Richard J. Haslam

‘The Pose Arranged and Lingered Over’: Visualizing the ‘Troubles’

At one point in Eoin McNamee’s 1994 novel Resurrection Man Heather Graham fears being murdered by her lover, the sectarian killer, Victor Kelly. She envisages a pulp detective magazine, its cover a photograph of her naked corpse with ‘abandoned limbs and parted lips, the pose arranged and lingered over’.1 This image, fusing voyeurism and artifice, is one of many in which McNamee knowingly alludes to the ethical and stylistic questions facing a writer who wishes to depict scenes of violence. What pose should the prose assume? What forms of lingering are exhibited by the author and induced in the reader? As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have noted, the representation of violence can reveal the potential violence of acts of representation.2 That is to say, representation involves not only artistic, ideological and technical choices, but also ethical dilemmas. Does the writer do justice or violence to his or her subject? Does the critic do justice or violence to the writer? In what follows, I want to suggest some possible answers to the first question by considering the ethical concerns and narrative anxieties generated by the visualization of political violence in Bernard Mac Laverty’s Cal (1983) and McNamee’s Resurrection Man. As for the second question, I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions.