‘What can we do, what does art do?’

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Deirdre Madden’s three novels directly addressing the Troubles in Northern Ireland – Hidden Symptoms (1986), One by One in the Darkness (1996), and Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008). To consider the role that they claim for themselves in the society out of which they are written, it examines how the two questions framing Madden’s first fiction, Hidden Symptoms – ‘what can we do?’ and ‘what does art do?’ in the face of human-inflicted violence – are played out in each of the novels. This entails an ethical appreciation of Madden’s thematic and aesthetic options. Thematically, the two earlier novels, written during the Troubles, feature Catholic families marked by the individual diversity of their members, and invite readers to engage with the predicaments of Catholic victims of sectarian violence, thus countering the invisibility of lives misrepresented and unacknowledged by political, legal, and journalistic discourses; in turn, Molly Fox’s Birthday, a novel written after the Good Friday Agreement, moves beyond Northern Ireland and its Catholic community to address the ethical challenge of acknowledging kinship with perpetrators of sectarian violence. Aesthetically, Madden’s use of fiction and focalisation affords readers insight into others’ subjectivity, while featuring characters aware of the power, as well as the limits, of imagination. Madden’s novels thus raise the question of whether and how aesthetic experience expands one’s intersubjective insight, prompts awareness of the limits of every subjective position, and may therefore perform a role in processes of reparative remembering.