Abstract
Memory of the Northern Irish conflict continues to shape any discussion connected to the province and its legacy is perpetually explored both in the critical discourse and in fiction. In recent years the consideration of the conflict has also been added to by the events surrounding the decade of centenaries, the effects of Brexit and the hundredth anniversary of Ireland's partition.
At the same time, the reflection of the conflict in culture has been aided by the surge of interest in memory in Irish studies and many scholars. Although the official message of the Good Friday Agreement urged for a "fresh start," the conflict continues to shape both critical examination and fiction in and about Northern Ireland.
In the case of its fictional representation, Eve Patten has pointed towards a distinction between the writers who engaged with the conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s, who rather than considering "the complexity and ambiguity of social conflict," wrote texts in which "consolatory images [..] largely obscured the exploration of community, identity and motivation," and more recent writers who look at the conflict's legacy and with distance observe it "directly [...] as a means of then moving beyond it." This doctoral thesis aims to scrutinize Patten's observation (made just before the end of the century) and examine novels by Northern Irish authors published as the conflict came to its official end in comparison with novels published in recent years, thereby considering the validity (or otherwise) of Patten's observation. Furthermore, the thesis aims to examine the above commentary about the development in the fictional representation since the end of the conflict using the lens of memory studies to examine Patten's points about "consolatory images" and "moving beyond [the conflict]." To better understand how authors engage with memory, the thesis will use concepts from cognitive psychology and its understanding of memory to study the novels, specifically to observe the portrayal and the interaction of an individual and their community.
As the narratives are crafted, the characters' identities and actions are often regulated by their memories. It is, however, important to distinguish between different types of memory.
Endel Tulving in his work on memory defines two types of explicit memory, or observable memory, - "semantic" and "episodic" memory. This distinction is crucial: while semantic memory is primarily an individual's accumulation of knowledge and provides him or her with scripts and schemas for the interpretation of everyday life, episodic memory is a storage of that individual's experiences.
The relationship between these two types of memories is crucial. In Tory Anderson's words, "sematic memory provides the structures and models to help make episodes from experiences, while these episodes are committed to episodic memory where, over time, they help distil further knowledge of semantic structures." The aim is to use the distinction between personal and communal memory to observe the interplay between the individual and their community on the narrative level as both the individual and the community formulate a type of narrative by constructing coherent plots.
The research will thus look at the varied narratives that appear through the differentiation and will treat memory as a narrative feature. Through a close reading of each novel the thesis will look at the narratives separately but more importantly, it will look at how the narratives of the community and the individual may or may not be at odds and, in this fashion, it will look at Patten's concepts of "complexity and ambiguity" as well as "community, identity and motivation." It will look at the narrative structure and organisation utilised by the texts' respective narrators and in connection with the narrative of the conflict it will be able to discuss a possible discord between "the time of narrating" and "narrated time." The thesis aims to look at authors such as Seamus Deane and Robert McLiam Wilson who published their major works in the second period proposed by Patten, as opposed to current writers like Paul McVeigh, Glenn Patterson, Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson and Anna Burns.
It will look at the development in the novels' portrayal of the Northern Irish conflict, specifically at the recent texts' attention "towards and away from the conflict," stipulated by George Legg in his comment on Patten's observation. This tendency acknowledges the disparity between remembering and forgetting the conflict while it continues to be represented in fiction that is included, although covertly, in Patten's original statement.
The thesis will thus try to provide a critical analysis of recent Northern Irish authors and the reflection of the Troubles in their work, examining the use of memory in their narrative structures and reporting on the distinction between their novels and the ones which captured the conflict three decades ago.