On docile bodies: silence, control and surveillance as self-imposed disciplines in Anna Burns’ Milkman

ABSTRACT

Anna Burns, the first Northern-Irish woman to have been awarded the Booker Prize for her novel Milkman in 2018 has been celebrated since then as a lucid and necessary voice in the contemporary panorama. Set in an unknown location in Northern Ireland, at a time when the Troubles were at its peak, the narrative defiantly targets at what appears to be sexual harassment, to further disclose layers of more subtle meanings related to sociopolitical (self-)control and surveillance, in an atmosphere of pathological silence. Informed by Michel Foucault’s theories, developed in his studies Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, this article explores Burns’ novel in light of Foucault’s model of biopower, defined as a “technology of power centered on life,” within which the panopticon will be revisited. I will contend that silence, consequently, surfaces as both the voluntary alternative and the inevitable consequence of the imposition of regulatory practices on docile bodies, on a disempowered microstructure of inmates that facilitates the success of such technology of power.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Ireland
• the Troubles
• panopticon
• docile bodies
• Anna Burns

Disclosure statement

The present text is a scholarly version of the shorter, more informative piece, which appeared in The Irish Times, with the title “Silence as an architectural form of containment in Anna Burns’ Milkman” (2019).

Notes

1. Bart Simon has argued that in the post 9/11 world: “Dataveillance (the collection, organization and storage of information about persons) and biometrics (the use of the body as a measure of identity) … are now becoming a regular feature of the everyday lives and culture of citizens,” in “The Return of Panopticism,” 1.

2. As I have used a Kindle edition of Milkman, the numbers that appear in brackets next to the quotations refer to positions and not to pages.

3. The novel was finished by 2014, before this movement took form. So, even though it was timely published, it was not planned. However, Clare Hutton argues that the members of the jury for the Man Booker clearly saw this favourable connection: “Appiah remarked that Milkman ‘is to be commented for giving us a deep and subtle and morally and intellectually challenging picture of what #MeeToo is about.’ The novel is ‘burningly topical,’” in “The Moment and Technique,” 354.

4. No Bones won the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (2001), for the best regional novel, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2002). Milkman has also garnered several awards, apart from the prestigious Booker Prize in 2018, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2018), the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize (2018–19) and the Orwell Prize (2019). It was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2019) and won the Impac International Dublin Literary award (2020), becoming the first Northern Irish writer to receive it.

5. Milkman often appears in the novel written in lower case, though sometimes the narrator refers to him using a capital letter. At the same time, there is a man in the text, who delivers milk, and who is often addressed as “the real milkman.”

6. Crum, “Anna Burns’ Booker Prize.”

7. Leith, “Pretentious.”

8. Devers, “Anna Burns Booker-Winning.”

9. Moseley, “On the 2018 Man Booker,” 153, 155.

10. Devers, “Anna Burns’ Booker-Winning.”

11. Thomas, “Northern Irish writer.”

12. Leith, “Pretentious.”

13. Quoted in McClements, “Anna Burns.”

14. Curiously, Anna Burns has admitted having started reading Beckett after she wrote Milkman. See, Allardice, “Anna Burns..”

15. See Toal, “Milkman,” Moseley, “On the 2018 Man Booker,” 154, Piatek, “The ‘Unspeakableness’ of Life,” 110.

16. Allardice, “Anna Burns.”

17. Fernández, “Anna Burns.”

18. Moseley, “On the 2018 Man Booker,” 155.

19. Magennis, Northern Irish Writing, 137.

20. Hutton, “The Moment,” 358–59.

21. Though by and large Malone reads Milkman “as a novel of voice.” See “Measures,” 3.

22. Piatek, “The ‘Unspeakableness,’” 107.

23. Estévez-Saá, “Recent Contributions,” 89.

24. Santos and Pinho, “Mourning the Troubles,” 444.

25. Clark, “Reading-While-Walking,” 94.

26. Drong, “Remembering.”

27. Farrell, “Milkman.”

28. As Legg has illustrated in a special issue of The Irish Review (2016) dedicated to “Biopolitical Ireland,” this approach is a valuable critical standpoint for Irish studies, “expected to spark revisions in scholarship,” in “Biopolitical,” 7.

29. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 144.

30. Ibid., 139.

31. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.

32. Ibid., 205.

33. Ibid., 200.

34. In the context of Irish literature, Kennedy-Andrews has applied Foucault’s approach to the reading of Catholic guilt in Bernard McLaverty’s Cal, arguing that the protagonist “inhabits the kind of contemporary society described” by the French critic in Discipline and Punish, since: “Through this technique of surveillance, assessment, supervision and correction, the individual feels that he is being continually watched,” in his Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 89. Also Haslam takes on a similar stand in his analysis of Cal and dwells on how violence and voyeurism, gender and politics, are intertwined in the novel, in “The Pose Arranged.” These two undertakings clearly resonate with Milkman.

35. Toal, Milkman.

36. Marshall, “Anna Burns.”

37. See Leith, “Pretentious.”

38. Devers, “Anna Burns’ Booker-Winning.”

39. Allardice, “Anna Burns.”

40. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 215.

41. People take for granted that they are being watched and that pictures could be used as evidence: “As for the state forces, friend told me not to worry about the cameras, the clicking, the data-storage, saying that even before Milkman there was bound to have been a file on me anyway. ‘The whole community’s a suspect community,’ she said. ‘Everybody has a file on them. Everybody’s house, everybody’s movements, everybody’s connections constantly are checked and kept an eye on. It’s only you who doesn’t seem aware of that. With all their monitoring. They even photograph shadows,’ she said” (pos. 2977–86).

42. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.

43. In Foucault’s words, its power “was destined to spread throughout the social body; … whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline,” in Discipline and Punish, 208.

44. Simon, “The Return,” 7.

45. Foucault saw the body as a text on which dominant practices could be inscribed. Being “manipulated, shaped, trained,” the docile body represents “something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body [from which] the machine required can be constructed,” in Discipline and Punish, 135.

46. Burns has admitted that this habit was her own and that she never understood why people found it noticeable. See McClements, “Anna Burns.”

47. Burns qtd. In McClements, ibid.

48. This double-sided perspective on power has been explained by Simon, who has found it in narratives of subjection: “The more one knows about how one is supposed to behave the more one is able to conform, but by the same token one is also more able to feign conformity. Only once all this is accomplished can the Panopticon function and even then it is impossible to speak of domination. In the Foucauldian framework the inmate can and does always resist as this resistance is no less a function of panoptic power than the control of the population,” in “The Return of Panopticism,” 8.

49. Devers explains it clearly: “Everyone else is deeply involved in side-taking, judgement and policing each other’s behaviour as friends, neighbours and enemies are killed, vanished or punished for being on the right or wrong side of things,” in “Anna Burns.”

50. Magennis, Northern Irish Writing, 148.

51. Piatek, “The ‘Unspeakableness,’” 109.

52. Hutton, “The Moment,” 360.

53. See Clark, who maintains that: “For all its careful adherence to anonymity, the novel exhibits an intense obsession with how naming demarcates cultural rules of identification,” adding that: “The exclusionary practice of naming-by-not-naming is embedded within a history of rigidly segregated space,” in “Reading-While-Walking,” 97.

54. For Foucault, sexuality “was tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies … . It was applied to the regulation of populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activity. It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the body … . Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species,” in The History of Sexuality, 145–46.

55. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.

56. In the end, she is suspected to be an informer: “It was that miscellany territory where, like the informer, you’re not accepted, you’re not admired, you’re not respected, not by one side, not by the other side, not by anybody, not even really by yourself. In my case though, seems I’d fallen into the difficult zone not only because I wouldn’t tell my life to others, or because of my numbance, or because of my suspiciousness of questions. What was also being held against me was that I wasn’t seen as the clean girlfriend” (pos. 2959).

57. As the narrator explains, in this society, “the renouncers-of-the-state were assumed the good guys, the heroes, the men of honour,” who were resisting to the oppression of “the other island, the enemy.”

58. McNamee, “Anna Burns.”

59. Simon, “The Return,” 16–17.

60. See in this regard, Mathesion and Baudrillard’s positions, in David Lyon’s Theorizing Surveillance.

Additional information

Funding

The research carried out for the writing of this article has been financed by the project “INTRUTHS 2: Articulations of Individual and Communal Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Irish Writing” [PID2020-114776GB-I00] funded by [MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].