Anticipating Northern Ireland’s post-Agreement novel: narrative suspension in Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads Deirdre Madden’s novel One by One in the Darkness (1996) as a transitional text from post-ceasefire to post-Agreement Northern Irish fiction. The article does so by taking into account the novel’s sceptical treatment of a possible peace agreement through various modes of narrative suspension, something that would find a renewed expression in the works of fiction published in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. Madden’s retrospective narration anticipates the Agreement’s rhetorical suspension of the country’s violent history even before it was signed in 1998 and in doing so, it certainly paved way to post-Agreement fiction’s penchant for re-imagining the past. The reading seeks to explore the novel’s proleptic potential in anticipating post-Agreement Northern Ireland’s suspended political situation through three interrelated conceptual frames – Benita Parry’s “anachrony”, Marcel Proust’s “involuntary memory” and Paul Ricoeur’s “affective trace”.