|
Irish Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (April 1998): Reading Notes Klaus Gunnar Schneider,
‘Irishness and Postcoloniality in Glenn Patterson’s Burning
Your Own, in Irish Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1998), pp.55-62 Quotes Michael Parker, ‘Book of Hours: The Fiction of Glenn Patterson’, in The Honest Ulsterman, Vol. 101 (Spring 1996): ‘[Patterson’s three novels evince] a profound concern with the impact of national narratives upon private histories, inviting the reader to draw analogies between dysfunctioning in familial relationships and within the state.’ (p.7). Quotes Kearney, ‘our culture may be more properly understood as a manifold of narratives … the notion of an “Irish mind” should be comprended in terms of a multiplicty of Irish minds’ (Postnational, p.16-17; here p.56.) ‘Contrary to [Richard] Kearney, I would claim that there is neither an ‘Irish mind’ nor a ‘multiplicity of Irish minds’, but that it is the very idea of an Irish mind which we have to take as a fiction evolving from and beign precariously placed within that ‘liminal space’ between the ‘manifold narratives’ to which Kearney testifies. [57]; … In the textual world of Burning Your Own, the figure of Mal is exactly this problematic ‘liminal space’ between identity and difference [59]; Francy is the ‘Other’ of Mal’s ‘Self’ in construction, it is Mal’s ‘own other’ in the sense that it is the back of the coin of which Mal’s self is the front. (pp.57-59.) Extracts from Homi
Bhabha: ‘The visibility of the racial/colonial other is at once a point of identity and at the same time a problem for the attempted closure within discourse. For the recognition of difference as “imaginary” points to identity and origin … is disrupted by the representation of splitting in the discourse.’ (ibid. p.50) ‘Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjections, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination … It is the scenario of colonial fantasy which, in staging the ambivalence of desire, articulates the demand of the Negro which the Negro disrupts.’ (ibid. p.41). ‘In this engagement the stereotype is not simply dismissed, but rather displaced from the fixation of its habitual discursive position and therefore regained for an open play about difference and meaning. As a result, the broad field of the “subaltern” begins to emerge behind those stereotyped subject positions. In this sense I want to claim Patterson’s novel as a postcolonial text.’ (p.61.) ‘My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse. To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possibly by engaging with its effectivity; with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs the colonial subject (both coloniser and colonised). (ibid., pp.37-38). Quotes Foucault: ‘We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one … We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process by which discourse can be both an instrument … of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. (Introduction, History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, Penguin 1990, pp.100-01; here p.12. Bibl.
|
|||||