Remembering a Transcultural Past: Recent Post-Tribal Fictions of Seventies Ardoyne

ABSTRACT

Recent works of fiction set in Northern Ireland continue to be preoccupied with the Northern Ireland conflict (the Troubles). Although it is never explicitly named in Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns, her hometown features prominently as a crucial signifier throughout the novel. Also, For the Good Times (2019) by David Keenan, set in Seventies Ardoyne, relies for its significance on historical and geopolitical references and allusions. Crucially, both novels address – and discursively perform – the conjunction of memory and borders/divisions. Thus they yield to a reading inspired by Astrid Erll’s notion of transcultural memory, highlighting tensions and boundaries within the nationalist community. The general claim in this essay is that both Milkman and For the Good Times contribute to a ‘redemarcation’ of cultural memory not only in Northern Ireland but also in other post-tribal societies, wherever it is necessary to challenge nationalist or ethno-sectarian narratives about the past and offer alternative histories, inclusive of transcultural, pluralist discourses. Consequently, both novels deserve attention as powerful critiques of nationalist geopolitics and of skewed images of the past in the tribal narratives perpetuated not only before but also after the Belfast Agreement of 1998.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anna Burns does not put any articles in front of the common nouns which are used in lieu of the names of her characters in Milkman.

2. The issue (and examples) of normative – and normativizing – ethno-sectarian narratives in Northern Ireland is thoroughly discussed in a special issue of Peace and Conflict Studies (vol. 15, no. 1, Summer 2008). See esp. Filardo-Llamas 77–94.

3. Ireland is described in postnationalist terms already in Richard Kearney’s magisterial study from 1997 – Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, esp. 1–10. In his more recent essay, Kearney discusses also Habermas’s project of ‘postnational constellation’ in Europe – see “Renarrating” 47–8.

4. Anna Burns says that her book Milkman is not specifically about life in Ardoyne. It creates, as she puts it, “a parallel Ardoyne, not quite the real world” (O’Doherty and Burns).

5. Feline symbolism in the novel is complex and multi-layered (it relates to history, politics, psychology, etc.). Here, I choose to discuss only one of its aspects, immediately relevant to the notion of jamais vu.

6. In this, and in several other respects, on can detect the influence of Glenn Patterson’s The International (1999) on Keenan’s writing. In Patterson’s novel, Danny Boy’s parents, in the absence of a family Bible, “always turned for comfort and reassurance in troubled times to the Reader’s Digest” (69).

7. For example, Gerry Adams’s personal chauffeur, also discovered to have been an informer, was not outed until 2008 (Radden Keefe 281).

8. In Northern Ireland alone, novels that illustrate the crimes and duplicity of the republicans against their own community, or loyalists turning against theirs, include, e.g., Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle and Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man.

9. For how this discourse has been discredited over the last few years, see, e.g., Radden Keefe passim.

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Notes on contributors

Leszek Drong

Leszek Drong is associate professor in the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice. His current research is concerned with the intersection of borders, cultural memory and tribalism and their representations in contemporary literature.