A City of the Mind: Ciaran Carson's Belfast

Abstract

In Northern Irish contemporary literature, Belfast is the centre of sectarian violence and hatred, and is one of the most dangerous cities of the whole English-speaking world. In Ciaran Carson’s writings, Belfast has a dream-like quality: it is the shape-shifting city that has to reinvent its own geography day after day, partially because it was a war zone during the ‘Troubles’, but also because of the duplicity of the city’s nature. Belfast is a city that had to accommodate new industries and businesses, and thus continuously changed without logic into something different by encompassing everything that was wrong and rotten in the country during the Eighties. For this reason, Belfast can be represented by both the labyrinth and the map, which symbolise its continuous morphing into something different, and convey a sense of entrapment. Carson’s exploration of Belfast is defined by these antithetical concepts of metamorphosis and enclosure. The essay analyses some of Carson’s poems, focussing on the difference between Carson’s imagery and the romantic nationalist forms as well as the rural world of the Irish tradition. Carson’s concern with language is also taken into consideration, since through language and the choice of a native imagery and a technical innovation, the author overtly discredits the English dominance and dismisses English culture as central.