Phantasmal Belfast, Ancient Languages, Modern Aura in Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory

Abstract

Ciaran Carson’s writings about his native city of Belfast focus on its unreality. This project began with the poetry collection Belfast Confetti (1990) and reached its apotheosis in his prose memoir The Star Factory (1997) and, most recently, continues with the philosophical novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson’s introspective fascination with Belfast’s inscrutability links him to mid-nineteenth-century writers about cities, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and to theories about the city in the era of rapidly expanding capitalism. In grappling with post-industrial and sectarian Belfast, Carson adopts a two-tiered rhetorical strategy. Firstly, his writings borrow from archaic knowledge, especially problems within the linguistic and taxonomic components uncertainly encoded into city maps, place-names, competing idioms (Irish, English), religious iconography (Catholic, Protestant), and ancient oral Irish narratives, many of them recorded by Carson’s father and transposed into his own memoir. Secondly, Carson interweaves this archaic knowledge with a late modernist view of Belfast as phantasmagoria and aura, concepts that German critic Walter Benjamin developed from the cultural phenomenon of the panoramas and magic lantern theatres that arose in European cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and from interpretations of commodities. Following Benjamin’s investigative model, Carson’s The Star Factory surveys the merchandises, found objects, and cinematic representations of mid-twentieth-century Belfast to recover his idiosyncratic memories and time-defying experiences. By scrutinising and interpreting such languages, genealogies, etymologies, and infrastructures, Carson’s autobiographical texts about Belfast replace static and misleading historical narratives with intimate, open-ended reflexive approaches.

Mapping the Unreal

Studying a map of Belfast published in 1811, Ciaran Carson notes that the city’s cartographer, John Dubourdieu, has diagrammed streets that never existed and a bridge over the River Lagan that was never built. Recounting an attempt to see the River Farset as a whole entity from behind the imprisoning ‘bars’ of a grammar school, Carson sees the waterway in collaged fragments. ‘I did not know [the river’s] name, then, but was mesmerised by its rubbish: a bottomless bucket, the undercarriage of a pram, and the rusted springs sticking out of the wreck of a sunk abandoned sofa.’¹ In another context, an adult’s appraisal of an inherited chesterfield sofa yields to its allegorical childhood function as a ‘flying machine,’ modelled on vehicles from folktales and science fiction. Belfast seems a sound stage for an unfolding picaresque film. Writing about a stretch of half-developed land, Carson observes ‘various stages of field, leftover landscape, vacant ground, plot, building site, half-built houses, and completed semi-detacheds.’² Political conflict intrudes, of course, introducing additional unrealities. An older version of Carson visits Smithfield Market after its incineration following a guerrilla bombing in the mid-1970s to find that the shopping arcade he had enjoyed visiting in after school hours resembles a site in a post-Second World War city, ‘a minor Dresden, with only the stone piers of its gates still standing.’³ Past, present, and future blur. Carson surveys an old Parliamentary report about Belfast’s riverside land use that ‘sings of leisure purposes, velodromes and pleasure parks,’ most unrealised, surviving as vividly documented fantasies by long-dead city planners, their maps presaging the later industrialisation of that same site, pocked with ‘ruinous Gasworks’ and unspooling ‘cul-de-sacs and ring roads’ wherein ‘the city consumes itself,’ all leading to Carson’s aporia that ‘The city is a map of the city.’

As a swarming commercial and socio-political dynamism, filled with innumerable lifestyles and subcultures, multitudinous infrastructures and peripatetic crowds, Belfast, like any modern city, remains impervious to a definitive or singular literary representation. Its heterogeneity is the source of its apparent unreality, ‘the ongoing, fractious epic that is Belfast.’⁴ The phenomenon is not unique to Belfast and the challenge is not only Carson’s. In Being Modern Together, Irish critic Denis Donoghue posits that, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, as the modern metropolis exerted its (still-unprecedented) overpowering cognitive and sensory overload on human consciousness, certain writers, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, sought to explore that ineffability and its baffling parts. However, the disconnected elements and infinitesimal dimensions of large-scale urbanism necessitated corresponding transformations in literary form, textual innovations conducive to the city’s socio-psychological challenges, a predicament that Donoghue formulates as ‘the friction between the individual mind and appearances—city streets, crowds, anonymity—over which it [the individual mind] had no control.’⁵ From the blind alleyways and dimly lit flats of Arthur Conan Doyle’s crime-ridden, Victorian-era London to George Perec’s maze-like apartment buildings in post-war Paris, much vanguard literature within any given era represents the city as discontinuous, opaque, and inchoate, resembling, in lesser and greater degrees, what T.S. Eliot calls an ‘unreal’ site.⁶ Indeed Eliot’s infamous adjective about the London’s population shows a poet blanching in the face of the ghostly quality within the city’s blunt-force day-to-day commuting. Such fictive or dreamlike components define urban experience, an intimidating reality that, as Italo Calvino puts it, ‘[c]ities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears […] the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd and everything conceals something else.’⁷

Commenting on Carson’s corresponding determination to handle his native Belfast’s cryptic mutability, poet Paul Muldoon, Carson’s slightly younger peer in the Northern Irish literary scene, says he ‘take[s] in the rubble and rumpus and riddling of day-to-day life in Belfast […] taking over Belfast even as he takes it on.’⁸ To ‘take on’ and ‘take over’ Belfast in The Star Factory, Carson relies on two seemingly divergent aesthetic and philosophical stratagems, one based in pre-urban oral Irish storytelling traditions and the other culled from modern Continental theories about cities and writing. Though rooted in different epochs and diametrically opposed worldviews, these epistemic poles are interrelated. Both forego realist or naturalistic conceptions of time and space, accommodating Carson’s determination to revive antique, archaic, or otherwise neglected forms of knowledge to make sense of the modern metropolis. Writing about Belfast involves recapturing and documenting gradations and subtleties in past and present acts of perceiving the city, realities ignored through the habitual comforts of conventional realism and the distortions of chronologically oriented memory:

Conscious perception is only a fraction of what we know through our senses. By far the greater part we get through subliminal perception […] What do we remember of ourselves? A few fleeting fragments, which we make into the shifting histories of ourselves […] [and] through language we make up a fictive self, we project it back into the past, and forward into the future, and even beyond the grave. But the self we imagine surviving death is a phantom even in life. A ghost in the brain.⁹

Applied to how the self identifies with its surroundings, this phenomenological project validates Carson’s uncertainty principle stipulating that, within Belfast, ‘everything is contingent and provisional’ including its ‘plan of might have beens.’¹⁰ He compares this instability about mapping the city to the ‘frottage effect’ in writing, in which ‘[W]hole segments of the/ map have fallen off.’¹¹ In response to this impasse, Carson’s literary representations of Belfast foreground contested, irresolvable debates between truth and error, memory and imagination, fact and fiction, advancing a radical scepticism about texts that purport to represent a city.

No don’t trust maps, for they avoid the moment: ramps, barricades, diversions, Peace Lines. Though if there is an ideal map, which shows the city as it is, it may exist in the eye of that helicopter ratcheting overhead, its searchlight fingering and scanning the micro-chip deviations: the surge of funerals and parades, swelling and accelerating, time-lapsed, sucked back into nothingness by the rewind button.¹²

The flagship text in Carson’s lifework about Belfast is The Star Factory (1997). The memoir transposes Irish oral traditions in storytelling into densely compacted, contemplative reportages about growing bewildered in a technology-driven, working-and-middle-class neighbourhood in a sectarian city. Carson augments these imaginative and mythic narrative Irish modes for relating urban experiences with abstemious fact-finding, civic sourcebooks and copious fieldwork. Complicating matters, the text filters childhood memories through the epistemic frameworks of phantasmagoria and aura, interrelated concepts derived from early twentieth-century German and French theories about urban culture.¹³ The Star Factory interpolates extended paraphrases and quotations from genealogical and etymological explications about places, found objects, and the city’s competing taxonomies about itself. The narrative detours and formal and structural gamesmanship parallel the zig-zagging energy, fleeting vistas, and elliptical motion within the daily bustle of Belfast. As critic Neal Alexander puts it, Carson’s Belfast is, ‘characterised by perpetual change, a ceaseless interplay of disintegration and construction through which […] place is conceived not in terms of certainty and stability but as a process of dislocation and appropriation through which meanings are assembled and contested.’¹⁴ Carson compares his city’s resistance to representation to the ‘frottage effect’ in writing, in which ‘[W]hole segments of the/map have fallen off.’¹⁵

Archaic Modernism: Irishness , Orality, and Belfast

In 2009, following the publication of Carson’s Collected Poems, a profile about the poet in a prominent British newspaper noted that his abiding interest in writing about Belfast inevitably invites comparison to James Joyce’s literary preoccupations with Dublin.¹⁶ Setting aside the implication of intramural Irish competitiveness and a dubious “anxiety of influence” of Joyce upon Carson, these two writers approach to Irishness and the English language through their urban writings and thus illuminate common concerns and crucial distinctions about language, storytelling, and national identity.

Through remarkably similar obsessiveness and excruciating attention to physical details, Joyce and Carson capture their respective native cities during fixed historical periods scarred by civil strife and crises about Irish nationhood. In writing about the Irish city, each draws upon their dexterity with languages other than English while also changing the rules and norms that govern the traditionally British literary genres that both writers subvert.

In reconnoitring Dublin, Joyce’s novels reconstruct the English language, including diction, grammar, and syntax, partly as a literary manifestation of his psychological revolt against repressive institutional forces in modern Ireland. Examining these perturbed undercurrents, Seamus Deane theorises that Joyce’s novels, immersed in Dublin, a city marked by ‘paralysis,’ showcase a writer trapped between unsuitable choices for claiming an Irish identity. ‘Joyce rewrote the idea of a national character,’ Deane notes, ‘and replaced it by the idea of a character in search of a nation to which he (Joyce-Stephen) could belong.’¹⁷ According to Deane , Joyce’s quest calls for a resistance to framing personhood within a new, banal, and compromised Ireland—an Anglicised Dublin of the 1910s and 1920s—while simultaneously rejecting identification with a cliché-ridden Irish past—‘Mother Ireland’ and various Celtic Twilight motifs. To resolve this impasse, Joyce fabricates an alternative mode, an imaginative morphology that Deane describes as the novels’ invented, phantasmal ‘language of emancipation’ epitomised in a mythopoetic orality, especially the ecstatic Molly Bloom and the effusive polyglot torrents of Anna Liva Plurabelle. Deane argues that Joyce’s synthetic, poeticised, and retooled English, however fabricated or ‘unreal’ on its surfaces, is, in fact, undeniably real because that recalibrated language responds to inescapably real and historically bound circumstances unique to Joyce’s existence in Dublin. His fiction weighs contemporaneous options for claiming Irishness and dramatises their insufficiencies, and the urban narrative rebels against these alternatives, forging a libidinous ‘new’ English language that upends literary convention and realises the phantasmal of Dublin city:

[T]he escape from national character into a version of identity, or the escape into a newly constituted version of national character, is consistently mediated through the recourse to the phantasmal. The phantasmal subject and the phantasmal territory do not become substitutes for something actual. Their virtuality is the consequence of the analysis of the actual; the real subject and the real country are, in Irish conditions, representable only as the unreal—the unreally real.¹⁸

In writing of Belfast, Carson shares Joyce’s deep distrust about the presumed authority of the English language as a vehicle for naming, controlling, and knowing an Irish city. In contrast to Joyce’s approach, Carson’s writing about Belfast makes no attempt to re-create the English language from within. While Carson’s texts raid the hidden corners of the English lexicon, especially for its specialised terminologies, technical jargon, and archaic and polysyllabic diction, Carson does not alter English as such. Instead Carson’s texts confront the fictive-and-real or, to borrow Deane ’s phrase, the ‘unreally real’ dimensions of Belfast’s Anglicised Irishness through an avowed philosophical unease about language and interpretation on any level, an interpretive wariness so extreme and so ubiquitous that this agnosticism about meaning is a modus operandi throughout his oeuvre.

In biographical contrast to Joyce, Carson’s first language was Irish, not English. Joyce’s alienation from English, a metaphorical conceit cultivated by Joyce, has been advanced for decades by biographers and critics; in contrast, Carson’s relationship to English is marked by an irrevocable yet constructive alienation. Born in 1948 to Catholic parents who met while taking Irish-language classes, Carson was raised as an Irish speaker in various neighbourhoods in West Belfast, learning English first on the streets and only later in school. Throughout the years, in editorial interviews and remarks to audiences, he has reaffirmed an uncertainty about all language and meaning, an abiding doubt that stems from this Irish-Anglo linguistic divergence. ‘I was brought up bilingually,’ he says, ‘always uncertain of what I was saying because to say one thing in Gaelic, means a totally different thing in English. To say that the words are true, to the extent that they are actual expressions of a real event, to me is very uncertain.’¹⁹ These foundational remarks about being ‘uncertain’ about the ‘real event’ shape his literary approach to Belfast. ‘You can never explain the world,’ he adds, ‘You can only go halfway.’²⁰ In that same context, what Carson claims for his poetry collection The Twelfth of Never (1999) holds true for his literary accounts of Belfast as an account of ‘the underworld, the otherworld, the in-between worlds that is not ostensibly the real world.’²¹ That liminal status extends to the author’s name, itself a linguistic skeleton key to the sectarianism and concomitant semantic ambiguities lodged in ‘simple’ middle-class Belfast life. Carson addresses the juxtaposition between his Celtic and Catholic-sounding first name, ‘Ciaran,’ and the paternal name, ‘Carson,’ ‘perceived as the epitome of Protestant nomenclature,’ due to the legacy of Edward Carson, the barrister who battled Oscar Wilde’s libel suit and who successfully led Ulster opposition to Home Rule in Belfast.²² In ruminating about the factional tensions programmed, as it were, into his name, Carson defuses its ancestral Catholic and Protestant genealogies by transforming it into a fable about ritualised ambiguity. Most significantly, the autobiographical tale foreshadows that fabulist-philosophical duality given maximum play in The Star Factory:

On Easter Sunday my paradoxical Catholic father William Carson, or Liam Mac Carráin, as he defined himself in Gaelic mode, would bring us children to the slopes of Stormont, seat of the Northern Irish parliament, where, presided over the by giant statue of Edward Carson, we would roll our eggs. Whether this was a subversive act of one of reconciliation I cannot tell, but its ambiguity mirrored that of the family history.²³

The semi-rural familial scene (‘on the slopes’) complete with a pagan-esque egg-rolling ceremony beneath a monument to Unionist hegemony (Stormont, Edward Carson) underscores how the author’s name mirrors Belfast’s divided cityscape. The parents are humorously implicated, choosing that civic site for a sort of symbolic Easter uprising disguised, in Carson’s retelling, as an innocuous familial gathering. Oscillating between such coded languages and referents, The Star Factory positions the acts of transliteration and translation as its pervasive narrative responsibility. Translation, Carson’s vocational endeavour, is figuratively speaking an operative metaphor for how his memoir discerns Belfast’s ‘rambling ambiguity,’ thereby producing the ‘subjunctive mood’ of his autobiography, ‘tensed to the ifs and buts, the yeas and nays on Belfast’s history.’²⁴

The foundational doubt about language, and its relevance to writing Belfast, is practised through the verse and prose-poetry in Belfast Confetti, as in a passage pursuing the geographical and geological etymologies behind the word ‘brick’:

Belfast is built on sleech—alluvial or tidal muck—and is built of sleech, metamorphoses into brick, the city consuming its source as brickfields themselves were built upon; sleech this indeterminate slobbery semi-fluid […] this gunge, allied to slick and sludge, slag, sleek and slush, to the Belfast or Scots sleekit that means sneaky, underhand, not-to-be-relied-on, becoming, in the earnest brick, something definite.²⁵

The Star Factory restarts this exploratory tactic. Belfast originates in Irish, in English, and in nonverbal language systems like signage, emblems, iconography, artefacts, fashion, maps, directories, packaging, and products. Largely distanced from interpersonal relationships, the autobiographical narrator develops his identity as a solitary multilingual interpreter or tour guide introducing and reintroducing Belfast to himself and to readers through circumspect translations of the city’s physical properties occasioned by Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’ that flit through personal memory. The work is consequently tangential and non-representational; the clarifying, open-ended discourse around interpretation means that the city surfaces within hypotheticals and measured deductions and inductions teased out by a memoir, performing a semantic séance on behalf of Belfast’s superstructures and substructures, past and present. One such exemplary object is a former gardener’s cottage, called ‘The Bungalow,’ in which Carson resided for over 20 years while working for the Northern Ireland Arts Council. The renaming of the building The Bungalow derived in the 1940s from popular local shorthand for its similarity to such houses. In turn, Belfast’s utility providers made the nickname into an official address, using it for their official correspondence and billing. Carson’s interest in the metamorphism behind the name illustrates the organic unpredictability of language and thus warrants a fable-like etymological digression that typifies the prose style of The Star Factory:

‘Bungalow’ in English sounds like a brand of coal or anthracite; more interestingly, if accented on the last syllable, it can be exactly transliterated into Irish as ‘bun na gcló’, a phrase redolent of ambiguity, but almost impossible to translate. ‘Bottom of shapes’ is a possible interpretation […].²⁶

Language and names are ceaselessly mobilised, a phenomenon epitomised by the poem ‘Belfast Confetti’ wherein ‘confetti’—referring to stone and glass projectiles—takes, in all at once, concrete material, figural expression, and urbanised gesture, the city’s general ‘riot squad,’ ‘raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-key […] a fusillade of question marks.’²⁷ Likewise, in writing about post-war, working-class Belfast of his youth, the text focuses on how raw materials attach to any given era’s variable idioms and vice versa, recovering anarchical substantiality essential to language that turns bloodless words into corporeal objects and exotic or once-anonymous objects into tangible words, foreclosing the disembodied or incorporeal abstractions on which official, institutional, and administrative cultures derive their authority.

Excavating everyday philological fields loaded with meanings, The Star Factory links Belfast’s recent past with archaic meanings that reside in objects and words, an anthropological approach catalysed by modelling his prose on the Irish oral tradition. The memoir re-enacts and dramatises how its narrator’s younger self studies and replicates the father’s inexhaustible oral storytelling skills.

An educated, autodidact postal worker fluent in Irish and the cross-cultural constructed language known as Esperanto, Carson’s father, Liam Mac Carráin, functions as an unsuspecting language guide and storytelling mentor for the younger Carson whose nascent desire to narrate his own Belfast memories materialises, in Proustian fashion, within the ‘warp and woof’ of the ‘memory theatre’ an intimate familial space suffused by the father’s exemplary oral tales.²⁸ This memory theatre exists on two planes of urban reality. Most obviously, the ‘memory theatre’ represents the unfolding memoir The Star Factory. More significantly, the ‘memory theatre’ is a privileged social space, mainly between father and son but extending outward to include unnamed fellow Belfast residents who participate in the telling and retelling stories about the site known locally as The Star Factory, a demolished building at 322 Donegall Road that once housed a boys’ clothing factory. The apocryphal lore about that site’s other historical uses gives communal impetus to kaleidoscopic ‘versions’ and ‘parables’ about it, as well as reports about uncanny Belfast incidences said to have happened in and around the former factory’s ‘Zone,’ a psychosocial area described as ‘an interactive blueprint; not virtual, but narrative reality.’²⁹ In this latter iteration of ‘The Star Factory,’ and its Zone, the unreal-real city locale represents a centrifuge from which Carson’s Belfast memoir draws power and authority, as the father’s verbalised stories about the building’s function (as an infernal salt mine, or dilapidated treasure house, or landing pad for space aliens) conjure alternative city legends and imaginary urban histories (‘versions’ and ‘parables’). The narrator explains that the ‘stars’ stand for mnemonic devices and ‘crucial points’ within the ‘constellations’ and ‘patterns of the [urban] everyday’ within an oral recitation or urban folktale. Each star-punctuated story is manufactured within that socio-familial space, a real, intimate Belfast ‘factory’ in the oral tradition, displacing the industrial-era, commercial enterprise that was once the ‘real’ Star Factory, that disused topographical locus useful now only for building Belfast stories about its presumably colourful past and fantastical interiors and recesses.

Moreover, the father’s published volume of Irish-language stories, entitled Seo, siúd, agus Siúd Eile (1986) subtends The Star Factory as its Ur-text. Carson translates the Irish book’s title as ‘Here, There and There Again,’ ‘This, That, and the Other,’ and ‘Miscellanea’ categories befitting the spatially oriented wanderings of The Star Factory.³⁰ Characterised by digressive yet tightly woven patterns, the father’s retold myths match the topographical intricacies, equivocal names for objects, and meandering intractability in the concrete jungles of big city Belfast. Remarking on the muse-like status of the father as ‘master [oral] storyteller,’ the narrator announces that the present autobiographical work about Belfast will emerge in corresponding ‘latitudes of anecdote and parable’ with ‘stories re-invented’ through a ‘hodgepodge’ and ‘mish-mash’ of ‘legend, sagas, folklore and songs.’ Claiming an ahistorical scope analogous to that in his father’s Irish orality, the memoirist is ‘incapable of being here and now without remembering the previous narrative zones he’s passed through.’³¹ In dispensing with chronology, the memoir’s nonlinear layout establishes its extemporal form through mnemonic devices and thematic cues, or pivots, modelled on the father’s storytelling and culled from addresses and street names and intersections in the shared familial homes around working-class Belfast. The text foregrounds the father’s improvised and accidental pedagogies. Carson’s story about Belfast is enmeshed in his listening to his father, and this listening involves a gradual education in how to defy historicism, realism, and naturalism through the timeless discourse and discipline of Irish orality:

The serial mode [of the father’s storytelling] allowed ample scope for such [fantastic] scenarios, whose iconic details might be mirrored over many episodes, in different shifts of emphasis or content. At such points, my father’s voice would elevate and quicken, since remembering the narrative depended on these rhythmic clusters or motifs. Compressed mnemonic devices, each contained within itself the implications of past and future.³²

The memoir opens at ‘100 Raglan Street’ as the Irish-speaking father sits on the ‘throne,’ smoking in ‘the cramped dimensions of an outhouse,’ telling the captivated son a mythical tale. In harkening back to that boyhood scene, the distracted narrator limns the memory with allusions to the royal court and to ‘chamber pots,’ drawing humorous philological associations from the jargon about toilets, plumbing, and pipelines, which lead to the childhood fantasy, among his young peers on the Belfast streets, that ‘sewer covers were portals to a parallel sub-universe; embossed with arcane lettering and numerals, [and] their enormous, thick, cast-iron discs.’³³ The philological sequence culminates with the ‘library’ being redefined as euphemism for ‘water closet,’ the latter image leading to remembrance of a childhood closet in which he imagines stepping through its ‘mercury’ into another era, wandering Belfast’s predawn streets, and riding a tram’s ‘iron parallels of time’ wherein through a ‘gaslit thoroughfare’ of that archaic dream city watching real fruit sellers setting up their market.³⁴ The father’s ritualised oratory steers the narrator’s imagination and memory through subterranean Belfasts; the vernacular for domestic objects—‘library,’ ‘water closet’—propels further projections; the ‘real’ Belfast of the early 1950s, with its outhouses, sewers, manholes, and libraries, emerges inseparably from the phantasmal city conjured by the son’s unfolding memoir, a text sprung from the preliminary spell of the father’s timeless voice.

Preserving the mythos of Irish storytelling and its embodied voices within a mid-century, post-industrial urban context develops as a meta-textual objective throughout the memoir. ‘Radio Ulster’ celebrates the family radio’s ‘big warm hugging Bakelite body’ with voices resounding through a favourite BBC Radio Ulster programme named Tearmann, ‘Irish for sanctuary,’ leading to the Irish, ‘Ba ghanth liom mé féin a chur i bhfolach innti,’ which the narrator translates into ‘I used to hide myself within her.’ From that maternal image, the text delves into a recitation of a tale from Knights of God, an anthology of ancient stories about saints given to him by his father, with its primordial tales around masculine heroes such as St Finnian and Ciaran.³⁵ The lives of the saints, transcribed from Knights of God, then revitalise the domestic ritual of listening to Radio Ulster a ‘disembodied medium’ simultaneous to the father’s physiognomy and full-bodied eloquence.³⁶ Carson conflates these pan-historical cross-sections of experience (Radio Ulster, Irish etymology and proverbs, stories of the Catholic saints) with a kind of familial eccentricity and insurgency, highlighted by a story about his father’s arrest during the Second World War, when he had been mistaken for ‘Uncle Pat [who was] rumoured to have been in the IRA.’ Like the waning art of oral storytelling, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) symbolises an Irish hiddenness lurking in the confines of Belfast:

Outside of such photo-calls, IRA men were practically invisible [during my youth] […] seeming to exist by rumour or osmosis in a narrative dimension largely inaccessible to the overwhelmingly non-combatant Catholic population. I used to think of them secretly meeting in minuscule cells built into cavity walls, lying parallel in threes beneath the floorboards of a ‘safe house’ […] I was sure they knew the sewer system of the city inside-out, where they were won to flit like wills-o’-the-wisp from manholes, into culverts, into niches where they’d stand like statues as the dark police passed underneath unwittingly.³⁷

In another memory illustrating how ancestral storytelling articulates contemporary urban unreality, Carson reiterates an oral Irish tale from his father, transcribing into English, about a blacksmith who falls from the graces of both heaven and hell left to wander the ‘moors’ wraith-like, taking the form of a ‘wandering star,’ an image that harkens back to Belfast’s White Star Street and the famous British shipping company White Star. In a fugue-like denouement, the father’s tale initiates translations about the Irish word sopog into ‘will-o’-the-wisp,’ and ‘fairy fire,’ leading to English literary asides about Friar’s Lanthorn, Ignis Fatuus, and Friar Rush (and Tuck), culminating in accounts of playing Robin Hood in Belfast’s ‘jungle,’ a ‘willow scrub-land’ on the ‘bank of the Owenvarragh river’ until his family moves to Mooreland Drive into a home the ‘underlying hollow dimensions’ suggestive of trap-doors concealing Sherwood’s Merry Band, or even ‘an IRA man on the run.’³⁸ The memoir braids disparate threads of the city’s unreality and reality—the Belfast father and his oral tale of Will Gallagher, the doomed blacksmith reincarnated as the flame-like ‘will-o’-the-wisp,’ an image that then metamorphoses into figures from English folklore and literature, captivating the young reader in Belfast who then playacts that literary material within the undeveloped spaces of a working-class neighbourhood, evoking through that recreation both the fugitives in Robin Hood’s gang and the outlaw IRA.

Recounting childhood schoolroom rituals in St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School on Barrack Street in Belfast, Carson explicates clandestine games about disappearance. A designated classmate would hoist himself up and out of the schoolroom window, temporarily vanishing onto the ledge outside, or, conversely, climb into a rack of coats in the schoolroom and burrow horizontally and ‘foetally’ inside them, disappearing from sight. Those audacious acts would win the doers the title of that day’s ‘Invisible Boy’ who was ‘simultaneously free and unfree, there and not there; his reality depended on the observer.’ This phantasmal play with seeing and not seeing, presence and disappearance spilled into enduring daydreams about being a Mafioso or IRA ‘man on the run,’ trapped between Catholic-dominated Falls and Protestant-dominated Shankill Roads where he ‘desperately searches for a manhole’ in which to escape.³⁹ The need to escape polarising Protestant and Catholic codes recurs when classmates take a forbidden route home and encounter menacing older boys from the other side of the sectarian division who bully them into choosing between the flag of the Irish Republic and the Union Jack.

In a panoptic city permeated by surveillance even before the onset of The Troubles, verbal interrogation and creative acts of invisibility develop productive, if ominous, relevance.⁴⁰ The memoir recounts Catholic school pedagogy predicted on rote learning, ‘conjugations and declensions’ and memorisation of names and ‘hierarchies’ with ‘liturgical exactitude’ along with ‘different techniques’ and ‘subtle disciplines’ for the ‘universal administration of pain’ when the answers are wrong.⁴¹ The anticipation about being beaten with the ‘strap’ triggers recollection of the ‘Manufacturer of Straps for the Discerning Educator,’ a real bootmaker with a phantasmal-sounding name located at 68 Divis Street, confirmed by the 1948 Belfast directory, published the year of Carson’s birth. This, the banal loggings, in a municipal directory are transmuted into a tale about sadism and powerlessness.

However, not all Belfast memories conform to that rhythmic framework modelled on the Irish oral tradition. Carson’s text identifies features in Belfast that defy such narration while still demanding autobiographical scrutiny and memorialising. Often these impervious facets of the city earn the status of an ‘aura,’ an elusive category of knowledge which recurs throughout the memoir and which the narrator finds especially useful when analysing the ‘Zone,’ that socio-cultural storytelling space inspired by the name and location of a defunct Belfast clothing manufacturer. ‘The Zone was not the Factory,’ Carson writes, ‘but it was of the Factory and bore its aura.’ In deploying this term, derived from theosophy and religious mysticism, Carson knows the redefined conceptual significance of ‘aura’ is grounded in secular, materialist philosophy and, more importantly, in Modernist theories about the unreality of city life, ideas developed outside of Irish culture and, for that matter, quite apart from the Anglophone world.

Modern Aura: Belfast as Phantasmagoria

Irish traditions of oral storytelling and fable, steeped in voice, punctuated by changing tones and recurring cues, translated and transliterated from Irish into English, and channelling the lore of afterlives, ghosts, wraiths, wanderers, and heroes, prove remarkably effective as autobiographical ciphers through which Carson smuggles memories of a gritty Belfast childhood that was steeped in comparably liminal states and in contemporary, urbanised experiences of invisibility and timelessness. As I have argued, much of that autobiographical transmutation of the archaic into the contemporary and of present urban actualities into antique Irish archetypes relies on Carson’s dexterity with Irish and English and on the autobiographer’s congenial agnosticism about whether Irish and English languages can capture reality. But even while testing linguistic limits against the concrete features of the unreal city, Carson’s The Star Factory catalogues uncanny visual memories and aesthetically charged encounters in Belfast that exceed the grasp of such narration. In doing so, the memoir draws heavily on two distinctly Modernist principles about the city—phantasmagoria and aura—interrelated categories of experience and knowledge developed in the 1920s and 1930s, in writings about Berlin and Paris by German intellectual Walter Benjamin, whose frequently invoked presence runs throughout Carson’s writing about Belfast.⁴²

As a materialist thinker and a Marxist philosopher with a learned background in Judaic mystic traditions, Benjamin theorised about methods that might undo the neutering, or dulling, of personal identity caused by technology-driven consumerist capitalism embodied by the metropolis. In Benjamin’s view—one implicitly shared by Carson—a stagnating process of reification conditions its urbanised citizenry to be docile once they conceptualise their existence as a commodity, one more object in the sphere of everyday production and exchange. Benjamin’s figure of the urban wanderer, or flâneur , stands as the anti-hero opposed to this ossification, rising as an alternative, active method for knowing oneself and one’s city, a model taken up by Carson’s peripatetic narrator in The Star Factory. The flâneur—the detached, attentive spectator culled from Charles Baudelaire’s urban poetics—pondered the ‘religious intoxication of great cities,’ a principle echoed by Carson in the autobiographical statement, ‘I am in religious awe of the power of [Belfast] names.’⁴³ Benjamin traced how Baudelaire ’s intoxicated flâneur, a nonconformist and ‘illuminati,’ whom the poet himself found in Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1854), was re-invented by Surrealist novels and in the sensory shocks registered by the meandering narrator in Marcel Proust’s introspective epic In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). More than a stereotype or poseur, the flâneur represents an alternative form of urban consciousness, a sort of double agent, who exists within the city and yet moves with a level of detachment that provides unique access to the fugitive meanings largely unregistered by the crowd. In imaginative literature as in real life, the flâneur saunters about manufactured spaces, neither a machine-like worker nor a sleepwalking consumer. As a detached outsider, he rips off the optical blinders and sensory filters imposed by civic conformity and functional pragmatism. Instead of submitting to the fate of commodified subject or capitalist tool, the flâneur wanders the city, studying randomness, changeability, and ephemerality. Carson’s narrator re-enacts past wanderings around Belfast in exactly such solitary postures, contemplativeness, and dispassionate observation, turning the autobiographer into an Irish version of this Baudelairean ideal.⁴⁴

Benjamin’s works on Berlin and Paris postulate that, however unfathomable cities seem, being technologically and ideologically determined, the cityscape constitutes a magnetic field bristling with meaning. Begun in 1928, and unfinished when he died in 1940, The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s hydra-headed ‘exploration of the soul of the commodity’ and, like the Irish oral traditions and the father’s storehouse of narrative modalities, subjects, and themes, so too does Benjamin’s Arcades Project provide a decisive formal model for The Star Factory. Culling and transcribing a century’s worth of literary texts and writings by a range of thinkers involved in the planning and the construction of modern-day Paris, Benjamin’s Arcades dissects urban enclosures and apparatuses invented by these modern technicians and utopian architects. Such techne include mass-produced clothing, shopping arcades, railroad stations, train cars, automobiles, panoramas, bookstores, kiosks, stalls, movie houses, and large palaces constructed for world’s fairs, almost all of which figure in Carson’s similarly analytical renditions of modern Belfast. Taking these mechanisms apart and examining their psychosocial effects and textures, Arcades tracks how city-based technologies replicate, for any user, the time-suspending spatial configuration in dreams, causing transformations in modern consciousness and social organisation unparalleled in human history. To advance this project, Benjamin developed two concepts which Carson draws upon in his autobiographical investigations of Belfast: the phantasmagoria and the aura.⁴⁵

Phantasmagoria was formerly the general term for panoramas, dioramas, and magic lantern theatres, pre-cinematic methods for optical projection that were technological precursors to moviemaking and virtual electronic forms of entertainment. These original forms of public entertainment, refining the ancient camera obscura, took root in late eighteenth-century Germany and spread to Paris, London, and American cities. These popular installations and enclosures often staged séances, replicated far-flung exotic or rural landscapes, and presented recreations of dramatic historical scenes. Largely refined as an aesthetic term and thus slightly removed from its originally Marxist meaning, phantasmagoria, for Benjamin’s Paris as for Carson’s Belfast, functions also as an authorial vantage point through which to recognise and then record the alternative reality concretised in the city’s prefabricated, resonating envelope, its equipment, apparatuses, shells, and encasings crafted by technology and propelled by consumerist culture, within which the urbanite travels and lives, as if inside a waking dream.

Since not all elements in Carson’s Belfast are translatable through language (morphological and lexical analyses of Irish and English) or supple enough to be distilled into oral traditions (fairy-tale plotlines or lithe, fable-like capsule narratives), Carson, in relying on Benjamin’s Arcades rubric, compiles prose-poetic lists, quotations, annotations, and aphoristic commentary about research material to document Belfast (as Benjamin does for Berlin and Paris) in its intrinsic state, as a phantasmagoric place. Belfast’s phantasmagoria appears within the memoir’s cavernous recesses and shelters, in sitting rooms and front yards, half shaded lots and garbage-strewn riverbanks, shopping arcades and sweet shops, archival photographs and cinema shows, street lighting and public transportation. The former shirt factory crystallises this phenomenon:

The Star Factory had been long since demolished, but bits of its structure still lay at the back of my mind. Floating through its corridors, ascending its resounding Piranesi iron staircases, or wading through a flooded loading-bay, I realised that for some time I had confused the Factory with other establishments, or other purposes, and its dimensions had expanded. Exterior adjuncts of itself lay scattered on the landscape like relics of a bombed city […] asbestos-roofed outbuildings on the margins of abandoned airfields or the skull-and-crossbones signs on electricity pylons and perimeter fences.⁴⁶

The passage surveys how variant physical formations (and deformations) in the cityscape haunt the memory and the imagination of the urban dweller, so that the Benjaminian term ‘phantasmagoria,’ in addition to naming these unspeakable exterior nonhuman realities, also designates a dislocated consciousness as it is altered by those external fabrications which surround and press upon an over-stimulated body. Human bodies become one with Belfast’s concurrently interior-and-exterior phantasmal domain, as in this ekphrasis on a street paving scene:

Then the street would be occupied with military-mortar cement mixers and a team of sappers in mismatching uniforms of greasy serge suits, a pair of whom would tamp parallels along the wet concrete street with a plank set on edge, two sets of rocking-horse handles attached to its ends. For a day and a night, or more, the street would be a no-go zone, demarcated by the serial monocular glow of a red bull’s eye oil-lamps hooked onto wooden rails between saw-horses, as the aromatic burning oil you sniffed was cut by acrid-smoke from the watchman’s brazier that had red holes punched in it.⁴⁷

The scene renders an infrastructure project within a cinematic vocabulary. That diction attests to the enigmatic and transitory animatronics within the seemingly routine. The work site absorbs human bodies whose exertions set in motion industrial machinations and transmute raw materials that literally make and remake Belfast. Furthermore the passage illustrates the juncture between the dispassionate flâneur ’s idiosyncratic attentiveness, personified by the invisible narrator, and the street’s infinitesimal concretions and municipal stagecraft, commemorated through poetic descriptors—‘team of sappers,’ ‘greasy serge suits,’ ‘rocking horse handles,’ ‘serial monocular glow.’ Belfast as a phantasmagoric city appears even in smaller scale tableau. Recalling hours spent in a billiard hall, Carson draws on an ‘inward eye’ to track how minuscule interior details summon up the fullness of the space’s exterior:

[E]ach stroke [on the snooker table] left a dot of chalk that on the cue-ball, which in turn deposited a microscopic track across the baize or, more especially, against the nap of it. So, one could reconstruct an epic frame from an examination of the empty green arena, until its supervisor, with a wide brush, wiped away the evidence.⁴⁸

In another nonlinear and phantasmagoric renovation of urban routine, the narrator settles into a Belfast train car bound for Balmoral, ‘in a compartment that smells of tobacco and autumnal-coloured moiré cut-moquette upholstery.’⁴⁹ In studying more closely the myriad of details within the train, the narrator experiences ‘momentary dislocation’ and then attends the motion of the train as it speeds along the tracks, dissecting each interrelated convolution in the locomotive whirr, such that the excruciations of textual detailing restore to a banal suburban commute its innately fantastical nature:

The whole elaborate system of junctions, sidings and crossovers is corroborated by the interlinks of rods and levers, wires plumbed into black tubings snaking parallel to the tracks, under intervallic staves of telegraph wires strung out between high poles, as the sleepers below exude oil and creosote, and the heraldic armatures of railway signals click their intermittent semaphores, trying to orchestrate the movements.⁵⁰

Phantasmagoria colours the recollections about Belfast movie-going as well. In diction that directly borrows phraseology from Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, Carson’s narrator recounts a ‘palpable dream’ of being ‘pleasurably lost’ in a Belfast ‘precinct crammed with shops, stores, offices, public houses, cafes cinemas’ including a semi-fantastic ‘sleep department of a vast emporium.’⁵¹ Suffused with dream content, the autobiographical vectors about the area housing the ‘Ulster Cinematograph Theatres’ are nevertheless anchored through actual coordinates, the ‘dense urban space of Arthur Street and its confluence of five streets’ and a ‘quadrangle of small shops containing three covered arcades of junk stalls, mostly built in 1848.’⁵² Alluding to childhood screenings of films that depict competing parallel universes—The Wizard of Oz and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—Carson explores how childhood fantasies drawn from films develop into adult imaginings as well, especially in autobiographical correspondences found in British director Carol Reed’s noir thriller Odd Man Out, based on the F.L. Green novel. Reed’s film, profoundly invested in Belfast’s interior-exterior enclosures, recesses, and fissures, serves as a cinematic exemplification, par excellence, of Walter Benjamin’s theories about the enervating potential in moviemaking.⁵³ Thus in Carson’s memoir, Reed’s film provides a cinematic corollary and a reflexive text authenticating The Star Factory’s temporally disjunctive wandering within his version of Belfast. Shot almost entirely in the post-war Belfast of Carson’s youth, Reed’s film follows the street-bound odyssey of Johnny McQueen (played by James Mason). McQueen, a mortally wounded leader of a local IRA unit being pursued by the police, hides in pockets throughout the city while encountering a cross-section of Belfast citizenry who interpret him in various degrees of ambivalence and captivation, as if McQueen were an urbanised extension of the city’s troubling inscrutability. Through memoires about seeing Reed’s film in Belfast, Carson obliquely reveals how the fragmented autobiographical tableaux in The Star Factory mirror the confined dislocations in Belfast undergone by Reed’s doomed hero. Although Reed’s film opens in realistic mode with crooked aerial shots of Belfast Lough, McQueen’s disorienting separation from fellow revolutionaries relatively early in the film suspends the advancement of linear time, opening out to a non-chronological, collage-like film which Carson’s memoir consciously imitates. Removed from social relationships that narrowly defined him, McQueen undergoes what Carson, alluding to his often solitary Belfast childhood wanderings, terms an ‘internal exile’ within Belfast, underscored by the film’s moody ‘Doctor Caligari camera angles.’⁵⁴ This Reed’s cinematographic style provides a generative model for Carson’s elliptical literary montages; both texts, film and memoir, blur the normal boundaries between public and private, outside and inside. In Reed’s film such spaces include the ramshackle lodging in a safe house, a bourgeois sitting room, spacious pubs and saloons, a dance hall, a church rectory, an artist garret, a junkyard, a bomb shelter, a getaway car, a tramcar, horse-drawn hansoms and automotive taxis, a dockland and innumerable storefronts, alcoves, lanes, alleys, and street corners.

Analysing the phantasmagoric paradox of interiors that double as exteriors, Carson decodes Reed’s Belfast in terms that apply equally to his version of the city, in that Belfast, ‘[in Odd Man Out] is a Daedalian construct in which even the street scenes, with their strong Caravaggio chiaroscuros, look like interiors.’⁵⁵ Compatible to Benjamin’s theory that commodity capitalism alters urban experience such that the cityscape conjures an irrealism collapsing distinctions between waking consciousness and dreams, the narrator of The Star Factory, like James Mason’s character in Odd Man Out, is unable to distinguish dreams about Belfast from actualities in the city. Both Mason and Carson’s narrator experience acute sensory flashbacks about encounters in particular Belfast locations that conjoin disparate past experiences, forming these into singular, hallucinatory scenes. Such moments document how the individual subconscious reshapes urban reality through its own sublimated imagery. The Star Factory adapts this montage technique to its own ends. The text deliberately ‘cuts away’ from descriptions of ‘real life’ past happenings to narrate scenes from recurring dreams. The memoir describes a childhood dream about constantly missing a particular red bus at Dunville Park and also around Ballysillan, anachronistically set in 1930 ‘when there were no buses’ and a dream vision of St. Peter’s square that has been reconfigured ‘with a piazza’ and buildings modelled on various cities, ‘Belfast grocer’s corner shop , Parisian boutique, New York diner, Dublin pub, Warsaw synagogue, Berlin brothel.’⁵⁶

Ultimately, Carson envisions Belfast’s concretions, both within and without the memoir The Star Factory, as emanating a timeless ineffability corresponding to what Benjamin describes as the reflexive ‘aura,’ affecting seer and seen alike and having its most recognisable nonhuman manifestation in commonplace objects and in artworks, including photography and film. Benjamin defines the aura as ‘an ornamental halo in which the object or being is encased as in a case,’ and, reflexively, as ‘the distance of the gaze that awakens in the object looked at.’ In a technological metaphor for how the human consciousness seizes on an aura within its attended appearance, Benjamin describes the aura as being ‘developed in the darkroom of the lived moment.’ Acknowledging the opacity of the ordinary world is a prerequisite for recognising and realising the aura of things. According to Benjamin, ‘[w]e penetrate the mystery [of the aura] only to the degree that we recognise it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.’⁵⁷

Carson’s memoir confronts and joins the formal and autobiographical challenges posed by Benjamin’s theory of the aura, mainly through the memoir’s curated contemplations of discrete objects and scenes. Examining engravings and photographs from frozen moments in Belfast’s ordinary past in ‘The Panoramic Photograph Company,’ the chapter unlocks a fleetingness within the seemingly arrested scenes of Belfast-past. An engraving from 1786 depicts a scene set on High Street, offering the narrating witness an opportunity to study the impenetrability of the small grouping of people and to unleash the fugitive haze, or aura, contained within that graphic transience. The autobiographical moment, charged with creative visioning of an art-object, serves, as do myriad moments in The Star Factory, as a case study in practising Benjamin’s ‘dialectical optic’:

A tricorn-hatted gentleman is chatting up two ladies, one of whom is looking over her shoulder, possibly at the woman carrying a baby. Two cloaked figures conduct some business, and there are other knots of twos or threes in the background. In the far distance, a gang of men or sailors converge on the tangle of masts, spars and shrouds where the Farset debauches into the Lagan.

The aura gleaned from the High Street engraving is realised (made real) within the medium of the hyper-perceptive text itself. The uncovered spontaneity dwelling within the image of a long-gone moment in late eighteenth-century Belfast finds corresponding, dialectical, vitality in the late twentieth-century words of an autobiographer who responsively intuits the figures’ motives and moods, fulfilling Benjamin’s mandate that the seer’s receptiveness to the object will yield up ‘distance of the gaze’ awakened in the object looked upon—its aura. This means the aura is both a means and an end in Carson’s writing. As Benjamin scholar Hansen notes, ‘aura is not an inherent property of person or objects but pertains to the medium of perception, naming a particular structure of vision’ and ‘a phenomenal structure that enables the manifestation of the gaze, inevitably refracted and disjunctive and shapes its potential meanings.’⁵⁸

When the narrator studies his stamp collection—at first glance the most mind-numbing autobiographical topic imaginable—aura again is made manifest. The text actualises the aura within the postal relic and in doing so transcends the banal, propagandist historicism stamped on the object by Irish national bureaucracy. The stamp in question, a 1941 issue known as ‘The Gunman,’ commemorates the 25th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Carson acknowledges the Nationalist import of the relic, its ‘subversion of authority […] for nowhere was the Crown as near ubiquitous than as on postage stamps, these little emblems of the temporal realm.’⁵⁹ Yet that static historicism means little; the third-rate portrait of the gunman is ‘banal, pious, badly drawn,’ and, as an item for potential sale, the stamp is ‘next to worthless in monetary value.’⁶⁰ Its insipidity and ugliness nevertheless contains within it an aura that ‘fascinates’:

I love the blue-black ink that seems to have a tint of bottle-green in it, so that it summons the dull enamelled frames of Royal Constabulary bicycles […] the colour of gunpowder, broken slates or magnets; the ooze blue-clay of the Lagan at low tide; coke-smoke from the gas-works; livid live lobster blue; rubber bullets, purple cobblestones, a smear of blackberries; cinder-paths at dusk, when no one walks on them; the black arm-band of the temporary postal worker.⁶¹

From smudged colours closely examined through a magnifying glass trained on bureaucratic detritus, The Star Factory cultivates language and subject, Belfast, as aura. The city’s unreality stands equal to the reflexive, mesmeric text. And the written word unearths legible opacities from Belfast’s impenetrability.