POSTMODERNISM

The term postmodern was brought into circulation in the 1960s and early
1970s and its dominant attitude is disbelief. There were historical and social
changes which caused radical shifts in cultural perceptions: the end of
empire; the rise of the womens movement, black power and gay pride; the
hugely increasing importance of popular culture; the impact of the
technological media.
The key background of literary postmodernism is in poststructuralism, which
is best known for the techniques of deconstruction. This involves breaking
down a text into its constituent differences and identifying its notional
centre, then exploring the procedures whereby certain of these differences
are preferred. A characteristic move is to invert differences and to point to
what is marginalized or absent, thereby setting up alternative centres or
challenging the notion of centres altogether.
Lyotard, a French philosopher, wrote The Postmodern Condition in the late
1970s. He says all modern systems of knowledge had been supported by
some metanarrative or grand discourse about the main direction of
history. A metanarrative is a story of mythic proportions (for example, the
Christian religious story, the Enlightment belief in progress, Marxist political
and economic history). Lyotard defines the postmodern era as a time of
incredulity toward metanarratives. He doesnt mean that all people have
ceased to believe in all stories, but rather that the stories arent working so
well anymore, in part because there are too many. There are a lot of centres.
We are exposed to a babble of diverse and contradictory fragments of
stories. The same world contains multiple worldviews. Postmodernity (the
time we are living in) is the age of over-exposure to otherness.
Jameson, in his book Postmodernism or The cultural logic of late capitalism
(1991) analyses the contexts and meanings of postmodernist irony and
parody (or what he calls pastiche). Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation
of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style. But it is amputated of the satiric
impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction. Pastiche is thus blank
parody. [] The producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past:
the imitation of dead styles. [] This situation evidently determines
"historicism", namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the
past, the play of random stylistic allusion (Jameson, 17-18).

Pastiche is partly the result of over-exposure. In the age of mass media there is a sense
that we have seen too many films, watched too much TV, too much advertising. We are
over-familiar with the forms of mass culture, which means its impossible to be original.
We can only recycle the conventions of earlier texts which Jameson calls the
cannibalisation of the past. Blank parody means that rather than being humorous or
satirical, pastiche has become a dead language unable to satirize in any effective way.
Whereas pastiche used to be a humorous device, it has become devoid of laughter.
The archetypal postmodern film-maker is Quentin Tarantino. His films are pure
pastiches: they pay tribute to pulp novels (Pulp fiction) and kung fu movies (Kill Bill).

Jameson also associates postmodernism with what he calls late capitalism.

Postmodernism is a cultural dominant that coincides with the logic of late
capitalism and the rise of consumer culture.
Postmodernism is broadly populist rather than narrowly elitist in appeal, and
tends to be multimedia rather than purely literary in materials.
Postmodernist texts deploy many of the strategies of Modernism: collage,
montage, pastiche, multiple viewpoint, reflexivity and open intertextuality.
ROBERT MCLIAM WILSON AND THE TROUBLES
Robert McLiam Wilson was born in Belfast in 1966 and he is one of the
generations of writers who grew up during the Northern Irish Troubles.
This is stated in the front page.
The Troubles is an ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland which dates
from the late 1960s and is considered by many to have ended in 1998 with
the Belfast "Good Friday" Agreement. There were almost three decades of
violence between Northern Ireland's nationalist community (who consider
themselves as Irish and/or Roman Catholic) and its unionist community (who
consider themselves as British and/or Protestant). Between 1969 and 2001,
more than 3,500 people were killed as a result of the conflict. Most of those
killed were civilians or members of the security forces.
The key issues at stake were the constitutional status of Northern Ireland
and the relationship between its mainly Protestant unionist community and
its mainly Catholic nationalist community. Unionists and loyalists want
Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom, while Irish
nationalists and generally want it to leave the United Kingdom and join a
united Ireland. The Troubles involved republican and loyalist paramilitaries,
the security forces of the United Kingdom and of the Republic of Ireland, and
politicians and political activists.
The violence was characterised by the armed campaigns of Irish republican
and loyalist paramilitary groups. These included the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (IRA) campaign of 19691997, intended to end British rule
in Northern Ireland and to reunite Ireland politically and create a 32-county
Irish Republic; and of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The state security
forces the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) were
also involved in the violence.
In 1994, the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire. The loyalist paramilitaries
followed. Although these ceasefires failed in the short run, they paved the
way for the final ceasefire. The Troubles were brought to an uneasy end by a
peace process that included the declaration of ceasefires by most
paramilitary organisations, the complete decommissioning of the IRA's
weapons, as agreed in the Belfast Agreement in 1998 (commonly known as
the "Good Friday Agreement").

THE NOVEL
Eureka Street is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland capital city.
around the time of the IRA's first ceasefire in 1994 and depicts the lives of
two friends from opposite sides of the political divide and their attempts to
reconcile themselves to the changing nature of Northern Ireland. Jake
Jackson is a disgruntled Catholic with a positive loathing for anything Irish.
His friend Chuckie Lurgan is an entrepreneurial Protestant, more interested
in his wallet or his women (Max and his mother) than anything political.
In Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles Kennedy-Andrews posits that
postmodernism offers the possibility of deconstructing the categories of
Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist by exposing the difference
and difference within identity and exploring new horizons of identity
altogether.
DECONSTRUCTION AND DECENTRING (strategy of postmodernism)
VS structuralism
In any given culture there is a tendency to assume a hierarchy of
differences, to imply preferences (e.g. Protestant before Catholic), what
Derrida (one of the most important poststructuralist thinkers) terms violent
hierarchies. It is the role of deconstructive thinkers not simply to invert
these hierarchies but actually to reopen the play of differences round the
terms and to resist merely binary thinking.
Differences have melted: The comedy was that any once-strong difference
had long melted away p. 163
liquid modernity
Slat, a socialist, dates a right-wing woman
Chuckie thought with pride of their friendship. Protestant and Catholic,
their casual brotherliness was the ultimate example of what he meant when
he said that no one he knew had been fighting (389)
At the end of the novel, Chuckie claims on a TV programme that he will
create a new political party: an effective and non-sectarian third force in
Ulster politics (386). Other alternatives in Irish politics.

Postmodernist disbelief is extended to language. Proceeding from the

structuralist insight that all meaning is constituted through the interplay of
differences, Derrida argues that all meanings are ultimately deferred
(difference allows a pun on difference and differal). There is never an
encounter with meaning, simply a ceaseless play of differences between

those terms which are present and those which are absent. In other words,
we only understand things by understanding what they are not.
OTG is a graffiti appearing which nobody knows what it means, its meaning
is delayed. Until finally Jake realizes it could mean whatever they want,
because it is just a parody of the other political graffitis: You want to know
what OTG means? Almost everything (395). There can be no absolutes
(296)
MULTIPLICITY OF POINTS OF VIEW
There are competing narratives and unreliable narrators who serve to
rupture historical and political complacencies, and metanarratives such as
Protestants v. Catholics.

1 person Jake. Past. A disgruntled Catholic. Working in the

repossession industry, then in construction industry. Falling in love
easily. Empathetic. Warm-hearted. Depressed.
Uncommitted to the Irish republicans: There were three basic
versions of Irish history: the Republican, the Loyalist, the British. I had
a fourth version to add. It was just lots of Irish killing lots of other
Irish (99)
Last part in the last chapter: narrative present Now, shes sleeping
four feet behind me and my room is magical with her present

Omniscient narrator, 3 person, focused on Chuckie.

Chapter 6: Omniscient narrator, 3 person, focused on Max

Chapter 10: Omniscient narrator. Poetic. Metafiction (fiction about the

nature and purpose of fiction): The city is a novel p. 215. Its earth
is richly sown with its many dead: reminiscent of the end of The
Dead by Joyce
3 person: That night, on Poetry Street, Jake slept like Chuckie and
Max. 212
2 person: You should stand some night on Cable Street 215
1 person plural : as our eyes, those democratic unideological
things 214

Chapter 11 and 12: Omniscient narrator focused on some characters.

Metafiction: The pages that follow are light with their loss. The text is
less dense, the city is smaller 231. 3 person and 1 person (we are
terrified, 232)

Chapter 18: omniscient focused on Peggy, Chuckies mother

PASTICHE
References to popular culture:
-

Dickens. A relative of Chuckies, Mortimer Lurgan, spends 18 hours in

the cold waiting to meet Dickens in a lecture. The writer is devoid of
literary significance, he is merely a famous character. Mortimer hasnt
even read any of Dickenss books.

The Pope is also portrayed as a celebrity (Could it matter that the

Pope was a Taig if the Pope was in the papers?) 31

Max told Chuckie that she had met Clint Eastwood (131)

Intertextuality:
The Irish Renaissance: A revival of the ancient Celtic myths. For Synge and
Yeats, the poor fishers and farmers of rural Ireland, especially the Irishspeaking West, offered a living connection to heroic Celtic Ireland, and they
celebrated their strength, simplicity, and what both saw as the poetry of
their daily speech. (Jake and Chuckie do not understand Irish).
The novel marks a significant departure in Northern Irish fiction in that it
focuses upon the city, and not the country, as a source of artistic inspiration
and a symbol of potential redemption.
Eureka Street satirizes the high art of Northern Irish poetry and its attempts
to elevate itself above the ideological compromises of Northern Irish life.
The resort to prose was a stated rejection of the poetic tradition which
McLiam Wilson regarded as having indulged in nationalist piety and political
evasion, and which he would condemn through the vicious caricature of a
Seamus Heaney-like poet. (Seamus Heaney: Irish Nobel-prize winner whose
poetic material is mostly the rural farming life of Northern Ireland. In the
1970s the focus of his poetry broadened to encompass the wider social and
political context).
Shague Guinthoss was an inappropriately famous poet who looked
like Santa Claus and wrote about frogs, hedges and long-handled
spades p. 173
A series of twats in poetic clothes driveled on about the flowers ,
the birds Unlike Guinthoss, none of these boys was from the
country p. 175
This is not a satire, but pastiche, because it is the play of random
stylistic allusion
The tone is humorous, ironic, but from chapter 10 to 12 it becomes serious.
It is fitting that Dickens appears briefly as a character in Eureka Street, for
this book again exhibits Wilson's neo-Dickensianism; the use of caricatures

and grotesques, of metonymic and symbolic devices, of a broad and

colourful canvas, of humour compounded with pathos (a quality in a person
or situation that makes you feel sad or sorry for them). And what the novel
attempts, in fact, is the confident resolution of classic realism - the working
out of various plot-strands towards appropriately moral conclusions, and the
humanist redemption which the opening line of the book - 'All stories are
love stories' - anticipates from the outset.
LATE CAPITALISM
Northern Ireland is reconfigured by the irresistible forces of late capitalism
and its attendant consumer culture. The changes are evinced in particular
through Jakes work as a repo man, who repossesses consumer goods from
peoples homes when they are unable to afford their repayments: Crab,
Hally and I worked North Belfast. [] and take their stuff away from them
(63).
In the era of consumer culture, Northern Irelands social hierarchies appear
to have shed their previous divisions along religious lines, and discrimination
is now based purely on economic status. Sectarian identities are depicted as
anachronistic and erased by the indifference of late-capitalist culture and its
imperative that wealth be the only truly significant mark of identity.
Chuckies story explores the promise of capitalist culture of transcendence
of ones class identity. Through abandoning stereotypically Protestant loyalty
towards Unionism and Britishness, Chuckie is able to reconfigure the politics
of national identity and transform it from a cry of allegiance into a
commodity to be sold on the international marketplace, part of what Eureka
Street describes as the Irishness business. Chuckie re-imagines Ireland in
the language of media advertising (FINE OLD COUNTRY, RECENTLY
PARTITIONED. IN NEED OF MINOR POLITICAL REPAIR. PROCEED FOR QUICK
SALE, 154) and he devises a series of dubious local products for export to
America: twigs become leprechaun walking sticks, etc. Consumerism: p.
250. Chuckie in the United States: chapter 14 (257)

Sources:
The British Council (on Robert McLiam Wilson)
The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Literature
Culture And Customs of Ireland
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, Volume 1
Jameson Postmodernism or The cultural logic of late capitalism (1991)
http://fashion-trends.knoji.com/postmodern-parody-and-pastiche/