Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature

Lost in a Liminal Space?

Birte Heidemann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319289915
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book uncovers a new genre of 'post-Agreement literature', consisting of a body of texts – fiction, poetry and drama – by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles but published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement.In an attempt to demarcate the literary-aesthetic parameters of the genre, the book proposes a selective revision of postcolonial theories on 'liminality' through a subset of concepts such as 'negative liminality', 'liminal suspension' and 'liminal permanence.'These conceptual interventions, as the readings demonstrate, help articulate how the Agreement's rhetorical negation of the sectarian past and its aggressive neoliberal campaign towards a 'progressive' future breed new forms of violence that produce liminally suspended subject positions.

© The Author(s) 2016

Birte HeidemannPost-Agreement Northern Irish LiteratureNew Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature10.1007/978-3-319-28991-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature: An Introduction

Birte Heidemann¹

(1)

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

…there is now a new wave of writing coming out of this place that demands attention; a hugely varied body of poetry, prose and drama, some of it still raw or rough-edged, but all of it distinctive, timely and powerful.

Daragh Carville, New Soundings: An Anthology of New Writing from the North of Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003), xi.

End Abstract

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (‘Agreement’ hereafter) in 1998, ¹ Northern Ireland has undergone significant transformation in terms of its political governance, and its reception in the artistic, aesthetic and literary domains. As critics such as Aaron Kelly caution, the Agreement’s “bourgeois reconciliation instructs that we should be amazed, or at the very least heartened” ² by its commitment to economic change, which is most visibly manifested in the aggressive redevelopment of Northern Ireland’s capital. A walk through the streets of post-Agreement Belfast reveals not only the changing terrain of the cityscape, but also the unchanging remains of its sectarian past. This rift between rhetoric and reality finds an even more pronounced expression in the way the City Council promotes Belfast as a place to “Be Inspired,” inviting the prospective visitors to “[d]o something out of the ordinary and do something extraordinary.” ³ Since 2008, the city centre has been plastered with posters that prominently feature a heart-shaped ‘B’ and a website whose very name reads like an instruction: gotobelfast.com. ⁴ This link leads to the official visitor website of Belfast, which builds on the heart-shaped, heartfelt imagery of the rebranding campaign, soliciting the visitors to post their favourite places on the “Lovin’ Belfast” guide: “Like it, pin it, tweet it and share it!” ⁵ In a curious way, then, the rebranding of Belfast resonates with Kelly’s cautionary remark that the Agreement ‘instructs’ as much as it ‘heartens’ its recipients by means of a “bourgeois reconciliation” with populism, neoliberalism and the rhetorics of economic and entrepreneurial ‘progress.’

Notwithstanding the City Council’s claim that Belfast is “packed with history,” ⁶ Northern Ireland’s conflictual past remains conspicuously absent from the visitor’s website: “Our great city blossomed from very humble beginnings…The perfect haven for repairing sea ravaged ships… And the rest is our history.” ⁷ Although the Council is careful to acknowledge the city’s colonial history (the “very humble beginnings”), it turns silent when it comes to Belfast’s recent past. The use of the possessive pronoun in “our history” not only reaffirms the conformity forged by the Agreement by assuming a collective responsibility for one history—the one that is ours—but in doing so, it denies the disruptions produced by Northern Ireland’s ‘troubled’ past. Sure enough, the city’s topography of terror hardly configures in the tourist adverts; instead, Belfast’s history is primarily identified with the Harland and Wolff shipyard which built the RMS Titanic in 1911. The redevelopment of Queens Island into the Titanic Quarter is indeed a glaring testimony to Northern Ireland’s lofty, if not megalomaniac, redevelopment project. ⁸ The showcasing of the city’s glorious past reveals nothing of the struggles of the workers, the labour politics and class hierarchies that ran along the colonially engineered sectarian divisions in the shipyards. On the contrary, the ‘Titanicisation’ of Belfast becomes a proxy narrative to post-Agreement Northern Ireland’s rhetorical escape from history, which “seeks to re-brand and co-opt the Titanic as a symbol” ⁹ for a new political course. Thus, it comes as no surprise that by re-enacting yet another doomed history—that of the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage—, Belfast’s own doomed history is overwritten by a “persuasive but frail version of the future.” ¹⁰ Indeed, the main objective of the redevelopment project is to rid itself of the “negative part of Belfast’s past” ¹¹ which would tarnish the polished, albeit porous, fabric of the post-Agreement city. As if “airbrushed from history,” ¹² the city’s sectarian past is thus systematically relegated to “the ‘blank page’ of the Titanic Quarter.” ¹³

In the last two decades, a number of Northern Irish writers have begun to fill the ‘blank page’ of the post-Agreement discourse and its (dis)engagement with the country’s conflictual past. Their writings anticipated the rhetoric of economic ‘progress’ and ‘prosperity’ even before the Agreement had been signed. In Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel Eureka Street (1996), for instance, this ‘proleptic’ perspective not only registers the shared sense of euphoria among Belfast’s residents following the declaration of the first ceasefire of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1994, but also points to the dangers and drawbacks of joining the bandwagon of global capitalism. ¹⁴ In the course of the narrative, protagonist Jake paints a sorry sight of the post-ceasefire city, one that foresees Belfast’s future redevelopment as a doomed project even before it had begun: “Belfast is a city that has lost its heart. A shipbuilding, rope-making, linen-weaving town. It builds no ships, makes no rope and weaves no linen. Those trades died. A city can’t survive without something to do with itself.” ¹⁵ As in Kelly’s reading of the Agreement’s “bourgeois reconciliation,” the narrator’s envisioning of Belfast serves as a periodic reminder of the city’s frail foundations, rooted in the dead trade of shipbuilding. Given that it was not just shipbuilding but also rope-making and linen-weaving that had nourished its economy, the Titanicisation of post-Agreement Belfast seems all the more puzzling for a city that is struggling to rediscover its originality. The choice of the Titanic is perhaps neither incidental nor innocent, but one that seizes upon the populist rebranding of the Titanic story in James Cameron’s Hollywood blockbuster of 1997. In either case, by anticipating how the Agreement seeks “to capitalise on the rhetoric of reinvention,” ¹⁶ Wilson’s post-ceasefire novel provides a proleptic commentary on the object of critique in Northern Irish literature since 1998.

One day after the signing of the Agreement, the Irish Times published a response by the late Seamus Heaney in which he announced the birth of a new literary era: “it is at the level of creative spirit, in the realm of glimpsed potential rather than intransigent solidarity, that the future takes shape.” ¹⁷ In an attempt to capture the “creative spirit” of what I call ‘post-Agreement literature,’ this book turns to the “hugely varied body of poetry, prose and drama” ¹⁸ to have emerged in the past two decades. Accordingly, the conceptual treatment of the term ‘post-Agreement literature’ in this book distances itself from the seamless blending of genres under the rubric of ‘contemporary literature.’ Given the new political situation of ‘post-Agreement,’ the term ‘contemporary’ in a Northern Irish context is misleading to say the least, for it is generally associated with the times of the Troubles and, to some extent, with the early stages of the Peace Process. While this book carefully acknowledges the contributions of writers such as Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson (poetry), Brian Moore and Bernard MacLaverty (fiction), and Stewart Parker and Brian Friel (drama)—to name a few—to the country’s “creative spirit,” it separates them from the “new wave” ¹⁹ of writers, who approach the period of communal violence from an entirely new set of personal, political and cultural sensibilities. Most of the writers I classify under the category of ‘post-Agreement’ were born around the same time Heaney and his contemporaries began to publish their work—the beginning of the Troubles—and came of age during the Peace Process. As a result, post-Agreement writers are acutely aware of how this shifting political terrain breeds a different kind of ‘conflict,’ one that is certainly less violent but gestures towards new forms of violence exerted by the Agreement’s rhetorical negation of the sectarian past and its aggressive neoliberal campaign. It is between these two coordinates of a suppressed and ‘regressive’ past, and the ‘progressive’ and ‘agreed-upon’ future that this book locates the generic parameters of post-Agreement literature.

Although the literature written in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement has received considerable academic attention in the past decades, post-Agreement literature as a literary genre, with its distinct formal-aesthetic parameters, remains largely unexplored. For a number of critics, this group of writers is defined as one that distances itself from the violent trajectories of the Troubles, but one that does not necessarily qualify for a literary genre in its own right, particularly in isolation from the preceding generations. Instead, dubbed variedly as the “new generation” ²⁰ or, even more vaguely, as the “new voices” ²¹ of “some recent” ²² Northern Irish literature, these critics remain elusive to any uniform categorisation or classification. There are other commentators who tend to assign certain generic qualities to a particular group of writers, variously naming them “prodigal novelists,” ²³ “emerging poets,” ²⁴ “youngish poet[s] from Northern Ireland” ²⁵ or, more specifically, “first-generation peace poets.” ²⁶ It is only Miriam Gamble’s coinage of “peace poets” that comes close to demarcating generic parameters by echoing Heaney’s views on the “creative spirit” of a new political situation. Having said that, the term ‘peace’ in the Northern Irish context has rather complex spatio-temporal connotations: it cannot be defined in terms of a temporal break signalled by the signing of the Agreement in 1998, as it is equally tenable to the transitional period of the Peace Process. And while one may be tempted to strike a hopeful tone over the implementation of political peace, the “peace poets” category, too, fails to register the critical undertones in the works of post-Agreement writers.

Drawing from the existing literary criticism on the new impulses of ‘contemporary’ Northern Irish writers, this book goes a step further in constructing the genre of ‘post-Agreement literature’ through temporal, spatial and formal-aes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature: An Introduction
• 2. From Postcolonial to Post-Agreement: Theorising Northern Ireland’s Negative Liminality
• 3. Retrospective (Re)Visions: Post-Agreement Fiction
• 4. Between the Lines: Post-Agreement Poetry
• 5. Performing ‘Progress’: Post-Agreement Drama
• 6. Diagnosing the Post-Agreement Period: A Literary Detour
• Backmatter