Reconfiguring Identities: Recent Northern Irish Fiction

Abstract

The Northern Ireland peace process, which began to gather fragile momentum in the summer of 1993, opened up new artistic as well as political perspectives on the sectarian violence and religious bigotry which had plagued the province for a quarter of a century.¹ The readiness of writers to anticipate and respond to the possibilities of peace was exemplified by Seamus Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy (1990), the final Chorus of which envisioned a ‘great sea-change/ On the far side of revenge’, and by Michael Longley’s sonnet ‘Ceasefire’, which was completed on 26 August 1994, five days before the first IRA ceasefire.² Refracting the contemporary moment through the lens of Homer’s Iliad Longley offers a vision of reconciliation and forgiveness which, in the words of one critic, claims ‘a deciding role for the aesthetic within the larger continuum of understanding between the warring sidesi³ in the conflict. Northern novelists have shown themselves equally adept at what Declan Kiberd, in another context, has termed ‘anticipatory illumination’,⁴ and have been no less reluctant to respond imaginatively to the political changes taking place in the province. Many of their texts, too, claim a transformative role for the aesthetic in relation to political and cultural processes. This essay examines two such novels written during the recent period of political negotiation in the North: Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness (1996) and Bernard Mac Laverty’s Grace Notes (1997).⁵