The Extraordinary Ordinariness of Robert McLiam Wilson's Belfast

In part because a rural mythos has made it easier to construct (or at least to imagine) a homogenous identity, pastoral ideologies have traditionally exerted a formidable influence in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, the idea of the city has tended to prompt strategies of anxious consolidation, at times so as to preserve national or ethnic unity against the city's seemingly unassimilable diversity. David Lloyd, for one, has noted the durable opposition between nationalist aspirations and the urban in Ireland; to the extent that it, too, valued a unified national identity, post partition unionism has also been informed by this antagonism.¹ In contemporary Belfast, where the concrete "peace line" has strikingly exaggerated the idea of gated communities, severe spatial segregation protects against the disruptions of alterity. Fortunately, though, as Edna Longley observes, "Belfast as a literary, let alone a political, concept is still evolving" (90). By strenuously challenging the old orthodoxies, Northern Ireland's writers have increasingly signaled the transformation of the city from the dark origin of the region's problems to a location where multiplicity of voice and identity could at last be actuated and celebrated in politically instructive ways. During a peace process that depended directly on the contributions of artists and heavily on the disavowal of essentialist positions, the city continued to offer a singularly instructive model and site of differentiation.

In proposing that "it is at the level of creative spirit, in the realm of glimpsed potential rather than intransigent solidarity, that the future takes shape," Seamus Heaney both articulates the inheritance of the Northern Irish writer and identifies the transformative potential of literature (1). If Northern Ireland was to escape its disabling ideologies and unitary discourses, it needed its writers, by reclaiming the city and the province for those marginalized by the sectarian narratives, to shape that future by reaching for "new paradigms of political and cultural accommodation" (Kearney 9). And, indeed, by projecting an "anticipatory illumination" as they responded to the possibility of peace, many of these writers augmented—and in some respects even developed—the vision and vocabulary necessary for seeing beyond the conflict's repetitions (Kiberd 4).² Literary contributions blended with fresh thinking and a newly conciliatory spirit in the political sphere, subsequently releasing into circulation an assemblage of words, phrases, and possibilities—dialogue, consent, power-sharing, respect for different traditions, et cetera—that were as hopeful as they were ambiguous.

By seeking more open spatial and psychic registers, Robert McLiam Wilson's 1996 novel, Eureka Street, more than any other single work of Northern Irish literature, rehearses the possibilities initiated by the Northern Irish peace process and directs the region's literature to move decisively toward Heaney's "glimpsed potential." The novel immediately indicates that it will use "the literary opportunities afforded by urbanism" to contest the tribal cartographies of the conflict and the nullities of pedestrian life reinforced in so much Troubles literature (Rotella 3); in the process it trades received notions of a grim, quarantined, and inscrutable city for a Belfast that is a vital, cosmopolitan, and, in fact, ordinary part of Europe and modernity. More importantly, by promoting a series of profoundly ordinary moments, Eureka Street delineates and celebrates a reconstituted urban imaginary; its urban citizens realize the freedom to pursue everyday itineraries that both restore their power as context producers and resolutely defy the "destructive ethos of territorial aggressiveness" (Rotella 228).

To this end McLiam Wilson's most important cartographer becomes the pedestrian walker who, as Michel de Certeau proposes in The Practice of Everyday Life, claims the power to "make up the city," to actualize some possibilities latent in space while negating others (97). Pursuing "traverses" out of an "ensemble of possibilities," the pedestrian walker humanizes the urban landscape and defies the "official" city mapped by urban planners, patrolled by security forces, and delimited by sectarian logics (98). Through its rhetoric of walking and sociability, Eureka Street elevates the mobile pedestrian into "a clandestine urban hero," who then ultimately becomes a producer of the kind of pluralism necessary to create an enduringly peaceful and...