carson as modernist

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 poets’1 – a generation that

includes figures such as Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, and Medbh McGuckian. Evidence for Carson’s

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 Carson’s

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 Carson’s 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 Williams’s 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 Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London; New York: Longman, 1993), p. 219.

2 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 one’s 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 Frisby’s 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 modernity’s

contradictions.’6 It is perhaps fitting, then, that whilst Belfast is typically situated at the centre of

Carson’s 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

city’s 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 Benjamin’s

desire to recover and reassemble the shattered fragments of the city’s image. Yet, this impulse

towards composing Belfast’s 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.

4 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 Carson’s Belfast is conveyed in a passage

from his prose book, Last Night’s 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 who’s playing it, who’s 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 Benjamin’s ‘art of straying’,9 a derangement of the senses that figures the individual’s

relationship to place as a process of dislocation and realignment that must be repeatedly enacted.

Each encounter with the city’s 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 Carson’s 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 city’s deterritorialization, its ramification along multiple lines of flight, to borrow Deleuze and

Guattari’s terminology, is importantly balanced in Carson’s 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 Belfast’s 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

8 Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun: About Music, Food and Time (London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 33.

9 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.

territoriality and identity that Carson’s 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 can’t 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 population’s

movements. The poem’s 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 Carson’s 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 Carson’s 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

Ciaran Carson, The Irish for No (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1987), p. 31. 12

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-art’s-sake are ironised and undermined by the political urgency of the

poem’s central situation.

Carson’s representations of Belfast do indeed, then, share in and crystallise modernity’s

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 Carson’s 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 Jameson’s judgement

13

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.

that ‘the notions that cluster around the word ‘modern’ are as unavoidable as they are

unacceptable.’17

Cleary’s notion of non-synchronous presents and the intersection of radically disjunct

temporalities will be familiar to readers of Carson’s 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,

It’s 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 Café menu;

The effects of the 1941 Blitz, the entire contents of Paddy Lavery’s 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 city’s 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 Carson’s writing of Belfast,

reflecting in microcosm the fragmentary record of the city’s 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 Carson’s 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 Belfast’s 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 wouldn’t 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 Carson’s 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 Carson’s deadpan

deployment of cliché 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, Belfast’s 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 Carson’s work, this series of transformations is experienced as both

20

David Lloyd, Ireland After History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), p. 51. 21

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 city’s architectural

fabric, as in the following passage from ‘Question Time’:

The junk is sinking back into the sleech and muck. Pizza parlours, massage parlours, night-

clubs, 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; Mooney’s 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 Carson’s 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 city’s 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

Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 57-8. 23


government’s 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, Carson’s 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 oblivion’25

through which Carson marshals the spectral traces

of Belfast’s 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 city’s urban unconscious.

By way of conclusion, I want to argue that it is through such imaginative geographies that

the latent utopian impulse that informs Carson’s 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

Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 66. 25

Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 67. 26


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 Carson’s 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 Massey’s 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 Carson’s prose

book, The Star Factory. This ‘fictional memoir’ excavates layers of personal significance from

Belfast’s vanished streets and redeveloped districts through a narrative technique that synthesises

the imaginative wonder of childhood with a storyteller’s 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 Carson’s telling it

becomes the architectural focus for a Babel of narratives, mapping out a discursive terrain of fractal

digressions and divagations:

27

Bill Ashcroft, ‘Critical utopias,’ Textual Practice 21, 3 (2007), p. 419, 418. 28

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 city’s urban fabric are over-written and re-inscribed through the

course of the book, producing a palimpsestic ‘interactive blueprint; not virtual, but narrative

reality’33

whereby Carson’s Belfast holds multiple versions of itself in the synaptic relays of its

expanding memory. Moreover, because The Star Factory’s chapters are each named after city

streets or landmarks, the text deliberately resembles a jumbled street directory, and Carson’s ‘hook-

and-eye principle’34

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 Carson’s 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

Belfast’s 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.

32

Carson, The Star Factory, p. 70, 62. 33

Carson, The Star Factory, p. 63. 34



Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The Foucault Reader ed., Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1984), p. 39, 41.

Ireland and Wales: Modernism, Modernity and National Space

Cardiff University, 23 November 2007

A Fount of Broken Type: Ciaran Carson as Modernist

Neal Alexander ([email protected])

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 one’s

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 modernity’s

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, 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 who’s

playing it, who’s listening; and you are not the person you were a week ago […].’ Ciaran Carson,

Last Night’s 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 can’t 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.

7. Though often you take one step forward, two steps back. For if time is a road,

It’s 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.

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 Café menu;

The effects of the 1941 Blitz, the entire contents of Paddy Lavery’s 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 wouldn’t 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, night-

clubs, 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; Mooney’s 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 father’s 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.