Oldal 18 [18]
OCR
16 | Péter Dolmanyos cling to the idea of the legitimacy of the imperial union and colonial settlement of Ulster.”*! This tangible sense of unresolved historical narrative is also noted by Richard Kirkland in his observation of the pattern of the exhibition in the Ulster Museum. At the time of his enquiry, the institution identified as the “national museum for Northern Ireland”?? would not “stray beyond the post-partition development of Ulster”,?® which he reads as a fragmented narrative and an expression of discontinuity, challenging historical totality, for which condition he employs the term “interregnum’”.** The implications of the term involve other elements beyond the principally suggested temporal ones, with a strong consequence for the sense of identity and the resulting cultural narratives that are eventually characterised by “ellipses, gaps, discontinuities and silences”.*° Such an approach also facilitates the acknowledgement of the simultaneous presence of different traditions and plural narratives, endowing the concept of place with a more dynamic set of features and potentials in its relation to the matter of identity. The (post)colonial situation of Ireland, however, poses a number of questions due to the particular position of Ireland relative to other former colonies. While the postcolonial approach to modern Ireland is frequently employed in critical discourse, it does not happen without questioning it at the same time, therefore it is important to point out some decisive elements that set the country apart in terms of its colonial experience. As Lloyd sums up, Ireland is “geographically of Western Europe though marginal to it and historically of the decolonising world, increasingly assimilated to that Europe, while in part still subject to a dissimulated colonialism.”*’ Though his list does not include the explicit reference to a shared western Christian cultural foundation and some clearly identifiable ethnic relations, the association of Ireland with Europe as a concept implies these elements as well, which eventually represent a significant set of differences compared to colonies located on other continents. This atypicality of the Irish (post)colonial experience requires caution when applying concepts regularly used in postcolonial discourse, even in the case of the term “hybridity” which appears to have more relevance than others to describe certain aspects of contemporary Irish culture and does even more so in the context of Northern Ireland. The most intriguing consequence, however, of this distinct colonial heritage is discernible in connection with the concept of place: “[w]ith peculiar intensity, Irish culture plays out the 31 Fadem, The Literature of Northern Ireland, 46 32 Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), 1 33 Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 2 34 cf. Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 7 35 Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, 11 36 cf. Sarah Fulford, Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 18-22 37 David Lloyd, Anomalous States. Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), 2
