“Brought up to Live Double Lives”: Intelligence and Espionage as Literary and Philosophical Figures in Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place and For All We Know

The article examines the figure of the spy—alongside themes related to espionage—as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson (1948–2019): the volume of poems For All We Know (2008) and the novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson’s oeuvre is permeated with the Troubles and he has been hailed one of key writers to convey the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. His depiction of Belfast thematizes questions of terrorism, the insecurity and anxiety it causes in everyday life, as well as the unceasing games of appearances and the different ways of verifying or revising identities. In Carson’s later work, however, these aspects acquire greater philosophical depth as the author uses the themes of doubles, spies, and makeshift identities to discuss writing itself, the construction of subjectivity, and the dialogic relationship with the other. Taking a cue from Paul Ricoeur’s and Julia Kristeva’s conceptions of “oneself as another,” the article examines how Carson’s spy-figures can be read as metaphors for processes of self-discovery and identity-formation, tied to the notion of “self-othering.” Carson employs the figure of the spy—who juggles identities by “donning” different clothes or languages—to scrutinize how one ventures into the dangerous territory of writing, translation and love, as well as to reconsider notions of originality and self-mastery. Ultimately, Carson conceptualizes literature as specially marked by deceptions and metamorphoses, defining in these terms the human condition.

Shibboleths of Grief: Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph”

The essay explores Paul Muldoon’s elegy for the fellow Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson with a view to showing that “The Triumph” seeks to evoke a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized. As the various intertextual allusions in the poem are traced, it is argued that Muldoon seeks to revise the notion of the Irish shibboleths that, as the poem puts it, “are meant to trip you up.” In lieu of this linguistic and political slipperiness, “The Triumph” situates Carson’s protean invocations of Belfast and traditional Irish music as the new shibboleths of collectivity.

Liquid Labyrinths

Stewart Parker’s play, Northern Star, begins with the character of Henry Joy McCracken reciting his seaborn heritage as a descendant of Huguenots and Covenanters, his mongrel inheritance ‘natural’ to his Belfast birth, the city a port of refuge from ‘the storm of history’. McCracken is remembered now as a United Irishman who was executed for his part in the 1798 rebellion, an insurrection that lingers still in the public consciousness of the city and its past. Northern Star was first performed in 1984 and through it Parker created a space for expressions of identity and place beyond the Troubles; that he did so in metaphors of storms and sea suggests the imaginative depth of the city’s maritime attachments, which form the basis of this chapter’s readings of mid-twentieth-century cultural production in the north of Ireland, including Seamus Deane, Medbh McGuckian, Sinead Morrissey, Glenn Patterson, and Ciaran Carson.

Adaptations in the Age of the Arbitrary

This chapter begins by noting with Saussure that the rupture structural linguistics makes between sound image and referent would appear to make etymology theoretically vacant. How one might continue to ‘believe’ in the truth of etymologies in the face of this occupies the rest of the discussion, beginning with the problems and possibilities of phenomenological ‘unveiling’ (Martin Heidegger, Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Waldman are discussed) and deconstructive etymological word play (Jean Paulhan, Nancy Streuver, Derek Attridge, Paula Blank). Play, or work, with etymology then frames a comparative reading of poems by G. M. Hopkins and Ciaran Carson, which explores questions of poetic assertion, belief, and irony. After sketching a taxonomy of etymological tropes in modern poetry, the chapter concludes by following the etymological development and redeployment of central metapoetic metaphors, which imagine the work of poetry as that of maker, weaver, singer, and ploughman.

The Life of Words

For centuries, investigations into the origins of words were entwined with investigations into the origins of humanity and the cosmos. With the development of modern etymological practice in the nineteenth century, however, many cherished etymologies were shown to be impossible, and the very idea of original ‘true meaning’ asserted in the etymology of ‘etymology’ declared a fallacy. Structural linguistics later held that the relationship between sound and meaning in language was ‘arbitrary’, or ‘unmotivated’, a truth that has survived with small modification until today. On the other hand, the relationship between sound and meaning has been a prime motivator of poems, at all times throughout history. The Life of Words studies a selection of poets inhabiting our ‘Age of the Arbitrary’, whose auditory-semantic sensibilities have additionally been motivated by a historical sense of the language, troubled as it may be by claims and counterclaims of ‘fallacy’ or ‘true meaning’. Arguing that etymology activates peculiar kinds of epistemology in the modern poem, the book pays extended attention to poems by G. M. Hopkins, Anne Waldman, Ciaran Carson, and Anne Carson, and to the collected works of Seamus Heaney, R. F. Langley, J. H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, and Paul Muldoon.

Rethinking Form (Yet Again) in Contemporary Irish Poetry

This essay provides a reconsideration of the centrality of form in discussions of Irish poetry and suggests ways of revivifying those discussions by moving away from the tired dyad of mainstream lyric and experimental (or alternative or innovative) poetry. Moving through examinations of Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson, Sinéad Morrissey, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh, this essay aims to pivot the conversation about Irish poetry so that more attention might be paid to the concrete textures and practices of contemporary poets such that we are better able to see and describe the implications and ramifications of their work.

Paul Muldoon em tradução

Paul Muldoon (1951 ”“ ) é um poeta norte-irlandês de origem católica nascido em Portdown, condado de Armagh. Integrou junto a Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley e Ciaran Carson, dentre outros, o chamado Belfast Group, organizado por Philip Hobsbaum. Publicou seu primeiro livro, New Weather, em 1973. Desde então, já publicou mais doze coletâneas de poemas, sendo a mais recente Frolic and Detour, em 2019. Além disso, já publicou literatura infantil, libretos de ópera, coletâneas de letras de música e peças de teatro. Já foi premiado com o T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry por The Annals of Chile (1994) e o Pulitzer Prize for Poetry por Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). Mudou-se para os Estados Unidos em 1987, onde foi professor do curso de escrita criativa na Universidade de Princeton até 2017 e foi, até 2016, editor de poesia da revista The New Yorker. As traduções a seguir integram o apêndice da dissertação “Uma Camisa de Força para Houdini: Paul Muldoon, Forma Fixa e Tradução”, defendida em fevereiro de 2020 na UFPR.

Outlaws and Spies

Outlawry and espionage would seem to be quite different phenomena, rarely discussed together. This book argues that they have something in common - that both involve exclusion from law. Challenging previous readings that view outlawry as a now-superseded historical phenomenon, and outlaws as figures of popular resistance, this book argues that legal exclusion is a longstanding and enduring means of supporting state power. Through close analysis of the literatures of outlawry and espionage, this book reads legal exclusion as a key theme in writing about outlaws and spies from the Middle Ages to the present day, arguing that literature plays an important role in representing and critiquing exclusion from law. The discussion draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Eric Hobsbawm, and engages with a range of primary legal texts from the Middle Ages to the present day. Literary works discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare’s history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story, to contemporary writing by John le Carré, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.

Unanswered Questions: Ciaran Carson

This chapter examines themes of surveillance, uncertainty, identity, and political violence in the work of Ciaran Carson. If Carson's Belfast poems, written during the Northern Ireland Troubles, have something of a journalistic aspect, they also contain the motifs of surveillance and interrogation paired with uncertainty and doubt. Carson revisits some of these themes in three post-Troubles works. The mirroring sonnet sequences of For All We Know play with the archetypes of spy narrative. The poems are full of dressing up, disguising, cross-dressing, but when you take on a false identity, these poems ask, who are you then? What does uncertainty mean in the aftermath of conflict, when so many unanswered questions remain? And in the context of so many false witnesses, where might truth, or justice, be found? In The Pen Friend, both the realities and possibilities of collusion between security forces and paramilitaries during the Northern Ireland Troubles find an echo in the explosion at the heart of Carson’s novel. Finally, Exchange Place gives us a fantastical take on surveillance, uncertainty, and questions of identity, with a whiff of espionage, in a novel that leaves us, again, with unanswered questions.

Teaching Ciarán Carson

In recent decades, Belfast writer Ciarán Carson has emerged as one of the most inventive of contemporary literary voices, in part for his unique style of textualizing space. Driven in some ways by the very specific technological challenges of the conflict zone of Troubles-era Belfast, Carson’s poetry and prose are marked by what we might describe as tech paranoia—but, in a constructive poetic answer, his texts create new logics for using tech materials, machines, and high-tech spaces in ways that privilege creativity. It is no coincidence, notes literary and technology theorist Katherine Hayles, that “the condition of virtuality is most pervasive and advanced” where centers of power are most concentrated and conflicted intersections most frequently occur. Carson’s oeuvre illustrates the point, employing the technology of the printed page to simulate and process the zone of conflict in new, postdigital ways. This article poses Carson’s texts as ideal for exploring issues that connect regional identities, technology, and the arts—including highly topical issues around terrorism and nationhood—that are highly relevant for contemporary students of literature.