Ireland and Wales: Modernism, Modernity and National Space Cardiff University, 23 November 2007

A Fount of Broken Type: Ciaran Carson as Modernist Neal Alexander

To consider Ciaran Carson as a modernist writer, as I want to do in this paper, may appear anachronistic, even slightly perverse. It is, in any case, to read against the grain of most critical assessments of his work to date, which tend to regard his writing as broadly postmodernist in character and intention. Neil Corcoran, for example, speculates that Carson may be the most thoroughgoing postmodernist among his generation of Northern Irish poets1 a generation that includes figures such as Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, and Medbh McGuckian. Evidence for Carsons postmodernism is usually found in the emphasis he places upon flux and provisionality in his work, his miscellaneous juxtapositions of high and low cultural forms, and the loosely deconstructive bent that is apparent in his digressive narrative procedures and exuberant language games. Yet whilst his work does indeed frequently set out to unravel the metanarratives of myth and of the dominant political ideologies of Irish nationalism and unionism, I would want to add that Carsons acute sensitivity to the material specificities of time and place in his writing also serves to undermine the generalised dissolution of boundaries and identities towards which postmodernism tends. If, as Peter Nicholls suggests, postmodernism manifests itself in its purest form as free, ungrounded play,2 then Carsons work typically stops short of it, and his ambivalent imaginative responses to the uneven and discontinuous modernisation of Northern Irish society might, I want to suggest, be better explained and explored in terms of modernist concepts and categories. In the contemporary period, modernism is a residual cultural movement in Raymond Williamss sense of the term, a formation of the past that nonetheless remains active in the cultural process as an element of the present. Modernism has been significantly incorporated into the dominant culture of postmodernity, yet also retains an alternative or even oppositional relation to that dominant culture.3 For although modernism, like postmodernism, can be understood as a product of capitalist modernity and is therefore invested with its ideology, it also incorporates a latent critique of that
1 2

Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London; New York: Longman, 1993), p. 219. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995), p. 277. 3 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 122.

very ideology; and it is this vital mode of critical reflection that is often impoverished or merely absent in postmodernism. Marshall Berman has famously described the experience of modernity in terms of a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.4 To be a modernist, he asserts, is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms ones own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.5 In what follows, I will be arguing that Carson can be regarded as a modernist chiefly in terms of his willingness to make the instabilities and contradictions of modern urban life the necessary foundation for his writing and its negotiations of space, place, and identity. For all the dizzying variety and miscellaneity of his work, Carson can be regarded as a quintessentially urban writer and it is through his representations of the city of Belfast that his complex engagement with the antinomies of Irish modernity is most powerfully apparent. In this regard, he confirms David Frisbys contention that, in representational terms, metropolitan experience and the experience of modernity are broadly coextensive: So many of the representations of our experience of modernity are tied up with our experience of the metropolis that the presentation and representation of the city are likely to share in modernitys contradictions.6 It is perhaps fitting, then, that whilst Belfast is typically situated at the centre of Carsons concerns serving as an imaginative focal point around which his interests in music, language, memory, and history are variously constellated it is a centre that is also often radically decentred, a source of both coherence and disjunction that is frequently rendered non-identical with itself. These effects of decentring and estrangement arise from an unusually keen attention to the citys multiple articulations in space and time, often approximating what amounts to a synchronic grasp of its diachronic transformations through history. As Walter Benjamin remarks, in thousands of eyes, in thousands of objects, the city is reflected,7 and Carson explicitly shares Benjamins desire to recover and reassemble the shattered fragments of the citys image. Yet, this impulse towards composing Belfasts material and historical multiplicity as a text to be read and deciphered is always qualified in his writing by an acute sensitivity to the contingency and specificity of its changing situations.

Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London; New York: Verso, 1983), p. 15. 5 Ibid., p. 345-6. 6 David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 5-6. 7 Cited in Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 6.

Something of the mutability and kinetic energy of Carsons Belfast is conveyed in a passage from his prose book, Last Nights Fun, a text that is ostensibly about Irish traditional music and the vagaries of time: Time is never called in my recurring dream of pubs. The Belfast which these dreams inhabit is itself recurrent, changing, self-referential, in which the vestiges of antique maps become the map. I wander streets I try to rediscover in the waking world: dog-leg alleyways and laneways, early-electric down-town avenues, apparent cul-de-sacs which lead you through the colonnaded entrance to a shopping arcade. [] Because you think you know your way around, you end up sometimes getting lost the city constantly evolves through synapses and mental lapses, forming bridges, short-cuts, contraflows and one-way systems. If the city is a piece of music, it depends on whos playing it, whos listening; and you are not the person you were a week ago [].8 The dialogue that is foregrounded here between the similar but disjunct spatial environments of the waking world and the world of dreams elicits a sense of disorientation that is at once pleasurable and disconcerting. Getting lost in the city is conceived of positively as a process of discovery akin to Benjamins art of straying,9 a derangement of the senses that figures the individuals relationship to place as a process of dislocation and realignment that must be repeatedly enacted. Each encounter with the citys streets, alleyways and arcades entails adjusting to its changing spatial and temporal co-ordinates, and such adjustments will necessarily have a destabilising effect upon the identities of both city and individual: you are not the person you were a week ago. Moreover, through its evolutionary metamorphoses and temporal dynamism Carsons Belfast would appear to embody precisely those attributes of modernity the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent which Baudelaire famously identifies and contrasts with the eternal and immutable qualities of art in his essay, The Painter of Modern Life.10 Yet, this vertiginous apprehension of the citys deterritorialization, its ramification along multiple lines of flight, to borrow Deleuze and Guattaris terminology, is importantly balanced in Carsons writing by a vigilant attention to its subsequent reterritorialization in accordance with newer articulations of power and authority. In this regard it is well to remember that Belfasts material and phenomenological transformations are neither spontaneous nor indeterminate, shaped as they are by the geopolitical circumstances and pressures of the Troubles, a conflict that foregrounds precisely those issues of
Ciaran Carson, Last Nights Fun: About Music, Food and Time (London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 33. Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, Selected Writings: Volume 2: 1927-1934 ed., Michael W. Jennings et al., trans., Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999), p. 598. 10 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, Vassiliki Kolocotroni et al., eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 107.
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territoriality and identity that Carsons work engages. In this highly unstable context the mutability of the city may involve more minatory possibilities, and disorientation lead to disempowerment rather than stimulation, as in the poem, Belfast Confetti: Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering, All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

I know this labyrinth so well Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street Why cant I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again. A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies. What is My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks.11 The sudden reconfiguration of the cityscape here, as the result of a violent confrontation, serves not to illuminate new connections but rather to shut them down, and the speaker finds his home ground rendered dangerously unfamiliar, a labyrinth of dead ends and one-way systems. Moreover, the agents of this spatial circumscription, the British Army, are figured as the representatives of an aggressively hi-tech modernity predicated upon the regulation and surveillance of the populations movements. The poems extended analogy between the built environment of the city and the material composition of the printed text seems to parallel this debilitating sense of physical constriction and entrapment with the frustrations of inarticulacy and the disintegration of sense. Yet, if Carsons writing of Belfast is here decomposed to a fount of broken type, then that writing nevertheless remains charged with a riotous, explosive energy that is distinctively modernist in character, connoting as it does an instance of creative destruction.12 And whilst the speaker finds his every move punctuated, ending at a military cordon where his origins and destinations are interrogated, the fusillade of question-marks with which the poem concludes manages to leave its onward trajectory open to interpretation. Belfast confetti is slang for the miscellaneous rubble thrown during street riots nuts, bolts, nails, car keys but also refers, self-reflexively, to the patchwork of raw materials from which Carsons texts are themselves assembled, the fragments of language and scraps of narrative that litter the streets of his city. The aesthetic self-consciousness involved here is reminiscent of high modernism and its autotelic self-referentiality, but at the same
11 12

Ciaran Carson, The Irish for No (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1987), p. 31. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 16-7.

time any notions of art-for-arts-sake are ironised and undermined by the political urgency of the poems central situation. Carsons representations of Belfast do indeed, then, share in and crystallise modernitys contradictions through their compounding of kinesis and inertia, connection and disconnection, creation and destruction, and their dramatisation of the fractious relationship between art and politics. The specific character and intensity of these contradictions as they affect Ireland has become an important and fertile subject of critical discussion in recent years within Irish Studies, and it may be useful to briefly situate Carsons work in relation to some of these debates. A recurrent strategy of the latter has been to emphasise the historical peculiarities of the Irish situation, and to problematise the deployment of terms borrowed from modernisation theory. Joe Cleary, for example, contends that in an Irish context the term modernity is stripped of its semblance of obviousness, and points to the danger of conceiving of Irish modernisation as a process of one-way traffic whereby global socio-economic tendencies are merely adapted to local circumstances.13 Similarly, Conor McCarthy insists upon the necessity of grasping modernisation as a contradictory or dialectical process, arguing that the linear transition from traditional to modern societies posited by modernisation theory renders it effectively blind to the unlooked-for or contradictory effects to which modernity characteristically gives rise, especially in the cultural or intellectual realms.14 Yet whilst McCarthy claims that the dominant conception of modernity in Ireland is intellectually impoverished, at least in as far as it remains wedded to the pattern of economic liberalisation established by Sean Lemass and T.K. Whittaker in the Republic during the late 1950s, he also affirms the continuing cultural, intellectual and political importance of critical forms of modernism in the fields of cultural production and criticism.15 Accordingly, one of the key critical functions of modernism is precisely to interrogate the political and conceptual bases of that modernity from which it arises and with which it remains in dialogue. To this end, Cleary also points to the emergence within Irish critical discourse of alternative narratives and conceptions of modernity that start with the assumption that there can be no clear-cut dividing line between past and present; in these models, every present is non-synchronous, a coeval mix of radically disjunct temporalities.16 In this respect, then, both Cleary and McCarthy echo Fredric Jamesons judgement

Joe Cleary, Introduction: Ireland and modernity, Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2, 5. 14 Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 19, 15. 15 Ibid., p. 30, 41. 16 Cleary, Introduction: Ireland and modernity, p. 19.

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that the notions that cluster around the word modern are as unavoidable as they are unacceptable.17 Clearys notion of non-synchronous presents and the intersection of radically disjunct temporalities will be familiar to readers of Carsons work, which draws upon the digressive and anecdotal narrative habits of Irish storytelling to probe the confusions of memory and the rich indeterminacies of time and space. As the speaker of Ambition observes: often you take one step forward, two steps back. For if time is a road, Its fraught with ramps and dog-legs, switchbacks and spaghetti; here and there, The dual carriageway becomes a one-track, backward mind. And bits of the landscape Keep recurring.18 Indeed, the story Carson tells in another poem, The Exiles Club, can be understood as an ironised analogy for his own historiographic aesthetic. Meeting regularly in a bar in Adelaide, a group of Belfast ex-pats console themselves with expensively imported Irish whiskey, stout, cigarettes, and a slightly-mouldy batch of soda farls, before getting down to the serious business of reminiscence: After years they have reconstructed the whole of the Falls Road, and now Are working on the back streets: Lemon, Peel and Omar, Balaclava, Alma.

They just about keep up with the news of bombings and demolition, and are Struggling with the finer details: the names and dates carved out On the back bench of the Leavers Class in Slate Street School; the Nemo Caf menu; The effects of the 1941 Blitz, the entire contents of Paddy Laverys pawnshop.19 The painstaking detail with which the exiles reconstruct their version of the Falls Road area of Belfast whether as a scale model, a map, or simply a tightly-woven fabric of memories attests to the hypnotic power of nostalgia, and suggests a desire to replace, perhaps erase, their Australian present through immersion in this carefully remembered and inventoried image of the city. But if this is one way for inveterate exiles to visit home, it is very difficult to know exactly which Belfast they are hoping to return to. Different temporalities jostle together in the poem (the Blitz, schooldays, the Troubles) creating a sense of simultaneity that is, in turn, directly contradicted by the exiles express attempts to keep up with the news of bombings and demolition, revising their mnemonic map in tandem with diachronic shifts in the actual citys fabric. The intimately known, all-but-vanished city of their personal experience here becomes enmeshed with the contemporary
17

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London; New York: Verso, 2001), p. 13. 18 Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1989), p. 27-8. 19 Carson, The Irish for No, p. 45.

Belfast of media reports and second-hand information, a place from which they are at least doubly removed yet with which they just about keep up. In its own particular way then, The Exiles Club exemplifies the dialectic of recollection and revision that informs Carsons writing of Belfast, reflecting in microcosm the fragmentary record of the citys spatio-temporal multiplicity towards which his work as a whole aspires. To this end, David Lloyd observes that his 1989 collection, Belfast Confetti, suggestively assembles the deep and sedimented histories of the city [], but does so not so much through a diachronic archaeology as through a synchronic section of their continuing play in the history of the present.20 The particular historical conditions to which Carsons work of the late 1980s and 1990s responds are dominated, however, by two distinct but overlapping temporal rhythms, both of which conspire in the ongoing transformation of Belfasts unstable spatial topography. The first concerns the vicissitudes of the Northern Irish Troubles, with their proliferation of schisms and splits, conspiracies and internecine conflicts, and the constant threat of random violence that resides in the agendas of State authorities and paramilitary groups alike. The pace of events in these circumstances is fast-moving, even appearing artificially accelerated, as in the opening lines of Hairline Crack: It could have been or might have been. Everything Provisional and Sticky, Daily splits and splinters at the drop of a hat or a principle The right hand wouldnt even know it was the right hand; some would claim it As the left. If only this, if only that, if only pigs could fly. Someone decides, hawk or dove. Ambushes are sprung. Velvet fist. Iron glove.21 The conditional tense with which the poem begins alludes to an atmosphere of uncertainty underwritten by fear, yet also hints at the utopian sense of possibility what could have been or might have been that informs much of Carsons writing, and to which I want to return later on. The punning reference to the central schism in the IRA between its Official (or Sticky) and Provisional wings emphasises the dangerous volatility of internal divisions, and Carsons deadpan deployment of clich also comments ironically upon the distance that opens up between events themselves and the language used to describe them. The second of the temporal rhythms I want to identify is that of modernisation itself; specifically, Belfasts gradual and uneven transition from a now depleted industrial economy to one that is more fully in line with the flexible accumulation and newer modes of production associated with late capitalism. In Carsons work, this series of transformations is experienced as both
20 21

David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 51. Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 50.

piecemeal and thoroughgoing, manifesting its effects in a slower and more subterranean fashion but also showing itself capable of abrupt and disorientating reconfigurations of the citys architectural fabric, as in the following passage from Question Time: The junk is sinking back into the sleech and muck. Pizza parlours, massage parlours, nightclubs, drinking-clubs, antique shops, designer studios momentarily populate the wilderness and the blitz sites; they too will vanish in the morning. Everything will be revised. The flyspeckled gloom of The Elephant Bar is now a Winemark; Mooneys Bar is a denim shop; The Gladstone has disappeared.22 The note of plangency informing this roll-call of disappearances and mutations reminds us that although change in the abstract can be regarded as a radical source of imaginative impetus for Carson, it is also often experienced personally in terms of pain, regret, and desolation. The point I wish to emphasise, however, is that in Carsons representations of Belfast the perceptual or representational frames of the Troubles city become increasingly entangled with those of the postmodern city, making financial investment and expanding consumerism as much a part of his cityscapes as political murder and socio-religious segregation. The one reality coexists awkwardly and discontinuously with the other, and Carson chronicles their mutual imbrication as the spatial layout of the city warps and shifts under seemingly tectonic pressures. Indeed, his prose poem, Revised Version, dramatises this confluence of violent conflict and market forces by casting a cold eye over official proposals to promote Belfast as a world city: The jargon sings of leisure purposes, velodromes and pleasure parks, the unfurling petals of the World Rose Convention. As the city consumes itself scrap iron mouldering on the quays, black holes eating through the time-warp the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment announces that to people who have never been to Belfast their image of the place is often far-removed from reality. No more Belfast champagne, gas bubbled through milk; no more heads in ovens. Intoxication, death, will find their new connections. Cul-de-sacs and ring-roads. The city is a map of the city.23 This planners and politicians vision of a sweet-smelling, leisure-plex Belfast sounds a decidedly discordant note within earshot of the citys mouldering quays, and is placed under erasure by the corrosive social realities of post-industrial decline. Intoxication and death, it seems, will find their new connections in spite of superficial efforts at gentrification, while plans for the new city appear choked with cul-de-sacs and ring-roads. Belfast has not, in fact, left its Troubles behind, and the

22 23

Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 57-8. Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 69.

governments efforts at promoting a revised image of the city seem to imply their blithe indifference towards the civic decay that is everywhere evident. And yet, Carsons own writing of Belfast is itself centrally concerned to document and bring to light those revised versions of the city which disorient official cartographies and static figurations of the city. For Carson, the reality of the city is not to be accessed simply by stripping back the layers of prejudice and distortion that have concealed it from view, but its lineaments are to be glimpsed fleetingly from within the shifting constellations of sensory perceptions and material details he arranges and records. Thus, the mock-scholarly survey of old photographs and aborted plans, inaccurate maps and unlikely proposals that takes up most of Revised Version allows him to conjure glimpses of what might have been, an imaginary diagram of how the city never was and could become, which, as soon as it materialises, already blurs and fades.24 This catalogue of intended streets and developers fantasias constitutes a tapestry of absent presences, an impossible map wavering between memory and oblivion25 through which Carson marshals the spectral traces of Belfasts failed incarnations, holding a composite image of the dream city in productive tension with its empirical reality: It lives on in our imagination, this plan of might-have-beens, legislating for all the possibilities, guaranteed from censure by its non-existence.26 Measuring the actual city of Belfast against Belfast the dream city, Carson exposes the fissures and lapses that disrupt the putatively totalising representational grid of the map, while simultaneously deriving his own imaginative geographies from an exploration of the citys urban unconscious. By way of conclusion, I want to argue that it is through such imaginative geographies that the latent utopian impulse that informs Carsons writing expresses itself, for by retrieving and reactivating those lost, forgotten, or neglected incarnations of the city he both gestures towards the future and suggests new ways of engaging the present. However alienating the experiences of revision and historical change may be, then, they are also integral to the challenge of imagining alternatives to the status quo. And, as Bill Ashcroft affirms, it is via this essentially political functioning of the imagination that utopia is embedded in the present as a constant horizon of possibility: Critical utopias are not so much concerned with the future as much as with sketching the present and our ways out of it. Vision and critique are deeply implicated. The issue is not

24 25

Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 66. Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 67. 26 Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 67.

what is imagined, the product of utopia so to speak, the imagined state or utopian place, but the process of imagining itself.27 The emphasis Ashcroft places upon the process rather than the product of utopian imaginings accords well with Carsons work as I have been discussing it, and particularly with his representations of urban space. Indeed, for all of his close attention to the role played by borders and boundaries in policing movements within the city, Carson also tends to sustain a conception of space as both radically open and inherently heterogeneous. To this end, his writing of Belfast echoes the geographer Doreen Masseys understanding of space as the realm of the configuration of potentially dissonant (or concordant) narratives.28 Importantly, Massey objects to developmental models of modernisation and stories of unilinear progress precisely because of their tendency to convene spatial difference into a temporal sequence. By contrast, she insists upon the political necessity of engaging with the challenge of spatial multiplicity, or what she calls the chance of space: It is in the happenstance juxtaposition, in the unforeseen tearing apart, in the internal irruption, in the impossibility of closure, in the finding of yourself next door to alterity, in precisely that possibility of being surprised [] that the chance of space is to be found. The surprise of space.29 The chance of space, as Massey defines it, is perhaps conveyed most fully in Carsons prose book, The Star Factory. This fictional memoir excavates layers of personal significance from Belfasts vanished streets and redeveloped districts through a narrative technique that synthesises the imaginative wonder of childhood with a storytellers gifts for elaboration. And the purpose of this experiment in autobiography, which veers between nostalgic reminiscence, nightmarish reverie, and a mania for paratactic associations, is arguably to juxtapose alternative modes of seeing and knowing the city, as a nexus of relationships personal, political, social and as a place to live. At the heart of the book lies the Star Factory itself, which figures as a sort of linguistic forge where words [are] melted down and like tallow cast into new moulds.30 In stark reality this mythologised Zone is a derelict shirt factory on the Donegall Road,31 but on Carsons telling it becomes the architectural focus for a Babel of narratives, mapping out a discursive terrain of fractal digressions and divagations:

27 28

Bill Ashcroft, Critical utopias, Textual Practice 21, 3 (2007), p. 419, 418. Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 71. 29 Massey, for space, p. 116. 30 Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997), p. 234. 31 Carson, The Star Factory, p. 246.

Of necessity, the story they had entered comprised many stories, yet their diverse personal narratives and many-layered time-scales evinced glimpses of an underlying structure, like a traffic flow-chart with its arteries and veins and capillaries.32 The underlying structures of the citys urban fabric are over-written and re-inscribed through the course of the book, producing a palimpsestic interactive blueprint; not virtual, but narrative reality33 whereby Carsons Belfast holds multiple versions of itself in the synaptic relays of its expanding memory. Moreover, because The Star Factorys chapters are each named after city streets or landmarks, the text deliberately resembles a jumbled street directory, and Carsons hookand-eye principle34 of often arbitrary or tenuous narrative connections mimics the way in which the alphabetical listings of directories and gazetteers allow for the juxtaposition of impossibly remote locations.35 And it is through this acute sensitivity to the rhizomatic structures of both space and narrative that I would argue Carsons representations of Belfast reveal their affinity with what Michel Foucault calls the ethos of modernity. This ethos or attitude involves a certain mode of relating to contemporary reality, one that is predicated upon the possibilities of utopian transformation. For the attitude of modernity, writes Foucault, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.36 Likewise, it is only by grasping Belfasts material reality in all its historical and geographical complexity that Carson is able to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to legislate for its unfulfilled possibilities.

Carson, The Star Factory, p. 70, 62. Carson, The Star Factory, p. 63. 34 Carson, The Star Factory, p. 226. 35 Carson, The Star Factory, p. 8. 36 Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? The Foucault Reader ed., Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 39, 41.
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Ireland and Wales: Modernism, Modernity and National Space Cardiff University, 23 November 2007 A Fount of Broken Type: Ciaran Carson as Modernist Neal Alexander (n.alexander@trinity-cm.ac.uk) 1. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. [] To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms ones own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London; New York: Verso, 1983), p. 15, 345-6. 2. So many of the representations of our experience of modernity are tied up with our experience of the metropolis that the presentation and representation of the city are likely to share in modernitys contradictions. David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 5-6. 3. Time is never called in my recurring dream of pubs. The Belfast which these dreams inhabit is itself recurrent, changing, self-referential, in which the vestiges of antique maps become the map. I wander streets I try to rediscover in the waking world: dog-leg alleyways and laneways, earlyelectric down-town avenues, apparent cul-de-sacs which lead you through the colonnaded entrance to a shopping arcade. [] Because you think you know your way around, you end up sometimes getting lost the city constantly evolves through synapses and mental lapses, forming bridges, short-cuts, contraflows and one-way systems. If the city is a piece of music, it depends on whos playing it, whos listening; and you are not the person you were a week ago []. Ciaran Carson, Last Nights Fun: About Music, Food and Time (London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 33. 4. Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering, All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

I know this labyrinth so well Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street Why cant I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again. A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies. What is My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks. Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti, The Irish for No (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1987), p. 31. 5. In short, a complex, contested history of claim and counter-claim means that in an Irish context the term modernity is stripped of its semblance of obviousness: its meanings have been consistently interrogated. [] Accordingly, in contemporary Irish scholarship, evolutionist and stadial conceptions of history contend with more recent models that start with the assumption that there can be no clear-cut dividing line between past and present; in these models, every present is non-synchronous, a coeval mix of radically disjunct temporalities. Joe Cleary, Introduction: Ireland and modernity, Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2, 19.

6. [Modernisation theory] presupposes that the simple diffusion of technology will alter an entire social formation. It is unable to foresee that such diffusion may have unlooked-for or contradictory effects, especially in the cultural or intellectual realms. [] [A] more radical and more useful view of modernisation is to see it as a contradictory or dialectical process, leading to a condition of modernity that produces various economic, political, social and cultural effects. Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 15, 19. Though often you take one step forward, two steps back. For if time is a road, Its fraught with ramps and dog-legs, switchbacks and spaghetti; here and there, The dual carriageway becomes a one-track, backward mind. And bits of the landscape Keep recurring. Ciaran Carson, Ambition, Belfast Confetti (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1989), p. 27-8. 8. After years they have reconstructed the whole of the Falls Road, and now Are working on the back streets: Lemon, Peel and Omar, Balaclava, Alma. 7.

They just about keep up with the news of bombings and demolition, and are Struggling with the finer details: the names and dates carved out On the back bench of the Leavers Class in Slate Street School; the Nemo Caf menu; The effects of the 1941 Blitz, the entire contents of Paddy Laverys pawnshop. Ciaran Carson, The Exiles Club, The Irish for No, p. 45. 9. As a volume, Belfast Confetti suggestively assembles the deep and sedimented histories of the city [], but does so not so much through a diachronic archaeology as through a synchronic section of their continuing play in the history of the present. David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 51. 10. It could have been or might have been. Everything Provisional and Sticky, Daily splits and splinters at the drop of a hat or a principle The right hand wouldnt even know it was the right hand; some would claim it As the left. If only this, if only that, if only pigs could fly. Someone decides, hawk or dove. Ambushes are sprung. Velvet fist. Iron glove. Ciaran Carson, Hairline Crack, Belfast Confetti, p. 50. 11. The junk is sinking back into the sleech and muck. Pizza parlours, massage parlours, nightclubs, drinking-clubs, antique shops, designer studios momentarily populate the wilderness and the blitz sites; they too will vanish in the morning. Everything will be revised. The fly-speckled gloom of The Elephant Bar is now a Winemark; Mooneys Bar is a denim shop; The Gladstone has disappeared. Ciaran Carson, Question Time, Belfast Confetti, p. 57-8. 12. The jargon sings of leisure purposes, velodromes and pleasure parks, the unfurling petals of the World Rose Convention. As the city consumes itself scrap iron mouldering on the quays, black holes eating through the time-warp the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment announces that to people who have never been to Belfast their image of the place is often far-removed from reality. No more Belfast champagne, gas bubbled through milk; no more heads in ovens. Intoxication, death, will find their new connections. Cul-de-sacs and ring-roads. The city is a map of the city. Ciaran Carson, Revised Version, Belfast Confetti, p. 69.

13. Critical utopias are not so much concerned with the future as much as with sketching the present and our ways out of it. Vision and critique are deeply implicated. The issue is not what is imagined, the product of utopia so to speak, the imagined state or utopian place, but the process of imagining itself. Bill Ashcroft, Critical utopias, Textual Practice 21, 3 (September 2007), p. 418. 14. On this reading, the spatial, crucially, is the realm of the configuration of potentially dissonant (or concordant) narratives. [] It is in the happenstance juxtaposition, in the unforeseen tearing apart, in the internal irruption, in the impossibility of closure, in the finding of yourself next door to alterity, in precisely that possibility of being surprised [] that the chance of space is to be found. The surprise of space. Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 71, 116. 15. The Star Factory had been long since demolished, but bits of its structure still lay at the back of my mind. [] Hence, there were dynasties of paths and destinations. Each family would tend towards certain entrances or adits, and the abstract space within was riddled with the swarming wormholes of their past and present []. They had no thread of Ariadne. Of necessity, the story they had entered comprised many stories, yet their diverse personal narratives and many-layered time-scales evinced glimpses of an underlying structure, like a traffic flow-chart with its arteries and veins and capillaries. [] This terrain is honeycombed with oxymoron and diversion, and the tiny ancillary moments of your life assume an almost legendary status. There are holes within holes, and the main protagonists are wont to disappear at any time, as in my fathers story, which follows: Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997), p. 61, 62, 70. 16. For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? The Foucault Reader ed., Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 41.