Expanding Narrative Possibilities of the Troubles (Maddy Birnbaum)

While public approaches to commemoration in Northern Ireland, such as the extensive mural tradition, are often defined by “sectarian constructs of society which reify an essentialist identity,” the more private and personal realm of fiction allows diverse voices to be represented in the public memory and perception (Graham and Whelan 478). In Post-Conflict Literature, Caroline Magennis discusses how contemporary Northern Irish novels create space for “dissonant voices to be heard and allow the diversity of experiences and reactions to be read outside of a narrow political narrative” (45). She also addresses how “the Troubles have been the predominant narrative catalyst for literature and culture, so other traumas have been relatively hidden from view” (44). Anna Burns’ Milkman emerges out of the post-conflict novel tradition which has, over the past two decades, been unfurling stories that challenge and complicate the grand, parallel “master narratives” that serve to justify actions of militant factions in nationalist and unionist communities. Middle sister’s narrative voice keeps the reader firmly grounded in her own experience of trauma during the Troubles, specifically the period during which she was stalked by Milkman, a high-ranking IRA member in her neighborhood. The deeply personal and self-reflective narration enables Burns to investigate how the “culture of silence” created by the Troubles resulted in the ostracization of people whose lived experiences did not align with overpowering sectarian master-narratives. In Milkman, Anna Burns adds a new voice to the genre of Troubles literature both stylistically and in subject matter: the novel stridently refuses to allow conventional nationalist-versus-unionist tropes to overpower or dilute the narrative of inner-community gender dynamics that it centralizes. Through middle sister, Burns demonstrates how power can be reclaimed in the act of controlling the narrative of history, and gives voice to the traumatic domestic strife that necessarily accompanied the glamorized military aspects of the conflict.

 

Transcript

Hello, my name’s Maddy, welcome to the virtual presentation of my comps! I wrote on “Expanding Narrative Possibilities of the Troubles in Anna Burns’ Milkman.”

Milkman is a 2018 novel written by the Northern Irish author Anna Burns; in it an unnamed narrator, called “middle sister” by her family, relates from twenty years later a deeply personal account of her stalking and harassment by a 41-year-old Irish Republican Army (or IRA) higher-up when she was 18 years old. Despite these details never being explicitly mentioned, one can infer that the novel is set over the course of a few months in 1979 Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital, in the insular nationalist neighborhood of Ardoyne. 

Historical Context

I’m going to give a little bit of historical context to ground my argument. When Ireland won its war of independence against England in 1921 six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties remained a part of the United Kingdom because the majority of the population in this area identified as British. “The Troubles” began in 1968 as a peaceful civil rights movement by the Irish-identifying minority “to campaign for more equitable access to political power, social provision, and cultural recognition” (Darby). However, the campaign quickly devolved to violence on both sides. Militant nationalists fought for a united Ireland, believing the British army and government to be an occupying colonial force, while the British and unionists labeled the militant nationalists as terrorists. Two distinct narratives of the truth existed simultaneously and in direct opposition to one another.

Historical Context: Post-Agreement

After thirty years of constant low-level war, civil war and 3,500 lives lost out of a population of only 1.6 million in Northern Ireland, negotiators reached a fragile peace in The Good Friday Agreement in 1998. However, one great weakness of the Agreement was that “no mechanism for dealing with past abuses, or ‘truth-telling,’ was established”; there was no “mechanism capable of producing a societal narrative” (Bell 1097, 1145). Therefore, parallel and incompatible narratives in nationalist and unionist communities continue to persist and in turn, “The continued emphasis on the two communities… excludes identities that do not fit neatly into Catholic/Protestant or nationalist/unionist dualities. This can impose a rigid framework on experiences of the Troubles and make a fetish of certain militaristic, male-dominated and conservative traditions and ideologies” (Eli Davies 2, 2018). I argue that Milkman pushes back against these traditions and ideologies. 

Thesis

All right, with that background I’m going to give a brief summary of my thesis and argument. In Post-Conflict Literature, Caroline Magennis discusses contemporary Northern Irish novelists and explores how fiction can create space for “dissonant voices to be heard and allow the diversity of experiences and reactions to be read outside of a narrow political narrative” (45). The increasing distance from the conflict allows more marginalized stories to take center stage, and with a greater level of retrospective self-consciousness and incisive commentary about the conflict itself without fear of antagonizing its actors. Milkman adds a new voice to the genre of Troubles literature both stylistically and in content: the novel stridently refuses to allow conventional nationalist-versus-unionist tropes to overpower or dilute the narrative of inner-community gender dynamics that it centralizes. Through middle sister, Burns demonstrates how power can be reclaimed in the act of controlling the narrative of history, and gives voice to the traumatic domestic strife that necessarily accompanied the glamorized military aspects of the conflict.

First-Person Retrospective 

The first sections of my comps examined the techniques that characterize middle sister’s narration style and allow her to create a unique linguistic landscape in which to relate her history. I’m not going to be able to talk about nearly all of these techniques, but the first one I’ll discuss is the use of the first person retrospective form. 

The critic Bran Nicol theorizes that in the first person retrospective style, the voice of the narrator functions as a “surrogate author” who “possesses an independence quite unlike even the most realistically drawn characters in a third-person text, because every word of the narrative originates only from [her]” (189). A central theme of the novel is the process by which middle sister regains agency through storytelling, meaning the reader’s ability to imagine her “authorship” is a crucial conceit. 

Another feature of the first-person retrospective novel is the way in which, “unlike the third person novel it posits itself as non-fiction, i.e., as a historical document” (Nicol 188). The sense of truth and reality that first-person retrospective narration confers grants a power to middle sister’s character, framing her experiences as a part of the greater historical fabric of Northern Ireland. 

Additionally, the act of narration in Milkman occurs twenty years after the events which middle sister is describing throughout the novel, and thus her character “is in effect split into two different manifestations of the same self, one who narrates and one who experiences” (Nicol 195). This shows through as middle sister describes an uncomfortable encounter with the IRA member Milkman:

“At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.” (Burns 6)

The gap in time influences middle sister’s telling of her own story by allowing her distance from the traumatic events she narrates: Burns creates an older, separate, and more mature persona that voices middle sister’s experiences of harassment that were never acknowledged as significant or real by her younger self and her community.

Inner-community sexual violence

The second section of my comps discussed the exploration of gender dynamics in nationalist communities that is able to emerge in the linguistic landscape Burns shapes from middle sister’s voice. I’m not going to be able to talk about all the elements of gender dynamics that I wrote about, but I’m going to briefly address inner-community sexual violence. 

The character of Milkman, the IRA member who stalks and harasses middle sister, is a shadowy figure and appears only four times in the novel, two of which are in the first ten pages. One of the effects of this characterization is to strip him of power by centering the narrative on middle sister’s process of reacting to and reflecting on the harassment rather than on the harassment itself. 

Middle sister presents Milkman’s actions towards her as a text to be analyzed: “Hard to define, this stalking, this predation, because it was piecemeal. A bit here, a bit there, maybe, maybe not, perhaps, don’t know. It was constant hints, symbolisms, representations, metaphors” (181). She gives language, narrative, and structure to the harassment, forcing it out of the shadows and onto the page to be shared and understood. She imbues the quiet, covert violence with meaning by mapping it onto the vocabulary of literature that is designed to define uncertainties and grey areas, the “symbolisms, representations” and “metaphors.” 

At the opening of the novel, middle sister describes how: 

“having been brought up in a hair trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there?” (6)

The act of narration that forms the novel is a reversal of this notion, as middle sister eventually claims power by “authoring” her story and thereby legitimizing her experiences to an audience of readers. 

Thanks  

Thank you so much for listening to this brief outtake of some things that were in my comps, thank you to everyone who is listening, and thank you to the English department: it’s been one of the best parts of my Carleton experience to be a part of this department, and I couldn’t ask for anything more.