EL TERREMOTO DE HAITÍ

a realm o f hyperreality that refuses us the distance to stand back from our experiences and question them; refuses us, in other words, a sense o f historical perspective.’6 This may be presented as both a way o f questioning cliched versions o f place-history, or may be a further confusion o f the postmodern milieu.

The complicity/resistance dichotomy that informs much comedy is doubly in evidence here. Just as comedy necessarily has to draw on a certain set o f shared assumptions in order to work, postmodern comedy may attempt to question the hyperreal, commodified world, yet it is also inextricably part o f that world. This is particularly clear when treating it within the arena of postcolonial discourse, as Gerry Smyth notes:

For if postmodernism relies on critical/theoretical strategies which have emerged from the ‘First W orld’, and specifically from the particular phase of late capitalism into which the West appears to have moved, then this radically qualifies its claim to be the agent o f resistance to Western politico-cultural practices.7

This factor is also complicated by the position of both the Republic o f Ireland and Northern Ireland themselves. They are clearly part o f this Western, commercial world (to whatever degree social commentators will attest to), but they may also be seen as postcolonial territories. There have been calls for a new way o f reading fiction without necessarily reflecting on the Irish ‘thing’: ‘This tendency for Irish writing to be swallowed by Irish Studies and fed into a narrative of Irishness and Irish history

6 Sim on M alpas, The P o stm o d ern (London: R outledge, 2 0 0 5 ), p. 94.

7 Gerry Sm yth, ‘The P olitics o f Hybridity: Som e Problem s w ith C rossing the B order’, C o m p a rin g

P o stc o lo n ia l L iteratu res: D islo ca tio n s, ed. A shok Bery and Patricia Murray (London: M acm illan, 2 0 0 0 ), pp. 4 3 -5 5 (p. 44).

o

effectively imprisons it.’ Despite this, there is clearly still a compunction to link the postmodern present to the colonial past, complicating the temporal shift. Linden Peach asserts that Ireland is an ‘in-between’ space, which turns its attention to tradition as much as it does experimentation: ‘it [the in-between space] also involves reclamation o f tradition in ways that make it peculiarly unhelpful to talk o f contemporary Irish fiction, as one might more easily of British fiction in terms of “experimental” and “traditional” writing.’9

There is a danger here that the critic may see the postcolonial past in the novel more than the writer, and certainly I would argue that the reclamation o f the past and tradition could also be linked to a wider postmodern tendency to try and discover both a level o f ‘authenticity’ and the ‘real’ perceived as lacking in the present. Certainly, however, both the postmodern social world, and also postmodern literary experimentation, is approached with a degree o f suspicion in some writing from Northern Ireland and the Republic. As Peach asserts: ‘a number o f Irish novels confront the unreliability o f narratives, symbols and definitions and challenge the seduction o f postmodemity.’10

This is especially true with reference to the seduction o f the postmodern commercial world within society. There is a feeling in many of these texts that social policy in both the Republic and Northern Ireland has been prey to the seductions o f the

8 Peter Sirr, cited by D esm ond Taynor, ‘F ictionalising Ireland’, Irish S tu dies R eview , 10 (2 0 0 2 ), 125-

132 (p. 127).

9 Linden Peach, The C ontem porary> Irish N ovel: C ritic a l R ea d in g s (Hampshire: Palgrave M acm illan,

2 0 0 4 ), p. 20. N otable exceptions to this are Yeats is D ead!, ed. by Joseph O ’Connor (London: V intage,

2 0 0 2 [2 0 0 1 ]), F in b a r ’s H otel, ed. by Derm ot B olger (London: Picador, 1999 [19 9 7 ]) and L a d ie s ’ N igh t

at F in b a r ’s H o tel (London: Picador, 2 0 0 0 [1999]), in w hich every chapter is written by a separate writer. In the case o f B o lg er’s collection s o f short stories, the writers o f each story are not specified. In

the case o f Yeats is D ead!, each writer continues the plot for a chapter before handing it on to the next,

w ith no master plan for the story. 10 Peach, p. 21.

international global economy. The new ‘decentred or polycentric corporation’ (26), to use Robins’ term, has had a direct impact on the role o f the individual within society as part of the economic boom.11 A change in work ethic from being part of smaller, localised companies, to being a possibly expendable member of a workforce at the mercy of multi-nationals, has led to a questioning of the identity of the individual worker. The increasing emphasis on the insignificance of individuals with reference to the ‘big picture’ has led to writers examining the (im)possibility of new ways of making this working identity ‘significant’ in other ways.

The influence of the world-wide commodification of culture has also had an impact within both the Republic and Northern Ireland. There is clearly a repudiation in many texts of a simplistic commercial Trishness’ which seems to be the view of outsiders. These representations may range between the kitsch, commodified ‘Oirishness’ of recent years, and an equally extreme media (and therefore saleable) image of the 1970s and 1980s IRA activity. These commodified versions of Irish identity are clearly not a reflection of reality, but are a hyperreal entity in themselves. As Baudrillard says o f the wider postmodern environment: ‘It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs o f the real for the real itself.'12 However, this is also problematized by the repudiation within the texts of some insider views, and the search for an ‘authentic’ Irish identity through what is often depicted as an outdated Nationalist discourse, most especially within the Republic. As Aidan Arrowsmith notes, the idea o f true Irish ‘roots' has come to represent a comforting image in the apparently empty postmodern world: ‘amidst the flux and homogenisation o f globalisation, Irishness as