“Reading-while-walking”: a nomadology of the troubles in Anna Burns’s fiction

Abstract

Anna Burns’s three published novels have Ireland and the Troubles (1968-1998) at their centres. This thesis argues that, if read in a Nomadological framework (BRAIDOTTI, 2011; DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1987), Burns’s writing attempts to undo sectarian violence by directly or indirectly interfering in crystallised historical narratives of the Troubles, by engaging with literature as a line of flight from stagnant binary constructions, and by bearing witness to the collective trauma of the conflict both as an aesthetic and a political principle of her fiction, especially if we take Milkman (2018) as a point of departure for such an investigation. In this novel, the Narrator’s habit of reading books while walking about comes as a nomadic impulse that she puts to practice not only through a refusal to adhere to the fixed categories available to her in a community organised by sectarian difference, but also through a process of rewriting the public space and making herself inaccessible through a disappearance into literature, her “reading-while-walking”. This habit, which has her shunned as a “beyond-the-pale,” is apparently part of an effort towards non-engagement, but it inadvertently draws more attention towards herself. It also becomes a major point of contention in the novel, as the body of the narrator, also identified as Middle Sister, becomes an object of intense scrutiny. Organised into three chapters, this thesis produces a reading of Burns’s writing in the context of contemporary Irish studies and offers that her three novels can be read as a Nomadology of the Troubles in themselves. Chapter 1, “Anna Burns’s Troubles Fiction: The Belatedness of Trauma”, argues that Burns’s fiction can be read as a response to the Belfast Agreement’s (BFA) progressivist logic and its prescription to “move on”. This first chapter looks into No Bones (2001), Little Constructions (2007), and Milkman (2018) in order to establish an overall view of Burns’s narrative strategies and of her different approaches to trauma and the Troubles in those novels. Chapter 2, titled “Milkman as a Response to Sectarian Binaries: Anna Burns’s Cast of ‘Beyond-the-Pales’” proposes that the “beyond-the-pales,” the district’s outcasts in Milkman, act as a Deleuzian war machine (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 1987, p. vii) in the novel, rising against any kind of sedentary power. The chapter looks at all the characters placed into this category in the novel, as well as at the origins of the term in Irish history. Chapter 3, titled “Middle Sister’s Literary Companions”, looks at the Narrator’s role as a storyteller and divides the literary references and allusions made in Milkman into three categories: books read by Middle Sister which are connected to reading-while-walking, wee sisters’ storybooks, and significant references made in passing. Considering the centrality that literature and the act of reading take up in the novel, this final chapter leans over Burns’s choices, arguing that the works and the modes of Middle Sister’s reading are crucial to her process of becoming a Narrator. The coda of this thesis offers a final commentary on the results obtained from the research process and presents new directions and ramifications these subjects might offer in the future