Mapping junkspace: Ciaran Carson's urban cartographies

Textual Practice

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 505-532

  Alexander, Neal ^a  

^a TRINITY COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Belfast; Carson; Ciaran; Irish; Mapping; Poetry

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749157080     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360701529127     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. David Harvey notes that 'the mapping of the world opened up a way to look upon space as open to appropriation for private uses. Mapping also turned out to be far from ideologically neutral', David Harvey, The Condition of Postmo- dernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Black- well, 1989), p. 228.
2. See also Doreen Massey, for space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 106-11 for a discussion of maps as 'ordering representations' which operate as a 'technology of power'.
3. Geoff King, Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1996), p. 174.
4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 121.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1992), pp. 13-14.
6. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 3-4.
7. Claire Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland', Irish Studies Review, 9, 3 (2001), p. 301.
8. Shaun Richards, 'Foreword', in Scott Brewster, Virginia Grossman, Fiona Becket and David Alderson (eds), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. xiv.
9. 10 Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland, 'Introduction', in Colin Graham and Richard Kirkland (eds), Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of 'Authen- ticity (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 2-3.
10. Connolly, 'Theorising Ireland', pp. 307-8.
11. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 99.
12. Scott Brewster, 'Introduction: space', in Scott Brewster, Virginia Grossman, Fiona Becket and David Alderson (eds), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 125.
13. For some representative examples of this tendency see Brian Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London and New York: Roudedge, 1997);
14. Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001);
15. Richard Kirkland, literature and Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 19-52;
16. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly (eds), The Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003).
17. Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, p. xvi.
18. Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1989), p. 67.
19. Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory (London; Granta, 1997), p. 15.
20. Carson, Belfast Confetti, p. 35.
21. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 263.
22. Fran Brearton, 'Mapping the trenches: gyres, switchbacks and zig-zag circles in W.B. Yeats and Ciaran Carson', Irish Studies Review, 9, 3 (2001) 383.
23. Ciaran Carson, The Irish for No (Loughcrew: The Gailer)' Press, 1987), p. 32.
24. Carson, The Star Factory, p. 126.
25. Carson, The Irish for No, p. 31.
26. Del d Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 28.
27. Peter Denman suggests that Carson's nine-line poems, which are divided into two stanzas of five and four lines, respectively, be called 'nonnets'. Peter Denman, 'Ways of saying: Boland, Carson, McGuckian', in Michael Kenne- ally (ed.), Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature (Gerrard's Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), p. 161.
28. Discussing The Irish for No, Neil Corcoran also con- tends that Carson's 'suavely sophisticated playing of control against licence is the crucial element' in the poems' 'delicate manipulation of tone'. Neil Corcoran, 'One step forward, two steps back: Ciaran Carson's The Irish for No', in Neil Corcoran (ed.), The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1992), p. 218.
29. John Kerrigan, 'Earth writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson', Essays in Criticism, 48, 2 (1998), p. 159.
30. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature briefly defines 'dinnshenchas' [sic] as 'lore of prominent places': 'Placenames are explained by reference to legends which are linked to them by means of pseudo-etymological techniques, where sometimes fictitious stories are adduced to explain the existing names. . It was part of the body of knowledge medieval Irish poets were expected to master'. Robert Welch (ed.). The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Litera- ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 90-91.
31. Carson's interest in medieval Irish (and Welsh) poetry goes back to his very earliest work, and is especially evident in his first collection, The New Estate (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1976).
32. For an illuminating overview of modern Northern Irish poets' engagements with the tradition of dinnseanchas see Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, p. 246-59.
33. Tim Robinson, Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara & Other Writings (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996), pp. 159-60.
34. Nuala ní Dhomlmaill, 'The English for Irish', "The Irish Review, 4 (1988), p. 117.
35. Cf. 'Four Sonnets', which includes the line: 'Put your ear to the street, you will hear the underground streams of Belfast'. Ciaran Carson, First Language (Loughcrew: The Gailer)' Press, 1993), p. 22.
36. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999), p. 522.
37. Desmond Fitzgibbon, 'Delfas, Dorqk, Nublid, Dalway: The Irish city after Joyce', in Aaron Kelly and Alan A. Gillis (eds), Critical Ireland: New Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 67.
38. As Carson makes clear in his 'Notes', Breaking News owes much to the pioneer- ing war correspondence of the Anglo-Irish journalist William Howard Russell (1820-1907), whose reports on the progress of the Crimean campaigns 'were especially influential in shaping public attitudes to the management, and mis- management, of war'. Ciaran Carson, Breaking News (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2003), p. 74.
39. Fran Brearton also discusses the historical sedimentation of previous conflicts, particularly those of the Great War, informing 'The War Correspondent' and Carson's poetry more generally in 'Mapping the Trenches', pp. 373 and 382-5. In particular, she draws attention to a suggestive isomorphism between Carson's metamorphic, multiform Belfast and the labyrinthine topo- graphy of trench landscapes,
40. Houen, Terrorism and Modem Literature, p. 269.
41. De Ce The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 105.
42. Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, headed an expeditionary force in the Crimea againsr the Russian army, winning battles at Alma and Inkerman. At Balaclava, he gave the order that initiated the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), was blamed for the failure of the Commis- sariat in the fierce winter of 1854-1845, and died shortly before the storming of Sebastopol. See the entry in Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 6th ed. (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1997), p. 1527. The OED glosses 'raglan' as designat- ing 'a sleeve with sloping edges running up to the neck and so without a shoulder seam' or 'a garment with such sleeves'. Raglan Street was located at the heart of the Lower Falls Road area just west of Belfast's city centre and was demolished, along with the surrounding streets, in the 1980s, a process chronicled and responded to in Carson's poem, 'Hamlet'.
43. See Belfast Confetti, pp. 105-8.
44. Anne Devlin, The Way-Paver (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 118.
45. Elizabeth Wilson, 'The rhetoric of urban space'. New Left Review, 209 (1995), p. 151.
46. For a fascinating photographic record of Smithrick!, both before and after its fire-bombing, see Kenneth McNally, Smithfield Market, Belfast (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1975).
47. See my essay, 'Strange City: Belfast Gothic', in Godela Weiss-Sussex and Franco Bianchini (eds), Urban Mindscapes of Europe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 113-25
48. - Frost's characteristically rustic poem has its speaker gazing into the depths of a well on the brink of visionary revelation, and con- cludes enigmatically: "What was that whiteness?/Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something'. Robert Frost, Selected Poems, ed. Ian Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 131.
49. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: NLB, 1970), p. 247.
50. Rem Koolhaas, cited in Fredric Jameson, 'Future city', New Left Review, 21 (2003), p. 74.
51. Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, p. 239.
52. Eamonn Hughes, 'Introduction: Northern Ireland - border country", in Eamonn Hughes (ed.), Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), p. 3.
53. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, p. 61. 1 say 'up to a point' because, whilst Kearney is energetically critical of the conceptual foundations and pol- itical functioning of the nation-state, he still seems to regard the nation as a worthwhile and necessary focus lor communal identifications which should be salvaged and recuperated within the new Postnationalist order. In this sense, he remains bound by the very ideological constraints that he sets out to undermine and reject.
54. For an illuminating critique of Kearney's work along these lines, see Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 94-8.
55. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since 1969: (de) constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 269.
56. In his notoriously critical review of Seamus Heaney's North Carson accuses the elder poet of becoming 'the laureate of violence - a mythmaker, an anthropol- ogist of ritual killing, an apologist for "the situation", in the last resort a mys- tifier'. Ciaran Carson, 'Escaped from the Massacre?', Honest Ulsterman, 50 (Winter, 1975), p. 86.
57. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940 (London and New York: Longman, 1993), p. 219.
58. Corcoran also makes rather more tentative claims for Carson's postmodernism in his essay 'One step forward, two steps back', p. 216.
59. Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, p. 42.
60. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 38.
61. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 410.
62. Sean O'Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998), p. 193.
63. Fredric Jameson, 'Cognitive Mapping', in Lawrence Greenberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 353.
64. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 92.
65. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 332
66. Similarly, in The Political Unconscious Jameson affirms: 'Totality is not available for representation, any more than it is accessible in the form of some ultimate truth (or moment of Absol- ute Spirit)'. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 39.
67. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 8.
68. Carson, First Language, p. 19.
69. Alan Gillis, 'Ciaran Carson: beyond Belfast', in Allen and Kelly (eds), The Cities of Belfast, p. 189.
70. Ciaran Carson, The New Estate and Other Poems (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 1988), p. 58.