Greetings, all. I've been wanting to follow on the heels of Andy's excellent posting about Eureka Street to provide some more odds & ends, and perhaps some comments to push us forward towards the last section of the novel. First of all, some basics about Robert McLiam Wilson that you might find useful: Born in 1964. A Belfast writer. A Catholic (as a Catholic growing up in West Belfast, he might have been expected to have developed IRA sympathies). "Like that of most citizens of Belfast," he has written, "my identity is the subject of some local dispute. Some say I'm British, some say I'm Irish, some even say that there's no way I'm five foot eleven and that I'm five ten at best. In many ways I'm not permitted to contribute to this debate. If the controversy is ever satisfactorily concluded, I will be whatever the majority of people tell me I am. As a quotidian absolute, nationality is almost meaningless. For an Italian living in Italy, Italianness is not much of a distinction. What really gives nationality its chiaroscuro, its flavor, is a little dash of hatred and fear. Nobody really knows or cares what they are until they meet what they don't want to be. Then it's time for the flags and guns to come out."
Eureka Street (1996) is his third novel, following the highly regarded and prize-winning Ripley Bogle (1989) and Manfred's Pain (1992). You've gathered by now that he's a striking urban writer and, indeed, Eureka Street may remind us of other great urban writers like Dickens and, more appropriately, Joyce. As I've invited you to consider any number of times now, it's useful to think about how his Belfast is mapped: is it mapped according to the confining logic and segregated spatialities of the Troubles (no-go areas, Catholics here, Protestants there)? Or is there a different logic at work? When and where do we see a possibly transgressive logic and spatiality evidenced?
We've also noted the predominance of the thriller in Troubles literature. They very often, of course, have quite grossly simplified the nature of the conflict; if one didn't know better, they would cause one to think that Northern Ireland has been utterly consumed by war (a war fought by two crazed, tribal groups, fighting to the death). One thing McLiam Wilson sets out to do in this novel is to represent the ordinary citizen, the citizen who is more concerned with the mundane realities of day-to-day life. In fact, McLIam Wilson once said that "an awful lot of people in Northern Ireland simply don't care whether it is Irish, British or independent. Yet no one speaks for them and no one reflects their views or even demonstrates the fact that they exist."
The other big part of the historical context for this novel is the fact that the peace process had started to gain a kind of tenuous momentum by 1993. It was a time of ceasefires, broken ceasefires, fits and starts, persistent but cautious optimism ... It's this new spirit of hopefulness that may be causing the classic Troubles thriller to mutate into something noticeably different in Eureka Street. With this in mind, we've tried to characterize the tone and the genre identity of this novel, as well as its attitude towards the contemporary conflict and its politics. As we look ahead to our last discussion day for the novel in our penultimate class meeting, we'll want to talk about how we characterize this novel's vision of the future: on what will a lasting peace depend, according to the logic of the novel? What does Peggy & Caroline's story have to contribute to this question? What is this text's "Eureka!" cry? What does OTG represent, ultimately?
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