Christian A/I–llusions as Narrative Reclamation in Contemporary Northern Irish Short Stories

Religion and politics: the notoriously promiscuous bedmates of the twentieth century. The freshly interconnected globe looked on as appeals to religious affect and tradition were enmeshed with political activity, by both fascists and well-intentioned liberals alike. Northern Ireland stands out as an emblematic community where religion and politics became so embroiled—ideologically, institutionally, socially—that there is no way to disentangle the two. When the prevailing social systems are rendered impotent in the eyes of the everyday person, how can religion be salvaged from the wreckage? One major challenge in finding a new path for contemporary Northern Irish identity, is determining how to disentangle politics and religion, or to simply abandon them to a shared fate in search for a new path forward. Complex religious imagery and allusion are not new to Northern Irish literature. Unsurprisingly, trends in Northern Irish literature continue to evince the deeply troubling complexity of the role of religion in Northern Irish identity in lieu of The Troubles and a century of religiopolitical violence.

The goal of this analysis is to deconstruct religious—specifically Christian—allusions in contemporary Northern Irish short stories by Mary Beckett, Rosemary Jenkinson, Linda Anderson and Lucy Caldwell. The use of religious imagery varies to a certain degree, but the shared resemblances are striking—allusions studied here share the intent to reassert the meaningfulness of the everyday secular life by coopting religious language or symbology. It is necessary to briefly draw out the nuanced functions connoted by "cooption." Having its origin in organizational dynamics— the election of a person from one group into one's own group—cooption carries with it the connotation of commandeering and assimilating some entity—a person, an idea, etc.—for one's own desired ends. It implies both the acceptance of the original significance of an entity, but also utilizes this significance in new way; it is a double-movement which requires embracing something's original significance, but utilizes the implied shell of its importance for a new purpose.

This cooption of religious symbols has multiple functions in the definition and redefinition of meaning for Northern Irish life post-Troubles: for one, uses of religious imagery assume the vacancy of an actual, real religious dimension to everyday life in the traditional sense while at the same time assuming the familiarity of the reader with classically Christian symbols; second (building on the first point) it facilitates a tongue and cheek use of religious allusion which cuts deeply at the vacuousness of religious tradition and importance for daily life. All of these examples of the cooption of religious imagery are grounded firmly in a strikingly Northern Irish struggle to see any positives in religion after the self-incrimination of religion and its contributions to the unraveling of the social fabric.

The first two literary examples worth investigating are scenes which implicitly reconstruct Christian tropes. Both are centered on exploring how prevailing social norms—in addition to the general public's assent to these conventions—react to unconventional actors, sometimes violently, with an immune system-like response. As a result, both stories draw on the Christian symbolism of atoning sacrifice and martyrdom to characterize the actions of the unconventional iconoclasts in the Northern Irish society.

Mary Beckett's short story "Flags and Emblems," follows the path of an unnamed narrator from a Catholic community who is engaged in a heated discussion about her brother with her father and her aunt. Her brother, Fergus, has married a woman from a Unionist/Loyalist family. He is now causing friction within their Catholic community after being seen walking with his child, carrying a small unionist flag, for a parade. The narrator's (and Fergus') father strongly disapproves, not only of his actions, but also clearly of his marriage. It is safe to assume that the rest of their community feels the same way. The father and aunt both express their concern that Fergus' actions have brought shame on their family (Gleeson 137).¹ The aunt, particularly, places the blame on Fergus' wife Rachel, who must have pressured him to engage in this Unionist activity. The story later corroborates this sentiment by relating Rachel's reflection at the moment she gave the flag to their child in spite of Fergus' shock:

[Rachel] realized that she had impaled him, [Fergus], not for one afternoon, because in a small town hoarding memories, it would be for the length of his life. He would suffer for his weakness and she would suffer with him, and the knowledge that she shared his expiation would intensify it. (138)

The language here is reminiscent of traditional Christian views of societal persecution for the sake of true belief. The community rejects the true believer who subverts its established norms. Rachel made a martyr out of Fergus, she laments, because of resentful feelings about discontent in their relationship. However, the sacrifice Rachel is forcing upon Fergus comes at the crucifying hands of the community. The narrator of the story, Fergus' sister, reconfigures the significance of the persecution of Rachel and Fergus: "the only real thing today is between Fergus and Rachel" (137). From the narrator's perspective Rachel and Fergus, because of their iconoclastic love, are martyrs charting a path out of the shallow sectarianism that continues to divide the community.

With the narrator's perspective in the foreground, Beckett's use of traditional Christian imagery in the above passage comes into clear focus. By handing the flag to her son, Rachel impales Fergus. As the Lance of Longinus draws water from the side of the crucified Christ, Rachel affixes Fergus' crucifixion as an sectarian dissident. This impalement is not unto death, but rather, it is the postmortem concrescence of their new identity in a cross-sect marriage. Their suffering is the suffering of Jesus and the saints, who atone for their sins against the community by bearing the weight of public shame and persecution. Beckett's word choice for this atonement—expiation—is etymologically inseperable from Christian theology. In traditional Christian thought, "expiation" is one piece of atonement theology: that Christ bore the suffering that was necessary in order to make amends and provide reparation for wrongdoing. In this case, however, Rachel and Fergus' righteousness, as perceived by our narrator, is not in service to a larger religious narrative and has no theological import. Rather, the willingness of Rachel and Fergus to endure the persecution of the community for the sake of "the only real thing," makes them martyrs of the way forward in Northern Irish identity—rediscovering the importance of love in spite of, and to crush, the lingering powers of sectarianism.

The second story, written by Rosemary Jenkinson, follows a young man who paints murals—predominantly Unionist memorials—in his community. Davey has an ecstatic experience while painting a memorial of Unionist volunteers through which he becomes fixated on a mysterious woman who appears strangely religious and angelically benevolent. At one point, he deserts the commemoration of his mural to chase the woman, unable to catch her. Upon being commissioned for a second work by the same benefactor, Davey, half-way through, abandons the agreed upon representation of traditional Unionist imagery, and paints the woman in a prayerful posture. As a result, he is chased down and beaten by a group of boys from his Unionist community.

Much could be said about the use of religious imagery throughout Jenkinson's story. Suffice it to say, her classical Christian elements (which are subtly Catholic) are the subject of division within this Unionist community. For the sake of this analysis, the conflicting nature of religious components in "The Mural Painter" depicts the ongoing divisiveness of religion—specifically Christianity—in Northern Irish communities. As these social identities have been constructed from the onset of the twentieth century, through the Troubles and up to now, religion, and the various iterations of its elements, is primarily an object of sectarian affectations rather than spiritual, moral or humanistic sentiments. With this in the background, the closing scene of "The Mural Painter" narratively draws on another traditional Christian story of martyrdom.

As Davey is being beaten violently by the boys angered by the mural, "he thought he could hear a woman's voice shouting above the men" (315). Jenkinson writes, "he could feel her above, as though she had floated down from heaven." The climax is strongly reminiscent of the protomartyr of Christendom, Stephen, and his story as related in the book of Acts. After Stephen preaches his defense to the priests, Luke recounts his ecstatic vision as he looks into the sky and sees Jesus standing at the right hand of God. The men rush at Stephen, and stone him to death. Davey is depicted as a martyr in the cast of saint Stephen. Nevertheless, Jenkinson removes God and the spiritual from the equation while retaining the import of the imagery—not only does the mysteriously angelic woman's voice "slowly fade into his own," but the story ends with Davey's recognition that the only woman present there was his mother (315).

In Davey's final moments of consciousness—whether he is dying or not—Jenkinson dispels the possibility of an underlying religious dimension to his story. Instead, Davey is made a martyr because of his unwillingness to continue using his art to perpetuate sectarian sentimentality. Like Fergus and Rachel, Davey has opted for the path of persecution rather than acquiesce to societal conventions. All three of them, Beckett and Jenkinson show us, perhaps embody a path forward in post-Troubles Northern Ireland. However, the martyr and the iconoclast willingly accept inevitable persecution by sacrificially living against established societal norms . Although both authors opt for classical religious imagery in order to evoke familiar sentimentality in their readership, neither identify religion as a path forward in post-Troubles Northern Ireland. The final two examples deepen the intensity of this dichotomy between this use of familiar religious tropes, and the lingering distaste for religious sentimentality in Northern Ireland.

Lucy Caldwell's short story "Mayday" depicts a Northern Irish woman in troublesome isolation as she undergoes a self-prescribed medical abortion. The story shifts between her first experiences using the pill and her conscious grappling with past experiences, memories, and relationships which weigh on her capacity to reconcile with her unenviable current circumstances. Throughout the story she relives classical religious experiences with both apathy and disdain. She laments the time her Catholic friends mocked her when she took Holy Communion as a protestant "and she chewed" (356). She protests the fact that you cannot study the seventeenth century without encountering religion, and recalls the alienating condescension of her grandmothers's minister. In the final throws of the story, the anticipated bleeding begins and she tries to come to terms with the disconcerting, impending reality:

She will remind herself: the bleeding and cramps are likely to be worse than a normal period, and there may be clots. Light bleeding may continue for up to three weeks. In most cases, four to six weeks after the bleeding stops, your period will resume. She will recite it to herself, over and over again, like a litany, a prayer. She will be one of the lucky ones. She will. She will. (363)

The litany and prayer are transformed from a religious recitation of theological truth for dealing with life, into a repetition of basic scientific truths that will help her accept the dark reality of the following weeks. There is no religious litany that will give her peace in the circumstances, but the repeated truth of the typical way in which medical abortions play out will give her hope. Her new litany is simply that "she will be one of the lucky ones. She will. She will."

In another story about a woman undergoing medical complications, Linda Anderson also coopts the language of the litany when describing an older woman in dementia who recites her physical problems to no avail. The protagonist Anna calls it, "a litany of incapacity." Both of our protagonists execrate the fundamental meaningless of the litany in its original religious sense. Anderson and Caldwell's literary cooption is tongue in cheek, hearkening back to the vacant litanies of childhood, deriding a church which offers no solace to the aching. Instead, the litanies are presented as repetitive psychological tools in which one can only hope to repeat something until it becomes true, or otherwise go insane trying. In both cases, the litany is removed from its original meaning as the religious structuring of life through repetition. The litany is instead utilized as a tool through which the difficult and dismantled processes of life may be given meaning, through the plain repetitiveness of reality, which give structure, grounding, and provide some vague semblance of significance.

Anderson's "The Turn," similarly to Caldwell's "Mayday," ends emphatically with the cooption of markedly Christian language. Despite Anna's utter rejection of Christian interpretations of the meaning of life and the explicit rejection of the resurrection and the life after death, Anna falls back on the founding Christian trope: "I have risen" (242). Like the litany, the trope of the resurrection is torn from its original grounding in a deeper metaphysical reality, and coopted as a way to depict her discovery of hope despite the meaningless turmoil in which her life is imprisoned. Subject to the sometimes brutal processes of everyday life and reality, both Anna, and the narrator in Caldwell's Mayday, resort to the language of the religion of their youth. They both mock its inability to offer solace or meaning to modern life in post-Troubles Northern Ireland, and coopt its language as a skeuomorph with which to construct significance for a life in a reality devoid of religious meaning.

As religion, society, and politics have had a long, complicated history in Northern Ireland, one would expect the disentangling process to be commensurably knotty and complex. Because of its entanglement, there is no clear way to reclaim only one part of this emergent identity discriminately. Instead, through literature, all of these writers attempt to recapture the import offered by the religious language of their society, while dispelling the unhelpful and traumatic influences it has had on Northern Irish life and identity. By drawing on classical religious tropes, the authors offer a critique of the perceived vacuousness of religion in Northern Irish life during the Troubles and post-Troubles experience. They instead coopt the language of meaning offered to the culture by Christianity and attempt to chart a different path, in which Northern Irish identity is rediscovered.