Contemporary Irish Literature

Session Coordinator: Gavin Keulks
Dept. of English, Western Oregon University
345 N. Monmouth Ave., Monmouth, OR, 97361

keulksg@wou.edu

'A Kind of Aural Atlas': Poetics of Ornamentation and Mapping Mediacy

Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Grace Notes refuses the dichotomy of high and low culture, instead it insists upon the primacy of the in-between site. Specifically focusing on a musical element common to Irish folk music and classical music compositions, the novel asserts that grace notes describe a subject position which locates a serially mediate place capable of provoking the strategic thinking necessary to resolve sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland. The protagonist, Catherine Anne McKenna, develops di-directional homophonic hearing (i.e., Bar talk is also Bartók), situates herself geographically in the perpetual middle (i.e. between Northern Ireland and England on the Isle of Islay, between East and West in Kiev), and composes two ways of hearing the Lambeg drums in symphony (i.e. as overwhelming aggressors and as integral constituents). I argue that the novel proposes grace notes as a model of mediation by demonstrating Catherine’s determination to find and to maintain the teetery fulcrum of middleness.  Contradicting the antagonisms necessary for the formation of Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space,” a poetics of ornamentation, based on musical qualities and performance practices, provides a concept of in-betweeness that is produced in an elaborative, non-confrontational process, suitable to erode the entrenched political divisions in Northern Ireland. Grace notes found in Bach as well as Granny Boyd’s rounds, in the glissandi of the priests’ songful prayers, in the notes that “girdle the earth so that there is neither East nor West” (MacLaverty 133) are confirmed in their significance by the novel’s formal structure that again highlights the middle ground: the novel’s chronological end comes mid-text; its final pages arrive at the middle of the plot.

Cameron Bushnell

University of Maryland

bushnell@umd.edu

Digging Into the Past:  The Materials of Memory and Jennifer Johnston's This is Not a Novel and Grace and Truth

In "Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin's Memory-work," Esther Leslie writes: "The process of excavation [Benjamin's term for digging into one's buried past] sifts through the layers that are the spacialization of the passage of time - the meaning of the object hinges on the layers of time that have smothered it, until now, the moment and place of discovery."

Jennifer Johnston's most recent novels use material objects to identify and determine temporal movement. Objects create identities for characters preserving them and for those inheriting them. In This is Not a Novel, the protagonist, Imogen, finds her father's diaries, 'excavating' them from a sealed trunk. Accompanying photographs, newspaper articles, music scores, poems and marginalia, become Imogen's method of finding her voice (literally, the effect of "conversion mutism") and accepting own and her family's identity. The effect is layered by her father's own keepsakes, objects which explain the discord between Imogen's parents.

Parental discord is intensified in Grace and Truth, where material objects take on even greater significance. The work is divided into three parts, the first and last routine in narrative structure with the protagonist, Sally, the focus. The middle section, though, is a memoir, written by Sally's relative (a Church of Ireland Bishop) and the reader discovers its contents as Sally does. This 'moment of discovery' reveals layers to Sally's identity and again explains parental discord. The impact of this reveals the impact of including
the material object.

Gill Hunter

Purdue University
ghunter@purdue.edu

Intergenerational Conflict and “Popular” Nationalisms in John Banville

My paper will explore the persistence of intergenerational conflict in John Banville’s work. Given that state authority often relies on tropes of domestic patriarchy, and in cultural and political discourse the nation is often cloaked in maternal imagery, my paper will make a connection between the familial relationships in Banville’s novels, specifically Birchwood and The Newton Letter, and his attitude towards nationalism. Benedict Anderson wonders at the depth of national loyalties, and why nations “inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love” (Imagined Communities, 141). Ties of blood and ethnicity often come into conflict with the seemingly more abstract ties of citizenship. Irish nationalism in its worst form is an oppressive narrative of the past which ensures that the future of the nation is determined by those who write its history. Banville uses his fiction to criticize the processes and structures by which loyalties to these histories are created and maintained. However the narrative of the family always qualifies and complicates that criticism. No matter how aware the protagonist of a Banville novel is of the way that national myths have shaped and manipulated an individual family member, he/she deeply cares for that person in spite of their ignorance and acceptance of those “low”, or “popular” constructions of history. I will ask how people can be separated from the nationalist myths from which they derive their meaning and how love can be distinguished from its perversions, both domestic and political.

Aine McGlynn

University of Toronto

AineMcGl@rocketmail.com

'Starving, Freezing, and Weeping Hysterically': Cultural Mediation in Ripley Bogle

Only recently has Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel Ripley Bogle received the attention it deserves, at least outside of Ireland, where it was celebrated in the late 1980s. Through its enlivening, transgressive narration, and its ambiguous – at times ambivalent – engagement with culture, the novel dramatizes the fissures and displacements that comprise identity in contemporary Irish society. Acting in many ways as a postmodern flâneur, Ripley Bogle’s wanderings through London and Belfast provide helpful ways of conceptualizing culture, both private and public.

At times willfully isolating himself from politics, Bogle confirms a humanist desire for quietism, akin to that which George Orwell traces in “Inside the Whale.” Other times Bogle’s recounting of the Troubles, and his family’s involvement in such events, verify the futility of even temporary isolation. In the end, what emerges is noisy, mournful, yet exuberant exemplar for contemporary Ireland itself: a figure who moves effort-fully within cultural debates yet repudiates intellectual or emotional entrapment, seeking instead a “middle-space” between personality and politics, “high” and “low” culture, style and subjectivity. Bogle offers few answers, and his narrative ultimately subverts whatever closure the reader wants to construct. However, that teleological retraction contains the foundation of Bogle’s (and Wilson’s) contribution to recent debates about Irish fiction and culture: a liberation that remains part engagement, part escape; a pronouncement that renounces—and aims to reshape—the terms that have traditionally framed such debates.

Gavin Keulks
Western Oregon University
keulksg@wou.edu