The Analytical Categories

For the purposes of transparently recording the assumptions upon which the methodology rests, the genre categories used in the data gathering instrument are defined. The genre categories used are thrillers, romance, bildungsromans, children’s fiction, domestic drama, comedy, crime and horror. Thrillers are novels which have fast moving linear plot action, often involving spies, lone soldiers, and terrorists, and the plot often involves a race against time. Thrillers are essentially paranoiac fictions whose elements, according to Jerry Palmer, are:

A conspiracy, which is seen as an “unnatural” or pathological disruption of an otherwise ordered world.

A competitive hero, who has to demonstrate his superiority both to his enemies and his friends. His competitiveness isolates him; he is an outsider, like those he hunts.

The process of suspense.

Upon these major dimensions depend some non-essential, but

extremely common conventions: the distinction between the amateur, the professional and the bureaucrat; the kerygmatic encounter; the inhumanity of the villain (Palmer, 1978, 100).

Thrillers often set a recognisable hero, sometimes in conflict with his superiors, against a recognisable villain who is often part of a larger conspiratorial group concerned with overthrowing order and stability. The plot builds towards a climactic confrontation followed by the conclusion which might take the form of the positive thriller’s return to order or the negative thriller’s more pessimistic and less certain ending (Palmer, 1978).

Romances are love stories which generally have happy endings. They are usually escapist, constructed to be optimistic and relaxing, and a favourite romance plot is the taming of a wild man by a woman. There tends to be straightforward unambiguous morality in romances: good always defeats evil and the heroine gets her man. In Troubles fiction, however, the plot is often a “love-across-the barricades” or Romeo and Juliet plot, in which individuals from opposite sides of the conflict fall in love but are prevented by public events from enjoying private happiness.

The bildungsroman is another generic category that is important in the production of Troubles novels, particularly novels written in the late 1980s and 1990s. The theme of the bildungsroman is the development of a character from youth to adulthood. Classic bildungsromans trace the development of male characters, but this is not always the case in Troubles fiction, for example Frances Molloy’s No Mate for the Magpie (1985), which, like Edna O’Brien’s novels of the 1960s, traces the journey of a young woman out of Ireland. There are also a number of children’s novels in the data set, which to varying degrees, tend towards the didactic.

Comedy forms the basis for some Troubles fiction, but comic Troubles novels tend to be black comic novels, in which naïve, inept or otherwise anti-heroic

characters are placed in nightmarish situations, which are simultaneously comic and horrifying. Some of the comic novels use elements of fantasy. Fantasy is based on a departure from reality. This might take the form of exploring parallel worlds, or including characters with magical abilities. Crime fiction also forms the basis of a few Troubles novels. The plot of the crime novel concerns the discovery and piecing together of clues to find the solution to the fictional crime, which normally occurs before the narrative begins, or early on in the narrative. The construction of the formal detective plays an important part in crime fiction. The one horror novel in the set includes fantastic and supernatural elements.

A summary plot synopsis has been coded for each novel. Initial categories were developed from pre-texts and Magee’s dissertation. Specific plot types were determined from empirical analysis of the texts, and include hunting the IRA enemy, IRA plots against British government or royal family or other establishment

figures/institutions, specific instantiations of Romeo and Juliet love stories, growing up in Northern Ireland, and escape from Northern Ireland. Paradigmatic choices that authors make regarding the representation of heroes, villains and female characters have been recorded. Wherever possible, modality markers have been established and identified. These include reference to the material world (places, people, institutions, events).

In this study, evidence of the ideological stance taken by the author in and through the book is text that reveals positive, neutral or negative attitudes towards personnel, policies, politics and activities relating to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Evidence of ideological stance might be drawn from the plot, from representations of characters, or from clues in the narrative or style of discourse. It is in relation to ideology that Hall’s framework becomes particularly useful. Hall’s framework is explicitly designed to map ideological reception positions. This study falls within the tradition of theorising text as intertext. Although structuralist theorists such as Genette and Rifaterre offer interesting ways of exploring intertextuality within literature, they are not concerned with ideology in the same explicit way that Hall is.

Moreover, structuralist poetics is generally more interested in identifiably poetic language in literature, which is not necessarily the language of Troubles fiction.

In relation to the semiotic model used in this study, it is useful to recall Eagleton’s commentary on Pierre Macherey’s claim that the literary text:

far from constituting some unified plenitude of meaning, bears inscribed within it the marks of certain determined absences which

twist its various significations into conflict and contradiction. These absences – the ‘not-said’ of the work – are precisely what bind it to its ideological problematic: ideology is present in the text in the form of its eloquent silences. (Eagleton, 1976, 89)

The reference to absences links this view of ideology in literature to the Saussurean idea of meaning in signs arising from difference. Eagleton critiques Macherey’s concept of the dissonant text for being “curiously Hegelian” (Eagleton, 1976, 94-95) in conceiving the text as that which is not. He also argues that Macherey’s concept of the dissonant text is a negative conception of the text’s relation to history, which is not necessarily always the case in relation to specific individual texts (93). In this sense Macherey tends towards dogmatism. It might be difficult to determine what counts as dissonance and absence within specific texts. Such decisions may be functions of the ideological positioning of the reader. In terms of the specific texts dealt with in this study, the notions of absence, silence, contradiction and conflict might be of some value because these texts deal with the ideological complex of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but do not always represent all aspects of lived experience in Northern Ireland. Absence of some parts of the ideological complex in this context might well signify conscious constructions of the real which are

ideologically motivated. There may well be absent referents: there is a real history, but this can be alluded to, manipulated, or ignored by specific authors writing specific texts. There may be absent reasons or motivations for the plot’s instantiation. This is a convention for the thriller genre in general, which often uses references to

pre-existing fears for the development within the narrative of exciting, fast-paced plots, but in relation to the Troubles, it might point to a deliberate omission.

The coding procedure undertaken in this study was interpretative and iterative, and led to the identification of sub-categories of genre, plot and characterisation. This process produced the information about:

• content transformation (semiotic and coding exercise)

• relationships between author-as-producer and author-as-reader (the coding exercise shows how the genre developed diachronically)

• range in genre-spectrum at any given point (synchronic)

Once the specific data elements were coded in each novel, it was possible to read novels against each other synchronically (what representations are in circulation at any given moment?), and diachronically (do the representations, produced by novelists, and editors, and published by publishers, change over time? In what ways are these representations changed?). At this point the semiotic categories of

paradigms and syntagms were used to compare and contrast the set of texts. Reading a large data set allows for the identification of overall conventions, against which particular paradigm choices can be mapped. Particular syntagmatic chains can be mapped against the possible syntagms gleaned from coding the large data set.

Semiotic analysis here does not form the basis of an interpretative approach which searches for “hidden messages”, but is used to identify existing codes and

conventions within a narrow set of texts.