Northern Ireland’s Interregnum. Anna Burns’s Depiction of a (Post)-Troubles State of (In)security

Abstract

This paper aims to present the main contours of Burns’s literary output which, interestingly enough, grows into a personal understanding of the collective mindset of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland. It is legitimate, I argue, to construe her fiction (No Bones, 2001; Little Constructions, 2007; Milkman, 2018) as a body of work shedding light on certain underlying mechanisms of (post-)sectarian violence. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between 1998 and 2020, the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region. My reading of the novelist’s selected works intends to show how the local public have been fed by (or have fed themselves upon) an unjustified—maybe even false—sense of security. Burns, in that regard, has positioned herself amongst the aggregate of writers who feel anxious rather than placated, hence their persistence in returning to the roots of Northern Irish societal divisions. Burns’s writing, in the above context, though immersed in the world of the Troubles, paradoxically communicates “an idiosyncratic spatiotemporality” (Maureen Ruprecht Fadem’s phrase), namely an experience beyond the self-imposing, historical time limits. As such, it gains the ability to provide insightful commentaries on conflict-prone relations, the patterns of which can be repeatedly observed in Northern Ireland’s socio-political milieu. Overall, the main idea here is to discuss and present the narrative realm proposed by Burns as (in)determinate, liminal in terms of time and space, positioning readers between “then” and “now” of the region.

Unstated Rage and Undefined Identity in Anna Burns’ Milkman: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Reading

“…At the core of the novel lies the stalking of the unnamed female protagonist, introduced in coined phrases like 'middle sister', 'middle daughter', and 'maybegirlfriend'; perpetrated by another anonymous but male entity; and contemporaneously prevails the vilification towards her, battered by the society as a whole during the 1970's Ireland due to unmitigated communal hatred (Hutton, 2019;Mc2, 2019). Burns' fictional outlines in Milkman illuminate certain shrouded structure of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland, and her own realization of the social temperament of the (post-)sectarian violence (Bartnik, 2021). Her depiction, through her protagonist, the middle sister; of the starkly untrue, vehemently fabricated musings and slandering nurtured and pelted, almost in a wholesale manner, by war-torn people speaks of the common experience of anyone bearing the memories of a mega-scaled violence, and living in its post-period (Mc2, 2019;Bartnik, 2021).…”

“…Burns' fictional outlines in Milkman illuminate certain shrouded structure of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland, and her own realization of the social temperament of the (post-)sectarian violence (Bartnik, 2021). Her depiction, through her protagonist, the middle sister; of the starkly untrue, vehemently fabricated musings and slandering nurtured and pelted, almost in a wholesale manner, by war-torn people speaks of the common experience of anyone bearing the memories of a mega-scaled violence, and living in its post-period (Mc2, 2019;Bartnik, 2021).…”