Intimate Vitality
Caroline Magennis, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles: Intimacies, Affects, Pleasures
Bloomsbury, 248pp, £28.99, ISBN 9781350074729
reviewed by Archie Cornish
In Anna Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001), the protagonist Amelia watches as her big sister and a gang of friends deliberately poison themselves. The grown-ups have left the building but there’s not much to do in 1980s Ardoyne. So Lizzie and ‘the Girls’ divide out a ‘twelve-year old nutmeg’ and wash it down with ‘an ancient packet of mustard and a rusty tin of peas’. Amelia watches them laugh in delight as the bad peas explode, ‘one by one inside them’. The violent conflict of the Troubles has made its way into domestic space, not just in the toxicity of relationships, but also in the compulsive deprivations men and especially women inflict on their own bodies.
That’s the sort of preoccupation and focus from which Caroline Magennis, in this excellent and timely book, is trying to move away. Too often in criticism of Northern Irish literature, she argues, the body is overdetermined by the conflict and the sectarian identities it has calcified. What’s more, the Troubles, for all the dysfunction and fragility of the post-1998 settlement, are over. About the conflict and its own involvement British society remains bafflingly ignorant. Yet underlying that ignorance, a blanket refusal to engage with wider Northern Irish society and its culture ensures that the Troubles are, frequently, all we collectively know.
The body is sometimes an object on which post-conflict trauma is inscribed; it is also, often, a site of joy and pleasure. Above all, contact with other bodies permits intimacy. Magennis focuses on texts from a specific slice of recent Northern Irish history — 2016-2020, after the referendum and before the pandemic — observing how intimacy, with its ‘power to radically destabilize and reshape lives’, challenges the rigidity of social norms and taboos. Political gridlock (power-sharing collapsed in 2017 and didn’t return until 2020) deepens socio-economic inertia; intimate encounters, private but far from de-politicised, bring life.
Magennis concentrates on fiction, and is more interested in scenes than plots. This focus on the momentary reflects the vibrant tradition of the (Northern) Irish short story, but also suits her theme: the intimate occurrences whose significance we might miss as the story drives to its conclusion. The generous range of her study means that this book sometimes feels itself like a critical anthology, but Magennis’s expert knowledge of Northern Irish writing and fluency in feminist and affect theory ensures that her readings still possess real depth: Jan Carson’s short stories of domestic intimacy and loneliness are characterised as ‘a distinctly east Belfast magic realism’, drawing on a context of the supernatural in Ulster Scots folklore uncovered in a recent research project by Andrew Sneddon and John Privilege.
Among the conflict’s many freezing effects was the preservation of a heavily patriarchal society — despite (or perhaps because of) what the historian Lindsey Earner-Byrne has called Irish nationalism’s ‘sublimation of femininity’. Magennis skilfully observes the radical potential in depictions of women’s pleasure. In the stories of Rosemary Jenkinson the female orgasm is an end in itself, a fleeting alternative to the repressive norms of married sexuality; in Glenn Patterson’s novels, where the conflict often smoulders in the background, sexual pleasure is not a metaphor for cross-community transgression but a route back to the ‘deep ordinariness’ of modern, secular life. Reading Wendy Erskine’s collection Sweet Home (2019) Magennis finds a valuable disentangling of women’s intimacy from the domestic sphere, highlighting the traditionally female ‘social spaces’ where intimacy, physical and conversational, might occur — ‘the beauty salon, the hairdressers, the laundrette’. Dance Move (2022), Erskine’s subsequent collection published after this study, features ‘Mrs Dallesandro’, an astonishing short story in which an affluent south Belfast woman remembers an early sexual experience from the private island of the sunbed.
The most strikingly original analysis in Magennis’s study is her chapter on the significance of skin. In the stories of David Park, which portray modern men in their lonely dislocation, male desire can’t be reduced to sexuality; it expresses longing for intimate connection felt, if not in language, through the ‘haptic’ exchanges taking place across the skin. Magennis highlights Park’s allusions to Renaissance culture: John Donne and Caravaggio provide a novel way of framing the skin as interface between ‘the physical and the cerebral’. In Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro skin is glows white against a dark background, and Magennis attends also to skin colour, and the entanglement of the desire for pure or healthy skin with whiteness.
She thus shows how we might sensitively integrate topics which have featured heavily in Northern Irish literary criticism — gender, violence, the body — with global themes in today’s socio-political conversation. It also exemplifies her critical subtlety and the virtues of her resolve to resist the overdetermination of literature by the Troubles. Skin keeps the traumatic score of the conflict, but it also receives the touch of others in the present; hands are for clenching into black-gloved fists, but also for holding. Such nuance allows Magennis to avoid the imbalance of some contemporary literary criticism: towards stringent, hyper-sceptical critique on the one hand, and towards affirmation and ‘repair’ on the other.
The final chapter, though it isn’t the last word, addresses Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), in recognition of its enduring visibility. Milkman is a Troubles novel — Burns has questioned fiercely why, having suffered the conflict, she should have to justify writing about it — and Magennis’s decision to focus on this tale of coercive control, of life in the shadow of the paramilitaries, seems at first slightly to dampen the freshness of her approach. Yet crucially her reading of Milkman also resists the overdetermination of the Northern Irish body. Middle Sister, the protagonist, narrates the objectification of her body, its surveillance by a community always trying to inscribe it with moralising meanings. Yet the possibility of inhabiting the body is also a way to ‘shake out of a heavy, dense affect and create some space’. Magennis reads Middle Sister’s experiments with running and dancing in the context of Burns’s own experience of Iyengar yoga. The rigid disciplining of others’ bodies is swapped for a liberating discipline in one’s own body.
Middle Sister likes to read too, sometimes while walking through the park — a declaration of autonomy, inadvertent but enough to spook the paramilitary thugs. Throughout, Magennis’s arguments illuminate the relation between readers and writers, but it’s significant that this species of intimacy is disembodied. The stretching of the world by globalisation — overlapping, from an Irish historical perspective, with a great age of emigration — means that much of our communication, intimate and otherwise, is digitally mediated. Magennis notes the attentiveness of recent stories by Lucy Caldwell to the comedy and pathos of mother-daughter exchanges, across the Irish Sea, via WhatsApp. Like the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland is experiencing a political moment of unfiltered sentiment. As William Davies argues in Nervous States, emotion has been pitted against reason. Yet expressions of tribal passion mostly take place beyond material reality, beyond the body, in comments sections and social media pile-ons. Reading a physical book, especially a good one, seems in this climate a rebelliously private, intimate form of disembodied communication.
Many of the scholars who will engage most deeply with this book are precariously employed, struggling to infiltrate or progress beyond academia’s margins. It’s helpful that Magennis’s work will be available to all readers by Open Access. Yet the book also opens itself out to other voices, ending with a miscellany of short ‘Reflections from Writers’. Many of these provide fascinating glimpses into writerly craft; Billy Cowan states that, in the attempt to create intimacy with the reader, he thinks of his writing as ‘a kind of secret I have decided to share with them’. Taken together, these reflections construct an atmosphere of ongoing conversation, and confirm the impression the book has given: of a contemporary Northern Irish extraordinary for its boldness, its intimate vitality.
That’s the sort of preoccupation and focus from which Caroline Magennis, in this excellent and timely book, is trying to move away. Too often in criticism of Northern Irish literature, she argues, the body is overdetermined by the conflict and the sectarian identities it has calcified. What’s more, the Troubles, for all the dysfunction and fragility of the post-1998 settlement, are over. About the conflict and its own involvement British society remains bafflingly ignorant. Yet underlying that ignorance, a blanket refusal to engage with wider Northern Irish society and its culture ensures that the Troubles are, frequently, all we collectively know.
The body is sometimes an object on which post-conflict trauma is inscribed; it is also, often, a site of joy and pleasure. Above all, contact with other bodies permits intimacy. Magennis focuses on texts from a specific slice of recent Northern Irish history — 2016-2020, after the referendum and before the pandemic — observing how intimacy, with its ‘power to radically destabilize and reshape lives’, challenges the rigidity of social norms and taboos. Political gridlock (power-sharing collapsed in 2017 and didn’t return until 2020) deepens socio-economic inertia; intimate encounters, private but far from de-politicised, bring life.
Magennis concentrates on fiction, and is more interested in scenes than plots. This focus on the momentary reflects the vibrant tradition of the (Northern) Irish short story, but also suits her theme: the intimate occurrences whose significance we might miss as the story drives to its conclusion. The generous range of her study means that this book sometimes feels itself like a critical anthology, but Magennis’s expert knowledge of Northern Irish writing and fluency in feminist and affect theory ensures that her readings still possess real depth: Jan Carson’s short stories of domestic intimacy and loneliness are characterised as ‘a distinctly east Belfast magic realism’, drawing on a context of the supernatural in Ulster Scots folklore uncovered in a recent research project by Andrew Sneddon and John Privilege.
Among the conflict’s many freezing effects was the preservation of a heavily patriarchal society — despite (or perhaps because of) what the historian Lindsey Earner-Byrne has called Irish nationalism’s ‘sublimation of femininity’. Magennis skilfully observes the radical potential in depictions of women’s pleasure. In the stories of Rosemary Jenkinson the female orgasm is an end in itself, a fleeting alternative to the repressive norms of married sexuality; in Glenn Patterson’s novels, where the conflict often smoulders in the background, sexual pleasure is not a metaphor for cross-community transgression but a route back to the ‘deep ordinariness’ of modern, secular life. Reading Wendy Erskine’s collection Sweet Home (2019) Magennis finds a valuable disentangling of women’s intimacy from the domestic sphere, highlighting the traditionally female ‘social spaces’ where intimacy, physical and conversational, might occur — ‘the beauty salon, the hairdressers, the laundrette’. Dance Move (2022), Erskine’s subsequent collection published after this study, features ‘Mrs Dallesandro’, an astonishing short story in which an affluent south Belfast woman remembers an early sexual experience from the private island of the sunbed.
The most strikingly original analysis in Magennis’s study is her chapter on the significance of skin. In the stories of David Park, which portray modern men in their lonely dislocation, male desire can’t be reduced to sexuality; it expresses longing for intimate connection felt, if not in language, through the ‘haptic’ exchanges taking place across the skin. Magennis highlights Park’s allusions to Renaissance culture: John Donne and Caravaggio provide a novel way of framing the skin as interface between ‘the physical and the cerebral’. In Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro skin is glows white against a dark background, and Magennis attends also to skin colour, and the entanglement of the desire for pure or healthy skin with whiteness.
She thus shows how we might sensitively integrate topics which have featured heavily in Northern Irish literary criticism — gender, violence, the body — with global themes in today’s socio-political conversation. It also exemplifies her critical subtlety and the virtues of her resolve to resist the overdetermination of literature by the Troubles. Skin keeps the traumatic score of the conflict, but it also receives the touch of others in the present; hands are for clenching into black-gloved fists, but also for holding. Such nuance allows Magennis to avoid the imbalance of some contemporary literary criticism: towards stringent, hyper-sceptical critique on the one hand, and towards affirmation and ‘repair’ on the other.
The final chapter, though it isn’t the last word, addresses Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018), in recognition of its enduring visibility. Milkman is a Troubles novel — Burns has questioned fiercely why, having suffered the conflict, she should have to justify writing about it — and Magennis’s decision to focus on this tale of coercive control, of life in the shadow of the paramilitaries, seems at first slightly to dampen the freshness of her approach. Yet crucially her reading of Milkman also resists the overdetermination of the Northern Irish body. Middle Sister, the protagonist, narrates the objectification of her body, its surveillance by a community always trying to inscribe it with moralising meanings. Yet the possibility of inhabiting the body is also a way to ‘shake out of a heavy, dense affect and create some space’. Magennis reads Middle Sister’s experiments with running and dancing in the context of Burns’s own experience of Iyengar yoga. The rigid disciplining of others’ bodies is swapped for a liberating discipline in one’s own body.
Middle Sister likes to read too, sometimes while walking through the park — a declaration of autonomy, inadvertent but enough to spook the paramilitary thugs. Throughout, Magennis’s arguments illuminate the relation between readers and writers, but it’s significant that this species of intimacy is disembodied. The stretching of the world by globalisation — overlapping, from an Irish historical perspective, with a great age of emigration — means that much of our communication, intimate and otherwise, is digitally mediated. Magennis notes the attentiveness of recent stories by Lucy Caldwell to the comedy and pathos of mother-daughter exchanges, across the Irish Sea, via WhatsApp. Like the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland is experiencing a political moment of unfiltered sentiment. As William Davies argues in Nervous States, emotion has been pitted against reason. Yet expressions of tribal passion mostly take place beyond material reality, beyond the body, in comments sections and social media pile-ons. Reading a physical book, especially a good one, seems in this climate a rebelliously private, intimate form of disembodied communication.
Many of the scholars who will engage most deeply with this book are precariously employed, struggling to infiltrate or progress beyond academia’s margins. It’s helpful that Magennis’s work will be available to all readers by Open Access. Yet the book also opens itself out to other voices, ending with a miscellany of short ‘Reflections from Writers’. Many of these provide fascinating glimpses into writerly craft; Billy Cowan states that, in the attempt to create intimacy with the reader, he thinks of his writing as ‘a kind of secret I have decided to share with them’. Taken together, these reflections construct an atmosphere of ongoing conversation, and confirm the impression the book has given: of a contemporary Northern Irish extraordinary for its boldness, its intimate vitality.