History as narrative, silence, and games of ‘seeing as’

‘Hauntings are, in their way, very specific. Everything has to be exact, even the vaguenesses.’ So
reflects the protagonist of Seamus Deane’s novel, Reading in the Dark. Deane calls upon readers to
read the ellipses in the novel, and yet challenges them in their readings while doing so. History as
narrative is repressed, played with, and shouldered as an immense burden. Set in the Catholic working-
class community in 1940s-50s Derry, Northern Ireland, split by sectarian conflict after the Anglo-Irish
Treaty in 1922, the narrator is presented as reader. His interaction with narrative prompted my own
questions. Can you ‘choose’ past narratives of history? What are the emotional repercussions when
equating narrative with truth or beliefs of representation?

The playful title hints at the limitless interpretations of the reader when reading in the dark and rewriting
a historical plot. The protagonist’s desire for narrative spills over in an interaction of imagination and
understanding, a ‘game of seeing as’, as Noël Carroll has noted. As a child, the narrator thinks
counterfactually by displacing Robert, the leader of the 1798 Rebellion and the hero of The Shan Van
Vocht tale, with himself. The narrator dissuades himself from fighting because of his lover Ann’s beauty,
rewriting the tale’s sacrificial and nationalist politics. In a lovely moment, he lies in bed with the book
open on his chest, subsuming the story under both his reciprocal understanding (the need for Robert to
fulfil his political duty), and his imagination (a romantic obstacle preventing Robert from leaving). He
flirts with narrative without ever asserting it to be fact.

Deane encumbers the protagonist’s search for why his uncle Eddie disappeared. Intricate choices are
made between ‘various alliances’ of voices in his head, leading to the finding that his mother’s father
executed his uncle Eddie, his father’s brother, in the mistaken belief that Eddie was an informer who
betrayed his family. The knowledge that his mother’s previous lover was the traitor that had set up
Eddie for execution, only results in further silence. Even in the chapter, ‘All of It?’ the narrator and the
reader conspire to fill in a recreated past, described as a ‘cunning labyrinth’ that exceeds hearing and
understanding, even language. The narrator keeps his knowledge from his father, a way of ‘loving them
[his parents] both.’ The chapters form uneven, dated instalments, interspersed with Irish folklore about
disappearing spirits. Following Carroll’s concept of the ‘constructive imagination’, Deane’s discourse
or syuzhet, seems to invite us to sew together an intelligible story world through explicit and implicit
information. As I read it, I was conscious of my stitching of the text through my own disposition, and
experiences of family, secrets. Even Deane’s childhood picture on the cover of the 1997 Knopf edition
provokes the reader to question the extent of memoir in an enigmatic, opaque text.

Perhaps the most painful moment in the novel was the silencing of narrative. The narrator’s mother
descends into an incoherent grief and hostility towards the narrator as she is burdened by his knowledge
of her own father’s role in her brother-in-law’s death, and her part in allowing the real informer, her
past lover, to escape. This repression of narrative leads to his mother’s mental breakdown, when the
narrator longs to simultaneously bear his mother’s animalistic sobbing and yet transform it into ‘words,
words, words.. no more of this ceaseless noise…’ As his mother begins to speak in a strange, ‘clear and
young’ voice, the narrator reads it as her confession in being in love with someone else, not his father.
He engages futilely in what Shaun Nichols terms ‘dispositional imagination’ as his mother’s hostility
towards him seems to dissolve when she has a stroke and loses the power of speech. They ‘could love
each other, at last.’ Engaging in imagination about narratives of the past may be a playful act of
interpretation, or resistance to any one reading. But Deane also suggests that the repression of narrative,
or its equation with truth or fact, is alienating, unresolved and fragmented by ghosts.