The Spatial Politics of Contemporary Northern Irish Fiction and Film
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Outlines of Ulster The Spatial Politics of Contemporary Northern Irish Fiction and Film Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie der Philosophischen Fakultät P der Universität des Saarlandes vorgelegt von Eva Michely aus Wadern Saarbrücken, 2020 Dekan: Prof. Dr. Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen Berichterstatter/innen: Prof. Dr. Joachim Frenk Prof. Dr. Astrid M. Fellner Tag der letzten Prüfungsleistung: 28. Januar 2020 To my mother, Ute, who loves a good story. And in memory of my father, Albert, who knew how to tell them. Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to my teachers and supervisors, Joachim Frenk and Astrid M. Fellner, who have always known how to pose the perfect challenge: It is due to them that I understand the thrill of academic discourse. I am particularly indebted to my first supervisor, Joachim Frenk, for his academic guidance through the years it took me to finish this thesis. For crucial advice casually given, and for our discussions of national identity and cinematography, I am grateful to Lena Steveker. Christine Moyrer shared her understanding of the early modern revenge tragedy, Stefan Lambert listened to my thoughts on Gull and Back to the Future , and Heike Mißler showed interest in and commented on most of my ideas over the years. Gabriela Vojvoda, Éamonn Ó Ciardha and Maurice Fitzpatrick introduced me to the world of conferencing in 2013, and have given freely of their friendship and their knowledge of divided cities and societies since. David Park showed me the great kindness of answering my questions on his work in an email correspondence early in 2015, Glenn Patterson has been generous to a fault with his time, words and wisdom during my research visit to Belfast in the summer of 2015 and beyond, and Garrett Carr very kindly sent me a couple of his articles on maps and map-making in 2018. For two inspiring research visits in 2015 and 2016, I am indebted to the wonderful researchers at the Centre for International Borders Research at the Queen’s University Belfast; special thanks are due to Katy Hayward and Liam O’Dowd for asking, listening and sharing with interest and kindness. The DAAD-project GradUS Global provided the financial support without which my second research visit to Belfast would have been impossible, and the UniGR’s Border Textures working group provided a welcoming and creative space for academic exchange upon my return. Michelle Moloney, Eamonn Hughes, John and Christine Roe, and Katharina Rennhak have provided encouragement, insight and advice at different stages along the way. I am indebted to Arlette Warken, Bärbel Schlimbach, Bruno von Lutz and the inspiring colleagues at the English Department of Saarland University I had the good fortune to work with. I am thankful for the friendship of Philip O’Neill, Pascal McCaughan and Tony O’Herlihy, who have shown me their Irelands. Steffi Saar and Stefanie Rung continued to believe that I could do this at times when I did not. For being a source of inspiration, linguistic and otherwise, I am grateful to Gerardine Pereira. And as ever, I am deeply grateful to my family, Maurice and Ute, for their strength and support, and to Torben, for sanity and silence. Contents 1. Introduction: “A Map of Words” ........................................................................................... 1 2. Geographies of Contention ................................................................................................... 22 2.1 Crossing the Border: Lucy Caldwell’s Where They Were Missed (2006) ..................... 63 2.2 “The Body of the Condemned”: Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2009) .............................. 84 2.3 “Cartographies of Subterfuge”: Eoin McNamee’s The Ultras (2004) ......................... 107 3. Geographies of Transition .................................................................................................. 148 3.1 The Transitional Text: Glenn Patterson’s Gull (2016) ................................................. 157 3.2 Geographies of Peace: David Park’s The Truth Commissioner (2008) ....................... 192 3.3 The Long Way Home: Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Five Minutes of Heaven (2009) ........... 225 4. Conclusion: Mapping Change ............................................................................................ 249 5. Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 258 6. Deutschsprachige Zusammenfassung ................................................................................ 280 1. Introduction: “A Map of Words” Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson’s second book of non-fiction, Here’s Me Here (2015) is a collection of journalism, comment pieces and blog entries, and it was aptly taken on by a publishing house of the name of New Island. What emerges from Patterson’s witty, sometimes whimsical, but always poignant observations is a vision of a new island indeed or, more specifically, a new way of thinking about the island of Ireland in general as well as the six counties that compound Northern Ireland in particular. An author who has written and unwritten Northern Ireland, and especially Belfast, throughout his fiction, Patterson offers further, non-fictional rewritings of the North in response to the ever-changing landscape of the peace process. Here’s Me Here contains a two-page piece called “Peace Procession,” which was first published in The Irish Times on 8 November 2011. Expressing an impatience with the institutionalised administration of the Northern Irish Peace Process, Patterson makes a startling proposition: “It is time to declare an end to the Peace Process” (94). He stresses that he does not have any sympathy with those who refuse to subscribe to peaceful means and political negotiation. Rather, his criticism dwells on the semantics of the term “peace process,” which is programmatic for the current and continuous political impasse – and he suggests that “the term itself has got to go” (“Peace Procession” 94). This aversion stems, for one, from the spatio-temporal openness of the metaphor, the term ‘peace process’ implies that “we are not there yet,” while at the same time “leav[ing] the decision of where there is to the professional Processors” (“Peace Procession” 95). 1 ‘Peace process’ hints thus, paradoxically, at the power of a political elite to determine when the social endeavour of peace-building has been completed successfully while, in the meantime, leaving the very population carrying out the ‘work of peace’ in limbo, unsure of their own status as a society. The peace process entails – and partly consists in – the building of an official and digestible narrative; one that makes sense of the form which the current political arrangement of power-sharing has taken – and one that, as the process itself, remains yet without conclusion. In a counterpoise to the ongoing administration of the peace process 1 In a similar vein, Liam Kelly and Audra Mitchell pinpoint the catch-22 situation in which professional peacebuilding depends at least partly upon the general agreement that peace remains elusive (“Peaceful Spaces?” 321). They posit that “the meaning of the word ‘transformation’ in the context of peacebuilding is not the simple conversion of an object from one state to another […]. The very processes used to transform ‘conflictual’ actors or spaces are integral to the control and stability of these spaces; by keeping them in a constant state of flux, the strategies of peacebuilding absorb and constrain eruptions of violence” (“Peaceful Spaces?” 312). 1 at the political level, Patterson proposes a bounded spatio-temporal event instead, which is to be carried out at the grass-roots of society; “a Peace Procession, no less” (“Peace Procession” 95). This Peace Procession would be a democratic event open to each and every member of society as it marched through every single street of Northern Ireland. The purpose of the procession would be to facilitate the personal recounting of any site-specific memory that any individual marcher wished to share in any given location along the route: They could, publicly, “bear witness to what […] they saw, what they suffered, what they knew, what they did” (95). The written word is curiously absent from this vision; there is to be no record, no transcript, no archived account of the event and the stories told thereat. Evading the great amount of archival work dedicated to the civil war that has been carried out in recent decades, the “Peace Procession” would instead be an ephemeral performance that follows a spatial, not a temporal order. In marching, it marks the communal reclaiming of the territory of Northern Ireland as much as the conviction that Northern Ireland is a space capable of holding together a multiplicity of personal truths. Establishing a continuity with the (US-inspired) civil rights marches of the late 1960s, it would affirm the end of the conflict as well as put an end to the liminal character of Northern Irish politics (96). The political impossibility of establishing a single, coordinated institutionalised approach to the contentious past was highlighted in the wake of the Flags Protest in December 2012. The protest escalated when, in an attempt to render Belfast City Hall more inclusive, i.e. less representative of one portion of the electorate only, Belfast City Council decided to restrict the flying of the Union Flag above the iconic city hall to designated days. Enraged and fearful, members