The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969

Utterly Resigned Terror

Aaron Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754638391
• eBook ISBN: 9781351881111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For the past 30 years, the so-called 'Troubles' thriller has been the dominant fictional mode for representing Northern Ireland, leading to the charge that the crudity of this popular genre appropriately reflects the social degradation of the North. Aaron Kelly challenges both these judgments, showing that the historical questions raised by setting a thriller in Northern Ireland disrupt the conventions of the crime novel and allow for a new understanding of both the genre and the country. Two essays on crime fiction by Walter Benjamin and Berthold Brecht appear here for the first time in English translation. By demonstrating the relevance of these theorists as well as other key European thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek to his interdisciplinary study of Irish culture and the crime novel, Kelly refutes the idea that Northern Ireland is a stagnate anomaly that has been bypassed by European history and remained impervious to cultural transformation. On the contrary, Kelly's examination of authors such as Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, Gerald Seymour, Colin Bateman, and Eoin McNamee shows that profound historical change and complexity have characterized both Northern Ireland and the thriller form.

Chapter 1
‘The Green Unpleasant Land’: The Political Unconscious of the British ‘Troubles’ Thriller

‘I will not cease from Mental Fight’.

William Blake, Jerusalem

J. Bowyer Bell discerns a correlation between the production of the thriller and broader structures of British propaganda and influence over the last thirty years: ‘in some strange small way the thrillers on Irish matters may have played a part in the British campaign to restore order, if not justice, to Ulster. In bold strokes of black and white, they have painted the jolly ploughboy, the Irish rebel, the romantic gunman, as a terrorist, futile, brutal, at best, misguided, at worst a callous killer. Surely the British could ask for no more’ (1978, 22).¹ However, as established in the introduction, the political unconscious of popular fiction offers a means of refuting the dismissal of popular culture as sheer mass deception, and thereby of negotiating the relationships between official propaganda or policy and the British ‘Troubles’ thriller in their full historical complexity. The application of a reductive Frankfurt School methodology of mass culture as self-affirmatively ‘identical’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 121) to a British-Irish colonial binary² constitutes the subjectivity producing and superintending this body of texts as a unitary British self-presence.

Indeed, the function of gangsterism permits a brief outlining of how the dialectic of the repressive and the redemptive refutes the dismissal of the thriller as pure propaganda. Luke Gibbons posits, in accordance with Bowyer Bell, that ‘the fact that the implementation of a criminalisation policy in the North in the mid-1970s coincided with the vogue enjoyed by the Godfather films handed the British authorities a valuable rhetorical weapon in their propaganda war against republicans. From then on, the leaders of Sinn Fein could be denigrated simply as ‘Godfathers’, and political violence similarly dismissed as ‘organised crime’, perpetrated by the mindless thugs of the republican mafia produced by the nationalist ghettoes’ (1997, 51). Although such representation can be imbricated with the state criminalization of paramilitary prisoners, which ultimately led to the Hunger Strikes, in the redemptive modality of the text, the gangster is also a figure affording allegories of familial belonging, filiative communal attachment, assured masculinity and so on.

In establishing the problematics of the British identities – and by British I shall be largely referring to the ‘Great Britishness’ constructed by English Nationalism – produced by the ‘Troubles’ thriller and the function of their ideological investment in representations of Northern Ireland, I shall begin by utilizing, and to some extent questioning, the theoretical framework provided by Edward Said's Orientalism. Certainly the dominant fictional representation of the North by one specific genre affords a focal instance of Said's formulation of the means by which a hegemonic field of knowledge is enthroned: ‘There is a rather complex dialectic of reinforcement by which the experiences of readers in reality are determined by what they have read, and this in turn influences writers to take up subjects defined in advance by readers’ expectations’ (1995, 94). However, in tracing the contradictions of the optimal or dominant reading positions produced by these texts across the historical interstices of class, gender, race and so on, there increasingly emerges a tension between the Gramscian and Foucauldian strands of Said's Orientalism that I shall seek to dissect.³ This chapter contends that there is no homogeneous, immemorial British subject configuring a stable generic unity, but that instead the antinomies etched within and between these texts belie their implication in historical process. The most prevalent cultural force mapping such historical process in the British thriller is provided by the hegemonic project of the New Right in England. It reaches from the disenchanted maverick voices of 1970s thrillers, through the collective institutional locus provided by Thatcherism and its populist militarism, and then permeates the continuing vogue for SAS fiction in the 1990s.

Indubitably, following one line of Said's thought, Michel Foucault's concept of a ‘discursive formation’ (1972, 38), wherein a group of texts both produce and delimit a given mode of knowledge, does assist an understanding of the mechanisms by which the British ‘Troubles’ thriller seeks to instigate and sustain a dominant representation of Northern Ireland. Foucault's models are particularly instructive in establishing the symbiotic complicity between power and knowledge: ‘We should admit that power produces knowledge … that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute … power relations’ (1980, 27). The intricate interrelationality of power and knowledge proffers a method for determining the precise historical conditions in which the discursive field of the ‘Troubles’ thriller naturalizes itself as representing the ‘truth’ about Northern Ireland. Indeed, in many of these texts one of the major mysteries to be explained and systematized is the riddle of a recondite Irish otherness. For example, Christopher Hawke's For Campaign Service claims that ‘the answers were always more difficult to set right in this theatre of operations because of one highly unpredictable factor – the Irish mind’ (57).⁴ The British ‘Troubles’ thriller grounds its self-empowerment on charting a cartography of knowledge around this inscrutable enigma.⁵ The representational mystification of Northern Irish society by these thrillers parallels the hegemonic framework theorized by Said's account of the ‘radical realism’ of the Orientalist text: ‘such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe’ (1995, 94). The deep attachments of power and knowledge accrued by such a discursive structure help explicate the viability of the trend, noted by Joseph McMinn, for thrillers produced by English journalists after their tours of duty in the North:⁶

their strength and limitations as novels come directly from the ambiguous social position of ‘on-the-spot’ journalism. This position ensures access to privileged forms of knowledge but rarely to a community. In other words, the journalists/novelists may divulge ‘authentic’ images of the much publicized protagonists because of the special kind of social intimacy developed over years of observation and contacts, but this is not a social intimacy (114).

Northern Ireland, then, in such a system of knowledge about Northern Ireland, becomes, to appropriate Said's terms, ‘less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics’ (1995, 177). Whilst Ireland and Irish people historically have figured in British spy and crime fiction,⁷ it is interesting that the current deluge of thrillers concerned with explaining Northern Ireland has occurred under a period of Direct Rule from Westminster.⁸ This representational convergence within a specific power relationship foregrounds the play and interaction, which Gayatri Spivak notes, in Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte between two verbs: vertreten (to represent as in speaking for or standing in for) and darstellen (to represent as in to re-present in art) (1988a, 276). In assessing the ‘positional superiority’ (Said 1995, 7) by which this representational framework is actuated, there is an interesting correspondence between the static yet unresolved system of the thriller form and Homi K. Bhabha's account of the insecure vacillation between ‘fixation’ and ‘reactivation’ (1994, 74) in the construction of the stereotype by a dominant gaze.

Under this gaze Northern Ireland as fetishized object is sought in order to restore to the dominant subject an original presence by masking its division and fracture: ‘The fetish or stereotype gives access to an “identity” which is predicated on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal’ (1994, 75). By suggesting that the English subjectivities produced across the historical co-ordinates of the ‘Troubles’ thriller are not homogeneous or stable, I am not denying thereby the representational dominance of those subjectivities. Rather, I am seeking to situate that dominance in historical process, in an ongoing hegemonic struggle implicating not only relations between Ireland and England, but also a fractious assemblage of forces concerning class, gender, state formation, changing modes of production, crises of patriarchy, of the social ideologeme of the family, etc.

Therefore, despite the consistent effort to transpose historical problematics onto the Irish as ‘a haunted race’ (Shaun Clarke 1998, 127), tormented by their troubled history and barbarity, it is the task of this chapter to restructure the political unconscious of England's own historical nightmare, to textualize the materials and problematics which the British ‘Troubles’ thriller is produced both to repress and resolve. In short, to overturn this putatively stable, superintending presence and, in the words of Pierre Macherey, to ‘trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it’ (94).⁹ The precise determination of the historical conditions necessitating the discourse of power-knowledge, which is constituted by the ‘Troubles’ thriller, entails the redress of a twofold distortion. Firstly, it is imperative to dispute the ‘truth’ of this discourse as a direct representation and reflection of Irish reality; and secondly, it is equally incumbent to refute the suggestion that the identities producing and produced by such representations are the expression of an organic, popular, and above all, unproblematic Britishness.

In illustrating the dominance of the power-knowledge cartography through which the gaze of the international thriller market represents Northern Ireland, and moreover, in beginning to unveil the precise historical forces seeking to perpetuate this immemorial displacement, the reception granted to Tom Clancy's contemptible Patriot Games – a parallel American New Right text – is instructive. Despite the fact that, as Eamonn Hughes notes, this novel ‘uses events in the North to drive its plot, but not one scene is set in Northern Ireland’ ('Introduction’, 6), Marc A. Cerasini contends that from a reading of the text ‘we learn much about Irish politics and the history of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland’ (26). There is a telling moment in Patriot Games wherein the CIA hero, Jack Ryan, stares into the eyes of the improbably Maoist Irish renegade, Sean Miller, and sees ‘nothing. Nothing at all’ (122). The scene neatly symbolizes how this dominant gaze attempts to use Northern Ireland as an empty or open signifier, a historically voided space upon which to rehearse and inscribe its hopes and anxieties. Such a representational mechanism reaffirms the value of the concept of the political unconscious, the sense that the thriller does not disclose a direct reflection of Irish history, but rather that History itself induces an ideology of formal ruptures to be negotiated by the troubled workings of the text's redemptive and repressive modalities. The utilization of Northern Ireland as an empty signifier can be reclaimed from its displacement by the recognition of History as exhorting subtext. Jameson's formulation of Freud's ‘The Uncanny’ serves as an allegory of the political unconscious of the British thriller's formal solutions, the manner by which Northern Ireland as historically-voided receptacle displaces the unrepresented yet symptomatically inherent historical trauma of English social fracture: ‘the formal articulation of uncanny or repressed materials may be organized as a kind of shell game … in which the reader's attention is diverted to the empty receptacle in such a way as to replace the psychic effect the filled one would inevitably have determined’ (1988b, Vol.1, 49).

Accordingly, we must rewrite the positional mechanism of the dominant discourse whereby Northern Ireland is projected as the intractable Id upon which a stable, civilized, Ego-located English subject and History are assembled. For example, in Gerald Seymour's The Journeyman Tailor, the British Intelligence operatives refer to ‘Ireland, the abscess that governed their lives’ (23).¹⁰ This binary is analogous to the dominant-subordinate positionings of Said's account of Orientalism, wherein ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (1995, 3). Such a placement is an example of Declan Kiberd's account of the figuration of Ireland as ‘a secret England called Ireland’ (1995, 15). It is a hierarchization of subjective placings which recapitulates the dominant narrative paradigms of British history outlined by Cairns Craig, wherein a normative, seemingly self-contained English monad simultaneously situates and marginalizes obtrusive provincial forms: ‘in the history of England, Scottish or Irish issues will be relevant only when they destructively intrude into the otherwise continuous domain of English narrative … England has a history; Ireland will only acquire a history once it comes into the orderly and progressive world imposed upon it by England’ (101).

There is an extraordinary ideological manoeuvre instigated by the production of a civilized English historical Ego upon an interruptive Irish otherness. For in the very moment of habituating itself as the linear and progressive model of History, this immemorial English paradigm is founded on the removal of itself from the dynamics of History, which are then projected onto the ideologeme of the ‘Troubles’. In other words, Northern Ireland as a voided, open signifier opens up a desiring space for this dominant subject to foist and engage its own historical problematics even in the very act of avowedly disaffiliating and absolving itself from them. Hence, Chris Petit's The Psalm Killer¹¹ offers its readership a portrait of the deranged serial killer, Candlestick, who, although actually a former British soldier who grew up in England, only has his murderous urges eventually triggered by the gothicized terrain of Northern Ireland, which offers itself as the completion of this Ego-Id historical identity:

When he arrived in Belfast he knew there was still something missing about himself and waited to discover what it was. He wondered if it mightn't connect with the sense of secrecy that pervaded his childhood, the time spent watching, waiting, hidden. He found what he was looking for in the clouded eye of a tortured man. The dumb, uncomprehending pain of the animals he killed was replaced by a terrible sense of recognition in the eye of his beholder that he was facing his nemesis. Now and at the hour of our death. He knew then that his destiny was destruction, killing people. Had he stayed in England he might have avoided this awful calling, but let loose in the grand labyrinth of Belfast, with its tortuous history, he became magnificent (66).

If we return to Bhabha's conceptualization of the stereotype, this passage assumes further significance in the dialectic of reinforcement contained by its gaze. A stereotyped image of Northern Ireland is authenticated for the dominant gaze by its reflection in the eyes of a corpse, producing a mutual identification or recognition through which the ‘missing’ component of Candlestick's identity is compensated. The dominant subject is accordingly restored to the narcissism of the Imaginary and a whole, ideal Ego by its petrifaction of Northern Ireland, in a confirmation of Bhabha's account of the fetishism of the stereotyped gaze: ‘The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (which the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in its signification of psychic and social relations’ (1994, 75). In other words, the essentialist, synchronic discourse of knowledge produced by the ‘Troubles’ thriller undertakes to efface the diachronic disruption of its own narrative by the very social materials which it seeks to represent. Put most...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• dedication
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: ‘You Didn't Need a Reason to Kill People, Not Here’: Narrative, the North and Historical Agency
• 1 ‘The Green Unpleasant Land’: The Political Unconscious of the British ‘Troubles’ Thriller
• 2 ‘And What Do You Call It?’: The Thriller and the Problematics of Home in Northern Irish Writing
• 3 ‘New Languages Would Have to be Invented’: Representations of Belfast and Urban Space
• 4 ‘A Man Could Get Lost’: Constructions of Gender
• 5 ‘It's Not for the Likes of Us to Philosophize’: The Pleasure and Politics of Thrills, or, Towards a Political Aesthetics
• Appendix A Travelling With Crime Novels
• Appendix B On the Popularity of the Crime Novel
• Bibliography
• Index