| For insurgent states, particularly states under colonialism like Ireland, part of the crisis of independence movements involves the control of national narrative: the collective envisioning of the nation. In this project, the narrative modes identified by Bahktin are applied to certain varieties of insurgent national narrative, as seen in twentieth-century Irish literature. Connecting several stories which describe the developing subjectivities of Irish adolescent characters, I read these stories as versions of this developing national narrative. The adolescent under colonialism faces a cultural crisis which resembles the oedipal dynamic articulated by Freud and refigured for the colonial subject by Fanon. The negotiation of this dynamic produces articulations of self and nation which fall into three narrative modes: epic, which posits a homogenous sense of nation and is often performed in violence; novel, which expresses a sense of the colonized nation as a post-lapsarian, hybridized space; and romance, which endlessly defers the traditional envisioning of the nation, but within that deferment reinscribes the politics of sexuality. |
