Phantasmal Belfast, Ancient Languages, Modern Aura in Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory

Abstract

Ciaran Carson’s writings about his native city of Belfast focus on its unreality. This project began with the poetry collection Belfast Confetti (1990) and reached its apotheosis in his prose memoir The Star Factory (1997) and, most recently, continues with the philosophical novel Exchange Place (2012). Carson’s introspective fascination with Belfast’s inscrutability links him to mid-nineteenth-century writers about cities, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and to theories about the city in the era of rapidly expanding capitalism. In grappling with post-industrial and sectarian Belfast, Carson adopts a two-tiered rhetorical strategy. Firstly, his writings borrow from archaic knowledge, especially problems within the linguistic and taxonomic components uncertainly encoded into city maps, place-names, competing idioms (Irish, English), religious iconography (Catholic, Protestant), and ancient oral Irish narratives, many of them recorded by Carson’s father and transposed into his own memoir. Secondly, Carson interweaves this archaic knowledge with a late modernist view of Belfast as phantasmagoria and aura, concepts that German critic Walter Benjamin developed from the cultural phenomenon of the panoramas and magic lantern theatres that arose in European cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and from interpretations of commodities. Following Benjamin’s investigative model, Carson’s The Star Factory surveys the merchandises, found objects, and cinematic representations of mid-twentieth-century Belfast to recover his idiosyncratic memories and time-defying experiences. By scrutinising and interpreting such languages, genealogies, etymologies, and infrastructures, Carson’s autobiographical texts about Belfast replace static and misleading historical narratives with intimate, open-ended reflexive approaches.