encompassing fields, crossing walls to gardens - stepping tentatively out through the door. I used place, while leaving, as naming bridge - droichead anseo, mise m’anim, anseo agus átha(s) - I played with lexicons of here”. The key symbol is the letter “H”, graphically signalling a bridge between two “I”s: My foreignness in conjunctions used to be a place. And here and where and how bridging here, meshing where once, and there together tying loose and once again -a raft to journey staying here. Where h her here, her frame for stepping her language ladder, lines stretching steps, tries tying to there – precarious tightrope flung across from side of I to other.30

The bridge is “precarious” and the use of a continuous present tense implies a temporal hiatus, an ongoing process that eschews the securities inherent in a Heideggerian sense of “dwelling”. As a clue to her overall intention, McLeer incorporates into the Perhelion version a quotation from the architectural theorist John Rajchman: “the fold distances one from one’s habitual perception and reading

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of space, as if to transport one to the ‘elsewhere’ where things go off in unimagined directions or are folded again”.31 The “fold” (or “perplication”) negates the idea of the house as a bounded or framed space. In contrast, the “glass house” is designed according to the principle of “multiplicity” where unity is the “holding together of a prior or virtual dispersion”.32 The idea of ‘here’, then, is not a pre-defined place but a gesture towards an idea of home that is dependent on a multiplicity of factors (social interrelations, cultural determinants, recollection, imagination, etc.). While the architectural theory informing this project seems at odds with the supposed memorialising aesthetic of Whitread’s House and the postmodern kitsch of Klein and Kühne’s Property, it shares with both a belief that the specificity of place is “continually reproduced” and that “it is not a specificity which results from some long, internalised history”.33 In a Northern Irish context, to adopt Eisenman’s motto regarding architectural practice - “In order to get […] to a place, you have to […] blow it apart […] you have to look inside it and find the seeds of the new”34 - would seem ironic, if not darkly humorous, given the violent manifestations of socio-political contestation which it has endured since the late Sixties. It has been noted that factors such as the inner city developments, incorporating high-rise buildings out of scale and sympathy with already existing edifices, and traffic pressure have each contributed to the decline in Belfast’s visual character,35 but that the main contributor has been the legacy of the so-called “Troubles” (peace-lines, sectarian graffiti, destroyed buildings). However, official responses to city planning have tended to strategically implement a policy of cultural amnesia. The graphics employed by the Belfast Urban Area Plan (1989), for example, projected “a suite of positive images of newly built or planned developments” which were “counterpointed by anaemic-toned panormas of the city of the past”. As William J.V. Neill points out, all reference to “the sectarian divisions with which the city is riven was studiously avoided in both text and photographs”.36 Counterbalancing this occlusion is a project such as John Davies’s Metropoli (2000), which sets out “to document the multi-layered character of metropolitan areas and to produce a coherent series of images which reflect the positive achievements and realities within our continually changing urban space”.37 The black and white photographs of Belfast depict a city in transition with modern and Victorian designs co-existing; the elevated vantage point from which the photographs are taken enable Davies to capture the icons of global capitalism in the same frame as the crowded terraced houses of the Donegall Pass. Davies here combines a synchronic gaze, that which “registers the varieties and patterns of present usage”, with a diachronic gaze that “opens up the urban palimpsest” and “goes back through layers and accretions, perceiving history, influence,

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development, change”.38 In one key image, that of an almost completed apartment block covered by scaffolding and tarpaulin, Davies, as Colin Graham astutely argues, “catches the moments in which a city’s nostalgia is made, when the tarpaulin is pulled back like the curtain on an unveiled plaque, and in the midst of the achievement we feel that twinge of regret for its completion, because the future of a city space revealed is the beginning of a life-in-death for many pasts”.39 The tarpaulin is the photographic text’s punctum, the expansive and metonymic detail that overwhelms our reading of the image and raises it above that which is merely unary.40 Like Whiteread’s House, the image is both a living and a dead space; the black-and-white photograph may indicate a documenting of the past, yet it is simultaneously a blueprint for the future. The most celebrated chronicler of Belfast’s ever-changing city is Ciaran Carson, a poet and prose writer who “collects the bricolage of corrugated iron peace lines, the cul-de-sacs of charred vacant lots, and the pubs and jails strung on decades of barbed-wire rosaries”.41 For him, the city is “an exploded diagram of itself, along the lines of a vastly complicated interactive model aircraft kit whose components are connected by sprued plastic latitudes and longitudes”.42 The city as a “diagram” suggests a space that is readable, a delimitative narrative subject to fixed interpretation. Yet “exploded” denotes a chaotic element implying a selfcancelling, ever-shifting metropolis, an impression reinforced by Carson when he immediately introduces a qualifying, supplementary metaphor: the city, he says, “mutates like a virus, its programme undergoing daily shifts of emphasis and detail”.43 Like Davies, Carson’s use of both a synchronic and diachronic gaze allows him to depict the city in transition. In a poem entitled “Clearance”, he captures the moment at which the Royal Avenue Hotel is demolished, opening up an unexpected vista: The Royal Avenue Hotel collapses under the breaker’s pendulum: Zig-zag stairwells, chimney-flues, and a ‘thirties mural Of an elegantly-dressed couple doing what seems to be a Tango, in Wedgewood Blue and white - happy days! Suddenly more sky Than there used to be. A breeze springs up from nowhere -44

The “breaker’s pendulum”, indicative of the ineluctable passage of time and its destructive effect, exposes the 1930s interior design to the flâneur’s gaze and juxtaposes it with the more contemporary features of a “greengrocer’s shop”. Carson’s “celebration” of the city’s collapse45 is not a form of macabre documentary; rather, he revels in the materiality of the buildings and the new narratives that they embody. Playfully conflating “story” with “storey”, Carson states:

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The “fractious epic” recorded by Carson pays close attention to the “expressive” nature of architecture, “the ‘social meanings’ that people give to the built environment”.47 In certain areas and enclaves of Belfast, buildings, and their material inscriptions (murals, flags, graffiti), are not merely functional or aesthetic objects, but serve as reminders of one’s political identity. Having experienced decades of conflict, the most troubled parts of the city have been “carved into mutually antagonistic ‘turfs’, where those who do not share an affinity with the cultural / political orthodoxy in particular neighbourhoods can feel under severe pressure, if not intimidation”.48 Buildings, therefore, become sites of contestation regarding identity. In “Intelligence”, for example, Carson registers the “dense graffiti of public houses, churches […] bonding stores, graving docks, monuments, Sunday schools and Orange halls”.49 Described as “graffiti”, these buildings do not constitute “a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph”;50 rather, “graffiti” here is a marker “not only in the material, territorial sense but also of political possession and assertion”.51 In a poem such as “Night Out” Carson focuses on one building, a private drinking club, and records with minute detail the security apparatus put in place to vet each customer: Every Thursday night when we press the brass button on the galvanized wire mesh gate A figure appears momentarily at the end of the strip-lit concrete passageway, Then disappears. The gate squeaks open, slams shut almost instantly behind us. Then through the semi-opaque heavy-duty polythene swing doors they might have taken From a hospital. At the bar, we get the once-over once again.52

While this gritty, poetic urban realism seemingly luxuriates in the material description, the main thematic preoccupation centres on the implied psychological effects. The banality of the scene and the unthinking manner by which the protagonist reacts both to the security procedures and to the “broken rhythm / Of machine-gun fire” suggests that sectarian conflict and the consequent protective rituals have all become normalised, habitual.

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Paul Seawright’s Belfast series,53 comprised of large cibachrome photographs of blocked-up entrances, scarred fences and security gates outside social clubs, shares with Carson’s oeuvre a concern for the way an urban environment can both reflect and reinforce a tribal mentality. The urban landscape embodies “discourses of inclusion and exclusion” and the buildings function as “symbols of identity, validation and legitimation”.54 Four images of blocked-up windows are suggestive of forced relocation at a sectarian interface; the red white and blue UVF marking on one of them is indicative of a reflexive nostalgia for past glory, a statement of defiance and a warning. All of the images, taken in Loyalist areas, connote defensiveness and decay. As Colin Graham argues, “the blankness with which the cages, gates, bricks and corrugated iron all respond to the camera is defiance devoid of substance, and it leads the viewer to increasingly see these images as reflective of a bewilderment, a lost stand still being made, its symbols decaying”.55 At each juncture the viewer’s gaze is blocked and the material constructions themselves represent a mentality that underpins conflict. The house here is not safe, yet it is utterly resistant to change. The key difference between the Irish and Northern Irish house, and their representation in art, is the presence (or legacy) of the Troubles. The physical, socio-political and psychological effects of the ongoing strife are most noticeable at the interfaces between loyalist and nationalist communities. In a number of localities in Belfast physical barriers (“peacelines”) separate the two communities and, as Brendan Murtagh’s research has shown, they affect “nearly every aspect of daily life”: Peacelines demarcate production and consumption patterns in the city, they intensify poverty and isolate people. They concentrate violence, cut through housing markets, blight land and project negative images to visitors and investors. But they also protect, build solidarity and enhance cultural identity.56

The barriers at these junctures reinforce a sense of an embattled ethnic identity whilst simultaneously constructing the neighbouring community as ‘other’. At the same time, the Housing Executive has transformed “the sociologist’s concept of ‘defensible space’ into the policing convenience of ‘containable space’”.57 The sense of alienation and defiance is captured in Rita Duffy’s Territory (1997),58 a work comprising fifteen drawings on gesso panels, each one featuring a cartographic representation of houses and streets situated near peacelines. Inscribed across the boards are selected lines from Seamus Heaney’s “Act of Union”: “His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum”; “And ignorant little fists already / Beat at your borders”; “your tracked / And stretchmarked body, the big pain”.59 Heaney’s text presents the 1801 Act of Union in terms of a rape, a clumsy psycho-sexual

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allegory that attempts to explain the origin of the Troubles. Duffy’s artwork retains the corporeal metaphor (land-as-body), portraying the peacelines as stretchmarks indicative of Heaney’s “opened ground”; the blood-red pigment and the violently rubbed surface of each board indicates the ongoing nature of “the big pain”. The image of the house may indicate sheltered domesticity, but in Northern Irish artworks the private realm is always under scrutiny. Poets register an acute sense of vulnerability due to the all-pervasive gaze of neighbours, the police, and the opposing community. Grainne Toibin’s “Family History” depicts the moment when the domestic realm becomes unsafe: Leaving that evening, Ashamed to be seen, (the word was out our house was next to burn).60

While the family avoid “our attackers”, they come under renewed surveillance from the authorities: “Police weighed up our load, address and destination”. The individual’s behaviour within the house becomes regulated as if within a panopticon. To express this debilitating unease (and to escape from it), another poet, Medbh McGuckian, inhabits the rooms once occupied by her literary exemplars; embedding unacknowledged quotations from their works allows her to empathise with their feelings of being placed under watch. In “Balakhana”,61 for example, she cites from a passage referring to state surveillance in the first volume of Osip Mandelstam’s biography, Hope Against Hope: “In the years of terror, there was not a home in the country where people did not sit trembling at night, their ears straining to catch the murmur of passing cars or the sound of an elevator. Even nowadays, whenever I spend the night at the Shklovski’s apartment, I tremble as I hear the elevator go past’.62 Similarly, in “Yeastlight”63 she quotes from passages referring to the intrusive searches of Mandelstam’s apartment and his subsequent arrests: During the search of our apartment in 1934 the police agents failed to find the poems I had sewn into cushions or stuck inside saucepans and shoes. (271) When M. was arrested again in 1938, they simply turned over all the mattresses (9) … they shook out every book (7)

When I found In the very cup of the town those poems sewn Into cushions, or pushed into saucepans or shoes, I took the arm of someone I didn’t know Who turned over all my mattresses And shook out every book.

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The house in each of these poems become unsafe sites. In the visual artworks of Willie Doherty, the image of the house under a watchful gaze is deployed to explore the deleterious, self-regarding identity formations determined by “a society in which surveillance is the prerequisite for control”.64 In works such as Blackspot from 1997,65 Doherty portrays the intrusive gaze of the security installations on top of the Derry Walls: the viewer experiences an unsettling voyeuristic pleasure as he watches the unedited, real-time thirtyminute video projection: the houses seem peaceful, yet the inhabitants are aware at all times that they are being watched. However, for Doherty, the conflict does not simply reside in political differences. Rather than presenting the viewer with an outworn media cliché of Northern Ireland as war-torn place in which the conflict is solely between two rival factions (Catholic and Protestant), Doherty makes the viewer question our received perceptions. God Has Not Failed Us from 199066 is a black-and-white photograph of a house with barred and broken windows overlooked by a fortification flying the Union Jack and adjacent to a wall and high railings. The text (“God Has Not Failed Us”) is written across the image acting as “a sort of screen though which visual perception must pass before it can come to terms with the image itself”.67 As always, “the picture demands a context”:68 here we have a house situated in The Fountain, a Protestant working-class area on the river Foyle’s west bank in Derry. The text, taken from a sermon protesting against the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, suggests that God will protect the Protestant privileged position in Northern Ireland; the image, however, indicates economic decline and the state’s refusal (or unwillingness) to ameliorate the condition. As Maite Lorés has argued, Doherty’s “images of a scarred urban environment hint not only at the endemic nature of violence, but the equally corrosive effects of economic depression”.69 All of the examples provided in this chapter suggest perhaps the crucial distinction between recent engagements with the house North and South of the border: whereas the latter’s self-reflexivity demonstrates a positive, forwardlooking engagement with outworn symbols, the former, although equally selfaware and critical, convey a sense of being trapped in a hiatus, unable to progress. Many others could have been cited. Victor Sloan’s c-type print House, Edenderry, Portadown,70 for example, presents a close-up of a scarred wall of a house. Unlike his previous work in which he did violence to the negatives, scratching them with a pin and applying toner indicating both his anger at and critique of the scenes depicted, in the series from which this photograph is taken “[the] violence has already been done to what is depicted, and what is depicted is invariably flat, is itself all surface, a plane, a fragment of wall or ground. All photographic content has been, so to speak, compressed into this place, a surface which is essentially a

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mute repository of history”.71 The wall acts as a record of and memorial to the violence in Northern Ireland, and the current political impasse in which the anomalous State finds itself is symbolised by the inability of the viewer’s gaze to move beyond the wall’s surface. The image is reminiscent of Willie Doherty’s early photo-text Closed Circuit from 198972 which shows, in the midst of metal barriers and security cameras, the Sinn Féin Advice Centre in Short Strand. The image highlights the way the inhabitants of this nationalist ‘house‘ must protect themselves; but the text implicitly criticises the cyclopic, self-regarding ideology of nationalism, with its siege mentality, unable to engage with either the British Government or the Protestant community. However, the most recent text to incorporate the house as a central trope demonstrates a distinct shift in emphasis. Glenn Patterson’s extraordinary novel Number 5 (2003)73 traces the history of the different occupants of a terraced house in Belfast from the 1950s to the present day. While the house becomes a relatively unsafe space during the years of the Troubles, Patterson’s broader perspective allows him to portray differing social dynamics and, ultimately, what one of the characters terms “the Peace Dividend”. The location may be singular, yet each occupant’s sense of place and their corresponding idea of identity is shown to be different. As with Whiteread’s juxtaposition of different time-frames within the same work, Patterson’s novel demonstrates that place depends on the co-presence there of specific “sets of social relations”.74 1

Jon Bird, “Dolce Domum”, Rachel Whiteread: House, ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon, 2000), 119. 2 Rachel Whiteread, “A Conversation with Rachel Whiteread”, Rachel Whiteread, eds. Lisa G. Corrin et al (London: Serpentine Gallery of Modern Art, 2001), 19. 3 Andrea Schlieker, “Pause for Thought: The Public Sculptures of Rachel Whiteread”, Rachel Whiteread, eds. Corrin et al, 59. 4 James Lingwood, “Introduction”, Rachel Whiteread: House, ed. Lingwood, 8. 5 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 168-9. 6 Massey, “Space-Time and the Politics of Location”, Rachel Whiteread: House, ed. Lingwood, 42. 7 NESC, Opportunities, Challenges and Capacities for Choice, National Economic and Social Council Report No. 105, Dublin, (1999): 21. 8 The first coming was announced in T.K. Whitaker’s famous 1958 White Paper on Economic Development. 9 Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, eds., “Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland – A Critical Perspective”, Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, eds. Kirby et al. (London: Pluto, 2002), 13. 10 Fintan O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin (Dublin: New Island Books, 1997), 28. For a general commentary see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 11 O’Toole, The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities (Dublin: New Island Books 1997), 20-1.

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O’Toole, After the Ball (Dublin: New Island Books, 2003), 3. See essays by Peader Kirby and Michel Pellion in Reinventing Ireland, ed. Kirby et al, 2137, 54-68, respectively. 14 The description is by Beat Klein and Henrikje Kühne from a letter dated 24 December 1998 which was included in a book of letters entitled Property which formed part of the exhibit. 15 Anthony King, Global Cities: Post Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (London: Routledge, 1990), 11. 16 King, 11. 17 See Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City (London: Architectural Press, 1972), 3-21. 18 Catherine Marshall, “The Unblinking Eye: Lens-based Work from the IMMA Collection” (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 2. 19 Stephen Barber, Fragments of the European City (London: Reaktion, 1997), 8. 20 Ann Marie Hourihane, She Moves through the Boom (Dublin: Sitric Books, 2000), 14852. 21 Vona Groarke, “Open House”, Other People’s Houses (Meath: Gallery Press, 1999), 168. 22 Wendy Wheeler, “Nostalgia Isn’t Nasty: The Postmodernising of Parliamentary Democracy”, Altered States: Postmodernism, Politics, Culture, ed. Mark Perryman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), 40. 23 Barber, 23-4. 24 Sean Hillen, Irelantis, (Dublin: Irelantis, 1999). 25 O’Toole, “Introducing Irelantis”, Irelantis, 5. 26 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979), 21. 27 See Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, eds., Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity (London: Macmillan, 1999) and Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 28 The quote arose in conversation with the artist. This project exists in print form in four versions: Circa, Coil, Performance Research and Perhelion. The print version in Circa indicates the directions in which text and images move. A web version previously existed on the Stunned Artzine (http://www.stunned.org). 29 Brigid McLeer, “Collapsing Here”, Circa, 86 (1998): 17-22. 30 McLeer, “Collapsing Here”, 21. 31 See http://www.heelstone.com/wherewewere/brigid/brigidpoetry.htm The quotation comes from John Rajchman, Constructions (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998), 23. 32 Rajchman, 15-6. 33 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 155. 34 Eisenman cited in Rajachman, 19. 35 C. E. B. Brett, “Victorian and Edwardian Belfast: Preserving the Architectural Legacy of the Inner City”, Urban Planning and Cultural Inclusion: Lessons from Belfast and Berlin, Eds. William J. V. Neill and Hanns-Uve Schwedler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 90. 13

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William J. V. Neill, “The Urban Planning Context in Belfast: A City Between War and Peace”, Urban Planning and Cultural Inclusion, Eds. William J. V. Neill and Hanns-Uve Schwedler, 47. 37 John Davies, http://www.daviesphoto.demon.co.uk/metropoli.htm 38 For the distinction between the two kinds of gaze, see Peter Barry, Contemporary British Poetry and the City (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000), 224-6. 39 Colin Graham, “Metropoli”, Source Magazine, 26 (2001): 10. 40 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Flamingo, 2000), 32-59. 41 Paul McDonaugh, Review of The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti, Éire-Ireland, 26.1 (Spring, 1991): 120. 42 Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997), 15. 43 Carson, The Star Factory, 15. 44 Carson, “Clearance”, The Irish for No (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1987), 32. 45 See Robert Johnstone, Belfast: Portraits of a City, (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), 151. 46 Carson, The Star Factory, 126. 47 Malachy McEldowney, Ken Sterrett and Frank Gaffikin, “Architectural Ambivalence: The Built Environment and Cultural Identity in Belfast”, Urban Planning and Cultural Inclusion, eds. William J. V. Neill and Hanns-Uve Schwedler, 101. 48 Frank Gaffikin, Michael Morrissey and Ken Sterrett, “Remaking the City: The Role of Culture in Belfast”, Urban Planning and Cultural Inclusion, eds. William J. V. Neill and Hanns-Uve Schwedler, 159. 49 Carson, “Intelligence”, Belfast Confetti (Meath: Gallery Press, 1989), 81. 50 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta, 1997), 1. 51 Declan McGonagle, “Troubled Land”, Troubled Land: The Social Landscape of Northern Ireland (London: Grey Editions), 1987, n.p. 52 Carson, “Night Out”, Belfast Confetti, 77. 53 Paul Seawright, Paul Seawright (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2000), 83-105. 54 Brian Graham, “Contested Images of Place among Protestants in Northern Ireland”, Political Geography, 17.2 (1998): 130. 55 Colin Graham, “Belfast in Photographs”, The Cities of Belfast, eds. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 159. 56 Brendan Murtagh, The Politics of Territory: Policy and Segregation in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 63-4. 57 David Brett, “Historicism and Modernity: New Building in Belfast”, Circa 56 (MarchApril, 1991): 32. 58 Rita Duffy, Territory, Banquet (Derry: Ormeau Baths Gallery, 1997), n.p. 59 Seamus Heaney, “Act of Union”, North (London: Faber, 1975), 50. 60 Gráinne Tobin, “Family History”, Banjaxed (Donegal: Summer Palace Press, 2002), 22. 61 Medbh McGuckian, “Balakhana”, On Ballycastle Beach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39-40. 62 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward (London: Harvill Press, 1971), 349. The italicised words are those used in the poem.

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McGuckian, “Yeastlight”, On Ballycastle Beach, 55. David Green, “Thwarted Vision: New Works by Willie Doherty”, Portfolio 24 (1996): 56. 65 Willie Doherty, False Memory (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 158. 66 Willie Doherty, Dark Stains (San Sebastian: Koldo Mitxelena, 1999), 54. 67 Dan Cameron, “Partial View: Transgressive Identity in Willie Doherty’s Photographic Installations”, Willie Doherty (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1993), n.p. 68 Taina Erävaara, “Willie Doherty”, trans. Michael Garner, Something Else: Irish Contemporary Art, ed.Valerie Connor et al. (Turku: Turku Art Museum, 2002), 73. 69 Maite Lorés, “The Streets Were Dark with Something More Than Night: Film Noir Elements in the Work of Willie Doherty”, Dark Stains, 116. 70 Victor Sloan, House, Edenderry, Portadown, Victor Sloan: Selected Works, 1980-2000 (Derry: Ormeau Baths Gallery, 2001), 141. 71 Aidan Dunne, “A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan’s Photographic Work”, Victor Sloan: Selected Works, 1980-2000, 122. 72 Doherty, Closed Circuit, Willie Doherty: Unknown Depths (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1990), n.p. 73 Glenn Patterson, Number 5 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003). 74 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 167-72. 64