Welcome to the desert of the real: resisting a postcolonial reality in the modern Irish novel

Benedict Anderson claims In Imagined Communities that nationalism and national identity are but fruits of a politicised imagination, and that the nation only acts what the State imagines. A decade later, in Tom Inglis re-examines such an imagination in a postcolonial Irish context, and traces the significance of the land in the process of identity formation. Anderson’s and Inglis’s understanding of personal identity formation resonate with the Deleuzian reading of a Rhizome-based local identity set against a monolithic backdrop of root-tree system. Where the former variety promises an animate, multifaceted identity, the latter conditions the development of Irishness to a closed system in which values are yet to be pronounced by the governing root, namely, the State. This is where one can draw the very red thin line between personal and national perception of reality (of being). The multilayered and dialectical nature of the modern Irish novel and its critical caliber has created an accurate touchstone that enables the Irish to identify the very two sides of reality. For the Irish, on the one hand, reality emerges as a monolithic, obdurate construct, fabricated and observed by the State; and on the other, it materialises as the nation’s memory of economic hardships, political marginalisation, ideological bifurcations, and psychological exiles. By exploring James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1974), this paper shall answer the question that Anderson and Inglis failed to address: what made the contemporary Irish literature a difficult reflection of postcolonial identity, which neither accepts the State’s atavistic nativism nor identifies with neocolonial political mindset

Toni Morrison’s paradise: the unreliable narrator

Previous critical readings of Toni Morrison’s novels, especially Paradise, largely emphasise the universal themes explored in her novels, namely, feminism, culture, psychology, and of course, her remarkable presentation of African-Americans in racial and cultural conflicts. Yet, there are major areas that remain unexplored in her works. One of the most conspicuous absences is Morrison’s dominance over the art of narration. Narratology, as a science, studies the ways in which narration and narrators help us shape our perceptions of reality, cultural artifacts, clichés, etc. Needless to say, it is Morrison’s ceaseless dominance and control over the art of narration that take her novels, including Paradise, to a new level and style - a modern style, which Roland Barthes refers to as the “writerly text.” By setting the science of narration as the cornerstone of this paper, the following notions will receive a proper narratological definition: (a) how the various stories, initially narrated by unrelated characters are juxtaposed against each other to convey a single plot/storyline, and (b) how a singular omniscient/omnipresent narrator is unable to lead the narrative towards a satisfactory ending. In order to investigate the significance of utilising a labyrinthine narrative form in modern texts, this paper studies the variety and relevance of the employed forms of narration, through the interdisciplinary science of narratology

The modern Irish Bildungsroman: a narrative of resistance and deformation

My thesis examines the ways in which the critical structure of modern Irish Bildungsroman deconstructs and re-examines ‘residues of past trauma’ in the form of socio-cultural, psychological, personal and notably political artefacts present in the nation’s unfortunate engagement with the State’s politics of formation. The result is a resistant and radical form which challenges the classical and modern specificity of the genre by introducing a non-conformist, post-Joycean protagonist, whose antithetical perception of history and socio-cultural norms contradicts the conservative efforts of the post-independence Irish State. To examine such a resistant critical structure, this thesis focuses on Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), Dermot Bolger’s The Woman’s Daughter (1987), William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Seamus Deane’s Reading In The Dark (1996), Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) and A Pagan Place (1970), Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), Flann O’Brien’s The Hard Life (1961), and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965). The selected novels provide an invaluable insight into the nation’s perception of sensitive concepts such as modernism and modern Irish identity, and how the confluence of these two produced a critical dialectical discourse which chronicles the formation of a non-conformist, ahistorical modern protagonist. To achieve a historical relevance, this thesis starts by examining Doyle’s fictionalization of 1916 Easter Rising and the chaotic 1920s; Bolger’s exploration of a repressive, inward-looking post-independence Irish society in the 1930s and the 1940s; Trevor’s engagement with a socio-political divide that further split the nation; Deane’s autogenous reading of an internal neocolonial ‘Othering’ during the ‘emergency’; McCabe’s illustration of the State’s architecture of oppression, and societal introversion from the early 1940s to the 1960s; Edna O’Brien’s and Nuala O’Faolain’s exemplary illustration of women’s blighted sexual Bildung in the 1940s, 50s and 60s; and finally examining a radical, ‘chronocentric’ depiction of a socio-political divide fictionalized by Stuart and McGahern, which emerged during the early days of the State and continued to dominate the nation well into the 1960s and the early 1970s. By examining psycho-social, sexual and political traumata reflected in the modern Irish Bildungsroman, this thesis provides a dialectical reading of the gap that appeared between the revolutionary ethos of independent Irish identity formation, rooted in the principles of 1916 Rising and the 1920s, and that which appeared in the form of a tolerant republicanism in the 1980s. To study this socio-historical gap, I examine the nation’s criticism of the State’s politics and structure of formation, manifested in narratives of individual and national formation. The modern Irish Bildungsroman, I argue, appropriates the traditional features of the genre, for instance, chronicling the individual’s psychosocial formation and the potential to re-engage with their society, and produces a critical matrix for a dialectical discourse which enables the nation to voice their concerns vis-à-vis a politically dichotomous post-independence Irish society, a repressed history, and at the same time to externalize their perception of modern Irish formation, being founded on an anti-colonial, non-conservative and politically aware consciousness. The result, which I call the ‘Meta-National Narrative of Formation,’ is a historically resistant and socio-politically conscious narrative which finds independence in rejection, imposition, and deformation, namely, by defying the State’s architecture of formation as well as their nativist, retrograde visions of Irish identity

Against the Oedipal Politics of Formation in Edna O’Brien’s <em>A Pagan Place</em>: “Women do not Count, Neither Shall they be Counted”

<div class="page" title="Page 375"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Edna O’Brien’s </span><em>A Pagan Place </em><span>is one of her lesser-known novels, which discusses decades of women’s sexual oppression and anomalous formations; it is a sexually conscious narrative of an Irish formation which enjoyed the socio-cultural and intellectual liberties of the “sexy sixties”, and critiqued the Oedipal Irish society of the 1930s and 1940s. Obsessed with physical and spiritual decency, the masculinized Society formed “moral codes” that by definition exiled the Irish woman to social and political marginalia. Socio-politically conscious narratives such as O’Brien’s </span><em>A Pagan Place</em><span>, however, functioned as not just social critiques, drawing on a culture of post-revolution stasis and neoconservative identity politics but also as vehicles for enabling a generation of oppressed women to voice their concerns and struggles with their feminine formation in a dominantly masculinized Society. By drawing on a Deleuzian definition of Oedipal Society, this study explores boundaries, limitations and alternatives of feminine formation in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. </span></p></div></div></div></div

A Portrait of the Rebel as an Artist: Deconstructing Post-coloniality in Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H

The historically ‘interrogative’ nature of the modern Irish novel introduces post-independence Ireland as a locus that is torn between social double standards and political extremes. Rebellious and critical voices channelled through the dialectical discourse of the novel and at once critiqued a State-sponsored voice of internal othering and narratives of decolonization. To sustain its relevance as a medium of criticism the modern Irish novel replaced the classical structure of the novel with narratives that tend to deconstruct the State’s politics of formation. These narratives, this paper suggests, are inherently personal and structurally biographical, enabling the Irish to revisit the past and restructure their perception of critical concepts such as national identity, ideological intolerance, and individual formation. By examining Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971), and John McGahern’s The Dark (1965), firstly I will identify these resistant voices, which challenged and subverted the socio-political, and educational boundaries. Secondly, I will explore a dividing line that appeared between such critical voices, splitting them into critics who sought a liberated definition of Irishness rooted in the principles of the men of 1916, and rebels who demanded social recognition and political and commercial success. It is the latter group, I argue, that instead of enhancing the standards of life in Ireland became a threat to its very foundation

The Lie of the Land: Irish Modernism in a Nativist Ireland

In Waiting for Godot (1953) Beckett draws upon a non-temporal stasis that has paralyzed the nation over the past decades, and demystifies such a paralysis by structuring the play around not only a fixed milieu and an unnamable saviour but also a widespread unwillingness in appreciating the urgency of this dominant spirit of stasis. I argue the roots of such severe pessimism, formlessness, and radical stasis as dominant elements in the works of Irish moderns can be found in a dichotomous perception of modernism and its emergence and development in post-independence Ireland. The rise of the State and their neoconservative politics of formation appear as internal forces that obstructed a proper appreciation of Irish modernism inside and outside Ireland. By exploring the roots of modernism in post-independence Ireland, and the conflict between modernism and the rise of a neocolonial State, this essay examines a critical and ideological reticence within the nation which considers Irish modernism as a sub-category of the movement rather than an independent variety, precluding a reading of Irish moderns in at once a national and international context