1At the end of her short story ‘Children’s Children’, Jan Carson alludes to the uncertain future of Northern Ireland in those words: ‘they held their silence reverently and wondered if they loved the island enough to be neither north nor south, foreigner or familiar, but rather a brave new direction, balanced like a hairline fracture in the centre of everything’ (2016, 190). Borders as boundaries that ‘indicate or fix a limit or extent’ (Merriam Webster Dictionary) have been part of Northern Irish identity since the 1921 division of a previously united Ireland during the Partition, a process defined by Brendan O’Leary as ‘a fresh border cut through one community’s national homeland, creating at least two separate political units under different sovereigns or authorities’ (in Wilson & Donnan 2012, 29). The ‘fresh cut’ (29) of the Partition was internalised by Northern Irish society, culminating with the Troubles, the sectarian conflict that opposed Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists. The Troubles illustrated Henk van Houtum and Ton van Naerssen’s definition of bordering as othering that segmented and segregated society (in Brambilla et al. 2015, 41). This led Northern Irish fiction, according to Billy Gray, to incorporate ‘the conventional paradigm of sectarian semiotics’ (2014, 61) in its attempt to represent the binary ethno-cultural identities that were shaped by the conflict. While the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement officially put an end to the historical period known as the Troubles in 1998, remnants of border mentality still run through contemporary society as captured by fiction.
2This context is essential to a full understanding of the sentence that maps out Carson’s narrative project in her collection of short stories Children’s Children. Her work strives to assess the legacy of conflict all the while exploring the ‘brave new direction’ that tentatively carves out a new path by blurring binaries, as suggested by the author’s stylistic balancing act (‘neither north nor south, foreign or familiar’). Carson’s fiction probes ‘the hairline fracture in the centre of everything’ in order to dissect the vestiges of Partition mentality while showing that this rigid border can be cracked open and become a space of circulation. Indeed, as Anna Lazzarini argues, ‘borders, originally meant to separate and draw distinctions, end up being constantly crossed and become a means for uniting through passage and movement’ (in Brambilla et al. 2015, 182). While the figure of the ‘hairline fracture’ could be analysed as a figure of discord, it can also be seen as a contact zone or a crossroads, suggesting openness and vulnerability to an uncertain future.
3For the purposes of this study, I will mainly focus on Carson’s novel The Fire Starters (2019), which explores two fathers’ fears of resurgent violence in contemporary Belfast. I will also consider The Last Resort, a collection of short stories published in 2021, in which the ghost of a teenager who was killed by an IRA car bomb haunts a sea resort. Although they only focus on the Protestant community and do not tackle religious or political divisions head-on, these stories address the legacy of the Troubles for the post-Friday Agreement generations. As a way of eschewing binaries and enclosure, Carson’s magical realist fiction multiplies motifs of border crossing and shifts the limits between temporal, generic and narratorial categories. The common denominator of these literary languages of border-crossing is Carson’s poetics of emotion that puts boundaries in movement and invests the liminal space of the ‘hairline fracture in the centre of everything’ in order to address the legacy of the Troubles and ponder the future of Northern Ireland.
4In her review of contemporary Northern Irish fiction, Fiona McCann dismisses the widespread temptation of assigning simplistic temporal boundaries to the Troubles: ‘There is general consensus that the conflict in the North of Ireland began in 1969 and ended in 1998 with the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, but these landmark dates discount sectarian or political violence perpetuated before and after this period’ (2020, 550). Contemporary fiction thus often draws ‘attention to the permeability of the temporal limits of the conflict’ (550), especially in the wake of Brexit, which stirred up anxieties around the Irish border and the fragile peace agreement. In order to assess the persistence of sedimented border mentality, Carson thus probes the limit between past and present and questions the ‘binary oppositions’ inherent in thinking about the limit (Brambilla in Brambilla et al. 2015, 118).
- 1 Most of Carson’s interviews about The Fire Starters and The Last Resort took place at the heart of (...)
- 2 Ghosts also feature in Carson’s most recent novel The Raptures (2020), in which a mysterious illnes (...)
- 3 The original French reads thus: ‘Le fantôme n’a que faire du temps chronologique, généalogique. Il (...)
5From the beginning of The Fire Starters, the overarching narrative voice simultaneously claims ‘The Troubles are over now’ and ‘The Troubles have only just begun’ at the beginning of two consecutive paragraphs (2019, 7), thus challenging any dichotomous logic through antithesis. Strikingly, in order to ponder the ‘complicated legacy of the Troubles and where we are now as a country’ (Bull 2020 [3’47]),1 Carson’s fiction embraces ghosts, both as metaphors and characters.2 Indeed, as Laurie Laufer argues, ‘ghosts do not care about chronological, genealogical time. They are too much of a “walker-through-walls” figure to be contained into one place’ (2006, 94).3 The ghost figure is therefore used to represent the blurring of temporal boundaries between past, present and future, as in The Last Resort, where the young Lynette still haunts the place where she died thirty-five years earlier while evoking the future.
- 4 There are two distinct narratorial regimes in the novel: chapters told from the protagonists’ persp (...)
6The very title of The Fire Starters points to a potential re-igniting of past violence in the present and future. In Northern Irish culture, bonfires celebrate Protestant culture, as the omniscient narrator of The Fire Starters4 remarks while retracing the history of the tradition:
The Eleventh is for bonfires, the Twelfth for parades, piss-ups and commemorating proud Protestant victories of the past. King Billy. The Battle of the Boyne. All the truths, and well-learnt half-truths, which keep the Orange ordered. ‘Remember 1690,’ they say, the year it all kicked off, and three hundred years later they remain hell-bent on remembering, though the details have worn thin from passing one generation to the next. (2019, 123; emphasis added)
7The crystallisation of the community’s identity around the commemoration of past victories is perceptible in the omnipresent lexical field of remembrance (‘commemorating’, ‘remember’, ‘remembering’): the same pronoun ‘they’ is used to conflate earlier and present-day communities of Protestants. However, the narrator’s account of cultural history and its transmission remains tinged with irony and scepticism, reminding the reader that the content of remembrance itself can be misappropriated or rendered too vague by transgenerational approximation (‘well-learnt half-truths’). The bonfires as symbols of unionist culture are a reminder that the present is still haunted by past strife. After the Good Friday Agreement, while restrictions were imposed on the bonfires’ height, they became a symbolic ‘battleground for Protestant identity and how we’re viewed by Westminster’, and Unionists started ‘fighting to hold on to what was left of their identity’ (Seth [16’02]) as they felt major concessions had already been made in the name of peace.
8In Carson’s novel, bonfires are thus turned into dangerously Tall Fires to protest against the regulations. Sammy, an ex-paramilitary, realises that his son Mark has quite literally picked up the torch and orchestrated the violence that is flaring up again. Throughout the novel, among other images, Carson couches these concerns in spectral metaphors. What crosses over from past to present is ‘the ghost of his [Sammy’s] rage’ (2019, 265), ‘the ghost of an old paramilitary tattoo’ (152) on Sammy’s skin, as a reminder that the violence of the past still lies under the surface and could bubble over. The metaphorical omnipresence of spectrality creates a temporal liminal space for reflecting on the transmission of past violence which seeps through present peace like a disease, as the following quotes from the novel suggest:
You are your father’s son as I was my father’s son and he the same, most likely. The rage runs through us all, as if we have two kinds of blood pumping side by side: red blood and blood that is much darker. (2019, 101; emphasis added)
But here we are with these Tall Fires and the broken mess of you. The whole city’s burning and you are at the centre of it, talking the bloody talk of my younger days (2019, 104; emphasis added)
‘Them bastards are trying to restrict our civil liberties,’ says the tallest one. Even as he wraps his tongue around this sentence I can hear the speech marks and the spot where it’s been lifted from some older man’s mouth. (2019, 118; emphasis added)
- 5 The Merriam Webster definition states that trouble is ‘public unrest or disturbance’ and ‘condition (...)
9In the first two excerpts, Sammy (the first-person narrator of the chapter) is addressing a ‘you’ that can easily be identified as his son Mark. Although this is staged as the conversation Sammy wants to have with his son, the chapter remains an internal monologue throughout and no actual communication takes place between the two characters. In the first example, the comparison between rage and blood is particularly resonant, as it conjures up the imagery of the seemingly endless bloodline (from son to father, grandfather and probably also great-grandfather). The red blood which symbolises life and transmission is contaminated by the poison of a ‘much darker’ blood running through the veins of the whole male lineage: the blood shed by the mortiferous energies of war. In the second example, Sammy blurs the line between his own violent youth and his son’s role in unrest by shifting from past (‘my younger days’) to present continuous (‘the whole city’s burning’). While no violent actions are described in these examples, the image of blood is used to show how the rhetoric of violence gets passed down (‘bloody talk’). In the final example, taken from the chapter ‘Tall Fires’, the narrator is Jonathan, the father of an infant, who runs into a group of teenagers trying to set a Tall Fire in a park. Jonathan’s account of the short interaction, just like Sammy’s imagined dialogue with Mark, shows that younger generations ventriloquise the violence of the past to the point of internalising it. The two older men’s experience and remembrance of the past add a layer of temporal and ironical distance to their perspectives, showing that the teenagers’ words are not really theirs but rather the product of a mimetic gesture. The spectral return of turmoil is expressed by a recurrent pun: ‘the old trouble could kick up its heels’ (2019, 85), ‘The Tall Fires are a different kind of trouble’ (129). By using the singular form ‘trouble’ rather than the dedicated expression ‘Troubles’, Carson does not just refer to the conflict but pares the word down to its general definition as a ‘condition of distress’.5 While The Fire Starters focuses exclusively on Belfast and the legacy of the Troubles, the fires are sometimes deterritorialised and compared to other iconic fires on a global scale such as ‘Hiroshima or Nagasaki in miniature’ (2019, 38) and the Twin Towers (78) serve as reminders of conflict and the mindless violence of binarism without borders.
10In addition to the spectral resurgence of turmoil which crosses over from past to present, Carson builds up a poetics of emotion to explore the porosity of the limit between peace and violence. Emotion, which is derived ‘from the Latin emovere or movement’ (Greaves 2006, 144), would be the driving force of the ‘walker-through-walls’ movement of fiction to engage with the legacy of the Troubles. In The Fire Starters, the dominant emotion is paternal anxiety combined with the fear of resurgent violence. Anxiety is defined as an ‘ugly feeling’ by Sianne Ngai, an ‘affective response to an anticipated or projected event, but also . . . something “projected” onto others’ (2005, 210). Sammy’s fatherly concern even extends to the future of Northern Ireland: ‘anxiety, worry, fear, call it whatever you want, Dr Murray. Half the time I feel like there’s no point going on’ (2019, 237). The doctor that Sammy addresses in this scene is Jonathan Murray, the other protagonist and father of a hybrid half-human half-siren child, whose own paternal anxieties are couched in a poetic language of border-crossing:
One morning, I was I. The next, I was we. Before you, I was already afraid. My fears were spread across different rooms and all the doors were firmly closed. Coming sharply from one room into another, I could pretend not to see the accumulating clutter. After you arrived there were no longer lines keeping one fear from the next. My individual fears spread into each other, like puddles pooling wildly until I had a lake on my hands. I couldn’t see the bottom of it. I couldn’t see the sides. I was a drowning man. (2019, 3)
11Running counter to Sammy’s tale of destruction by fire (another element which crosses borders), Carson uses spatial and watery metaphors to convey the surge of Jonathan’s fears. The protagonist’s vulnerability, defined as ‘liability to harm’ by Jean-Michel Ganteau (2015, 5) is turned outwards as a sense of overwhelming responsibility for his daughter Sophie but also the rest of society, as the man’s solipsistic ‘I’ becomes ‘we’. Anxiety thus stems from the accumulation of separate ‘fears’ and their transformation into an overwhelming tidal wave (‘puddles pooling wildly’). For Gretchen Braun, anxiety indeed operates ‘through boundary-crossing between the self and whatever being, people, or object is coded as Other’ (2019, 503). Here the Other is the potentially violent child that could unleash further chaos. Anxiety, which blurs boundaries between one fear and the other, present and future but also self and other, becomes a vehicle for apprehending the legacy of the Troubles, in both senses of the verb ‘apprehend’, meaning both ‘to become aware of’ and ‘to anticipate especially with anxiety, dread or fear’ (Merriam Webster Dictionary).
12Most of Carson’s books revolve around the passing down of dis-ease from one generation to the next but her work often crosses boundaries between reality and magic or myth in order to represent cultural anxieties that cannot be expressed through traditional realism.
- 6 Sakyfely’s review as well as the others (in English and in French) can be found online at the follo (...)
13During the 2022 literary festival Littérature Live, French high school students were given the opportunity to review The Fire Starters, which led to the following comment by Sakyfely: ‘the book is literally split in two sides, Jonathan’s side and Sammy’s side. But only Jonathan’s side is fantastical and not Sammy’s. So I wondered why the whole book wasn’t fantastical’.6 Fantastical incursions into an otherwise realistic narrative are a trademark of Carson’s writing, which is populated by ghosts (in The Last Resort and The Raptures), children with inexplicable superpowers and mythological creatures such as mermaids (The Fire Starters). This thematic particularity has become a staple of interviews with Jan Carson, who links it with Northern Irish culture, having once declared that ‘there’s a certain amount of pageantry about how Protestantism is celebrated in Northern Ireland and I began to see it was perfect material for magical realism’ (Anon., n. pag.). Carson has been defining herself as a magical realist whose ‘overlapping imagination’, steeped in Celtic and Biblical culture, probes the ‘very thin line between realism and tapping into the fantastical’ (Seth [14’32]). For Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, magical realism can also be defined through the spatial imagery of juxtaposition or border-crossing:
Magical realism refers to a mode or a style—sometimes a genre—of writing in which magical elements are presented alongside realistic ones as if there were no difference of kind between them. A magical realist text will treat supernatural occurrences as if they were perfectly natural. It will incorporate, without surprise, fantastic elements into the realm of history and objective materiality. (2020, 1)
14Magical realism, which ‘blurs borders between categories’ (Faris 2004, 23), thus explores the liminal space between literary modes of expression.
15In The Fire Starters, the most obvious example of this border-crossing between realistic social commentary and magical incursions is the elusive siren, the dangerous mythological creature with whom Jonathan conceived a child who cristallises his anxieties about the future. Carson’s decision to name the mythological creature ‘siren’ rather than the more-often used ‘mermaid’ highlights the polysemy of the word, in order to reinforce the symbolism of the figure. Carson guides the reader by peppering dictionary definitions through the novel, both in the epigraph and the following excerpt: ‘I’ve looked up Sirens on Wikipedia. . . . The Sirens have their own entry—Siren (Mythology), not to be confused with Siren (Alarm)—though it seems likely they are both derived from the same root’ (2019, 87). This frantic internet search expresses Jonathan’s deep anxiety by conflating the auditory effect of the mermaid figure, whose voice lures sailors to their doom, and the alarm’s warning sound. Indeed, Carson explains:
I wanted to explore the idea of how rhetoric and, in particular, persuasive language has been used to fuel the conflict and division here in Northern Ireland and so I began thinking about images which could unpick the idea of language as a potentially destructive force. I very quickly landed upon the idea of the siren and, given Belfast’s rich maritime history, and the fact that it is a port city, the siren seemed to fit well with the story. (Anon., Bookstagram interview)
16The siren’s dual symbolism allows Carson to articulate some deep-seated anxieties about the legacy of the Troubles and the future of Northern Ireland. It also blurs temporal boundaries by looking towards the past to address (traumatic) history. Even more than magical realism, the conflation of myth and historical knowledge can be deemed symptomatic of traumatic realism, which explores the ‘borderland of extremity and everydayness’ according to Michael Rothberg (2000, 109), in order to narrativise fears or memories of extreme violence and make them intelligible. Will little Sophie grow up to become a siren too? This question perpetually haunts Jonathan’s mind, as he wonders ‘if her mother might be behind all this havoc, all the needless suffering. Could it be her voice singing the violence into these boys’ ears, her sick words planted and beginning to sprout?’ (2019, 84). The character’s mounting hysteria is expressed in the repeated questions and the botanical metaphor (‘planted’, ‘sprout’) which transforms the metaphor of transmission of violence through blood into an organic, inescapable condition.
17The answer to Sakyfely’s question in the blog section of the Littérature Live Festival is rooted in the novel’s thematic unity: on the realistic side, Sammy’s concern about his teenage son’s rage is couched in images of blood, fire and violence while on the magical realist side, Jonathan’s fear that his baby will grow up to unleash violence takes the writing in a fantastical direction, but both stories partake of the same sentiment. As discussed earlier, Sammy notices how the rhetoric of violence is incorporated by Belfast’s children, while Jonathan is obsessed with the thought of cutting his daughter’s tongue out in order to nip her potential destructive power in the bud (2019, 23). As they constantly cross borders between literary modes, both sides of the story articulate similar fears about the future of Northern Ireland. Going back and forth between a realistic perspective and a narrative which contains magical elements enables Carson to fully voice the protagonists’ most irrational fears and a more general form of cultural anxiety: ‘I need that distance in order to write about the uncomfortable things’, Carson notes in an interview with Sasha de Buyl (2020 [40’54]). This anxiety primarily seems to eschew the possibility of empathy: the reader is given no access to Mark’s perspective, and Jonathan’s (delusional?) ‘cruel intentions’ (2019, 246) would consist in maiming an infant, even though the plan fails to come to fruition in the end.
18Carson states in an interview that magical realism enables her to ‘shock the reader into seeing [something they are quite familiar with] from a new perspective or in a different context’ (Barros del Río 2023, 200). She also acknowledges the influence of Rushdie’s Midnight Children (1981) on her work, and follows his claim that maybe ‘realism can no longer express or account for the absurd reality of the world we live in—a world which has the capability of destroying itself at any moment’ (quoted in Faris 2004, 88). In the case of Northern Ireland, where peace remains poised in a state of fragile equilibrium, magical realism is a means of accounting for uncertainty and fears of resurgent violence. As a clear reference to Rushdie’s masterpiece, The Fire Starters also incorporates into its cast children variously called The Unfortunate Children, ‘Kids who aren’t normal’ (2019, 164), or kids with ‘special powers’ (165) that turn out to be liabilities, turning them into ‘victims of their circumstances’. Jonathan, worried about his half-siren daughter, joins a group of concerned parents:
By the time the introductions are complete I’ve heard about two further flying children, a child who hears trees and a boy who lives in a tree, invisible twins and a little girl who was born with a bird’s egg unhatched in each hand, a child who sees the future in every liquid surface, a baby who turns to cloud every time she falls asleep and, best of all, a boy, named Matthew, who has wheels soldered to the heels and balls of both feet. (2019, 182)
19Each of the children on this seemingly incongruous list has a section in italics dedicated to their individual story (such as ‘The Boy Who Sees the Future in Every Liquid Surface’, 119). Carson acknowledges in an interview with Jayanti Naju Seth that those children are the struggling ‘ceasefire babies’ who ‘represent the next generation of kids who have been impacted by the legacy of the conflict without having experienced it directly’ (Seth [29’45]). Each unfortunate superpower has symbolical significance: the boy who has wheels is unable to stand still (‘can’t stay in Northern Ireland, they need to leave’), the ‘boy who sees the future in every liquid surface’, Connor, ‘can see the future and doesn’t want to’, because he, like Carson, sees ‘Brexit looming on the horizon’ (Seth [30’10-31’42]).
20Blurring the limits between realism and magic by adding those sections into the novel’s complex narrative pattern enables Carson to comment on the ‘scary direction’ which Northern Irish society appears to be taking. This literary language of simultaneous retrospection and anticipation that strives to represent the volatility of the Northern Irish situation is also composed of a formal and generic part.
21Carson is known both as a short story writer and a novelist, which gives her the creative space to choose the most appropriate form for each story. The novel, defined by Bakhtin as a ‘zone of maximal contact with the present in all its open-endedness’ (1981, 7), appeared to fit Carson’s tale of anxiety about the future in The Fire Starters. Furthermore, Carson makes the most of the novel’s formal flexibility to incorporate the ‘rhythm, lyricality and even brevity and concision’ of poetry into her writing (Seth [46’10]). In the short, italicised sections that introduce the Unfortunate Children, the struggling generation of ‘ceasefire babies,’ are couched in magical realist prose-poetry style, at once symbolic, lyrical and full of humour. For instance, the chapter entitled ‘The Boy Who Sees the Future in Every Liquid Surface’ opens with the following lines:
Connor talks vaguely of dark shapes and sadness. The world curling into itself like a piece of orange peel left too long in the sun. He sees strangers weeping in empty rooms. Children hurt for no reason. Many, many fires, burning brightly. . . . Connor sees the future in every liquid surface. Puddles. Toilet bowls. Tea paling in the cup. The rain, which is ever present in East Belfast. Sinks. Spilt drinks. His own piss and blood. His salty tears. (2019, 120; original emphasis)
22In this fragmented portrait, poetic cadences and alliterative sonorities accompany each snapshot of the character’s world, going from vague intuitions to clearer perceptions of the novel’s defining isotopies (first fire then water). The short, clipped sentences convey the dizzying rapidity of Connor’s cumbersome visions, enhancing the reader’s perception of his discomfort. The water surfaces that cause the boy’s visions become more and more intimate (from ‘puddles’ to ‘his salty tears’), expressing the gradual entrapment of his mounting anxiety. The ‘poetic sensibility’ (Seth [46’17]) inherent in Carson’s prose heightens the writing’s expressive capacity. The blurring of the limits between prose and poetry comes with the need to represent reality differently as the writing crosses over from present to visions of the future.
- 7 The original French reads thus: ‘L’éclatement des genres n’a de sens que comme mouvement, mouvement (...)
- 8 The short stories were also broadcast on Radio 4 in ten instalments and each chapter could be seen (...)
- 9 The original French reads thus: ‘[l]a nouvelle est un genre difficile à délimiter, à mi-chemin e (...)
23In 2001, Marc Dambre and Monique Gosselin-Noat co-edited a collective volume on generic border-crossing entitled L’éclatement des genres. In her contribution to the volume, Dominique Vaugeois argues that ‘the explosion of genres only makes sense as a movement that spills over limits, when genres crack at the seams and reveal their frameworks’ (2001 37, translation mine).7 Carson’s poetics of emotion is characteristic of this generic disruptive movement. Nowhere is this process more perceptible than in Carson’s subsequent work The Last Resort (2021), which blurs the boundaries between short story collection and novella or even drama.8 Illustrating Claude Maisonnat and Patrick Badonnel’s claim that ‘the short story is a genre that is hard to delimit, halfway between the poem and the novel’ (in Carmignani 1995, 143)9, the ten interlaced short stories, connected by temporal and spatial unity, take place at a seaside resort where a choral cast of regular holidayers are gathered. While the book is advertised as a collection of short stories, each chapter provides a different character’s perspective on the same events, blurring the limit between short story and novel to let a collective Northern Irish voice emerge from the composite fable.
24Contrary to The Fire Starters’ focus on present and future, The Last Resort is defined by melancholic attachment to place: each short story alludes to the same event: the death of a teenager (fifteen-year old Lynette) in an IRA-led car-bomb attack thirty-five years earlier during the Troubles. Her grieving father Frank erects a memorial bench at the top of a cliff, leading most of the characters to gather, reminisce about the tragic event or simply mention it in passing:
There’s a bench here now, a memorial to that girl who died in the car bomb. That was a bit before my time. (‘Lois’ 14)
There’s already been a murder here. Not a proper Agatha Christie one–just a bomb–but a girl got killed. Her daddy’s still moping about. (‘Alma’ 52)
There’s something about this place. Everything feels heavier here. Maybe it’s because of that girl who died. A murder leaves something hanging in the air. It’s a scientific fact. They had it on The X-Files once. (‘Malcolm’ 63)
Poor Martha’s still trapped in the last happy summer at Seacliff. The year before Lynette. (‘John’ 82)
25All four examples offer a mosaic of perspectives on the same event, from those who were there to those who have only heard about it, showing that Lynette’s death still haunts the place and resonates in various ways, setting the stage for present-day events.
26The other connecting storyline is the mysterious disappearance of objects (photographs, relics of the past and even electronic devices) from the caravans in every short story, turning the collection into a ‘whodunit play’ (Sinoimeri 2023, n.p.) as characters’ search for the culprit crosses over from one short story to the other. It turns out in the end that the culprit was Lynette’s ghost, who in her own mischievous way wanted to free people from the weight of the past. She confesses and justifies her actions in the last chapter: ‘I only nicked things that were holding them back. . . . This could be the fresh start they’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow everything could be different. They’d finally be able to move on’ (2021, 91, 94). Carson uses the trope of the ghost as a border-crosser, which for Christine Berthin ‘stand[s] in defiance of the binary oppositions (life or death, inside or outside as well as present or past) that constitute our symbolic system’ (2010, 3). But while ghost figures usually symbolise the past spilling over the present, Lynette’s haunting is turned towards the future: her monologue encapsulates the desire for forward movement from ‘holding them back’ to ‘mov[ing] on’, and from past progressive to conditional.
27At the end of the story, the entire cast of characters gathers around the caravan where Lynette has stored the stolen objects. As a storm hits the cliff, the caravan is ‘hanging over the edge’ (2021, 88). On the other side, Martha, an old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s, is lost ‘just over the cliff edge’ (92): in this highly symbolic scene, the group faces a choice as to what matters the most to them. As a reversal of the crippling parental anxiety which superimposes a palimpsest of past and future onto the present in The Fire Starters, the teenage ghost crosses the border between death and life to perform an act of care, fully engage with the present and take responsibility for the survival of the vulnerable old woman. In so doing, she destroys the memorial bench that was erected in her memory to draw other people’s attention to Martha’s plight:
I can’t be silent or invisible any longer. Martha needs me to make a scene. I use every ounce of energy I can muster. Now’s the time to haunt like a proper ghost. I let the anger build up in my arms and legs until I slowly begin to rise, through the rain and wind, till I’m hovering above the cliff. When I’m fifteen, maybe twenty feet up, I bring my rage down in a furious rush. Thirty-five years of pent-up fury descends upon the stupid bench. I feel the wood splinter beneath me. I hear the crack as it splits in two. I come down so hard I might’ve left a crater. Tomorrow, they’ll wonder what on earth’s happened here, but I know exactly what I’ve done. I’ve severed the tie. I’ve brought an end to things. I’ve drawn a line my dad couldn’t draw. I might not love him, but I can’t watch him suffer. I have let him go. I open my mouth and howl. The sound that comes out of me isn’t human. It’s sad and angry and urgent. I’m screaming for Martha. I’m screaming at Dad. I’m screaming for everything that’s wrong with this place. I am screaming for the person I was going to be. I make myself impossible to ignore. Like a banshee screeching across the clifftop. My voice pierces the wind. (2021, 96–97)
28As the ghost spectacularly (and theatrically?) breaks the memorial bench that was erected for her and channels her lingering rage and frustration into looking out for others, the living finally ‘let go’ (97) of their obsession with the past to look for the old woman, returning to life thanks to the ghost narrator’s intervention. While the violence of the Troubles is dangerous in The Fire Starters, in The Last Resort, Carson gives it a purpose: the symbolic destruction of the memorial bench (‘I hear the crack as it splits in two’) which stands for melancholic commemoration, is a metonymy of the necessity to move on, ‘sever[ing] the tie’ and ‘draw[ing] a line my dad couldn’t draw’. The ghost fully inhabits the present, expressed by the multiplication of present continuous forms, restoring the limit between past and present. The ghost as a liminal figure itself, crossing the border of human perceptibility, is the most appropriate figure to visibilise the socially invisible old woman. Carson subverts the symbols related to the ghost’s haunting powers: the theatricality and stereotypical forms of haunting (‘furious rush’, ‘banshee screeching across the clifftop’) and the poltergeist trope of mischief (bench-breaking and object-stealing) paradoxically become acts of care as defined by Sandra Laugier:
- 10 In the original French: ‘L’éthique du care appelle ainsi notre attention sur ce qui est juste sous (...)
Care brings our attention onto what is right under our eyes but we don’t see, by lack of attention. This is why the ethics of care can also be defined as ethics of attention, both in the sense of paying attention and attracting attention onto ordinary reality. (2015, 129)10
29While the inclusion of the ghost’s perspective at the end of the collection blurs the limits between past and present and revives the memory of the Troubles, the magical realism inherent in the ghost story opens up a new vision of the future. What differs from The Fire Starters is that the ghost’s rage brings the future forward and helps the living let go of the past by performing a counter-ritual, instead of bringing back the spectre of the conflict. Carson’s practice of generic border-crossing thus allows for distinctive voices of present-day Northern Ireland to resonate and carve new pathways beyond the heritage of the Troubles.
- 11 As Fiona McCann argues, ‘Our collective difficulty in addressing the recent past in Northern Irelan (...)
30Jan Carson’s fiction, in exploring the ‘hairline fracture at the centre of everything’ seems to illustrate John Brannigan’s statement that Northern Ireland is ‘politically and culturally, in a state of suspension’ between its bloody past and ‘tentative visions of an infinitely abortive future’ (2005, 142).11 While critics remark that Northern Irish fiction has been ‘tightly wedded with naturalism’ in the past century (O’Donnell 2016), Carson foregrounds her own ‘playful take on realism’ which takes into account the country’s ‘huge oral tradition of myths and legends’ (Seth [8’45]). Her work therefore uses magical realism and spectral figures to tackle the country’s traumatic past and express anxieties about the future but also to open up pathways for empathy and care, giving characters the ability to move on and beyond border mentality. Indeed, writers, for Carson, have a crucial part to play in the construction of a shared future:
I think we are moving towards some form of a referendum on a united Ireland. . . . Artists are going to be a huge part of that, because . . . people are going to vote on the future of the whole island without knowing what it’s like to live in Tipperary if you live in Ballymena, or what it’s like to live in Ballymena if you live in Tipperary. That’s where books come in. Writers can take you into these worlds, to understand a bit. (Meyrick 2023)
31Border-crossing from one perspective to another could thus continue to play a crucial part in the nation’s ‘peace and reconciliation process’.