FIGURAS LITERARIAS

Some of the critical writers writing in the 1980s condemn the novels that focus on individuals and psychological explanations of the Troubles, and urge novelists to write about history, society and cultural realism. Joe McMinn (1980, 1985) explains that the psychological novel ignores the historical and political context, and so ultimately fails to offer any kind of explanation. He argues that it might be that the novels are crude because the Troubles are crude, but “we should ask a bit more of our

‘imaginative writers, and critics, than this kind of unquestioning mimesis” (113).

McMinn’s method is to “detect general patterns rather than to engage in detailed stylistic analysis of any one outstanding novel (even though this does lead to a certain

‘levelling’), to see if there is any pattern of consensus within the form” (113).

However, the article includes only twelve novels, so the “general pattern” detection is confined to a narrow research set. He argues that narrative form, as well as content, tells us something about the ideological readings of the Troubles. McMinn constructs

a general classification of Troubles novels, according to which the sub-classes within the genre are: novels written by journalists; novels written by writers who have “an Irish connection in the family” (116); serious novels that “insist on the exclusively psychological basis of political violence, with varying degrees of concession to History” (117); and novels employing the Troubles as “a backdrop to a Romance”

(119). Methodologically, his approach is to present a very short synopsis of the plot, followed by subjective comments.

McMinn’s general view is that the Troubles have been used in two principal ways in contemporary novels, which are “1) as a basis for documenting realism, 2) as the background for Romance. The first category is the thriller, with its predictable pattern of events in a world of pursuit and confrontation between the IRA and the State. The second category, which often includes elements of the thriller, represents the social and political upheaval as ‘a threat to privacy and individualism’ ” (114).

Thrillers written by journalists are often vehicles through which authors attempt to document realism, and they often contain concrete details relating to the topography of Belfast, and scenes of a city at war. Journalists are marketed as knowledgeable and authentic, but the journalist-author can never write out of “a people’s experience of the war, since their occupation demands that they remain outside direct involvement and sympathy” (114).

McMinn, like so many of the critics, evaluates and rates the novels against his own unarticulated criteria of worth. Jimmy Breslin’s World Without End is described as a “very fine novel” (115), because of its sympathies with the unemployed working-class of Belfast and Derry (115). Realism in this novel is achieved through the

inclusion of concrete, even domestic, images of a community at war, a realism similar in some ways to “much photographic realism” (116). He is particularly dismissive of the novels of the professional Irishmen, arguing that these thrillers and “other serious novels” (117) insist on a psychological basis of political violence. Kiely’s Proxopera (1977) and McCabe’s Victims (1976) are used as examples of this type of novel, in which there is a fatalism about Irish fanaticism, and an insinuation that the Troubles are those of the Irish “character” or “temperament” (119). McMinn argues that this assumption, or insinuation, is used so often that it “begins to assume the status of a literary convention” (119).

McMinn concludes by referring to a set of novels using the Troubles as a backdrop to a romance: Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on our Skin (1977), Dave Martin’s The Task (1975) and Ceremony of Innocence (1977), and Francis Stuart’s A Hole in the Head (1977). These novels represent the Troubles “as a separate but proximate world which impinges on the preference for a private order” (119). The pattern in these novels is a search for self-expression and self-fulfilment “with the war as a reminder of the uselessness of most such searches” (120), and these novelists have a “preference for psychological characterisation”, which is “consistent with their indifference to history” (120). They do not attempt to explain Ireland in structural and political terms: the emphasis is on exploring the consciousness of the individual artist.

In these novels the recurrent violence is ultimately explained by reference to myth.

His conclusion is that all the novels considered in his survey incline towards

psychological characterisation and are indifferent towards history. This indifference is to a certain degree a reflection of the writers’ own limited knowledge, but beyond

this, McMinn argues, lies an “imaginative distortion’ … [which] reveals a basic conservatism of form as well as feeling” (120), and these conservative forms are far from being “disinterested reflections, faithful to reality” (121), but have ideological implications.

The conflict between the private life of the artist and the public violence of the Troubles is a theme to which McMinn returns in 1985, writing about The Railway Station Man (1984), Cal (1983) and The Dark-Hole Days (1984). McMinn takes a dim view of the ways in which Jennifer Johnston writes about the Troubles in her novels, because her representation of “violent men shows her conventionality” (20).

Both The Railway Station Man and Cal are novels in which “images of a violent society are wholly abstract” (20). For these “popular, best-selling authors”, the conventions of the Troubles are there to be picked and easily used. In particular, he comments on the revival of the “godfather” type in modern novels, a type invented by Sean O’Casey over sixty years ago, inspired by Pearse (20). In both novels, heroes are fore-grounded, and clichés are firmly in the backdrop. Una Woods gets even shorter shrift. The Dark Hole Days is described as pretentious and boring (22).

McMinn argues that the sense of estrangement in these novellas comes not from the Troubles, but from higher education as “[t]he dominant viewpoint, whether of character or narrator, is that of someone who can’t talk to people anymore because, thanks to college, they don’t think like the people they grew up with”(22). This is interesting in the light of later critics who argue that higher education has given a generation of young novelists distance from the events in Northern Ireland, enabling

them to write with the postmodern irony and detachment that is valued by contemporary critics.