Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles

Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures

Caroline Magennis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350074743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Winner of the British Association for Comtemporary Literary Stuides (BACLS) monograph prize The period since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 has seen a sustained decrease in violence and, at the same time, Northern Ireland has undergone a literary renaissance, with a fresh generation of writers exploring innovative literary forms. This book explores contemporary Northern Irish fiction and how the 'post'-conflict period has led writers to a renewed engagement with intimacy and intimate life. Magennis draws on affect and feminist theory to examine depictions of intimacy, pleasure and the body in their writings and shows how intimate life in Northern Ireland is being reshaped and re-written. Featuring short reflective pieces from some of today's most compelling Northern Irish Writers, including Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Bernie McGill and David Park, this book provides authoritative insights into how a contemporary engagement with intimacy provides us with new ways to understand Northern Irish identity, selfhood and community.

1

Intimacy

While intimate life has provided a source of inspiration for writers from the North of Ireland for centuries, the decades since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement have seen a marked interest in this theme as a central object of creative inquiry. This chapter will argue that recent novels and short stories demonstrate the richness of intimacy as a way to re-examine the experiences of Northern Irish people in the twenty-first century. The introduction to this book set out the changing social context for these representations, and subsequent chapters will examine two facets of this turn towards intimacy in more detail: pleasure and touch. This chapter will examine five texts that examine intimate relationships in very different ways. Michael Hughes’s Country explores paramilitarism during the mid-1990s. Because the novel involves a retelling of the Iliad, its depiction of intimacy is informed by both this source text and also the ways in which decades of conflict take their toll on romantic, filial and familial life. This novel also involves a reworking of some of the tropes of Troubles fiction and so acts as a point of comparison with the more contemporary-focused writing which follows in this chapter. Wendy Erskine’s Sweet Home, a collection of short stories, examines domestic life in East Belfast, and while the conflict does not loom as large as in Hughes’s work, she subtly explores domestic mores and what goes on behind closed doors. Returning to East Belfast, Jan Carson’s The Firestarters considers faith and family in her signature variant of magic realism, offering an inventive perspective on intimacy and domesticity in an East Belfast terraced house. Phil Harrison’s The First Day shows an interplay between sexuality and violence that is distinct from the way this trope is used in fictions of the Troubles as the author is heavily influenced by the language of philosophy, literature and faith. Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies, from the title onwards, meditates on the complex ways in which our public and private lives intersect. All of these novels and short story collections demonstrate the complexity of representing intimacy. All of them are influenced by the legacy of a long violent conflict and the dictates of an uneasy peace. Taken in total, they create a compelling exploration of the different ways in which they engage with intimate life demonstrates the plurality of experiences that make up contemporary Northern Irish experience.

Intimacy is not a concern specific to Northern Irish literature. In recent years, approaches to contemporary fiction have traced the affective economies of what Jennifer Cooke calls ‘intimate reading encounters’.¹ I want to – drawing on the work of Cooke, Lauren Berlant and others – first to consider the concept in a more general sense, and then to ask how we might position Northern Irish intimacy. The term ‘intimacy’ is used for a variety of acts, practices and orientations. It can function as a euphemism to cover a range of ambiguous, usually sexual, acts: essentially, it can be way of talking about that which is hidden or behind closed doors. This imperative is particularly keen in fiction grappling with the representation of relationships in a ‘post’-conflict society. Within the prose fiction under consideration, truths unspoken feature heavily, and the inability to fully articulate desire, apathy and disgust plays a role in several. Equally important, an intimate is a term used to refer to a confidant, with whom you make sense of your personal life by setting it out into a narrative, and this process is both mirrored in, and complicated by, the act of writing fiction. To intimate to someone can also mean to tell them part of a possibly sensitive story: intimate as a verb is often followed by a ‘might’ or a ‘should’, indicating a state of affairs that is not quite ready to be fully shown. This ambivalence is also a strong characteristic of these texts and an aspect that I want to draw out – intimacy can be both a sense-making narrative and a hidden world.

Within the Northern Irish context, a turn to the intimate could be read as fundamentally apolitical, as a deliberate orientation away from the sectarian violence of Troubles, but this elides the complex relationship of the personal to the political. The ‘public’ politics of sectarian conflict and the ‘private’ politics of intimacy is a binary that is easily collapsed by examining the lives depicted in the fiction that follows. In intimacy, we find the interaction of the public knowledge of telling or writing and the private realm of our own hidden knowledge, as Lucy Caldwell notes ‘To intimate means to imply, to communicate something urgent or delicate or otherwise impossible to articulate with the most sparing of signs.’² Intimacy is a way of knowing that can only occur through an exchange. Most obviously, we learn the culturally appropriate behaviours for our intimate encounters through what we have seen and read, but accordingly, as Cooke points out, the ‘ways we write and the forms in which we choose to write about our most intimate states – such as love or mourning – are capable of altering our conceptions of them’.³ When we write intimacy into being, whether as authors or critics, we are engaged in a process of reinscribing and renegotiating our part in this process.

Intimacy in literature, then, lives at the intersection between our private and social worlds – it does not just represent a sanctuary from the external world. Berlant articulates the complex way in which the intimate functions:

This view of ‘a life’ that unfolds intact within the intimate sphere represses, of course, another fact about it: the unavoidable Troubles, the distractions and disruptions that make things turn out in unpredicted scenarios … moral dramas of estrangement and betrayal, along with terrible spectacles of neglect and violence even where desire, perhaps, endures.⁴

Indeed, we often find disappointment due to discordance between scripts of intimacy, for example, with a partner who does not perform their affection in the manner that we want. Intimacy can be a disruptive force on a continuum, from the smaller ruptures of awkward lovemaking to the larger problems of abuse and violence meted out by a trusted partner or family member. The spectre of what is called intimate partner violence hangs over any idealization of home and hearth. In the texts under consideration, we will see unwanted sexual encounters and difficult decisions, but domestic violence and sexual abuse is not quite the narrative catalyst so often seen in earlier Northern Irish fiction: these texts often feature women taking control of their living spaces and intimate lives, especially in the work of Caldwell and Erskine.

The consideration of the intimate could be seen as offering a reverse exceptionalism when considering Northern Irish culture. Bodies are not necessarily encoded with the legacy of violent civil conflict when a lover runs their fingertips up your back or a grandparent hugs you with happy tears in their eyes: acts of intimacy that occur throughout the world occur in Northern Ireland (with all the complications that Berlant outlines above). But, as these acts are framed within narratives set in a ‘post’-conflict society, the representational legacy of violence does influence the context in which they are encountered and read. Readers often expect political engagement from texts which are set in countries with a recent history of violent conflict, so when these authors turn to the intimate, critical readers often seek to extrapolate historical meaning. This is understandable because the private and the public have been tied to each other in complex, ambiguous ways in Northern Irish culture. Such readings, as we will discuss in Chapter 2, seek to homogenize the experiences of writers who relate to the conflict in markedly different ways while exploring a variety of intimate acts. Two of the texts in this chapter (Carson and Harrison) directly address faith as a prism through which to see relationships, both between people and between God and the faithful. Some of Erskine’s and Caldwell’s characters also have faith-based upbringings that influence their relationships in direct and indirect ways. Faith often relies, as does intimacy, on that which is not fully revealed. I do not intend to paint a crude picture of Northern Irish intimate life as something solely influenced and constrained by the dictates of religious institutions, it is clear that it is a factor in the way we understand the development and representation of the moments that follow.

In this fiction, intimacy is regularly examined in a domestic setting. Indeed, two of the texts (Erskine and Carson) explicitly focus on the home while the other three (Caldwell, Hughes and Harrison) regularly feature interior spaces. Of course, intimacy does not only happen in the home: public displays of affection and ‘sex in public’,⁵ to borrow Berlant and Warner’s phrase, demonstrate the vibrancy of that intimate life outside the confines of the domestic. But the house also is the primary staging post for much of our intimate lives. The fictions considered here were all published in the late 2010s and in 2020, over twenty years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Only one of them (Hughes) is set explicitly during the Troubles. To that end, most of these dwellings are ‘post’-conflict houses, but each writer demonstrates an awareness of the representational history of the Northern Irish house, especially East Belfast terraces of Erskine’s and Carson’s writing. Critics have drawn our attention to the ways in which the supposedly private space of the home was co-opted and given meaning during the conflict. Bryony Reid asserts that ‘because of the intimate nature of the Troubles, houses have been on the frontline of violent struggle’.⁶ Adam Hanna argues that the house, coded as private, appropriates a remarkably public role in the work of poets from the North⁷ and Eli Davies⁸ shows us the ways in which, traditionally, the home has been used by writers pre-1998 ‘as an escape from the conflict’.⁹ The home here acts as a sanctuary, but, as Davies notes elsewhere in her essay, this often elides the radical possibility of home as a space to renegotiate memory and the public/private dichotomy. This chapter seeks to build on this Troubles-era analysis to explore the post-conflict domestic and ask to what extent the novelists under consideration rewrite the terraced house of the Troubles and the sorts of lives with which they choose to fill these homes. In the negotiations of intimate life that follow, we will find authors keen to imagine new domestic configurations, new ways of writing and new intimacies.

‘Nothing political, nothing sectarian, just a small personal matter’:¹⁰ The legacy of Troubles intimacy in Michael Hughes’s Country

Michael Hughes’s second novel Country, published on the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in 2018, examines the political changes of the mid-nineties era through an Irish Republican Army (IRA) Active Service Unit. Stationed on the border, while these men are bound together by duty, they display an intense personal animosity towards each other. For not the last time in this study, it is a novel that focuses on men and masculinity. While Hughes wrote the novel in the period leading up to the Brexit referendum, the political concerns of the novel gained a particular currency afterwards: ‘I was sharply aware of militant ideas of nationalism resurfacing. But the Irish border wasn’t seen as particularly significant at that stage of the referendum – that realisation came much later for a lot of people. So I’d accidentally written a rather topical book.’¹¹ Accordingly, this chapter will examine some of the political resonances in the novel, it will focus particularly on how these public concerns shape and are shaped by intimate encounters. Hughes’s depiction of intimacy is also filtered through a very particular narrative style, as Eoin McNamee noted:

The register is coarse, furious. Hughes has an ear for his own tongue, brings into it a gnawed-at vernacular of fear and savagery. It needs to be tonally on the money and it is. But underneath it and through it you hear Homer’s cadences, the long lines of chant in dactylic hexameter. He mixes Border idiom with Greek formalism.¹²

This lyrical style assumes a sense of intimacy with the reader by engaging with the storytelling traditions of both the Greek oral poem and Irish seanchaí culture. A repeated refrain in the text is ‘Wait now till you hear the rest.’¹³ This address, common in Northern Irish vernacular (‘Wait til you hear’) serves to create a sense of intimacy with the reader, as does the tragic familiarity of the source text. Hughes notes that it ‘was very important to me the book presented the intimacy of person-to-person close-quarter violence, as the Iliad so graphically does’.¹⁴ The plot of the novel is roughly based on the Iliad (Henry for Hector, Achill for Achilles, Nellie for Helen and so forth) but remains inescapably a Northern Irish novel in subject and vernacular. Hughes said of the novel, ‘Leaning on an existing story and an existing structure gave me permission to write in an imaginative fictional way: I’m simply setting a story that’s been around for a few thousand years within the dynamics of the last days of the Northern Ireland conflict.’¹⁵ Classical references are frequently used in twentieth-century Northern Irish poetry and Michael Longley’s poems in The Ghost Orchid, especially ‘Ceasefire’, have ingrained the association between Homer’s epic and the uncertain period of the 1990s. Florence Impens details when, in August 1994, Longley heard rumours of an IRA ceasefire and began to write the poem, which was published soon after.¹⁶ Although Hughes notes that Longley’s work was not uppermost in his mind as he wrote the novel,¹⁷ the wealth of critical material on both Longley and the Iliad allow us some way into how the representation of intimacy in Country both chimes with and deviates from these other s...