The Methodological Framework

This study is concerned with methods and interpretation. The first part of the study focused on the conceptual and interpretative frameworks and methodologies used in the secondary critical literature, and established the shifting patterns of critical

approaches over time. The second part of the study focuses on the primary sources, which are analysed using conceptual categories derived from semiotic traditions, and interpreted using models variously derived from the literature reviewed in Chapter Two, Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling”, and a novel adaptation of Hall’s encoding/decoding model.

The methodological framework for this study enables intertextual connections in and through a large data set of Troubles novels in the form of generic codes and conventions to be identified. Specific texts are mapped out in relation to the generic codes and conventions, themselves the product of specific concrete texts. The initial set of generic codes and conventions (plot, theme, characters) have been constructed through reference to the literature of Northern Irish Troubles fiction criticism and an examination of the set of pre-texts identified in Magee’s study. This framework has the flexibility to allow cultural artefacts to be considered as the products of human agency, but also recognises that those human agents always work within the possibilities and limitations of existing societal constructs and constraints.

Rather than adopting a more conventional hermeneutic, interpretative approach, which would explore a few texts carefully chosen from the larger body of texts, so that the choice of texts is in itself an analytical and critical activity, the approach adopted in this study is one which explores patterns and relationships between Troubles fiction texts in a large data set. Although the methodology is designed to limit the space for interpretative hermeneutics as much as possible, it is acknowledged that in any qualitative methodology, interpretative hermeneutics is inevitable.

Troubles fiction has been chosen as an appropriate generic formation through which to actualise the methodology as Troubles fiction is rich in ideological content and contested representational signs because it is based on a real historical conflict. It is a relatively narrow field despite there having been over three hundred novels published. Troubles fiction novels are attempts to symbolically encode elements relating to a real and particular historical moment, which is the subject of controversy. Troubles fiction is a set of texts that is particularly rich because it is particularly open to ideological content. Every text is ideologically grounded, but in political-historical texts, the ideological content is central.

The literature review undertaken in the second chapter of this dissertation provides an initial knowledge base from which it is possible to identify generalised interpretative models of Troubles fiction that grow out of critical studies. Two main interpretative models emerge from an analysis of the secondary literature of Troubles fiction. The first model is one in which Troubles fiction is characterised as being a static site of cultural production in which a narrow range of negative (Rolston, 1989; Titley, 1980) or false (Magee, 2001) stereotypes of the Irish are endlessly reproduced and repeated, with notable exceptions, which are better, more realistic, or more truthful representations of the material circumstances of the conflict, the Irish and Northern Ireland. In general, this view of Troubles fiction emanates from critical writers of the 1970s and 1980s, although it is also a view that Magee’s 2001 book supports. The second dominant interpretative model is one which sees Troubles fiction as a site of cultural production that has experienced a form of cultural rupture as a younger generation of writers critique existing conventional representations, and

re-interprets and rewrites traditional stereotypes and stories. The causes of cultural rupture are variously ascribed to cultural interaction with Britain (Patten, 1995), post- modern globalisation (Pelschiar, 1998), or a form of post-colonial revisionism

(Smyth, 1997). This view is common in the secondary literature of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The view that representation in Troubles fiction is monolithically stereotypical ignores historical changes in the representation of the Troubles in fiction, while the view that representation has been subject to some sort of “cultural rupture” ignores the intertextual relationships between texts that represent the Troubles, and the details of diachronic transformation, focusing instead on a “transformed” set of texts.

This study is based on the assumption that Troubles fiction is, and has been, subject to transformations in representation within a diachronic framework. These transformations can be studied in a systematic way through the analysis of a large data set representative of the full genre spectrum. The systematic study of

transformation reveals that the range of transformations possible is itself constituted and constrained by the larger logonomic system within which the producers and receivers of the texts operate.

Post-structuralist theories of cultural production and reception stress the multivalency of the sign and the polysemic nature of audience reception, while literary criticism and cultural studies often emphasise the dialogic and intertextual nature of webs of discourse, but the problem with these approaches is that they tend towards idealist theoretical perspectives about culture. This study begins from a materialist position regarding the production of popular fiction in capitalist societies,

which is always limited and controlled by material publishing houses, operating within the logonomic constraints of capitalism. As a consequence, it is likely that only a limited range of representations circulates within the public domain and only a limited range of representations is legitimated in the sense of being published. Novels in contemporary Western society are published by publishers whose

motivation is profit. The range of representations circulating at any given synchronic moment will be the product of decisions made by specific publishers, who will be concerned with publishing and circulating representations that they believe will be marketable. People write novels, and facilitate the publishing, distribution and marketing of those novels, but not in the circumstances of their own choosing.

Within any given society at any specific historical juncture, there may be a number of different ideologies circulating in a range of media, published through a variety of different means. The parameters of what is considered marketable, and thus in terms of economic production, acceptable at any given moment in history is a product of changing logonomic systems, themselves a product of material historical changes. Changes and transformations in the ideologies operating in and through cultural production in current western society are asymmetrical. At any synchronic moment, there will be in circulation cultural products which replicate the dominant cultural and generic codes and conventions of the moment, cultural products which modify the dominant codes and conventions and cultural products which challenge.

Using the framework of diachronic transformation allows us to think about authors as both producers of texts and as receivers or consumers of texts, and it begins to be possible to see Troubles fiction authors as possessing knowledge of the

generic conventions of Troubles fiction in advance of creating Troubles fiction novels. Popular genre is important in Troubles fiction, so important that the conventions overflow specific novels and define the categorical mode, Troubles fiction. It is the overflow of generic convention from specific texts to the level of category that Jayne Steel captures in her study of the female stereotype, Vampira. Even in the novels that literary critics are inclined to label as being more “literary”, for example Bernard Mac Laverty’s Cal, the forms and plots derive from popular generic categories. In the case of Cal, the across-the-barricades love story and the thriller elements are structurally and thematically crucial.

This model of the consuming/productive author allows the possibility of revising encoding/decoding interpretative frames to reconstitute the notion of reading positions as being simultaneously reading/writing positions, because in such a model, the author-as-decoder is the pre-condition for the possibility of author-as-encoder. Such a model of encoding/decoding, which reverses the order of elements, has

similarities to Kristeva’s intertextuality in which the text is considered as “a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva, 1986, 37).