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Reading in the Dark: Irish Literary Identity Dragana R

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Reading in the Dark: Irish Literary Identity Dragana R READING IN THE DARK: IRISH LITERARY IDENTITY DRAGANA R. MAŠOVIĆ University of Niš Abstract: The concept of literary identity is here used to emphasize the ways in which the author of a literary work can use the storage of the traditional techniques at his disposal to symbolically illuminate the social, historical, cultural and intellectual phenomena of his time. These techniques, which are part of the author’s art, become the means of constructing his literary identity. The result is the profound expression of an individual experience of a certain social and cultural history. The novel “Reading in the Dark” (1996) by Seamus Deane illustrates such an experience. Key words: identity, Irish tradition, literary identity 1. Introduction. Discussing literary identity The present paper deals with two questions: What gives a certain literary work its distinct quality within the world of literature? and How can we know that the story is Irish (apart from relying on extra-literary data)? The answer to the latter does not focus on the “national” identity as constructed in literature (Powell 2004:3), but on “literature” as a set of tendencies that we relate to the Irish literary legacy. This implies forms, structures and modes created in the course of Irish literary history that surface in contemporary literary works such as the autobiographical novel Reading in the Dark (1996) by the prominent Irish author Seamus Deane. 2. Seamus Deane and the Irish literary identity The expression “Irish literary identity” almost always means “the identity of Ireland or Irish people” as constructed in literature. Rarely does it deal with “a kind of literature as written in Ireland or by Irish people”. The explanation for this partly lies in the overwhelming insistence on the ideological concepts of identity and its various sub-forms (national, gender-related, racial, political, colonial, local, etc.). In other words, social, ideological, political and cultural concerns have taken predominance over the literary. Thus, literature, for much of its history an ancilla to history, ideology or politics as well as a “construction worker” of identities, now is estimated as a too long, too demanding, or even too risky and dangerous kind of cultural programming, acceptable only in its shorter and ideologically (assumed) harmless forms. Therefore, its “identity” – its aesthetic quality - is much too often disregarded or pushed to the margin. In this paper, however, this identity is seen in terms of the peculiarities of the literary tradition in Ireland. 2.1 The concept of literary identity If we accept the concept of literary identity as a set of tendencies which make one literary tradition distinct from others, we can then make another point: B.A.S. vol. XX, 2014 102 our focus is on the concept of “tradition” rather than on “nationality”. More exactly, we presume that authors were born within a certain cultural and social ambience, that they have mastered their trade and ways of articulating their thoughts and feelings within a certain literary framework and that they have constructed their literary identity by using the features of their literary legacy. It is the legacy that they choose from and build upon. The act of choosing makes their literary identities an open, dynamic and “open to negotiation” literary creative space. Relying, as T. S. Eliot stated, on his “historical sense”, an author has not only “the whole of the literature of Europe”, but also “the whole of the literature of his own country” (Eliot 1973: 505) at his disposal. This can serve as a general framework, a map of literary history, a storeroom of impressions, phrases, images and experiences. It is the material for a new work of art (that will, following Eliot (1973: 506), in its turn, have an impact “on all the works of art which preceded it”). It begins to exist when the author starts a dialogue with his social, cultural, political, as well as literary inheritance. 2.2 Irish literary identity In Reading in the Dark (1996), there is true wealth of fictional forms and tellers of tales. One of them is the narrator’s aunt, Kathie, the proponent of the original authentic oral storytelling skill. She is the one to delineate the main body of the identity framework, which has, in this novel, the form of a “labyrinthine plot” (Deane 1996:62). She tells the stories to her cousins, the children of the given family, but even when her listeners grow up, she would still tell stories of a different kind, like a true seanchai, a storyteller and historian in early Ireland, a prominent public figure and keeper of collective memories. Therefore, Kathie stands for the framework outline, a large set of stories which have found, in one way or another, their place in Deane’s novel, in itself a mixture of detective, Gothic, ghost, black humour, thriller, horror, grotesque prose genres. The novel is shaped to accommodate this variety: it consists of a series of vignettes, short stories and even shorter ones inserted in them, anecdotes and reminiscences, often given an enclosed form and ending with effective exit lines. The patchwork of stories is unified by the voice of the nameless narrator (“the boy”), who carefully marks the dates of the personal and communal events referred to in the novel. The fact that the novel takes the form of connected yet short sketches, written in the first person, evokes an oral rather than written tradition; it resembles a set of storytelling sessions, with the narrator as a teller of tales. The modern seanchai tells us a story, let’s say, about his own growing up (Bildungsroman) in the atmosphere of the Troubles, in the Northern Ireland city of Derry. Only this time we are not sitting in a circle round him, but in our homes, holding his book in our hands, with the lights on. It would be, he claims, a completely different thing to try to read it in the dark. 2.2.1 Reading in the dark Another thought-provoking aspect of Deane’s literary technique is suggested in the very title of the novel: “reading in the dark”. It implies an apparently impossible situation: the story is not meant for any “daylight reading”. The lights should go out – the way they go out for the narrator when his elder brother orders 103 APPROPRIATING OTHERNESS him to turn them off and go to sleep – and the narrator finds himself “reading” the texts illuminated by the inner light of his curious and imaginative mind. In the darkness, the daylight versions are doubted, explored, questioned. In the darkness, the mind begins its search for truth. In other words, the narrator intrudes into the treasury of seanchai or Aunt Kathie, gets involved in a labyrinthine plot, his family story burdened with family secrets (Ross 2007), and from there, he starts his search for a way out. His investigation is an archetypal quest for truth (or part of the Romantic tradition of self-discovery) (Ross 2007). By “reading in the dark” or interrogating the nature of the fictions gathering in and around him, the boy tries to get the primary cause or, symbolically, the Original Sin that had led to his family’s curse, deaths, losses and suffering – the final melancholy. In other words, he tries to find the Original Story most probably hidden in the maze of many versions. 2.2.2 Strange little alliances Another important tendency present in Deane’s novel, concerning literary identity, is the following: the traditional framework with its labyrinthine structure is used here not only to block or captivate the process of getting to the truth/solution/exit of/from the story, but also to open up its numerous renderings and possibilities. Above all, it boastfully stresses its capacity to branch into numerous corridors, fables and fantasies. Thus, tradition is given a double sense – it is both a framework within which to articulate one’s personal experience and one within which one should start a dialogue with it. The questions posed by the narrator show how many tales are just ornaments created by “strange little alliances” (Deane 1996:189) people make up in their heads, trying to assert their versions of reality in conversations and thus prove their points, pretending they are in the know). While “reading” the stories, the narrator detects superstition, delusion, falsehood, at places where the truth is wished for. His mother gives an explanation: much of what is produced as a story is stemming from the country people’s need to explain everything in personal terms, to always find some blame somewhere and to “storify” it. Mother does it, too, in her construct of one family mystery, the death of the narrator’s uncle Eddie, an IRA member. Her story “cancelled all others” (217); with all the witnesses silenced or in exile or dead, the boy’s search for truth becomes a difficult endeavour. He has to revise his relationship with Mother as his cognitive process is unfolding and as he is trying to create logical connections between the many stories. This is an emotionally painful process, exerting pressure on the participants in the quest. It is filled with the iconography of the Roman Catholic dogma, with the dominant metaphor of infernal fire as punishment for sin, especially when it comes to the main actor of the family story, Mother. It is in her that the fire is most often “burning, burning, burning” (219) 2.2.3 Choice of pain An intense religious experience shaping some of the stories could be seen as another marker of Irish literary experience. The boy can interpret his family past in terms of personal/collective fall, sin and remorse.
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