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Moments of Pleasure in Recent Northern Irish Culture

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Moments of Pleasure in Recent Northern Irish Culture Études irlandaises 42-1 | 2017 Incarner / Désincarner l’Irlande “Bubbles of joy”: Moments of Pleasure in recent Northern Irish Culture Caroline Magennis Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5183 DOI: 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5183 ISSN: 2259-8863 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 29 June 2017 Number of pages: 155-168 ISBN: 978-2-7535-5495-5 ISSN: 0183-973X Electronic reference Caroline Magennis, « “Bubbles of joy”: Moments of Pleasure in recent Northern Irish Culture », Études irlandaises [Online], 42-1 | 2017, Online since 29 June 2019, connection on 06 September 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5183 ; DOI : 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5183 © Presses universitaires de Rennes “Bubbles of joy”: Moments of Pleasure in recent Northern Irish Culture1 Caroline Magennis University of Salford Abstract This essay considers the representation of pleasure in three “post”-conflict Northern Irish texts: Glenn Patterson’s novel The Rest Just Follows (2014), Billy Cowan’s play Still Ill (2014) and Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection Multitudes (2016). A framework is offered that advocates a turning away from the dominance of trauma theory in Northern Irish cultu- ral criticism towards a recognition of the plurality of experiences which these texts represent. This essay uses theoretical insights from Lauren Berlant, Heather Love, Laura Frost and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to consider the unique affective topography in which Northern Irish writers represent their pleasures. In these texts, published in the last few years, we see the repre- sentation of queer and non-reproductive sexual encounters set against the backdrop of the social and political policing of morality in Northern Ireland. This essay, however, will argue that these texts are not simple metonyms but rather present complex sensual experiences which enrich our understanding of the emotional landscape of contemporary Northern Ireland. Keywords: Northern Ireland, Fiction, Affect Theory, Fiction, Contemporary Literature. Résumé Cet article s’intéresse à la représentation du plaisir dans trois textes nord-irlandais « post »-conflit : le roman de Glenn Patterson The Rest Just Follows (2014), la pièce de Billy Cowan Still Ill (2014) and le recueil de nouvelles de Lucy Caldwell Multitudes (2016). Il s’écarte du cadre théorique de la théorie du trauma souvent privilégié pour l’étude de la culture nord- irlandaise et plaide pour la reconnaissance de la pluralité d’expériences que représentent ces textes. Il emprunte des outils théoriques à Lauren Berlant, Heather Love, Laura Frost et Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick et aborde la spécificité de la topographie affective dans laquelle les écrivains d’Irlande du Nord inscrivent leurs plaisirs. Ces textes récents montrent des rencontres sexuelles queer et non-repro- ductives sur fond de régulation socio-politique des mœurs et de la morale. Cependant, cet article démontre que ces textes n’ont pas seulement valeur de métonymies, mais qu’ils présentent des expé- riences sensuelles complexes qui enrichissent notre compréhension du paysage émotionnel de l’Irlande du Nord. Mots clés : Irlande du Nord, fiction, affect theory, littérature contemporaine. 1. I would like to thank the London Irish Seminar at the Institute for English Studies, Senate House, for inviting me to present this work and to Christopher Vardy and Jane Kilby for their comments on drafts of this piece. • 155 Caroline Magennis “Pleasure can get out of hand2.” It might be stating the obvious to assert that Irish literary and cultural criti- cism is in thrall to trauma, violence and a reconsideration of the most contested elements of the past. Critical texts often use psychoanalytic and deconstructive frameworks, including the work of Cathy Caruth and Dominic Le Capra in their analysis3. There are intellectual and institutional imperatives for this focus, and comparative perspectives are often thought to yield a way out of Irish exceptio- nalism, but an over-deterministic focus on a painful past has come to dominate criticism on Northern texts. In this age of the academic funding imperative, parti- cularly in the British climate with the impact agenda, many projects have sprung up to discuss “dealing with the past” and the commemoration of violent events.4 There is a danger that literature and culture have come to be used in instrumental ways, to discuss what they can tell us about the politics of the author or a parti- cular historical moment and they are often read as palliatives for perceived ethical gaps in a flawed process. The frustration is palpable and understandable; critics want literature to do things that politicians in Northern Ireland seem unable or unwilling to do. But, quite often in these analyses, literature is not set within its formal contexts and culture is expected to do transformative ethical and politi- cal work. This impulse has also led to those texts which are seen to engage most directly with political violence receiving not only disproportionate critical atten- tion, but also being widely taught to “sex up” courses on Northern Irish culture. Through this process, trauma texts come to dominate the focus of Northern Irish literary scholarship, while texts which speak to broader political questions are elided from the cultural landscape. Of course, this goes to the heart of a funda- mental issue of academic value: what critical objects are worthy of study and why? What is considered to be a “serious” object of academic inquiry in this area and who gets to speak for these objects? While a focus on trauma is perhaps natural in this political and social context, it is not sufficient to explain contemporary Northern Irish culture’s engage- ment with history, politics and sexuality. Consequently, this essay advocates for something of a critical turn – a turn towards the representation of pleasure in 2. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, New York, Colombia University Press, 2013, p. 8. 3. Recent examples include: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem”s The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Shane Alcobia-Murphy, “‘Snared by Words’: Trauma and the Shoah in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian”, Études Irlandaises, 36-1 (2011), p. 109-120; and Robert F. Garratt, Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead, New York:, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 4. Recent examples include: Bill Rolston, “Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland: The Current State of Play”, Estudios Irlandeses, 8 (2013), 143-149; and John D. Brewer and Bernadette C. Hayes, “Victimhood and Attitudes towards Dealing with the Legacy of a Violent Past: Northern Ireland as a Case Study”, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 17.3 (2015), p. 512-530. 156 • “Bubbles of joy”: Moments of Pleasure in recent Northern Irish Culture Northern Irish texts. Moments of pleasure within literature and culture will be examined as a space for exploration and contestation of hegemonic ideas of home, sexuality and political life. However, while undertaking this reassessment we must be careful not to set up a false dichotomy between a “pleasure text” and a “trauma text”: Northern Irish literature and culture has moments of both, often situated side by side. The issue here, then, is not with texts but with readings, and the aim is not to replicate one over-deterministic critical practice with another. Instead I propose we seek out moments of pleasure and let them stand beside moments of pain, to do justice to the myriad of affective states expressed by Northern Irish writers. This essay will consider depictions of pleasure in a selection of recent texts which are written by authors from Northern Ireland and which engage directly with both this geographical context and also with pleasure in the “post”-conflict era: Glenn Patterson’s novel The Rest Just Follows (2014), Billy Cowan’s play Still Ill (2014) and Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection Multitudes (2016). The focus will be on the depiction of pleasure, particularly sexual, to see whether these texts offer new ways of being an erotic subject in the changed political climate, or whether the sexual charge still lies in the fissures of unresolved conflict. On this, I follow Laura Frost’s reading of “pleasure as a bodily, individual experience that is simultaneously located in a social field as well as, most importantly, a textual one5”.This essay will situate Northern Irish pleasure in its social and textual contexts and suggest that there is a “new pleasure” that has emerged in Northern Irish texts. Alexander Beaumont discusses how a representational burden was felt on British fiction during the decline of leftist politics in the 1980s as “the expecta- tion placed on expressive culture to do the work of political action”. However, he notes that “today, the British novel is frequently marked by structures of failed utopianism, frustrated or incomplete experiments and even withdrawal and quie- tism6”. Beaumont’s identification of the consequences of critical expectations on British fiction can be compared to the current situation in Northern Ireland, and we must guard against the ossifying effects of wanting literature to fit into our cri- tical and political paradigms. The distinction should be drawn between this sort of broad, political utopian project and the generative possibilities espoused by Eve Sedgwick in her essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (2003)7. As Robyn Wiegman summarises, Sedgwick’s approach to reading and recovering is: 5. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 25. 6. Alexander Beaumont, Contemporary British Fiction and The Cultural Politics Of Disenfranchisement, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2015, p. 2. 7. Eve Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 123- 153. • 157 Caroline Magennis about learning how to build small worlds of sustenance that cultivate a different present and future for the losses one has suffered.
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