SUBALTERN AESTHETHICS: TRACING COUNTER‐HISTORIES IN CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH, IRISH AND NORTHERN IRISH LITERATURE Stefanie Florence Lehner DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The University of Edinburgh 2008 ABSTRACT This PhD thesis proposes an Irish-Scottish comparative framework for examining a range of shared ethical, socio-political and theoretical concerns, pertaining to aspects of class and gender, in contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature. My approach galvanises Lévinasian ethics with the socio-cultural category of the ‘subaltern’ in relation to postcolonial, Marxist and feminist theories in order to trace what I term a ‘subaltern aesthethics’ between selected works of Scottish, Northern Irish and Irish writing that show a specific sensibility to the social inequalities and inequities that are part of the current restructuring of the global capitalist system. My work explores how these texts engage with both the processes of political and economic transformation in the Atlantic archipelago, and critical-theoretical approaches which, I argue, show the tendency to subsume the specificity and intensity of subaltern concerns. The first chapter delineates key debates in Irish and Scottish studies, offering a critique of conventional applications of postcolonial and postmodern theory. I demonstrate that dominant versions of postcolonialism are analytically entrapped in the nation as a paradigm. Additionally, I show that for all its apparent celebration of difference, postmodernism reduces otherness to the terms of the self. Chapter 2 outlines the model of a subaltern counter-history as a theoretical framework for reading ethical issues of historicity on the basis of texts by James Kelman, Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson. This engagement with history is continued in chapter 3, which investigates the desire to archive Northern Ireland’s recent past in the context of its peace process in Glenn Patterson’s and Eoin McNamee’s recent novels. The emphasis of the three subsequent chapters turns the attention of my counter-historical method to issues of gender. The fourth chapter evaluates the material consequences that the gendering of the imagined nation has on female bodies in particular. Whereas the focus lies here specifically on the Irish context, the following chapter 5 engages in a comparative reading of traumatic herstories in three Irish and Scottish novels by Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway and Jennifer Johnston. The purpose of both of these chapters is to examine women’s experience of disempowerment and their struggle to reclaim agency. My last chapter then investigates the relationship between men, gender and nation in the allegorical imagiNation of Alasdair Gray and McCabe with specific regard to the turn to the feminine that has taken place in contemporary criticism. i CONTENTS Preface v Acknowledgements vi Declaration vii List of Abbreviations of Selected Primary Texts viii INTRODUCTION: Towards an Archipelagic Subaltern Aesthethics 1 1. Deli‐N(e)ations: Irish and Scottish Studies & 33 the Enjoyment of the ‘Nation‐Thing’ (Re)Inventions and Redemptions – Postcolonial & Postmodern 2. Subaltern Counter‐Histories in the Scottish‐Irish 64 Archipelago James Kelman’s ‘Naval History’, Robert McLiam Wilson’s ‘The Dreamed’, Patrick McCabe’s The Dead School and James Kelman’s You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free 3. The Peace Process as Arkhe‐Taintment? 113 Glenn Patterson’s That Which Was and Eoin McNameeʹs The Ultras 4. ‘Dangerous Liaisons’: The Politics of ImagiNation 132 and Gender Relations Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad, Edna O’Brien’s Down By the River and Mary Costello’s Titanic Town ii 5. ‘Un‐Remembering History’: Traumatic Herstories in 158 Contemporary Irish and Scottish Fiction Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing and Jennifer Johnston’s The Invisible Worm 6. The Feminine Redemption of Masculinity?: 196 Gender Trouble in the Allegorical ImagiNation Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine and Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto CONCLUSION 232 REFERENCES (Works Cited) 237 APPENDIX I : Further Works Consulted 260 APPENDIX II : Publications 276 iii PREFACE This thesis uses the Chicago Style Guide (author-date system) with slight variations to ensure the fluidity and readability of the text. These include that when the author of the referenced source is clear, only the date and/or page number will be cited in parenthesis in the text. Footnote references comprise in addition a short title. Furthermore, references to the primary texts selected for detailed discussion are abbreviated; a list is supplied at the beginning of this thesis. Full bibliographic information of all works cited is supplied in the list of references at the end of this thesis; further works consulted are recorded in Appendix I. All quotations are commonly cited in their original formatting, which includes the adoption of original emphasis (commonly italics). That means that only when the emphasis is added by the author of this thesis it is indicated. This also pertains to quotations from novels, and I would like to particularly point here to the specific typography in the works of both Alasdair Gray and Janice Galloway. iv ACKNOWLEGEMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Edinburgh, whose provision of a research scholarship allowed me to undertake this project. In particular, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Aaron Kelly, for his invaluable kindness, intellectual generosity and encouragement, and from whose thoughtful and thought-provoking suggestions I have benefited greatly. The commitment and spirit of his work has been a formative and challenging inspiration. My genuine thanks are also due to my assistant supervisor, Robert Irvine, and to Randall Stevenson for their support and perceptive comments upon my work at various stages. I am obliged to all at the University of Edinburgh who have helped me to see this project to fruition, foremost the members of the Department of English Literature. I also want to indicate my appreciation for the assistance and patience of the staff of the University Library, the Computing Services and the National Library of Scotland. Special thanks go to Rajeev S. Patke (National University of Singapore) for offering helpful feedback on this project in its initial stages; and to Patricia Coughlan (University College Cork), Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), Eamonn Hughes (Queens University, Belfast), Carole Jones (Trinity College Dublin) and Aaron Kelly (University of Edinburgh) for their generosity and kindness of making (at the time) unpublished material accessible to me. This project has specifically profited from the annual ‘Crosscurrents’ postgraduate conferences in Irish and Scottish Studies, sponsored by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and I want to state here my gratefulness to all the organisers and participants for the intellectual crosscurrents they have enabled. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the British Association for Irish Studies, whose awarding of the 2007 Essay Prize not only permitted me to publish a chapter of this thesis, but also immensely assisted my research through the form of Cambridge University Press books. The list of colleagues and friends who inspired and encouraged me over the last years can only ever be incomplete. I would therefore like to express my deep gratitude to all those in Edinburgh, Berlin, and many other places, with whom I had stimulating discussions, and whose love and friendship has been an unfailing source of support. Finally, I wish to dedicate this thesis to my family, Christa, Ludwig and Annabelle Lehner, without whose incommensurable love, unceasing encouragement, and sacrifices it could never have been accomplished. However unworthy, I hope to have captured, at least, a certain spirit of my father’s tenet in this work: DUM SPIRO SPERO ~ As long as I breathe, I hope. v DECLARATION I herewith declare that this thesis, ‘Subaltern Aesthethics: Tracing Counter-Histories in Contemporary Scottish, Irish and Northern Irish Literature’ has been composed by myself and is completely my own work. I have not used any other material and aids than the ones mentioned. The work has not been submitted to any other degree or professional qualification except as specified. Stefanie Florence Lehner Edinburgh, 1 September 2008 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Primary Literature by Selected Authors BoP Patrick McCabe, Breakfast on Pluto (London: Picador, 1999 [1998]). DBR Edna O’Brien, Down By the River (London: Phoenix, 2000 [1996]). DS Patrick McCabe, The Dead School (London: Picador, 1995). FD Glenn Patterson, Fat Lad (London: Minerva, 1993 [1992]). IW Jennifer Johnston, The Invisible Worm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992 [1991]). J Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003 [1984]). NH James Kelman, ‘Naval History’ in The Burn (London: Minerva, 1991), 93- 105. TD Robert McLiam Wilson, ‘The Dreamed’, in Granta 81 (2003): 303-322. TKB Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (London: Vintage, 1999 [1989]). TT Mary Costello, Titanic Town (London: Methuen, 1992). TW Glenn Patterson, That Which Was (Hamish Hamilton, 2004). U McNamee, Eoin, The Ultras (Faber and Faber, 2004). WW Doyle, Roddy, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (London: Minerva, 1996). YH James Kelman, You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004). vii ‘A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.