Haunted by the Future: Children, Parents and Community in Jan Carson’s The Raptures (2022)
Résumés
Les écrivains nord-irlandais contemporains explorent l’héritage des Troubles, et examinent leur impact sur la vie politique, culturelle et quotidienne. Des œuvres récentes abordent les thèmes de la mémoire communautaire et individuelle, dont les représentations reflètent souvent les divisions actuelles au sein des communautés. Le roman de Jan Carson, The Raptures (2022), met en scène une communauté confrontée à une maladie mystérieuse qui touche certains enfants. L’article se concentre sur la façon dont le roman dépeint les relations entre enfants, parents et la communauté en général, et examine comment l’œuvre de Carson commente à la fois la société fictive et la culture nord-irlandaise contemporaine. Il étudie l’influence des générations précédentes sur les générations présentes et futures, selon la distinction établie par Jan Assmann entre mémoire communicative et mémoire collective, et s’appuie sur le concept de hantologie en littérature, tel que discuté par Katy Shaw, pour analyser les thèmes spectraux du roman.
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This article was made possible with the financial support of the Charles University Grant Agency, project no. 99623, entitled “Memory in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Novel”, implemented at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
Texte intégral
1Contemporary Northern Irish novelists continue to grapple in their narratives with the impact, aftermath, and memory of the Troubles, demonstrating the conflict’s often constricting presence in a seemingly post-conflict society, as arbitrated by the Good Friday Agreement. Whether their texts are set directly during the conflict or post-1998, they (as well as other writers) position their characters in situations where the past looms over them, having either a direct or an indirect influence, and where they often face choices predetermined by someone else’s past actions, either individual or communal. These texts are still affiliated with the genre of the so-called Troubles novel, which has in no way diminished in its importance. Such is the case for the novels of one of the most prominent Northern Irish fiction writers today, Jan Carson. Although she refers in her novels and short stories to the conflict often indirectly, the legacy of it is still detectable.
2Carson’s most recent novel The Raptures (2022), through its portrayal of formative relationships between parents and children within a single Protestant community, and importantly through its main character, Hannah, who becomes haunted by her dead classmates, continues in this vein of other contemporary texts and brilliantly portrays the authority that a group exerts over its members as well as the fundamental influence that parental and by extension communal narratives exercise over their children or a younger generation within the space of Northern Ireland. Carson’s novel displays how much children are guided, or to put it more negatively, are manipulated, both by the actions and the language of their elders, and how they, often without realising, continue in maintaining the values and perspectives of their predecessors; in essence, they carry on the cultural memory of their community, further strengthening the communal spirit and the link between the past and the future. The narratives, which children receive from their parents, mark, organise and clarify their own experiences. Carson illustrates this trend by utilising the character of Hannah as the primary focalisor throughout the novel (while offering limited space to other characters as well). She offers a contrast between Hannah’s childlike and naïve point of view and that of many adult characters while being aware of the knowledge that the readers themselves will bring.
- 1 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, p. 129.
- 2 Ibid., p. 129-133.
- 3 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser (ed. and trans.), Chicago – London, The Uni (...)
3To closely examine the interaction between children and parents in the community portrayed in the text, the article aims to employ the concepts of communicative and collective memory, as described by Jan Assmann. To look more closely at the theme of hauntings, to which the main character is subjected, it then makes use of Katy Shaw’s recent addition to the concept of hauntology, particularly in contemporary literature. Assmann, responding in his work to Maurice Halbwachs, differentiates between communicative or everyday memory and cultural memory which is, in contrast, marked by “its distance from the everyday”.1 While communicative memory serves individuals in the formation of immediate connections within their social group, cultural memory reaches further into the past and provides connections to those group members and events that individuals have not personally met or experienced.2 Both Assmann and Halbwachs also assert the important interaction between the past and the present. As Halbwachs pointed out, “even at the moment of reproducing the past, our imagination remains under the influence of the present social milieu”.3 These two types of memory then necessarily interact.
- 4 Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature, Cham, P (...)
- 5 Ibid., p. 115.
- 6 Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter”, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida (...)
- 7 Jan Carson, The Raptures, London, Penguin Random House, 2022, p. 182. Henceforth, page numbers in b (...)
4Shaw’s recent work in literary studies adds to these memory studies concepts through her discussion of hauntology. Both the areas of hauntology and memory studies highlight the presence of immaterial or even spiritual elements of the past, which influence living individuals and communities, shaping their thinking and actions in the present. According to Shaw, the appearance of a spectre in a text draws attention to “absences in the present, recognizing fissures, haps and points of crossover”, and communicates the ephemeral nature of the present.4 Specifically in 21st-century literature, “spectral hauntings [encourage us to revisit] historical and cultural heritages that remain unresolved in the present”.5 Both Assmann and Shaw demonstrate that “living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be”, as Fredric Jameson established.6 His assertion is then clearly illustrated by Carson’s novel. Although the main character in The Raptures, Hannah, is told by a counsellor in the final chapter that she is going to leave her small town (which constitutes the majority of her knowledge) when she grows up, and that she has “[her] whole life ahead of [her]. Years and years”, adding: “Think of all the things you’re going to do”,7 the novel questions this seemingly positive future outlook and Hannah’s ability to overcome the determinism of her community.
The past of the community
- 8 Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, Peter Shirlow, Northern Ireland a Generation after Go (...)
5The novel takes place in 1993, in the small fictional Protestant town of Ballylack, where, in the beginning of the summer, several children, all from the same class, begin to die of a mysterious illness. As each of them dies, they visit the main character Hannah, who in each case has a chance to talk to their spectres, before they are forced to live in an alternate version of their town. Essentially, they both leave and do not leave. As the narrative progresses, every time a child dies, Hannah learns how the alternate town is changing and developing, and how her classmates respond to their own death and subsequent fate. At the end of the narrative, Hannah herself catches the disease, and the climax of the novel is concerned with whether she will live or die. Ultimately, Hannah recovers from the illness, becoming the only surviving child from her class with an important choice of how to continue: whether she will allow herself to be further controlled by the influence of her parents and community, which has been apparent up until that point, or not. Although set in 1993 and mentioning the discussions of a possible ceasefire, the novel also examines current concerns (it was written during the Covid-19 pandemic and accordingly the narrative deals with a mysterious disease), as well as contemporary questions specific to Northern Ireland. Indeed, the text demonstrates what Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward and Peter Shirlow observed, namely that, “while Northern Ireland is certainly no longer at war, it does not seem to be a society entirely at peace with itself”, and that one of the challenges the younger generation faces here today is that “their particular interests and identities are rarely reflected” in everyday discussions and politics, as opposed to the older generations.8 This is apparent particularly through Carson’s use of present tense throughout the novel, which gives the events a sense of immediacy.
6The description of the community, their language, and actions are crucial, although for the readers of recent Northern Irish novels and short stories they may appear almost as a cliché. In the first chapter we learn that life in Ballylack is “same old, same old. Twenty-odd years of everyday killings. Routine set in years ago. Everybody’s just trying to get on with enjoying the summer” (p. 16), hinting at a certain fatigue anytime the topic of the Troubles comes up. Yet when the children start to get sick, the parents’ worries and even the short-lived search for a possible culprit actually appear to interrupt local celebrations of the Twelfth of July which “[the locals] don’t, for a second, consider cancelling. It’s the eleventh of July and burning Sinn Féin posters is their God-ordained right” (p. 150). While tired with the violence, the rituals connected to the victory of Protestant King William of Orange are imperative for them. Importantly, there is also a sense of these particular practices and the language being determined much earlier (presumably by past generations) and now well-settled. No one questions the proceedings, no one questions their God-ordained right, showing the insidious effect of collective memory patterns. While there is everyday communication between the residents of Ballylack corresponding more to what Assmann describes as communicative memory, factors that shape cultural memory – the events associated with the Troubles, the divisions and the discord between the two communities – have long been previously established.
- 9 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, p. 127.
7When Hannah and her family are watching what she calls bad stuff on TV, we can observe the two types of memory interacting. Hannah’s dad “makes a clickety noise with his tongue” in response to the TV programme portraying some violent events in the province (p. 3); Hannah does not react. Illustrating Assmann’s communicative memory, she is accustomed to seeing violence on TV as well as her parents’ response to it. And while she comments that “[she’s] not sure who’s stopped talking to who” (p. 48), her knowledge is indeed that things are as such and have always been this way. Hannah’s awareness of the divisions is ingrained, in line with Assmann’s collective memory. The children, all around the age of ten, who then begin to fall sick and die, are necessarily influenced by this particular language and acceptance they have observed. They conform to Assmann’s comments on individuals within a community; the children’s own individual narrative “constitutes itself in communication with others [who] conceive their unity and peculiarity through a common image of their past”.9 In their case, that common image is made up of the Troubles, the history of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland as well as by the established other.
8Once we recognise this persistence of the past, it is interesting to observe what can be described almost as an obsession with the future, but only the future on this community’s terms, not the open future that Hannah is told about by her counsellor. The idea that the conflict will get solved – somehow, someway – in the future (and with the walls and divisions still existing) is absurdly depicted in the first chapter. The novel shows this on the very first page, which describes a scene in Hannah’s classroom. In class, her teacher tells the children that “it wasn’t always going to be like this. Eventually, it would get better. Matty raise[s] his hand and ask[s] if eventually was going to last much longer” (p. 1), to which the teacher stays silent. The text actually begins with Hannah’s class as well as other children in her school being asked to write an essay for a national competition about how they imagine their future to be. While they obviously, as ten-year-olds, dream of simple things such as sweets, no school and free time, they are expected to write about Northern Ireland once peace is achieved (whatever that means), skipping the step of achieving. The teacher even tells her class that she’s “extremely hopeful about the years ahead. [Their] generation’s going to change things. The future’s [their] responsibility” (p. 6), giving the children an impossible task.
9The first chapter, being from Hannah’s point of view, provides her commentary on how the influence of the community transpires. She tells the readers, “I don’t know why we have the Troubles here, but I know it’s us children who deserve better. We’re the future of Northern Ireland. We had a special assembly about it last month” (p. 7), and she does not give it more thought. Being told and essentially accepting that she and her classmates are the future in an assembly is enough for her. Importantly however, neither here nor elsewhere are the children given any tools together with that responsibility for the future of the province. The only tools they do have are the language and the narratives of their parents, corresponding to communicative memory, and the narrative of their community, corresponding to collective memory. Subsequently, they only seem to be able to understand and further their situation – be it the deceased children in alternate Ballylack or Hannah herself – with the (un)awareness of those memory narratives.
The future of the children
10This influence, determinism, and lack of diverging future prospects then can be observed more directly in the portrayal of the children who die during the novel, their parents, as well as in the relationship between Hannah and her family. As more and more children fall sick, the town naturally grows concerned and spooked, but the first two dead suffer the fate of disinterest. The narrator tells the readers:
Two children dead in as many weeks is not enough to pique the interest of the press. It isn’t nearly tragic enough. The Troubles have raised the benchmark for what’s considered newsworthy. When six or seven lives can be lost in a bomb-blast second, it takes something truly horrendous to qualify as real tragedy. (p. 74)
- 10 Ibid., p. 125.
11Even the children’s response after their own deaths demonstrates this disinterest. While some are worried about their grieving parents, the children’s worldly concerns persist; the twins still fight over being twins, Kathleen, the popular girl, is still concerned about being the most popular, and Leif, having grown up in an alternative, hippie environment, is only interested in watching all the TV shows he previously missed. It primarily shows the influence of communicative memory patterns, and, as Assmann comments, that “the specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture [is] a result of socialization and customs”.10 The children naturally repeat learnt models of behaviour they used before dying.
12The children’s actions after death, however, also show the influence of collective memory, particularly its dangerous aspects. The readers only really learn about the children as characters once they visit Hannah as spectres and describe their life in alternate Ballylack. The fact that they only speak when dead is also significant, illustrating their lack of voice while alive and, more generally, an improbability that the young generation can grow up and make a change, express themselves and have a future in this given setting. The first dead child, Ross, when looking around the alternate Ballylack, “shrugs, then sweeps his arm wide as if to say, Look around you. It is what it is” (p. 26), which can be also taken as a larger comment on the province itself. The alternate Ballylack is almost an exact copy of the real Ballylack, however, it also presents some key differences – similarly to how the province can be described pre- and post-Troubles. Physically, the two towns are the same with the alternate version having a more surreal, mystical quality. It is, in theory, a freer, undefined space for the dead children to express themselves. However, a key piece of information that Hannah learns is that the children are unable to leave Ballylack, negating that possibility of freedom. Furthermore, as they describe their activities, she learns how they repeat older patterns and actions, which they would not have necessarily experienced directly in the village. As such, it is similar to the province today, which, although still hosting peace walls and divided neighbourhoods, has the potential for change and yet is occupied by individuals and communities reiterating collective memory patterns.
13This trend even influences the small number of immigrant characters, both in communicative and in collective terms. The Leung family, originally from China, stage what they imagine to be a proper Irish funeral after the death of their child, because they assume it is expected. Maganda Gardiner, originally from the Philippines and now married to a local farmer, also loses a child. Her son, named Bayani by Maganda, gets called Ben by everyone (interestingly, even by the narrator), and Maganda unwillingly accepts both his and her own nickname, Megan. She has become accustomed to life in Ulster “long enough to understand that there were some things better left unsaid” (p. 63). While the overall response of the community in Ballylack is open to the immigrants in the novel, there is a clear attempt by the Leung family and by Maganda to fit in, which is not necessarily reciprocated by the locals. Consequently, characters such as Maganda, her son Bayani / Ben and the Leungs begin to copy the local patterns of behaviour. In their case, they are influenced mostly by the everyday, communicative memory while also accepting the collective memory narratives.
14What Hannah hears from her classmates during their haunting visits is quite dismal, as they are often happy to be dead and to be free from their parents’ influence, not aware of their mirroring actions. Acknowledging the province’s (and her own) violent past, Kathleen frankly exclaims, “like I was saying, I’m totally used to death” (p. 56). Yet the novel lamentably observes that, even after, in the state that they are in, the children continue to be determined by their community, as they are not allowed to leave the town and, to a degree, mirror their parents’ and community’s actions. Part of them form the Dead Kids gang (shortened to DK, in the manner of many Northern Ireland’s acronyms throughout the 20th century), which later divides into two factions. Matty, the final dead child, tries to act as a peacekeeper, but, reflecting the first chapter, he again does not have the necessary tools. Ultimately, he only gives empty speeches (similarly to Hannah’s teacher in the beginning), which the other children, set in their ways, either ignore or complain about. Both the passed on collective and communicative memory continue to haunt them and show the impossibility of a break between the past and the present, both in Ballylack and in the province.
- 11 Katy Shaw, Hauntology…, p. 115.
- 12 Ibid., p. 2.
- 13 Ibid., p. 2-4.
- 14 Ibid., p. 2.
15What these children had (either directly or indirectly) experienced in their lives will continue to determine their actions in the afterlife that the novel gives them. Returning to Shaw’s commentary on the concept of hauntology in literature, the text offers an interesting play on it, as the children themselves experience being haunted by the present and the future. Their haunting has a “deconstructive capacity”, questioning “this possibility of justice”,11 after a conflict. The dead children are forced to visit Hannah in the “living” Ballylack, and yet they are no longer part of it. In contrast, Hannah is haunted by the possibility of dying in the near future and joining them, or maybe more ominously by her own future when she grows up. The novel shows a “dissolving […] separation between now and then”,12 which Shaw finds crucial in her debate on hauntology.13 The children spectres point both to “the compulsion to repeat the past, and an anticipation of the future”,14 where the repetition of older customs and narratives may or may not transpire.
16Hannah herself is portrayed in the novel as an outsider, both in relation to the other children and the town itself. Although Ballylack as a whole is Protestant, Hannah’s parents belong to a more extreme Presbyterian church. Hannah is not allowed to engage in activities such as popular music or TV; she has to attend church with her parents more regularly and partake in fasts. She accepts this – at least in the beginning of the novel – as normal, and, in contrast to the glimpses into the other children’s lives, we learn that her parents’ influence over Hannah extends much deeper. Subsequently, any of Hannah’s attempts to dissociate herself from her parents’ and religious community’s influence may be that much harder. This is a demonstration of parental authority and reflects Assmann’s description of communicative memory. In her everyday life, Hannah is primarily influenced by the direct interaction with her parents, but, at a distance, the practices established by the church are also clear.
- 15 Karen Salmon, Elaine Reese, “Talking (or Not Talking) about the Past: The Influence of Parent-Child (...)
- 16 Rory Allen, “The Legacy of the Northern Irish Conflict, Weak Men and Silenced Women in the Novels o (...)
17Hannah reveals in small comments how much power they hold over her. As the novel is focused mainly on her, we also get much deeper insight into her mind and see how the language of a parent or authority provides “the critical context for [children] to learn ways of remembering, understanding, narrating, and processing their own experiences”, as Karen Salmon and Elaine Reese observed in their research into parental influence.15 Being brought up in a strict Protestant context, Hannah has been undoubtedly raised with shame and even taught “to believe the fault is always with her” (p. 21). She copies her parents’ words and actions, showing the immediate influence of communicative memory. The novel provides an interesting representation of this through a mirror image of Hannah and her mother after each child’s death. On one hand, the image demonstrates a repetition of beneficial narratives and gestures specifically. On the other hand, it is important to note that the novel here (and elsewhere) also portrays “tasks placed on [Hannah and her mother] by traditional gender roles”, as Rory Allen points out.16 While Hannah’s mother always attempts to soothe the parents, Hannah seeks to do the same for her classmates. Hannah does this even as she admits that she “hasn’t a clue how to navigate those moments when there are no rules or adults telling her what to do” (p. 230). When one of the dead children mentions a popular song, Hannah’s first thought is that “dad wouldn’t approve”, and she is ashamed of both wanting to know and not knowing the lyrics (p. 134). Having been given the knowledge and language by her parents and church community, she is responding to situations in the only way she knows. Hannah is patching together the events she is experiencing and integrating them into her own narrative on the background of her cultural and societal context.
- 17 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, p. 130.
18Hannah’s discussions, particularly with her grandfather, also reveal how little she knows about the situation in Northern Ireland or about the Troubles, which makes the request to write the essay in the beginning of the novel – and essentially solve the conflict – quite absurd; it shows how little the children are actually told about their historical background, while being obliged to accept and further it. It displays the strength of collective memory but also that “[n]o memory can preserve the past. What remains is only that ‘which society in each era can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference’”, as Assmann comments on previous assertions on collective memory by Halbwachs.17 The importance lies in the interpretation, not the historical facts, which is evident notably in the province’s Twelfth of July marches. When they talk in the evening on the eleventh of July, Hannah’s grandfather asks whether she even knows the background to the celebrations. Hannah only “shakes her head. She’s a bit hazy on the details. She thinks it’s something to do with letting Catholics know they’re wrong” (p. 50). The novel here makes an irreverent joke about the background and the multifaceted historical causes leading up to the Troubles, the sometimes-obscure reasons as to why individuals and groups joined the conflict, and often-seen gratuitous violence accompanying that conflict.
- 18 Fionna Barber, “At Vision’s Edge: Post-Conflict Memory and Art Practice in Northern Ireland”, in Me (...)
19Hannah questions that received knowledge once she begins to meet the spectres of her dead classmates. This, however, happens only to an extent, as she continues to make comparisons to what she knows and has previously learnt. While Hannah asks herself “what if Pastor Bill’s not always right” (p. 50) – not out loud, of course – she continues to come back to her parents, her church and the knowledge they have given her. The children in the alternate Ballylack also appear to only confirm her previous conviction, or rather her parents’ and her church’s convictions, namely that only members of their church are pious and good people, and there is evil all around. First, her classmates form the gang, then the two factions, and finally they decide to burn down one of the houses for no apparent reason other than that they simply can. As more and more of them join the alternate Ballylack, the children mostly enjoy spending their free time stealing alcohol from the alternate convenience store, and in Hannah’s eyes, they prove her group’s beliefs because they are themselves repeating past narratives they know or have heard of. Even after death communal narratives remain “relevant to contemporary life [and are] significant means whereby people live out their identities”,18 as Fionna Barber points out in an essay in Oona Frawley’s seminal Memory series. In addition, the novel here also appears to comment on the lack of economic prospects in Northern Ireland today and questions the simplified portrayal of “jobless” individuals.
- 19 Katy Shaw, Hauntology…, p. 3.
- 20 Ibid.
20Most of the actions of the dead children denote a mere repetition of patterns and actions of their community, and they are indeed interpreted as such by Hannah. They appear to repeat both clearly marked sectarian violence and – particularly as they burn the house for no real reason – they also display gratuitous violence, so prevalent during the conflict. However, in their approach and final aid to the main character, the dead children reveal an immense self-awareness, which nonetheless remains as a point of misunderstanding and misinterpretation between them and Hannah. When Hannah falls sick with the same disease and is on the verge of death, it is the children who force her out of their purgatorial community and urge her to live. They seem to realise that, while their own fate is to repeat the communal narratives, Hannah has a chance to change that. A small comment from the narrator hints that Lief, one of her classmates, “understands that he’s been robbed” (p. 125), but the children do not take the road of malevolence towards Hannah as the only survivor. They all appear to see that she is the only one with the possibility of a different future, even if the novel’s ending questions what Hannah’s actions in the future will be. And while the spectres in the novel “confront the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realization that we must engage with it”, as Shaw describes the role of haunting spectres in literature,19 Hannah’s reaction remains somewhat unwilling. Hannah’s classmates – in their spectral haunting forms – attempt to help her to turn “to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future”, as Shaw reflects on fiction engagements with the past.20 However, Hannah’s response to this suggestion in the final chapter considers her parents and community first, before acknowledging her dead friends.
Northern Ireland’s prospects (in fiction)
21The conclusion of the novel, particularly the last chapter, again narrated by Hannah in the first person, appears to offer that divergent opportunity in the future, yet is also very cautious. It mirrors the current society in Northern Ireland twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, which continues to deal with the diverse relics of the Troubles. Hannah manages to survive and deals with the trauma as well as her future prospects. In this chapter, the novel cleverly returns to the commentary made in the first one and the essay the children were asked to write to discuss the future of young generations. Now that the disease / armed conflict is over, Hannah herself at first recognises that, similarly to the essay, “it’s an awful heavy thing to be lugging around. There’s only one of me” (p. 319). When she visits her counsellor in the final chapter, during several sessions the doctor attempts to convince Hannah that what happened was not her fault, recognising that as Hannah’s primary concern. Trying to explain this to the child, the counsellor says:
But it isn’t your fault. Do you hear me? It’s not your fault. You’re just a child. You don’t have to carry any of these hard feelings by yourself. You don’t have to make things OK for everyone else. (p. 321)
Although these words resonate with the novel’s assessment and caution over past influences, and Hannah’s ultimate decision is to move forward, that choice is a forced one, still informed mainly by her community. She tells the readers: “I need to be happy. My happiness has cost them so much. I have to live enough life for ten. I understand this” (p. 319). Although it is an attempt at a future-positive perspective, it is still determined by her communicative and collective memory, just as the young generation in Northern Ireland continues to be shaped by the violence and conflict that they have not personally experienced. Hannah must be positive; she does not have a choice but neither an idea of how to go about it. She is not allowed a break from the nearest generation of her parents or the previous generations in Ballylack. While she is no longer haunted by the spectres of her classmates, she ends up being preoccupied by the living spectres of her parents, neighbours, and community. Consequently, Hannah’s final decision reflects one of the primary questions on the role of collective memory in (post-conflict) societies, namely to what degree it is desirable to forget, and to what degree it is necessary to remember.
- 21 Stefanie Lehner, “The Irreversible and the Irrevocable: Encircling Trauma in Contemporary Northern (...)
22Stefanie Lehner has argued several years before the publication of The Raptures that recent Northern Irish novels depict “this sense of passive entrapment that finds its apotheosis in depictions of Northern Irish Troubles”,21 and Carson’s narrative undoubtedly shows that such portrayals continue to be pertinent. To briefly come back to the community in Ballylack, there are two specific revelations that corroborate Lehner’s assertion. At the same time, they comment on the passing on of narratives, or memories, and the perpetuating determinism for any future generation. The first of these revelations is that Hannah’s calm, moderate grandfather was actually a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in the past. Although he personally left his convictions and activities behind and is portrayed as mild-mannered and apolitical, the novel does make a point to describe the man’s tattoos and his direct connection to the paramilitary group. As Hannah’s grandfather is no longer interested in the group’s agenda nor in the dogmatic Protestantism of his wife and Hannah’s parents, it is then crucial that the text does not allow him a break from the past. He is revealed to be the reason for Hannah’s sickness. Unknowingly, he takes his granddaughter to visit the place with the source of the bacteria, which she had previously avoided because of a class trip forbidden to her by her parents.
23The second revelation comes from the narrator’s comment about the Twelfth of July march in the town. The readers are told that
The older men think they shouldn’t be marching. It’s not respectful. […] The younger fellas, some of the fathers included, want to march and dump their drums and afterwards get shit-faced in the field. (p. 170)
Similarly to Hannah’s grandfather, we see that, while the grandparent generation may not at this point in time want to take part in the community’s narratives, they are presumably the ones who have passed them onto their daughters and sons – now the parents of the dying children – who are currently reconstructing and reusing these narratives, reasserting their collective identity in the face of an unknown threat, further enslaving and paralysing themselves and those after them in this never-ending continuation of memory narratives.
- 22 Richard Kearney, On Stories, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 2.
24These examples also illustrate the process of interpretation that can be observed in the cycle of collective memory. As Richard Kearney points out, “historical memory always involves some measure of interpretative selection or conflict – depending on who is telling and who is reading the narratives”.22 The importance of creating narratives and the question of truth in narrativity itself emerges several times in the text. Once the children from Hannah’s class begin to die, the narrator comments that “the whole place reels when a wee one dies” (p. 195). However, the very actions of the community show, primarily with their investment in the Twelfth of July celebration, that it is not completely true. Similarly, after Hannah’s recovery at the end of the novel, when her parents wonder what to say to the parents whose children have died, their doctor advises them to simply admit that Hannah “got better […]. Since when were that lot concerned with the truth?” (p. 300).
Conclusion
- 23 Stefanie Lehner, “The Irreversible and the Irrevocable…”, p. 277.
- 24 James Smart, “The Raptures by Jan Carson Review – Visions in a Northern Irish Village”, The Guardia (...)
25While at first glance Hannah’s future is open to new possibilities, there is still the larger, looming spectre that “things don’t change here” (p. 11). Even the living dead are not allowed a break from the past, which was imposed upon them, and which they relive in their alternate version of the small village. Similarly to other recent Northern Irish novels, Carson’s text shows how “the past continues to haunt the present […], in the form of memories, flashbacks, and repetitions, thus confounding irreversible time and narrative”, as Lehner comments on earlier fictional representations of the Troubles.23 The topic of narratives being passed on can be seen even in the illness that the children suffer from, as it is in fact caused by one of the fathers dumping illegal materials on the outskirts of the town. While Alan Gardiner, the man responsible, is presumably taken away, there is no great resolution to his crime, and life in Ballylack goes on, just as it does in Northern Ireland today. Although the deaths have seemingly stopped (both in the fictional village and in the post-ceasefire province), their aftermath is not resolved, similarly to the situation twenty-five years after the professed end of the conflict. The novel has been described in reviews as “an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit” and it can be read as such;24 however, this does not appear to be the point of the denouement of the search for the culprit. At this point in the narrative (or in the conflict), it does not necessarily matter who started it and who’s at fault. The primary issue is the subsequent and persisting influence of the past in the present and possibly in the future.
- 25 Stefanie Lehner, “The Irreversible and the Irrevocable…”, p. 274.
- 26 Marisol Morales-Ladrón, “Othering Reality: Magic Realism in Jan Carson’s Malcom Orange Disappears a (...)
26Although in no way responsible for the actions of their parents and community, the dead children in the alternate Ballylack continue in their vein, both by their own destructive activities – Carson is careful here not to make them simple and innocent scapegoats for the actions of others – but also by the simple fact that they do not have the option of leaving the alternate version of the small town. Their only option is to try to warn Hannah and urge her to choose a different direction. Their presence as spectres seems to corroborate Lehner’s observation on contemporary novels according to which “the memory of violent events refuses to be buried in silence and oblivion; its haunting return thus suggests the desire and attempt to recognize and ultimately to proclaim the ‘unspeakable’ that happened”.25 In Carson’s texts, the engagement with the unspeakable is characterised by her use of magic realism in general, and the hauntings in The Raptures, specifically. Marisol Morales-Ladrón has well pointed out that the technique allows Carson to blur “all kinds of boundaries”, and to render “marginal subjects visible to ultimately let them raise their voices against hostile environments”.26
- 27 Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, Peter Shirlow, Northern Ireland a Generation after Go (...)
- 28 Ibid., p. 291.
27Hannah engages with her dead friends’ suggestions while still considering her parents’ and community’s influences and needs. Her decision and awareness reflect both a continuing influence of the past as well as a possible detachment from it in the future. She indeed mirrors what Coulter, Gilmartin, Hayward and Shirlow describe as “varied and complicated afterlives of the Northern Irish conflict”.27 The end of the illness that is described in Carson’s novel illustrates numerous observations on the province and the presumed ending of the Northern Irish conflict, namely that it “is far from a perfect peace. It is ragged at the edges and torn in the middle”.28 The ultimate comment of the novel, the essay competition in the beginning and Hannah’s inner debate at the end, all mirror Carson’s own previous assertions in interviews, namely that
- 29 María Amor Barros del Río, “‘When writing, I see myself as a drone’. An Interview with Jan Carson”, (...)
We put much pressure on the generation that came after the Good Friday! We expected them to fix things and be different […]. [Yet when] we are not educating them in tolerance and open-mindedness, then it is ridiculous to expect them to react differently.29
Notes
1 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, p. 129.
2 Ibid., p. 129-133.
3 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser (ed. and trans.), Chicago – London, The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 49.
4 Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 2.
5 Ibid., p. 115.
6 Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter”, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx”, Michael Sprinker (ed.), London – New York, Verso, 2008, p. 39.
7 Jan Carson, The Raptures, London, Penguin Random House, 2022, p. 182. Henceforth, page numbers in brackets refer to this source.
8 Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, Peter Shirlow, Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday: Lost Futures and New Horizons in the “Long Peace”, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008, p. 15.
9 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, p. 127.
10 Ibid., p. 125.
11 Katy Shaw, Hauntology…, p. 115.
12 Ibid., p. 2.
13 Ibid., p. 2-4.
14 Ibid., p. 2.
15 Karen Salmon, Elaine Reese, “Talking (or Not Talking) about the Past: The Influence of Parent-Child Conversation about Negative Experiences on Children’s Memories”, Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 29, no. 6, 2015, p. 791.
16 Rory Allen, “The Legacy of the Northern Irish Conflict, Weak Men and Silenced Women in the Novels of Jan Carson”, Review of Irish Studies in Europe, vol. 7, no. 2, 2024, p. 31, DOI: https://doi.org/10.32803/rise.v7i2.3316.
17 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, p. 130.
18 Fionna Barber, “At Vision’s Edge: Post-Conflict Memory and Art Practice in Northern Ireland”, in Memory Ireland, vol. 3, The Famine and the Troubles, Oona Frawley (ed.), Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2014, p. 232.
19 Katy Shaw, Hauntology…, p. 3.
20 Ibid.
21 Stefanie Lehner, “The Irreversible and the Irrevocable: Encircling Trauma in Contemporary Northern Irish Literature”, in Memory Ireland, vol. 3, The Famine and the Troubles, p. 272.
22 Richard Kearney, On Stories, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 2.
23 Stefanie Lehner, “The Irreversible and the Irrevocable…”, p. 277.
24 James Smart, “The Raptures by Jan Carson Review – Visions in a Northern Irish Village”, The Guardian, 8 January 2022.
25 Stefanie Lehner, “The Irreversible and the Irrevocable…”, p. 274.
26 Marisol Morales-Ladrón, “Othering Reality: Magic Realism in Jan Carson’s Malcom Orange Disappears and The Fire Starters”, in “Lost, Unhappy and at Home”: The Impact of Violence on Irish Culture, vol. 1, Literature, Maria Gaviña-Costero, Dina Pedro, Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill (eds.), Oxford, P. Lang, 2024, p. 230.
27 Colin Coulter, Niall Gilmartin, Katy Hayward, Peter Shirlow, Northern Ireland a Generation after Good Friday…, p. 21.
28 Ibid., p. 291.
29 María Amor Barros del Río, “‘When writing, I see myself as a drone’. An Interview with Jan Carson”, Estudios Irlandeses, no. 18, 2023, p. 201, DOI: https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2023-11371.
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Marie Gemrichová, « Haunted by the Future: Children, Parents and Community in Jan Carson’s The Raptures (2022) », Études irlandaises, 50-2 | 2025, 39-52.
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Marie Gemrichová, « Haunted by the Future: Children, Parents and Community in Jan Carson’s The Raptures (2022) », Études irlandaises [En ligne], 50-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/20752 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15a9z
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