Yvonne C. Garrett

Professor John Waters

IRISH-GA.1001.1.001.FA11 - Final Paper

December 18, 2011

"The Music in Bad Whisky" or "Everything will be revised": Anxious Landscapes

and Hybrid Structures in the work of Ciaran Carson

"As technology winds underneath sidewalks and between the partitions of buildings, it

gives birth to an entire set of urban 'furniture,' whose very presence is haunting, whether

in the form of billboards or road signs, video screens, dividers, gates or railings."

Antoine Picon and Karen Bates, "Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust"

"A good map is worth a thousand words because it produces a thousand words: it raises

doubts, ideas. It poses new questions, and forces you to look for new answers."

- Franco Moretti

Neal Alexander states that Ciaran Carson's work exhibits a "formal

complexity...foregrounding the resistances that poetic language affords to habitual modes

of perception and understanding." (1) In Carson's 1989 collection Belfast Confetti, he

shifts between C.K. Williams-influenced poetic structures and a more narrative prose

style, interspersing haiku throughout. Working with definitions of hybridity found in

cultural criticism1 I aim to suggest that the hybrid nature of Carson's text is a reflection

not only of his myriad influences and interests - from Williams and Benjamin to Irish

history and pop culture - but also of the hybrid nature of the poet's interior and exterior

1 Cyrus R.K. Patell, Robert J.C. Young, and Homi Bhabha among others.

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world. The text itself resists traditional poetic classifications just as the poet resists

traditional cultural classifications. It is this resistance that exemplifies hybridity and, in

Carson's case, a move toward a new poetics expressive of the poet's own hybrid space.

In Fran Brearton's 2001 essay, Mapping the Trenches, she states that Carson's

poetry exhibits "preoccupations...with the representation and experience of crisis: a

delight in telling unofficial histories, the politics of naming, and the always

problematic...expectations of poet as war correspondent." (373) Brearton makes reference

to Carson's project of "mapping his home ground" and it is this project which I wish to

focus on in conjunction with this notion of a poetic language which affords

"resistances...to habitual modes of perception and understanding." As Brearton suggests,

the "specificity of place, and the localised violence in 'Belfast Confetti', evoke a wider

context and alternative time zones." (373) While the map of the city itself is its own site

of conflict, the very street names contain a history of global war, a history of the Imperial

project of naming. In Carson's texts, Belfast works as a site both symbolic and literal

with past and present co-existing "in perpetual flux" - more than one place, more than one

city at more than one time. (373) Belfast is, "changing daily...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." (Carson, Belfast

Confetti 57) But Carson's Belfast is not simply a portrait of the post-modern city full of

post-modern anxiety such as the cities of Breton, DeLillo, etc., it is a city in a state of

siege. And this is not the siege of 21st Century New York or London, although, of

course, Carson's Belfast precedes (predicts?) this later state of urban life rife with

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surveillance and a constant rewriting of maps. This is Belfast of the Troubles. Carson's

work illustrates, "the full shock of the challenge to reconised modes and forms

represent[ed] by the realities of post-1968 Northern Ireland...an exfoliating narrative of

turnings and returnings, digressions and parentheses, lapses and dissolvings, the

haphazard and the circuitous" (Corcoran 216) Belfast is a city of "...bridges within

bridges, the music in bad whisky, the/demolished air-raid shelters used as infill for the

reclaimed land of Belfast Lough - who will sort out the chaos? Where does land begin,

and water end? Or memory falter, and imagination take hold?" (BC 54)

Brearton suggests that Carson's poems in Belfast Confetti may be read "as

mapping some of the rhetorical transactions between present and past, Ireland and

Europe, modernism and postmodernism..." linking Carson's work with a restructuring of

the modern mind brought about by World War I and suggesting that Carson's

claustrophobic structures of Belfast speak to a metaphor of trench warfare. (374) While

this linkage is compelling, I feel that Carson is moving decades past the "Great War" and

instead, working with the notion of the modern city under siege - to State surveillance,

technology, commerce, and of course, State-sponsored and paramilitary violence.

Brearson suggests that, for Carson, "the sense of living and writing within the

'labyrinth'...is particularly acute, as is the fear of boundaries, fixity, and containment" all

of which is linked with trench warfare. (374) However, this idea of the city as labyrinth,

as claustrophobic containment to me reads more as a city both under siege to terror and

the State but also reflecting those cities in Gibson, Calvino, Pynchon, P.K. Dick or

Delaney (among others) with their nightmarish dead-ends and cul-de-sacs, their tunnels

of collapsing infrastructure and rusting or self-generated fiber-optics, cameras, and

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technology-gone-awry.2 Examples of these nightmare cities appear throughout Carson's

work and are far too numerous to reference here.3 Instead, reference a brief excerpt from

a recent interview Elmer Kennedy-Andrews conducted with Carson. (Andrews 9) Carson

is responding to Andrews's question, "Is there ever a way out of the labyrinth?"

I never deliberately started out to get into the labyrinth as a recurrent symbol. But

it so happens that I have a recurrent anxiety dream in which I am trapped between

the Falls Road and the Shankill, or trapped on the wrong side, which to me is the

Shankill: a labyrinth of side-streets, cul-de-sacs, fences, rivers, factory complexes,

dams. It seems inescapably ingrained in my experience, in my psyche... For all its

familiar dread there is something beautiful about its clarity and recurrence.

Perhaps the way out of the labyrinth is to get deeper into it, more fully to explore

its ramifications. (Andrews 25)

I am interested in the way this image of Belfast as "labyrinth," as "containment," might

speak both to the structures of sectarian violence and the surveillance borne out of that

violence but also to this broader idea of "anxious landscapes" referenced with the Picon

quote at the opening of this paper, "As technology winds underneath sidewalks and

between the partitions of buildings, it gives birth to an entire set of urban 'furniture,'

whose very presence is haunting..." (58)

Carson is both haunted by and haunting his city through his words - his

overwhelming cataloguing of objects, his etymologies, his descriptions of spaces and

events with seemingly every present moment a reflection of the past - whether an "actual"

2 Philip K. Dick's Los Angeles, any of William Gibson's cities, and Pynchon's London, Berlin or Los Angeles are examples. 3 1997's The Star Factory is a stunning example.

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past or a rewriting of that past. Carson's work uses phrases, words, images again and

again, like a snatch of conversation or a piece of music repeated throughout. I am

reminded of the way in which music brings in certain phrases, themes and then

throughout a piece will repeat and distort and renew this particular phrase or melody.

Carson is an accomplished musician and has stated an interest in Glen Gould and in the

structure of the classical fugue (Andrews 15) While linkages between Carson's work and

traditional Irish music and oral story telling have been made4, I would gesture instead

toward this idea of the classical fugue and variation, along with a post-modernist project

of creating a "meta-text" where everything is included, repeated, rephrased, and re-

mapped - a hybrid text born out of Carson's specific hybridity if you will.

Source: http://imej.wfu.edu/articles/2002/1/06/images/fig5.jpg

4 See Frank Sewell's "Carson's carnival of language: the influence of Irish and the oral tradition" in Kennedy-Andrews for example. Discussion of the intersection of Carson's work with traditional Irish music are myriad - Alexander among them.

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In his 2007 essay, "Mapping Junkspace," Neal Alexander states that maps may be

seen both as instruments of State power and, a possible "tool-box for dissidents and

philosopher-guerillas, capable of constant modification and multiple uses rather than

[simply] imposing a monolithic order." (506) And that Carson's work, "probes the logic

and limits of maps and the connections they make visible." (506) Mapping and the

territorialization of space holds a special power in Northern Ireland where, "territorial

claims make themselves felt with...violence and insistence, as is particularly evident in

modern Belfast's sectarian geography of 'peace lines' and checkpoints, walled estates and

no-go areas." (508) In Ireland, as in other areas where populations have undergone brutal

projects of Empire, space serves as a "site of dispute" and an "index of power." (Brewster

qtd. in Alexander 508). Carson's representations of Belfast, "serve to 'dislocate' habitual

frameworks for apprehending the city by attending to its multiple articulations across

time and space..." (508)

In Turn Again Carson explores this idea of mapping as "multiple articulations

across time and space." Maps are not to be trusted:

There is a map of the city which shows the bridge that was

never built.

A map which shows the bridge that collapsed; the streets that

never existed.

Ireland's Entry, Elbow Lane, Weigh-House Lane, Back Lane,

Stone-Cutter's Entry -

Today's plan is already yesterday's - the streets that were there

are gone.

And the shape of the jails cannot be shown for security reasons.

The linen backing is falling apart - the Falls Road hangs

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by a thread.

When someone asks me where I live, I remember where I used

to live.

Someone asks me for directions, and I think again. I turn into

A side street to try to throw off my shadow, and history

is changed.

(Carson, Collected Poems, 125)

Carson's line breaks highlight the following: "never built," "never existed," "are gone,"

"by a thread," "to live," and "is changed" making nearly a separate poem, certainly

providing an added depth of meaning serving to underline this idea of mapping and re-

mapping that his work addresses. And, of course, there is the line, "And the shape of the

jails cannot be shown for security reasons." This phrase brings home the image of a city

under siege - whether to the State or the constant threat of sectarian violence. As with all

Carson, there are many levels at work here - the nonchalant, almost glib

acknowledgement of the "writing out" of the jails and also a note of 20th Century theory.5

This is one of the many qualities of Carson's work that speaks of post-modern (perhaps

post-post-modern?) genius at work - the myriad implied layers of his work.

In arguably one of his most powerful prose pieces, Question Time, there is the

simple enough statement, "Maps and street directories are suspect..." followed by "No,

don't trust maps, for they avoid the moment: ramps, barricades, diversions, Peace Lines."

(BC 58) The piece starts off innocently enough with a quote from George Benn's "1823

history of the city," (57) moving on into a few lines of Carson's "travel-writing" which

nod more to Calvino than any travel guide I've read,6 "That disorientation, that

5 For example, Foucault's "Discipline and Punish." 6 Specifically Calvino's "Invisible Cities."

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disappointed hunger for a familiar place, will be experienced all the more keenly by

today's returning native; more than that, even the little piggy who stayed at home will

sometimes feel lost." (BC 57) Home is no longer home and while this speaks to the

broader conversation of post-modern alienation, Carson's work is also very specific to

Belfast. His project of showing a city under siege comes to the fore with the following

lines, also from Question Time:

Though if there is an ideal map, which shows this city as it is, it may

exist in the eye of that helicopter ratcheting overhead, its searchlight

fingering and scanning the micro-chip deviations: the surge of funerals and

parades, swelling and accelerating, time-lapsed, sucked back into

nothingness by the rewind button; the wired-up alleyways and entries.

(BC 58)

Of course, the implication is that there is no "ideal" map - there are only competing

versions, even technology is suspect, prone to time-lapse and "the rewind button." As any

student of modern Media can attest - there is no such thing as an "objective" point of

view, there are only competing stories, all subject to editing, re-telling, and re-mapping.

Carson shows this in the next passage from Question Time,

Or it may exist in photographs - this one, for example, of Raglan Street,

showing '...a sight that was to become only too common to a generation

of British soldiers as rioters stone 'A' Company...during the Lower Falls

riots of 3-5 July 1970...' But the caption is inaccurate: the camera has

caught only one rioter in the act, his stone a dark blip in the grizzly air. (BC 58)

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Here we have again, the possibility of an "ideal" map presented as "it may exist in

photographs" only to be shown that photographs seldom show the "ideal" map or truth or

even an accurate account of a particular event or moment. Instead we are told, "The

others, these would-be or has-been or may-be rioters, have momentarily become

spectators...some others are looking down Bosnia Street at what is happening or might

happen next." (BC 58) Everything is in a process of becoming past or future, nothing is

"ideal" or sure, everything is contingent. To quote Carson again, "I'm attracted to the

speculative fiction of writers like Borges and Calvino, and I'm sure my prose has been

affected by them...some of that otherworldliness, the sense of alternative universes, has

crept into my poetry." (Andrews 19) Perhaps this statement can better be applied to

Carson's other writing7 but it is this idea of contingency that I would also argue is

suggested in the work of Borges, Calvino and Carson. Everything is always in the act of

becoming past or future, of changing. Belfast is always changing. Rioters are becoming

spectators are becoming rioters.

Question Time moves from discussion of helicopters and photographs and riots

into a first person reminiscence by Carson of "running the gauntlet" or "penetrating the

British lines" as a child, against his father's orders. (BC 59) This childhood memory

moves on to a chilling adult encounter with paramilitaries in which his "personal" map,

his memory of roads, of houses and shops no longer there, literally saves his life,

The questions are snapped at me like photographs.

The map is pieced together bit by bit. I am this map which they examine,

checking it for error, hesitation, accuracy; a map which no longer refers to the

7 The Star Factory or Shamrock Tea for example.

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present world, but to a history, these vanished streets; a map which is this

moment, this interrogation, my replies. (BC 63)

This is the post-modern city at its most horrifying and yet this passage also speaks to

Carson's project of self-mapping, of map as memory as an essential mode of existence.

Quite literally without his internal map of the city, his memory-map if you will, he would

not have survived.

The idea of the Northern Irish poet and place is often referenced by critics

particularly that of Seamus Heaney and his "rootedness."8 In connection to this idea of

"rootedness" is the idea of the hybrid subject - Heaney strives for "rootedness" in the

midst of upheaval. The necessarily hybrid position of the Northern Irish poet is

particularly pronounced within Carson's work - witness his use of the word, "sleech," the

idea that everything "will be revised," and his obsessive exploration of etymology. In

Carson's Brick, Alexander sees "assonantal slippage and etymological trickery [which]

provide a means of probing Belfast’s unstable foundations, delving into the city’s

material fabric in order to delineate a constitutive dialectic between hard and soft, solid

and liquid, land and sea. ‘Belfast’, Carson reminds us, ‘is built on sleech – alluvial or

tidal muck – and is built of sleech, metamorphosed into brick, the city consuming its

source as the brickfields themselves were built upon.’" (513) This image of malleability,

of the city as built on unstable foundations speaks volumes against the ways in which

Heaney presents the land as root, and identity as born out of this rootedness, this

connection with the land. While Heaney's poetry often references the bog, Carson works

8 See Elmer-Andrews "The Poetry of Seamus Heaney," Curtis's "The Art of Seamus Heaney," and Heaney's own writings, among many other examples.

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with the less wholesome, decidedly urban image of "sleech" - even the sound of the word

implies something un-wholesome, something unclean (think "leech, "sludge," etc.) While

this "verbal swamp" makes for compelling poetic tropes and a fascinating wordplay9

Alexander suggests that through this wordplay Carson "renders the city’s earnest bulk

pliable and soft. Honesty, reliability, sturdy independence: all are founded on a morass,

which is itself constantly being transformed into new land, building sites for the future

city." (513)

Referencing Carson's response to Andrews's question, "Are you in any way a 'rooted'

poet? Or do you think of yourself more in terms of being 'neither here not there', 'in-

between'?" Carson responds,

In-between, I think. I'd like to fall into the cracks in the pavement...Maybe

[Belfast's] provisional nature, its ongoing dispute as to what it was, what it is and

what it might have become, has provided a ground - a shifting ground, like the

sleech on which the city is built - for the exploration of other modes of being,

other possibilities...I have always lived here. I have to deal with the situation on

the ground. I have to see some redeeming qualities - those of provisionality and

change, for instance. (Andrews 19-20)

This notion of "in-between-ness" appears in Belfast Confetti in several instances:

I liked the in-between-ness of it,

Neither

One thing nor the other.

And,

9 Carson refers to "a kind of instant onomatopoeia" in Andrews, 20.

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he was between times just then, like me

between terms.

(Loaf, BC 15)

And in All the Better to See you With, we have "neither-here-nor-thereness. Coming the

act of going." (BC 23)

Again, Carson is illustrating the contingency of life, of the city, of everything. It is

this idea of contingency that both speaks to Carson's qualified optimism and creates

anxiety while also providing space for a new, perhaps "better" moment to arrive. I would

suggest that, as Carson states, the nature of his being "in-between," or in a state of

hybridity, is exactly what gives him this ability to be open to the possibility of

redemption through "provisionality and change." While some critics have chosen to see

Carson's work, particularly Belfast Confetti as negative, or without hope10 I believe that

aside from the fact that creating poetry out of chaos speaks volumes, Carson's work does

show that it's not all horror, violence, and rubble collapsing into "the sleech."

In his 2002 essay, "Archaeology of Reconciliation" Jonathan Highfield suggests

that Carson explores "questions of cultural identity, myths, and violence...in Belfast

Confetti, [Carson] looks at the ways resurrecting the past maintains the normalcy of

instability...a glimpse of how unearthing the narratives of the past can both exacerbate

tensions and reveal forgotten commonalities." (171)

This idea of the "normalcy of instability" is one which I believe describes both

Carson's Belfast and the post-modern city-under-siege in general (London, New York,

Mumbai, Jerusalem, Beirut, etc.). I would also argue that this idea of the "normalcy of

10 Highfield among others.

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instability" is not simply a descriptive for the city-under-surveillance in the now global

terrorist world but also speaks to this idea of "anxious landscapes" of the city sinking into

"the sleech." Highfield suggests that Carson's art and Northern Irish artists in general

are, "...plagued by the instability of this new topography." [172] And further,

The wounds suffered over nearly four hundred years of colonial rule

and eighty-five years of sectarian battles have left the people of Northern

Ireland locked in a landscape where each name is contested, each street map

suspect. Belfast is a city that reflects all the pain and suffering of the new nation's

history...To move through the streets of Belfast, therefore, is to negotiate a way

through contested maps - maps that stretch back to the very founding of the city

and are made of memories rather than pen strokes. These psychic maps create a

divide more solid than the wall separating the Falls from the Shankill... The wall

is coming down now, but one can still come across it unaware, following a street

map which omits the information that a street has been bisected by a wall of red

bricks. (Highfield 172)

Carson states that, "a lot of the poems I wrote in the 1980s and 90s were some kind of

reflection of the Troubles...I thought of the poems as snapshots of what was going on, the

sometimes surreal circumstances of the violence...I didn't choose to write about it, it

chose me." (Andrews 17)

This idea of "snapshots of what was going on" shows up throughout Belfast

Confetti where we have the repeated image of confetti as representative of the violence

and the potential for violence. For instance:

Handshakes all round, nods and

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whispers.

Roses are brought in, and suddenly, white confetti seethes

against the window." (Snow, BC 21)

In this instance, Carson is referring to an image of snow falling against windows which

the poet is "seeing" by cupping a ping pong ball between his hands. There is no snow,

only the imagined image, perhaps the memory of snow. In All the Better to See You With,

"...the red of his buttonhole, a shower of red confetti." (BC 25) is presumably a flower in

the groom's buttonhole but with a suggestion of violence and the poet, perhaps still in

love with the bride but also equally terrified of her, imagining scenarios where she is the

"Wolf, and me as Little Red Riding/Hood/Being gobbled up..." and finally, both bride

and groom "found in a wood" in states of fairy-tale or cartoonish violent death. (BC 25)

In Queen's Gambit there is the image of a bomb disposal unit ticking down a street

"splattered with bits of corrugated/iron and confetti." (BC 33) This reads as a nod to both

definitions of "Belfast confetti" - the half-brick which Carson defines it as in Brick, and

an amalgamation of nuts and bolts used in the shipyard riots. Again, referencing Carson:

"if there was a riot in the shipyard they would assemble the collective nuts and bolts, iron

bits for this and that and the other thing…‘For we’ll throw some Belfast Confetti on them

and see how they will be getting on with that."11 As we move through the text, the use of

confetti as a trope becomes directly linked with violence as in Barfly where "there's

confetti everywhere" meaning body parts and blood-spray (BC 55) and in Jump Leads

where we have "The Victim in his wedding photograph. He's been spattered/with

confetti" which, while this could be read as the photograph showing him spattered with

11 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/11_16/poetry/war.shtml

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paper confetti from his wedding, can also be read to mean that the man was blown up

since we have the "bomb-disposal expert" and the "killers" a few lines before. (BC 56) In

Brick, Carson references "Belfast confetti," as, "The subversive half-brick, conveniently

hand-sized, is an essential ingredient of the ammunition known as 'Belfast confetti'..."

(BC 72) and finally, in Jawbox there is the "dilating, red confetti" which both references

the blood from a tooth "he" broke on the rim of the sink (jawbox) "when he was eight"

and again, "Red confetti spatters the white glaze." This time referring to "Jekyll's

head...jerking back and forward on the rim" referencing both the broken tooth and the

carnage that has slowed "Dr. Jekyll's" train trip into Belfast. (BC 90-94) The cumulative

affect here is one of viewing news footage or the snapshots Carson references - an

accumulation of images of "confetti" that come to mean violence and its aftermath -

death, body parts, and blood. The experience for the reader is one of a need to revise, to

constantly re-write interpretations - moving back to the earlier poems, might not the

"white confetti" that we read as "snow" represent something more sinister? And what of

the groom's "red confetti" in his buttonhole, does he become the Victim in the wedding

photograph "spattered/with confetti"? Nothing is innocent, no image, no moment can be

said to mean any one thing - everything is contingent, everything must constantly be re-

written.

Highfield states that, in Carson's work, "...The city itself is a palimpsest, with

layers upon layers of conflicting stories and remembrances on the walls, in the

disappeared streets, and in the minds of its citizens..." and further that Carson's work

focuses on "...the persistence of memory, the insistence of surveillance, and the ensuing

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violence which inevitably results. The retelling of stories and the mapping of movements

continue, though both are shown to be fallible..." (174) Highfield references the short

poem Gate from Belfast Confetti, "Carson captures the elisions and additions that are

everywhere in the Belfast landscape. The walls and streets of Belfast are a palimpsest

renamed by each viewer...but as bombs deface buildings and the British government

erases streets, more and more of the palimpsest exists only in the memory." (174)

Keeping Highfield's comments in mind, I would like to look at Gate:

Passing Terminus boutique the other day, I see it's got a bit of

flak:

The T and the r are missing, leaving e minus, and a sign saying,

MONSTER

CLOSING DOWN SALE. It opened about six months back, selling

odd-job-lots,

Ends of ranges. Before that it was Burton's, where I bought my

wedding suit.

Which I only wear for funerals, now. Gone for a Burton, as the

saying goes.

The stopped clock of The Belfast Telegraph seems to indicate the

time

Of the explosion - or was that last week's? Difficult to keep

track:

Everything's a bit askew, like the twisted pickets of the

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security gate, the wreaths

That approximate the spot where I'm told the night patrol

went through. (BC 45)

I read this first stanza as descriptive of any city and the impermanence of the urban

condition until we reach the troubling line, "Which I only wear for funerals, now." If we

are being willfully optimistic readers, we can read this line as a nod to age - it's no longer

a time in the poet's life when people are getting married but instead, people have aged,

there are funerals. In the second stanza, we are given no choice but to re-write this

reading. We are in Belfast and explosions are common, "the time/Of the explosion - or

was that last week's/Difficult to keep track:/Everything's a bit askew..." and this forces us

to re-read the first stanza - there are no more weddings only funerals because people are

being killed and this also forces a re-read of that first line: "Terminus" has "got a bit of

flak" - a nod to Heaney's "Terminus" - that idea of being in-between, an ability to stand

on stepping stones mid-stream, to negotiate between borders/boundaries.12 Carson's

Terminus has "got a bit of flak" - it's hard to negotiate between borders/boundaries when

you haven't "escaped the massacre."13 As John Goodby says, "For the image of the past

and identity in Carson, is not that of the omphalos; rather, it is the patchwork quilt, or the

endless, and endlessly self-revising story. The nature of memory means that the past is

always being provisionally constructed in the present; this, in fact, is what memory is, in

Carson's work, rather than the establishing of a pure source, or origin." (82 in Andrews)

12 See Heaney's essay "Something to Write Home About." 13 "Escaped the massacre" is a line from Heaney's poem "Exposure" in his 1975 collection North of which Carson was highly critical.

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To return to Gate, we now have to see that the focus of the poem is violence and

the aftermath of violence, the impermanence of shops and their names but also, the gate

itself, "like the twisted pickets of the/security gate, the wreaths/That approximate the spot

where I'm told the night patrol/went through." (BC 45) It is important to remember that

Carson's project here is not simply to explore the impermanence, the mutability of the

city but also to provide snapshots of Belfast and those snapshots must include violence.

Highfield states that, "The difficulty of naming anything accurately pervades

Carson's poems, accompanied by the similar impulse to keep naming, to keep telling

stories no matter how accurate they are, because the ability to name delineates the living

from the dead." The naming of things, of streets, even the way in which the city's name

is pronounced are all of paramount important as, "...in the space of Belfast, where the

mere pronunciation of the city's name identifies a person as belonging to one side or the

other..." (174) Witness Jawbox, where "Dr. Jekyll" is "caught between Belfast and

Belfast..." (BC 93) the different pronunciations of which can be deadly indicators as to

English or Irish, Protestant or Catholic.

Carson, brought up in an Irish-speaking home but learning English in school and

in books and in his everyday life outside the home, is in some ways, like the figure in

Jawbox - caught between. I see his poetry as not only an expression of the violence of

this form of hybridity but also perhaps a way through and past this violence, this rigidity

of "sides" and walls and borders.

In Carson's work, often names have nothing to do with the present but reference a

city, a way of life that no longer exists - a mapping of the past over the reality of the

present. Brian Graham refers to this mapping as "the landscapes of memory...the same

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places may participate in different landscapes, denoted by different meanings, merely

reflect[ing] the unagreed nature of our society..." (8) This is not just the re-mapping done

by Empire as witnessed in the Ordnance Survey or Carson's recitation of city street

names14 this is a re-mapping of reality of existence, and of memory. As Highfield

suggests, "Because of the nature of landscapes in Northern Ireland, everyone must

constantly negotiate a path between the realms of memory and physical existence...one

must always keep the remembered landscape fresh in one's mind..." (175)

John Goodby suggests that, "As a reader of the city...one is always being read...by

the city's other inhabitants...the city reads those who try to read it...to ignore the

reciprocity of the process, to imagine that it is [possible] to simply stand outside the city

and 'fix' it in a single, all-encompassing sweep, is an error, possibly a fatal one, for you or

someone else." (Andrews 70-71) For an example of this, reference Carson's poem, Last

Orders:

Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but

It's someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens.

Like electronic

Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who's who, or

what

You're walking into. I, for instance, could be anybody. Though

I'm told

Taig's writen on my face. See me, would I trust appearances?

14 Many of the street names Carson references in his texts are named for battles in the Crimea and other actions of Empire.

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Inside a sudden lull. The barman lolls his head at us. We order

Harp -

Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks

daggers at us

From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how simple it would

be for someone

Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and

ourselves, to Kingdom Come. (BC 46)

This then, is a simple enough moment in time: two Irishmen (presumably) walk into a

bar, as the story goes. But even to enter the bar, first the poet must "squeeze the buzzer"

on a security gate which he pictures as a "trigger" but here we have Goodby's point of

"being read", "It's someone else who has you in their sights" followed by a "click" which

is the gate being opened but could, just as easily, have been the trigger being pulled. The

moment is referred to as "electronic/Russian roulette" because it is impossible to know

"who's who, or/what/You're walking into" which speaks of the extreme anxiety of living

in a city under siege. The poet is culpable too, included in the violence as he "could be

anybody" and even he doesn't "trust appearances" and finally, we're told "how simple it

would be" for "someone/Like ourselves" to embody, to become the violence they are all

watchful against. While the notion of naming/re-naming and mapping or re-mapping is

not as apparent in this poem, there is still this idea of a language that must be learned that

must be known even in something as simple as ordering a drink - they order Harp which

is deemed safe and we are shown a "Bushmills" mirror which to the poet gives the signal

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of association.15 Again, just as in Question Time, to survive this encounter, "the narrator

must map the past" (Highfield 175) and remember and speak the appropriate language, he

must know whether this is Belfast or Belfast.

Seamus Deane suggests that an obsession with naming, with writing/re-writing

the past is a part of the work of colonialism with the colonists in a constant struggle to

write their own identities in relation to or apart from, the colonizer: "What seems like an

endless search for a lost communal or even personal identity" is both "futile" and

"inescapable." (11)

Highfield states that, "The closing of Belfast Confetti suggests that peace is

extremely difficult to achieve where memory and landscape conspire to keep the wounds

of the past constantly seeping. The excavation of the past, Carson suggests, can only lead

to a repetition of a story with the same uncertainty and potential violence, and though his

own work actively pursues that excavation, he seems to question his worrying of the

past..." (Highfield 180) I don't feel that Highfield is capturing the whole of Carson's

intent but instead find myself more aligned with Goodby's view that, "[there is an]

exhilaration [which] comes from the possibility that change will throw up something new

which engages human creativity...Belfast is...an indefinable, protean city of process...The

change it offers can be a renewal, not merely destructive. Against the violence of the city

is the insistent vibrancy and process of it; continually changing, continually reinventing

itself...resurrection of the dead into life, may be concealed within it..." (Goodby 71-73 in

Andrews) And here I would echo Highfield's self-contradictory conclusion, "For Belfast

15 Bushmills being the Protestant whisky, Jamesons the Catholic.

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to escape the legacies of occupation and the scars of division, new stories must be

told...The work of Carson...argues that those stories lurk right beneath the surface,

waiting for someone to pull away the surface tensions and reveal the common memories

of life..." (Highfield 183)

To move back to discussion of Carson's obsession with etymology, Alex Houen

states that Carson's "interpretations of the dinnseanchas, the relation between a place and

its onomastic lore is...broken apart. Eytomology interposes a "verbal swamp", as Carson

suggests in his own reading of the word "brick": "Its root is in break, related to the flaw

in cloth known as brack; worse, it is a cousin of brock...rubbish, refuse, broken down

stuff" (86) Carson's linkage between "Belfast's bricks as contributing not only to its

buildings but also its rioting (as "ammunition")" points to implications for the city as city

or construct as well. To quote Carson: "The land we inhabited [as children] has long

since been built over...Belfast has again swallowed up the miniature versions of itself in

its intestine war. The inevitable declension: Brick./Brack./Brock." (BC 75) To Houen,

"Eytomology weaves its own connections...contrasted against the background of the city's

transformations. Linguistic arbitrariness is thus confronted by material contingency."

(258-9) I would suggest that this obsession with etymology, with naming links back to

Deane's comment re: the need for the colonized (or the post-colonial?) to continually

work toward constructing space, identity, the "home" which has been taken from them by

the colonizer. It is the hybrid subject's need to find a space in which to survive.

In Houen's discussion of Carson's work he continually speaks to the issue of "the

conditional" and "the subjunctive" because, he states, "...the writings of Northern Ireland

poets such as Carson...are saturated with the conditional and the subjunctive... precisely

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because potentiality in Northern Ireland is a very real concern." (261 Houen) In Carson's

depictions of Belfast, everything can change and will; everything is always almost about

to happen. And as Houen states, "All the more reason for paramilitaries and security

forces alike to try and map situations." But, of course, "the possibility of mapping is

frequently undermined by the city's own shifting contours... So while the image of the

map arises throughout Carson's work, mapping itself is invariably made provisional

because..., 'Everything will be revised': 'No don't trust maps, for they avoid the moment:

ramps, barricades, diversions, Peace Lines' " (261) It is not just an "issue of urban

cartography" but instead one of "delineating variables of political terror itself...if poetry is

linked by Carson to charting such potentials, then what are the potentials of the poem as a

type of map? " (262)

To speak to the issue of contingency again, I turn directly to Carson in Revised

Version: "I catch glimpses of what might have been, but it already blurs and fades...In

waking life I expect streets which are not there...the ambivalence of this dilapidated

present, the currency of time passing...wavering between memory and oblivion...For

everything is contingent and provisional; and the subjunctive mood of these images is

tense to the ifs and buts, the yeas and nays of Belfast's history..." (BC 66-67) For Carson,

"contingency is wholly yoked to the historical terrain..." (Houen 262) Even mapping

itself "must become provisional..." (Houen 262) Reference again the provisional mapping

extant in Question Time wherein Carson is forced to "embody the right map" and the

mapping done by State surveillance as embodied by the helicopter, the technology used

by the State. Houen suggests that, "...the ideality of this map is again qualified by the

subjunctive - 'if there is...it may exist'" and further that, "Belfast is itself a tale of at least

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two cities...streets and situations...explode into diagrams of their own potential...security

forces use virtual mapping to contain the possibility of violence. Two levels of the city,

two types of map... (263-264) Echoing Highfield as regards Carson and the situation

extant at the time of his writing Belfast Confetti, Houen states that, "Carson's poetry

presents a potential for engagement precisely because the landscape of power and terror

in Belfast does not just include [violence] but also the discursivity of legislation, the

media, and local stories along with virtual powers of surveillance technology." (270)

Or, as I would more simply state it, Carson's poetry provides snapshots of the violence, a

creative history/present/future writing of the city, and a language that through use of

enjambment allows a new space for breathing, thinking, living within the particular

tensions inherent in a modern city under siege.

Carson has often referenced an affinity for, and influence by, the American poet,

C.K. Williams. Peter Denman states that one of the characteristics associated with

Carson's poetry is the long line, referencing precedents in English and American poetry

including Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg, and Williams. (35 in Andrews) According to

Denman, the "normative length of the poetic line in English is between eight and twelve

syllables," Carson's poetry features a "normative length...of sixteen to eighteen syllables."

(35) Carson's poems feature "submerged" or "hidden" rhymes or "rely on linking words

in unusual or surprising ways" (39) and further that Carson's verse forms "work back

against standard measures, extending and complicating them. At the same time, his

language suggests additional ways of meaning in its accretions and duplications." (43-44

in Andrews) In Belfast Confetti, Carson uses different structures and blends genres to

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create a hybrid of stanza-driven poetry, prose, haiku, and free-verse which speaks both to

the layering in his depiction of Belfast and to the hybrid project that is the city and the

hybrid tensions Carson lives within.

Alexander suggests that Carson's "rangy, sinuous long-line...adapted from...C.K.

Williams...accommodates the rhythms of pub-talk and the brisk inflections of Belfast

demotic [and the] improvisatory nature of his longer narratives provides a formal

analogue for the shape and texture of life in the city." (513) Further, Carson's "frequent

use of enjambment…subtly reinforces the dialectic of connection and disjunction that the

poems enact…" (513) Houen states that Carson uses "enjambment to separate adjectives,

genitives, articles, and conjunctions from dependent nouns and clauses, thus

foregrounding the sense of not knowing what lies around the corner." (272) The poems

thus achieve a "performativity" which forces a space between, "the city's exploding map

and the security forces' surveillance technology," and attempt to "give expression to the

impact of violence at the same time as mediating it by making it expressible and figuring

other connections." (272) Carson's texts do not simply work to figure "other connections"

but actually force open a space in which new stories, new connections, or new layers can

be created. Carson offers "new ways of thinking about the Troubles in terms of the

relation of violence to textuality. Once we are forced to think of linguistic variables as

being placed in variation by states of affairs, we need to think of a new type of trope to

account for the linguistic turnings." (272) Houen references the "exploded tropes" found

throughout Belfast Confetti - whether the trope of confetti itself or the many other

repeated images throughout the text. While he sees this use of "exploded tropes" as

speaking to fragmentation caused by violence, I would also argue that these repetitions

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are exemplary of Carson's own poetics - both a nod to the repetitions in song and the oral

tradition but also the repetitions found in Whitman and Ginsburg - repetition that can lead

to a comforting sense of connections for the reader (for example in Whitman) or to a

sense of unease in the case of Carson's poetry of enjambments and interruptions, lost

histories, and provisional existence. No word or trope can be relied upon to continue to

mean the same thing - confetti is not confetti but blood, blood-spray, body parts, and so

on. Andrews suggests that Carson's work not only shows Belfast's violence and the

breakdown of civil society but "also showcases the necessity to grapple with

incompleteness, fragmentation..." and further that the "textual disturbance" evidenced in

Carson's work connects with the sectarian violence extant in Belfast. I would argue that

these textual disturbances not only express the project of the poet to "grapple" with

fragmentation but provide a level of discomfort for the reader so that we can no longer

merely be the "artful voyeur" (to borrow a phrase from Heaney) but must become

implicated in the violence on some level - we are made distinctly uncomfortable not only

by the images presented but in the actual reading of the text.

In his essay, "Mapping Junkspace," Alexander references the following passage in The

Star Factory: "Sometimes the city is an exploded diagram of itself...it mutates like a

virus, its programme undergoing daily shifts of emphasis and detail. Its parallels are bent

by interior temperatures; engine nacelles become gun pods; sometimes, a whole wing

takes on a different slant. … Now that I can see the city’s miscroscopic bits transfixed by

my attention, I wonder how I might assemble them, for there is no instruction leaflet; I

must write it.'" (510) Alexander suggests that this passage writes against the possibility of

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authority in any mapping project of the city, "the city’s ‘daily shifts of emphasis and

detail’ render each draft untrustworthy or obsolete. In the face of such abstraction, history

and the sheer materiality of the city are liable to reassert themselves..." (511) Further,

"maps function for Carson paradoxically both as forms of imposition to be resisted and as

the means by which such resistance can be effected, for it is through mapping that his

work calibrates and responds to the city’s deterritorialization and reterritorialzation..."

(511) This project is one of metamorphosis brought on by "bombings and demolition,

decay and redevelopment" where Belfast's "citizens are forced to revise their personal

maps of the city accordingly." In perpetual motion, Belfast is a city "characterized by

perpetual change...through which a sense of place is conceived...as a process of

dislocation and appropriation through which meanings are assembled and contested."

(511) Alexendar points to Carson's poem Clearance from his collection Irish for No, as

exemplifying "a fecund dynamism that also figures as a metaphor for artistic creativity

and the generation of new forms" suggesting the wrecking ball in the poem is bringing

forth fresh air, a fresh view, "opening up unexpected new perspectives" (511) This image

also appears in Question Time: "Belfast is changing daily: one day the massive Victorian

facade of the Grand Central Hotel, latterly an army barracks, is there, dominating the

whole of Royal Avenue; the next day it is gone, and a fresh breeze sweeps through the

gap, from Black Mountain across derelict terraces, hole-in-the-wall one-horse taxi

operations, Portakabins, waste ground, to take the eye back up towards the mountain and

the piled-up clouds." (BC 57) Certainly, this is an image of a fresh view but it's

important to remember that everything is provisional, as the "one-horse taxi operation"

repeats later in the piece as the location of the poet's interrogation where his knowledge

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of a map of the past is what helps him to survive. It is not the fresh view or the "eye back

up towards the mountain and the piled-up clouds" that is the only trope at work in this

piece. The trope of demolition/building of the material space of the city as signifying

change, or space for creation also appears in the following passage from The Star

Factory, where we have "a metaphorical 'place of writing'":

I used to watch the bricklayers ply their trade...throwing down neatly gauged

dollops of mortar, laying bricks in practiced, quick monotony, chinking each into

its matrix with skilled dints of the trowel. Had their basic modules been alphabet

bricks, I could have seen them building lapidary sentences and paragraphs, as the

storeyed [sic] houses became emboldened by their hyphenated, skyward narrative,

and entered the ongoing, factious epic that is Belfast. (SF 126)

Here we have building as writing the city, providing new narratives while demolition

provides a space to create.

Carson's mixing of genres in his writing the city can be seen as speaking to the

hybrid state in Carson as subject and in the city of Belfast as a site of hybridity: "But if

the city resembles a vast, unfinished text, then the fusion of diverse genres, styles and

registers in Carson’s writing can...be seen as an effort to approximate the hybrid

multiplicity of urban forms." (Alexander 512) Or as Andrews states, "Carson's writing

makes us think about writing - about what it can and cannot do; the ways in which it

opens up new imaginative pathways, makes new connections; how it raises doubts and

ideas, poses new questions, forces us to look for new answers, suggests new

epistomolgies." (11-12)

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Carson himself refers to that space, the idea that there is "a language beyond

language" (Andrews 16) which he links to Catholicism but which I would argue is that

space his writing creates, that blurring between what we believe a word to mean and all

the variants that poetry of the caliber of Carson's can point to. Perhaps within these

variants there lies a space beyond violence, beyond the borders and boundaries that we

construct between each other. Or, in Carson's words, "maybe writing is itself an

alternative universe." (18 Andrews) And further, "it seems to me that the moral of every

story is to put the reader into another place, to make them consider other possibilities, to

imagine what it might be like to be someone else, or see the world through another's eyes.

To make them think again. To make them examine their preconceptions. To disturb them,

sometimes without their knowing. To leave them wondering. To see their world anew."

(Andrews 24)

Belfast 2009 Source: http://ilovegraffiti.de/eng/2009/04/07/belfast-peace-line-wall-2009/

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WORKS CITED Alexander, Neal. Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. ---. "Mapping junkspace: Ciaran Carson's urban cartographies." Textual Practice. 21:3 (2007): 503-32. Print. Bhabha, Homi. K.. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Brearton, Fran. "Mapping the Trenches: Gyres, Switchbacks and Zig-zag Circles in W.B. Yeats and Ciaran Carson." Irish Studies Review. 9:3. (2001): 373-86. Print. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978. Carson, Ciaran. Belfast Confetti. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1989. Print. ---. Collected Poems. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 2009. Print. ---. Irish for No. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest UP, 1987. Print. ---. The Star Factory. London: Granta Books, 1997. Print. Corcoran, Neil. Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland. Seren Books, 1992. Curtis, Tony, ed. The Art of Seamus Heaney. Wales, Seren Books, 2001. Print. Deane, Seamus. "Introduction" in Eagleton, Terry, Frederic Jameson and Edward W Said. Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis: UofMN Press, 2001. Print. Denman, Peter. "Language and the Prosodic Line in Carson's Poetry." Kennedy-Andrews 28-44. Print. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1975. Print. Goodby, John. "'Walking in the city': space, narrative and surveillance in 'The Irish for No' and 'Belfast Confetti'." Kennedy-Andrews 66-85. Graham, Brian. "The imagining of place: Representation and identity in contemporary Ireland," In Search of Ireland. Brian Graham, ed. 1996. Print. Highfield, Jonathan. "Archaeology of Reconciliation: Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti and John Kindness' Belfast Frescoes." The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. 28:2 (Fall, 2002): 168-185. Print.

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Houen, Alex. Terrorism in Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer, ed. Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. Print. ---. "Introduction: For all I know: Ciaran Carson in conversation with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews." Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. Print. ---. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Columbia Critical Guides. New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. Print. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print. Picon, Antoine and Karen Bates. "Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust." Grey Room. No. 1 (Autumn, 2000): 64-83. Print. Sewell, Frank. "Carson's carnival of language: the influence of Irish and the oral tradition." Kennedy-Andrews 182-200. Smyth, Gerry. Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature. London: Pluto Press, 1998. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Accessed via Web: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf. Dec. 2011. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge. 1995. Web. Source: Google Books. Dec. 2011