by Violet Woolf on the novel as political document, contemporary Irish fiction, and the border that shapes everything
Wednesday. Reading Irish Fiction. Again.
I have been working through a stack of contemporary Irish fiction that accumulated while I was reading other things, and the experience of reading it in sequence is producing an education in how a political situation — the border, the Troubles and their aftermath, partition and its ongoing effects on identity and culture — shapes a literary tradition in ways that are visible from outside and presumably unavoidable from inside. The best of this fiction does not address the border directly. It is present in the grammar of the work: in who speaks and who is silent, in which geographies are described as navigable and which as contested, in the way that identity is treated as something claimed and disputed rather than something given.
Anna Burns’s Milkman, which I am rereading alongside newer work, is the canonical recent example of this: a novel set in a Northern Irish community during the Troubles that never names its setting, its characters, or its political context directly, because the characters inside it cannot speak those names aloud without consequence. The formal constraint is not aesthetic choice but political realism. The unnamed city is named by its unnamability. This is the novel doing something that only the novel can do.
The Contemporary Moment
The Good Friday Agreement is twenty-eight years old. A generation has grown up on the island without the specific violence of the Troubles, though the political questions the Agreement managed rather than resolved continue to shape politics on both sides of the border. The fiction emerging from this generation is doing something different from the Troubles fiction that preceded it: it is writing about the aftermath of a history rather than the history itself, which is its own complex position. The London Prat on Irish cultural politics this week covered related ground. The reading stack is not getting smaller. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
