Ciaran Carson's Belfast: Redrafting the Destroyed Native Space

Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies

Ciaran Carson's Belfast: Redrafting the Destroyed Native SpaceAuthor(s): Danielle BarriosSource: Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 10 (2011), pp. 15-33Published by: Dalarna University Centre for Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41702665 .

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Ciaran Carson's Belfast: Redrafting the Destroyed Native Space

Danielle Barrios

As digital media forms have rapidly displaced the novel and newspaper in much of Western society as the 'technical means for "re-presenting" the [. . .] nation', there has been a corresponding change in our conception of nationhood.1 The patterns of dispersal and dissemination that characterise digital media have accelerated the ongoing dissolution of the paradigms upon which the nation-state developed and gained dominance: exclusive rights to power and languages, determinacy and controlled boundaries, as well as privileged systems of representation. That is to say, the nation-state is founded in print, and digitality raises questions about the very structures upon which it was built. This point has particular significance in regions where the existence of nationhood has historically been a question, as it has in Northern Ireland. Ciaran Carson, a writer from Belfast, is one of those whose work epitomises the deterritorialised consciousness, speaking always from an amorphous geopolitical space that is a product of both the paradigmatically troubled media that frame it and the politically troubled history that produced it.

While many critics have focused on Carson's representations of physical geographies,2 others like myself have privileged Carson's virtual or coded environments.3 Carson himself seems to privilege both material and immaterial elements of communal identification, sometimes emphasising the concrete, such as streets, buildings, and objects, and at other times wandering amid the virtual, through layers of alternate reality and code. 'In any event', Carson explained in a 2009 interview with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, 'the writer is bound to write about what is there, whatever it might be'. The phrase 'what is there' suggests a certain realism, one aligned with Carson's frequent inclination toward catalogues, lists, and historical accuracy. But, in the same interview he adds, 'Having said that, maybe writing itself is an alternate universe', immediately absolving it from obligation to cohere with the real.4

As a kind of imaginative geographer, Carson continues a tradition in Irish writing of being frequently occupied with environmental experience essential to the human condition. His attachments to the concrete elements



Nordic Irish Studies

of space, warm earth and 'hard hills of stone',5 connect him with poets of older earlier generations, such as Seamus Heaney and John Montague.6 However, the digital era showed space to be (as John Kerrigan has aptly noted) 'a social product as well as a means of production, and thus capable of reinvention through politics, technology, and art'. This has introduced a new matrix of possibilities for writing in Ireland, particularly for reimagining the contested social space; Carson has used this matrix of possibilities in remarkable ways.7 A continuing challenge for writers of and within the contested space has been to reconcile environmental, grounded experience with imaginative and psychogeographic (virtual) experience, in the process of writing about the home space. Realities are now regarded as multiple, parallel, and intersecting, and ever more so in the context of ongoing regional deconstructions and reconstructions, as there have been for decades in Northern Ireland.8 Thus for Carson, writing constructive poetry in response to conflict requires the invention of an intermediate plane, neither entirely real nor entirely virtual, for locating and understanding Belfast.

This essay will explore the dynamics of home and exile, the oral community, the textual nation, digital globality, and an emergent textuality composed of integrated virtual and real, or the posttext, in Carson's work. All of these elements interact to produce the unique location of Carson's Belfast. I will also analyse how movement and communication together enact deterritorialisation in his poetry and prose-poetry (I will use 'poetry' in reference to both), and how, as borders and centres disappear, the Carsonian text hints at a vastly channeled, hyperstructural sense of space. Finally, I will contend that, insofar as the writing can be interpreted as a spatial and historical code, it has the potential to reinvent home and identity as open spaces.

Exile and Homelessness: Breaking News

The condition of exile is pervasive in the contemporary world, in which national identity has become simultaneously less significant and more emphatic as geographic reality is called into question. The public space of nationhood, the imagined community, is justified by many as a reaction against its perceived opposite: incommunicability, separation, unbelonging. The grounding of a text in its real regional environment is no longer as possible, nor as useful, as it once was; the significance of text as monument barely resonates in the age of digital communications, because we are globally situated and locally lost, or, as Carson and others have suggested, we are all psychological fugitives.9 The bond 'between narration and

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Ciaran Carson's Belfast

location that characterizes traditional rooted discourses' has been broken, setting poets like Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin distinctly apart from the preceding generation in Ireland.10 The contemporary Irish poet writes the digital universe, whether intentionally or not, since we have all become extraterritorial, 'poets unhoused and wanderers across language'. Edward Said has gone so far as to argue that modern Western culture is 'the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees'.11

It may be that forces of multinational capitalism and cybertechnologies have simply clarified our cultural sense of what was already missing, a digital re-rendering of Gertrude Stein's Oakland, where the search for home leads to the realisation that 'There is no there there'.12 It has been a long time since there was a 'there' in Northern Ireland, and it seems the poets of the Carson-Muldoon-Paulin school have a set of practical advantages in writing to a world disappointed by its emerging understanding of the immateriality of the environment in which they live. The virtual space, and by that I mean a space which cannot be materially proven, is the non-ground upon which their national histories are built. Carson's Belfast has a strange character of being everywhere and nowhere. Thus in 'Exile', he writes:

I walk

the smouldering dark streets

Sevastopol Crimea

Inkerman Odessa

Balkan Lucknow

Belfast is many

places then as now

all lie in ruins

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and it is

as much as I can do

to save even one

from oblivion.13

The poet-reporter of Breaking News has a daunting purpose in this cultural landscape, to save 'even one' place from oblivion. Carson's exile is responsible for protecting an undefined value, a non-place or an every- place; 'even one' sounds pointedly finite, but is actually pointedly infinite, and it raises the question of what replaces nationalism, and what replaces commitment to the home space, in a deterritorialised world. In 'Reflections on Exile', Said wrote that nationalism and exile are fundamentally connected, diametric opposites:

Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages. Indeed, the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel's dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other.14

But what of voluntary exile, an impulse informing so much of what is written about cultures from without? James Joyce, as Said points out, ' chose to be in exile: to give force to his artistic vocation. Joyce picked a quarrel with Ireland and kept it alive so as to sustain the strictest opposition to what was familiar'.15 Carson has had this goal as well, as he has said straightforwardly: to live in a world 'defamiliarized so that it can make sense to me', and thus, as the 'moral of every story [. . .] put the reader into another place'.16 The eventual replacement of the dialectic of nationalism and exile is not only disconnection from a singular home space, that postmodern homelessness about which so many have theorised, but also, perhaps for a precious few, a broadening commitment to all space as connected with home. Carson is even post-cosmopolitan; his Belfast is not dependent on shared space or values, nor on the rejection of a coherent home in Joycean style; it is a hyperlinked city, rather, as a hub or node in a

18




vast network, infinitely constellated in relation to other places and in that sense infinitely coherent.

'Bearing Across': Travel, Poetic Metaphor, and Communications

Carson's work reflects changing geopolitical consciousness, as the structure of his imagined or virtual city recreates the structures of virtual text: its code and gaps within its code, its illuminating flux, its provisionally and the sense of infinite links and networks. One element of the Carsonian infrastructure is an undoing, a dissolution of conventional ideas of form where movement and travel are, to borrow Jeffrey Gray's phrase, 'a path of poesis' travel and world-building intimately linked.17 Because crossing territorial boundaries makes elsewhere a functional element of Home, Belfast is pervasive in Carson's representations of the rest of the world, which is probably most explicit in the prose-poetry and in the poems of Breaking News. Concomitantly, the rest of the world is also pervasive in the poetry and prose that is framed by experiences of Carson's native city.

The New Estate (1976), Carson's first collection, is concerned with the islanding of the creative faculties and with the acceptance of 'outer limits', suggesting an early attachment to insularity.18 However, the two volumes that follow, The Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989), climb auspiciously out of the ivory tower and, characterised by tropes of check and enclosure, they also continuously evoke worlds beyond checkpoints. Numerous European cities and landscapes of the Middle East, South America, and Russia haunt the sometimes apocalyptic ruins of The Irish for No ; Belfast Confetti , blocked with stops, is also obsessed with 'going elsewhere', undefined futures, far-Eastern haiku and narrow roads to the deep North.19 The poems of First Language (1993) continue along this line. In short, the poetry Carson published after his first collection increasingly attended to a de-islanding, a pangaea-ising or relinking, of the cultural poetic space.

That is to say, although Carson's poetry and prose tend to be grounded in Belfast, they are multilayered with innumerable associative links to the wider world, and things otherworldly. The prose-poetry piece The Star Factory (1997), for example, traverses the city sites of Belfast, their real histories and concrete details, but in the chinks of these descriptions are memories, dreams, and imaginings of other places, embedded thickly within the narrative in ways that are sometimes obvious, at other times quite oblique. The Star Factory is where Carson first adopts Carol Reed's characterisation of Belfast as 'a universal city'. 'I cannot help but see',

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Carson writes, 'bits of Belfast everywhere. Berlin, Warsaw, Tallinn, New York, to name some, have Belfast aspects [. . .]'20 In 1998 he published The Alexandrine Plan , translating sonnets of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud, borrowing a romantic bohemianism from the originals and drawing frequent connections between writers, musicians and travellers. Thus, for example, in 'On the Road', a translation of Rimbaud's ' Ma Bohème ', Carson writes, 'I strummed the black elastic of my tattered boot [...]/ A veritable pop-star of the awful rhyme'; in 'Travellers', from Baudelaire's ' Bohémiens en voyage' nomads are Jack Kerouacs.21 It is the traversing of territories, Gray points out,

reconstituting the known as unknown [that] have constituted not only modern travel but also modern poetics. The various poetic movements of the twentieth century, from early modernism [. . .] through the 1960s - all those antirealist directives and manifestos - are recipes for defamiliarization, for making a reader see and feel anew [. . .]. Frequently, these antirealist directives have been recipes for the derangement of the subject, as in Rimbaud or Baudelaire.

Deranging subjectivity to the point of transformation, one function that travel and modern poetry have in common, is a goal of much of Carson's writing. As he has stated, 'I want whatever world I live in to be defamiliar-

23 ized [. . .] so that I can see it anew'. This willing defamiliarisation of the known world also motivates

Carson's constant surveying of the field of communication and exchange; again, an element that poetry and travel have in common. Like The Star Factory , Carson's second prose-poetry volume, Fishing for Amber (1999) is composed in sections which are named for natural and technological concepts rather than Belfast locales: 'Antipodes', 'Delphinium', 'Clepsydra'. Instead of linking points in material geographic space, Fishing for Amber makes constellations of ideas, a map of concepts raising constant inquiry into communication. For example, one section begins with this passage: 'for men, that have organical bodies, nature has designed instruments for the conveying and receiving of knowledge; that is, the tongue, and the ear; and the communion between these is called speech or language [. . .]'.24 This leads into a brief discussion of these tools as apparatuses, in short, technology, and concludes that there is no such thing 'as a natural language, as some fondly conceive'. And indeed, 'As

25 language is artificial, so is writing [...].

Frequently, the volume returns to ruminations on the myriad relationships between travel and communication, in an interesting fusion of

20




the high-tech and the archaic. In a section entitled 'Tachygraphy', for instance, a speaker notes that 'for swiftness of communication, none are better than the angels [. . .]. If a man could be familiar with an angel, and send him on an errand, that would be a most swift dispatch'.26 The range of delivery methods, of communication methods, is an ongoing interest of Carson's oeuvre, and even more than this, the timeless nature of innovation patterns, how despite changes in the apparatus, 'all men, in all ages, tend to

27 have similar thoughts'. These thoughts are always eventually aimed at bearing ideas across boundaries, either by metaphor, on foot, by e-mail or angel.

Shamrock Tea (2001), the third volume of prose-poetry, contextualises an ever-growing network of communication paradigms among historical events, real places, and tellable histories. The narrative begins, 'On 20 July 1434, at the hours of tierce as told by the great Belfry of Bruges, in Flanders, two green-skinned twin children - a boy and a girl of about thirteen - materialized from a storm-grating in a town square [. . .]' and continues to build a tale that is interspersed with connections to other tales, and other travels, namely, those of pilgrims, wanderers, and visitors

28 throughout history and fiction. The book occasionally opts for the tone of a travel guide, similar to the magical-realist take on Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy , a tone that in this case is dedicated to a

29 postmodern reimagining of Flanders. Like Carson's earlier books of prose-poetry, Shamrock Tea is structured somewhat disjointedly, despite its nods to narrativity. The explanation for this type of structure is provided by the narrator of the section entitled 'Belladonna': 'It is helpful', the narrator advises, 'in one's meditations, to think of each image, or station, as a drawer in an extensive cabinet: for then one can, in the future, mentally open each compartment [. . .]. Thus the past and future meet'.30 In such ways, Shamrock Tea points to an imaginative dimensionalisation of the cerebral, concept-loaded network of Fishing for Amber , a translation of the virtual memory-space (the image or station) back into the language of the concrete everyday object (a drawer in a cabinet). The book demonstrates the changing and yet consistent nature of communication, but is also about travel between actual, concrete places and historical moments. The travel is virtual, but the stations are real.

Carson's poetics drives compellingly at the posttextual. Posttextuality is yet an emergent concept in literary studies, referring not necessarily to the replacement of textual communication with other forms, but to the rapidly increasing conditions in which text is supplemented and thus changed by surrounding technologies. Posttextuality is the avant-garde recombination

21




of forms by new technological means, which also implies a mingling of their social and creative spheres.31

It is clear that the posttextual mode follows the hypertextual, and reflects the semantics of digitality, as well as integrating semantics of the archaically real, of objects, places, and concrete sense experience. The posttext is a text that integrates various forms that can include not the postmodern everything, but rather the potential for anything, including any form, to intersect anything else. If postmodernism most respects the multifarious multitude as it exists, posttextualism will most respect the blank point in which anything may occur.

In its early forms (web 1.0), hypertext linked pages or texts, in later stages (2.0) words, and in its 3.0 phase it links ideas and concepts. Human conceptions of reality change significantly with each revolution, particularly as signification changes, as the concept of a 'link' becomes more and more literal. With the aid of the web and communications technologies, the digital sign appears to link directly to experience, to the meaning or object: an audio file that we can hear, an image we can see.32 We may not sense the links, which can occur on the level of programming, so we qualify this new reality by calling it virtual, but the linking process simultaneously produces a digital consciousness for humanity: it opens our minds to the possibilities of literally linking multiple realities to the world we consider real. Travel performs the same function; it displaces an accepted reality with the idea of parallel realities; it rather forces the traveller to make conceptual space for a multiplicity of realities.

Similarly, in the posttext, artists use emotional and technological innovations to produce in our minds an open network of possible worlds. These realities are composed not only of our own experiences, but of the recombined experiences of the digitally- and emotionally-networked world. Digital programmes like the role-playing game World of Warcraft , which combine audio, visual, and emotional experiences in a variety of text forms, are posttextual; they certainly evoke the real, with a large and demonstrable database of signs. However, experience is still constrained by the limits of the database, by which sounds and images are available, and the experience is limited to one communication paradigm. New and more promising posttextual experiences likely depend on our ability to work across formats, to reproduce the process in another space.33

The condition of digitality suits text more than it can unproblematically acknowledge. The digital word, like the Carsonian word, is intensely provisional and existentially ambivalent; the printed word insists, as Katherine Hayles has observed, on positing its own origin. Despite the fact that the contemporary written word is dependent on digitality (if not on its

22




hardware, then certainly on its soft influences in society), for the writer of print text to acknowledge this can be awkward, altering 'the text's fundamental view of its own ontology'.34 Carson does not discuss the digital, beyond admitting that Google is an interesting tool for generating ideas.35 And yet his writing is a database in its own right, one arguably more powerful than the digital database because it exists independently of it, imagining possibilities in a systems-heavy but procedure-free environment. Fishing for Amber and Shamrock Tea are odd narratives filled with objects that contain messages, always directions to other worlds. Carson is fascinated with the moment of 'bearing across' - linking, translation, travel - how the moment is minimised or expanded, how alterations of the moment, or the apparatus by which it occurs, alter the message. However, he is also, perhaps inevitably, attracted to the horizon upon which the moment promises to disappear, the logical augury that thinking and being will inevitably converge. In Fishing for Amber and Shamrock Tea , they do. The Dutch and the Irish are speaking Esperanto, the streets of Holland are paved with bits of Irish mountains, and travelling by KLM we are 'unable to discriminate between dimensions' - here is there.36 A world without territory is a world without distance, and the points being made are not only true in that created world, but in this one as well.37

Home without Nation

Carson's modes of writing travel, changing as they have from the 1970s through the 2000s, reflect the changing nature of travel itself. Traditionally, an obligation of the traveller-exile has been to yearn for an idealised home centre from without, to imagine the 'uncorrupted inside'38 and write it as home for a regional consciousness.39 The concepts of home and nation are invented by communication patterns and are also deconstructed by them. Much of modern poetry concerns itself with the exchanges that build and destroy, the dynamic between the monumental and the spatial - between 'the dispersal of communication through time' that is possible with stone structures and the 'dissemination of a communication across space' that is possible with textuality.40 Home is a common point of negotiation and contention between communication grids; a traditional, monumental home, linked to an oral and local communication grid, is transformed by the national, textual communication grid required to protect the centre. In turn, this textual organisation encourages outward movement from the centre, the definition of borders and of national identity by othering. Defence and expansion are textual in the way of the fixed, establishing print-text; the crossing of boundaries (travel/exile) corresponds to impulses toward the

23




collaborative, hypertextual and digital - the global communication grid. This in turn leads to a paradigmatic shift of decentralisation, by which the concepts of home and nation have been irrevocably changed. By textual- isation, home lost precedence to nation; now nation loses precedence to world.41

Because Northern Ireland has lacked a firm national establishment, its poetries did not make the same progression as other regional poetries did: the era that might have been national-textual was instead an amalgam of local orality and 'mutant [post]modernisation', which explains why writing the traditional home was a major issue as recently as the 1990s for the generation including Seamus Heaney and John Montague.42 Yet the following generation of Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon seems native to virtual rather than actual space. This is why Carson can remain in Belfast and still dissect its consciousness with insight as exacting as an outsider's, like a surgeon performing operations via simulator technologies. This is also why he can creatively rebuild home from amid the ruins, rather than projecting, in Edna Longley's words, 'the tropes of stylised retrospect' onto a vacated territory from without.43 But the national step has been missed.

Carson's earliest work does show preoccupation with possession and dispossession of the home space, the security of the 'warm earth' which can be called by 'possessive names' and memorialised in time, versus the freedom of leaving 'solid ground behind' in the pursuit of spatial freedoms.44 This quickly gives way to a dominant sense of home as the closed circle, the island or ivory tower. In The New Estate , envisioning himself as St. Ciaran, Carson's subject is islanded in a round space:

Since I have come to this island, The big world has receded.

[...] The reeds

Of its shores beg me to accept Water as my outer limit. There are some things I cannot cross. I know the loneliness in it;

Having tried to talk to men Of God, I have talked to the trees Of God's silence. He gave no sign, But covered me in leaves [. . .]

It is a closed circle the subject imagines, a limitation to movement, a relationship with silence; not the communal home circle, but a solitary anti-

24




centre. He is an exile almost immediately. St. Ciaran' s island is connected with textuality and institutionalism in certain ways - the church and monasticism; the establishing of 'outer limits' in- text - but it represents a brief moment in Carson's evolution. As Eamonn Hughes has noted, the poems of The New Estate quickly begin to refigure home near the middle of the collection (he marks 'The Bomb Disposal' as the turning point), when it becomes

a place of childhood fear, violence, decay or defilement. Rather than a refuge, home is [. . .] a trap, set on a level with those dead ends and cul-de-sacs which are to be avoided [. . .]. The only alternative in these 1970s writings is a set of poems which make Muldoon-like gestures to travel.46

A fear of being trapped in time leads Carson's evolving subject to consider more and more frequently the potential liberating factors of movement and communication across space. Significantly, Carson transitioned almost immediately from the local-oral to the global-digital. It took the information age to teach Western society what Northern Ireland already knew, from byways of bombings and reconstructions, namely, that one cannot be at home in one's home. As Theodor Adorno noted, 'The bombings [. . .] merely precede as executors with what the immanent development of technology had long decided was to be the fate of houses'.47

The world has followed suit: 'We no longer have roots', Mackenzie Wark has said succinctly, - 'we have aerials'.48 With highly developed technological infrastructures available, we no longer need to travel by roads, nor think in terms of materially discrete pathways; instead, the channels of movement and communication can be conceived in terms of

49 vectors, 'the matrices] of possible trajectories in which events occur'. Carson writes precisely in this way, composing poetry and prose in a hyperstructure of seemingly infinite vectors. He is writing the poetry of the electronic nomad, grandchild of the Whitmanian cross-civilisational 'I'. As Jahan Ramazani argues, the new subject is 'translocal, binding disparities, forging new and surprising connections in its travel across the globe'.50 Adorno wrote that the mission of the intellectual and the exile is to refuse the state of affairs by which life is pressed into 'ready-made forms', prefabricated 'homes', and Carson also seems motivated by this impulse.51 The home of Belfast was never, in any sense, the administered home-as- institution, a product of industrial, textual nationalism; instead, it looks both backward to locality and forward to globality. Carson's Belfast is part

25




oral story (tribal and pre-textual) and part metamedial (global and posttextual), and so constantly denies the missing step of nationhood and

52 textualism. By doing so, it avoids the exclusiveness of the fictive originary point in favour of complex interdependency - a new function for the home space in Irish writing.

Where Geographies Converge

Nevertheless, insomuch as Belfast is Carson's home, he never leaves it; he is an internal, rather than an external, exile. One of the remarkable characteristics of his work is that he sees Belfast from both within and without, continuously circumscribing and never enclosing. The world evoked in The Irish for No's 'Dresden', for example, is an encircling panorama, an imaginable skyline of embedded histories and significant artifacts: 'Tobacco. / Baling wire. Twine. And, of course, shelves and pyramids of tins [. . .] steeples of rust, the gate that was a broken bed'. The lines of 'Dresden' circumnavigate and re-traverse, over and over, the home-space with phrases like 'I forgot to mention' and now I'm getting round to it', weaving through tin-stacks with images of airplanes flying overhead.53 Belfast is composed of pieces of Belfast, rearranged and out of order, of various Belfast histories; as Kennedy-Andrews explains, 'details of place and historical circumstance are established only in free-floating fragments, exactly as in a dream'.54 It is a Cubist reimagining, reflecting unsettling fractures and manufactured ideals of all that the city might be, the multiple realities of Belfast.

There are remarkable parallels between this multiply-linked, hyper- Belfast and high-tech reconstitutions of city-space in divided zones elsewhere; it is quite similar, for example, to the Berlin that Mackenzie Wark discusses in Virtual Geography , as represented during the fall of the Berlin wall:

The caption 'Berlin', placed underneath by NBC, was not actually referring to the physical space of Berlin itself. It referred to an electronic space constructed in the studio, which mixed images made on the East and West sides of the wall into a single vital center. There was no great 'distortion' of the situation here. If anything, this simulated nonfact seemed a more appropriate rendering of the situation than a more straightforwardly representational image would have been [. . .].55

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Again, the renegotiation, or intensified negotiation, of the meanings of space in the age of the digital mash-up complicates the question of the regional, city or national identity. For Wark, the virtual city is truth beyond symbolic truth. NBC's Berlin is a space for free integration of the ideas and images that the material geography of the wall was designed to frustrate: 'The wall itself may still be standing', Wark writes, 'but it is no barrier to certain vectors and flows of information, if indeed it ever effectively was'.56 And mash-up Berlin, or Carson's mash-up Belfast, equally remade by news reports and other forms of postmodern public storytelling, exist not just in the media, but in the minds of its citizens. As material events, like the building or felling of a wall, structure public identity, so do so- called virtual events.57

This idea certainly informs Breaking News, where material events of conflict and media events of conflict reporting contend for historical authority, and war is an unsettlingly atonal arrangement of culturally- loaded artifacts and emptied voices; where you walk 'the road / from

58 Sevastopol / with boots / that lack feet'. Many of its most striking adaptations compose the dominant piece in Breaking News entitled 'The War Correspondent'. As always, the city is global-universal, Belfast-but- more-than-Belfast:

the ruins, fused into the most fantastic shapes, looking like an opium-smoker's cityscape or a crazy oriental fairground -

minarets, cathedral spires of twisted blades, blades wrought into galleries and elevated switchbacks railroad sidings, cul-de-sacs, trolleyways, and racing tracks, gazebos, pergolas, trellises, and colonnades.

59 Such were the effects of the great fire of Varna.

The above selection is from the second poem, 'Varna', in a cycle of seven named for cities ravaged by the Crimean War. Each of these cities stands in some sense for Belfast, and it for them: the experience of perpetual violence is remastered in a hybrid of the poem and the news report, and filtered through the modern technological mindset. The poems intentionally evoke the writing of Crimean War correspondent William Howard Russell, sometimes verbatim, whose reporting, as Carson explains in the afternote, was 'especially influential in shaping public attitudes to the management, and mismanagement, of war'.60 Many have attributed this influence to the balanced truthfulness of Russell's reports, which allowed the public to

27




understand, for the first time, the realities of war. It is highly significant that he was among the first to use the telegraph to rapidly link between event and audience. And as NBC's virtual depiction of Berlin influenced the psychogeography of East Berliners, Russell's innovative combination of technology and creativity made him the first modern war correspondent, and influenced the psychogeography of Europe.61 Carson's poetry works in the same way, as a constant high-tech redrafting of the destroyed native space.

As the nineteenth century is largely an invention of Balzac, modern Belfast may become largely an invention of Ciaran Carson.62 The artist can remake the city; the artist, like the exile, 'symbolically takes on responsibility for absolute power and freedom, to shape and create his world' - to shape and create, in the digital age, his universe, and in doing so to reinvent home as an open space.63 In the opening section of Fishing for Amber , Carson remakes Holland:

My father never set foot in Holland but [. . .] he had a long-time Nederlander pen- friend, Arie Kuipers of Voorburg, with whom he corresponded through the medium of Esperanto [. . .]. They exchanged studio photographs of each other wearing the Green Star, which is the badge of fellows everywhere who seek a common tongue. They never met, at least not face to face. But I can see Uncle Arie' s picture in my mind's eye yet, and see the picture postcards he would send [. . .]. We loved the ruled perspectives of the dikes, the regimental multicoloured stripes of tulip fields. Holland was a wondrous place, a made-up land.64

Carson is well-versed in the processes of fashioning reality from the material and immaterial fragments of an exploding culture, and he makes smooth transfers between virtual and the archaic currency. Thus, Holland is a constellation of points of materiality - letters, people, photographs - connected by lines of immateriality, such as common languages, images like the Green Star, and stories told. As a posttextual poet, Carson writes an age in which world-creating is no longer the artist's symbolic value, but is an increasingly literal act. He is both for and ahead of his time; we are all exiles in the digital age, which makes us all creators. Edward Said writes:

Much of the exile's life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule. It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists, chess players, political activists, and intellectuals. Each of these occupations requires a minimal investment in objects and places a great premium on mobility and skill [. . .]. The

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European novel is grounded in [the experience] of a changing society in which an itinerant and disinherited middle-class hero or heroine seeks to construct a new world that somewhat resembles an old one left behind forever.65

Communication is the central point; exchange is the medium through which worlds are built. The construction of reality depends on bearing across : what the metaphors of the arts, speakers between languages, and travellers on foot have done for centuries is now adapted to high-speed networks of global communications. Carson's emergent posttextuality adapts to the condition of there being no clear ground on which to build a new world, but an infinite number of channels by which to do it.

The Posttext of Belfast

As for Belfast as home, 'I never thought of leaving', Carson wrote to Elmer Kennedy- Andrews, and so 'I have to deal with the situation on the ground'.66 Edna Longley has said that the Ulster Catholic writer 'has lived so long with the imagery of land-decay and land-loss that he has become addicted to it', that he longs for 'the recovery of a politico-spiritual impossibility, a mythic landscape of beauty and plenitude that is pre- Partition, pre-Civil War, pre-Famine, pre-Plantation and pre-Tudor'.67 As Jonathan Hufstader and others have shown, perhaps one of the key elements marking Carson's departure from the generations of Northern Irish poets preceding him is his progressiveness; by not reinventing home in metanarrative, by maintaining tribal identity and yet assimilating global (more concrete in its implications than simply 'universal') motives, Carson

68 is indeed doing something different. His Belfast is a non-mythic landscape, not an imaginary return nor a refurbishing of an old idea, but a Belfast which has worked through its attachments to social innocence to become something quite new. Much of what makes Carson's Belfast globally relevant is its synecdochal demonstration of violence and destruction; the innovation that is Carson's Belfast is not the promised land.69 ' [I]ts fractured history keeps impinging on what I write', he has said. Even 'in an attempt to put the war behind me [. . .] before long elements of various conflicts, including our local row, found their way into the poems. It seems inescapable. There's always a war somewhere'.70 Ciaran Carson does not write toward any restoration of local or regional coherence, which must be sustained by self-nomination and conflict with other centres; instead, he writes toward global integrity, engendered of shared suffering and the inevitability of transformation.

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Notes and References

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 25.

2 See Fran Brearton, 'Mapping the Trenches: Gyres, Switchbacks and Zig-Zag Circles in. W.B. Yeats and Ciaran Carson', Irish Studies Review 9.3 (2001): 373- 86; John Kerrigan, 'Earth Writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson', Essays in Criticism 48.2 (1998): 144-68; Jonathan Stainer, 'The Possibility of Nonsectarian Futures: Emerging Disruptive Identities of Place in the Belfast of Ciaran Carson's The Star Factory ', Environment and Planning D : Society and Space 23.3 (2005): 373-94.

3 See Neal Alexander, 'Deviations from the Known Route: Writing and Walking in Ciaran Carson's Belfast', Irish Studies Review 16.1 (2008): 41-54; Neal Alexander, 'Mapping Junkspace: Ciaran Carson's Urban Cartographies', Textual Practice 21.3 (2007): 505-32; Stan Smith, Globalization and Its Discontents: Writing the Global Culture (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006); Stan Smith, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005).

4 Elmer Kennedy- Andrews, ed., Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009) 18.

5 Ciaran Carson, 'The Insular Celts', The New Estate (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1976) 2.

6 Douglas C.D. Pocock, ed., Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) 15-16. From 'The Insular Celts': 'They will come back to the warm earth / and call it by possessive names: /[...] to hard hills of stone they will give / the words for breast; [...]' Carson, 'The Insular Celts' 2.

7 Kerrigan 145. 8 See Catherine A. Middleton, 'Roots and Rootlessness', Humanistic Geography

and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place 101 . 9 Kennedy-Andrews 26. Also from Kennedy-Andrews, 'John Montague: Global

Regionalist?', The Cambridge Quarterly 35.1 (2006): 37: 'The imagery of car and radio signals the modern journey of the exile uprooted from his home place, but still hankering after stable ground, the resonances of a mythic past, in a disintegrated modern world'. From Edward Said, 'Reflections on Exile' in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) 173-4: 'Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees [. . .]. The critic George Steiner has even proposed the perceptive thesis that a whole genre of twentieth-century Western literature is 'extraterritorial', a literature by and about exiles, symbolizing the age of the refugee'.

10 Kennedy- Andrews 227. 11 Said 173.

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12 Carole Faunce Copeland, Language and Time and Gertrude Stein (Iowa City, I A: University of Iowa Press, 1975).

1 3 Carson, Belfast News 42 . 14 Said 176. 15 Said 182. 1 6 Kennedy- Andre ws 1 8 , 24 . 17 Jeffrey Gray, Mastery's End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (Athens, GA:

University of Georgia Press, 2005) 17. 18 Carson, 'St. Ciaran' s Island', The New Estate 5. 19 From 'Loaf: 'We were staring out the window / At the end of summer.

Aeroplanes flew by at intervals, going elsewhere: / Tiny specks, the white lines of their past already fuzzing up the blue'. Ciaran Carson, Collected Poems (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2008) 129.

20 Ciaran Carson, 'The Church of the Holy Redeemer', The Star Factory (London: Granta, 1997): 153. In this section, Carson discusses how the Belfast of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) is unnamed by the film, and wears the aspects of many other cities as well.

21 Ciaran Carson, The Alexandrine Plan (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1998) 23, 33. 22 Gray 15. 23 Kennedy- Andrews 18. In "'Faery lands forlorn": Reading Tradition in the Poetry

of Ciaran Carson', Patricia Horton presents a similar argument, when she notes that: 'Carson's flâneries awaken memories which disrupt spatial and temporal certainties and therefore defamiliarize Belfast'. Kennedy- Andrews 168.

24 Ciaran Carson, Fishing for Amber (London: Granta, 1999) 257-8. 25 Carson, Fishing for Amber 257-8. 26 Carson, Fishing for Amber 260. 27 Carson, Fishing for Amber 260. 28 Ciaran Carson, Shamrock Tea (London: Granta, 2001) 2. 29 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Random

House, 2002). 30 Ciaran Carson, Shamrock Tea (London: Granta, 2001) 68-9. 31 For contextual explanations toward posttextuality, see Amy Elias, 'Interactive

Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History', New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 705-25.

32 See Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs in Semiotic and Signifies: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady We I by, ed. Charles S. Hardwick and James Cook (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977).

33 Other posttextual literary experiences will doubtless come in the form of progressive arts projects that combine material and immaterial space experiences together, a form of autopoesis that is part-program, part-literature. See interactive media group Art+Com: www.artcom.de/. See also the First World War experiential poetry archive in Second Life, developed by Oxford University's Learning Technologies Group: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/wwllit/secondlife.

34 N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) 154.

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35 In From the Small Back Room , Carson says in interview: 'when I'm writing I often type a phrase into Google to see how it's been used in other contexts, and that sometimes leads me to different ideas and different conclusions than what I began with. I suppose poetry itself is a kind of search engine'. W.R. Irvine, ed., From the Small Back Room: A Festschrift for Ciaran Carson (Belfast: Netherlea Press, 2009) 171.

3 6 Carson, Fishing for Amber 4-5 ; Shamrock Tea 43 . 37 On the virtuality of reality and vice versa, see Pierre Levy, Becoming Virtual

(New York: Basic Books, 1998) 16: 'The virtual, strictly defined, has little relationship to that which is false, illusory, or imaginary. The virtual is by no means the opposite of the real. On the contrary, it is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation, opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the platitude of immediate physical presence'.

38 Nejd Yaziji, 'Exile and the Politics of (Self-) Representation', Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders , ed. John Hawley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996)91.

39 Yaziji 90-1. 40 Mackenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events

(Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994) 66. 41 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Also, for

foundational theories see Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University Press, 1962) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw Hill, NY, 1964; MIT Press, 1994).

42 See John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

43 Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986) 195.

44 'The Insular Celts' 2. 45 'St. Ciaran's Island', The New State 5. 46 Eamonn Hughes, 'The mouth of the poem: Carson and place', Ciaran Carson:

Critical Essays , ed. Kennedy-Andrews (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009) 87-88. 47 In Said 184. 48 Wark x. 49 Wark viii. 50 Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2009) 303. 51 Said 184. 52 Said 184. 53 'Dresden', Collected Poems 77-81 . 54 Kennedy- Andrews 233. 55 Wark 50. 56 Wark 50. 57 Wark 61. 58 'Siege', Collected Poems 465. 59 'The War Correspondent' , Collected Poems 472-3 . 60 Ciaran Carson, 'Notes', Breaking News (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2003) 59.

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61 See William Howard Russell, ed. Nicholas Bentley, Despatches from the Crimea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007).

62 Pocock 13-14. 63 Roy Ascott, 'The Construction of Change', Cambridge Opinion 41: Modern Art in

Britain (1964): 37-41. 64 Fishing for Amber 4. 65 Said 181. 66 Kennedy- Andrews 17-20. 67 Longley 191. 68 Jonathan Hufstader, Tongue of Water, Teeth of Stones: Northern Irish Poetry and

Social Violence (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1999) 222-8. For more on Carson's progressiveness, see Neal Alexander's 'Deviations from the Known Route: Writing and Walking in Ciaran Carson's Belfast' in Irish Studies Review 16.1 (2008); and 'Mapping Junkspace: Ciaran Carson's Urban Cartographies' in Textual Practice 21.3 (2007). Also see Stan Smith, '"Cruising to the podes": Ciaran Carson's Virtual Realities' in Kennedy- Andrews, Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays.

69 Longley 191. Quoting Tom Paulin: 'Field Day, like Hugh, "dreams of a perfect city" as well as a promised land'.

70 Kennedy- Andre ws 17.

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Ciaran Carson's Belfast: Redrafting the Destroyed Native Space

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