ABSTRACT
Home is supposed to be familiar, particularly for filiative ideologies. Can one therefore be at home in a contested territory such as the North, where one is nationally two places at once? Rather than viewing the problematics of home in the North, however, as induced by the impacting of two narrative coherencies (i.e. British and Irish Nationalism), this chapter intends to investigate how the Northern state evidences the contradictions of both.1 The preceding chapter suggested that the problematization of home is by no means peculiar to Irish culture and also forms the basis of the wistful, imperial allegories of an English imaginary and the range of filiative belonging in American culture. Undoubtedly though, the concept of home within Irish culture is tainted by a specific colonial inflection, which obviously makes the place one inhabits become strange. Yet the problematization of home and belonging in Northern writing is not reducible to a colonial affliction or binarized national collision, but also invokes a complex totality of displacements such as class and gender. I shall initially examine both the problematics and the strategic affinities operative in the engagement by Irish writers with overarching international representations of the North as historically voided.2 A constructive theoretical framework for quantifying such a representational hegemony, through which Irish historical agents are written out
Feargal Cochrane declares that, in relation to the North, British and Irish Nationalism 'resemble the benevolent visitors to their schizophrenic relations in a mental home' (1994, 378-379). Cochrane's metaphor neatly suggests a regulated 'home' that constructs a false intimacy and privacy - a theme which will inform this chapter. A consummate account of the incapacity of both Irish and British Nationalism to deal concretely with the Northern state is offered by Joe Cleary's "Tork-Tongued on the Border Bit": Partition and the Politics of Form in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict' South Atlantic Quarterly 95;1. 1996. 227-276.
