I shall discuss three binary oppositions that characterize Deane’s wresde with Irish identity, reading Reading in the Dark as an artistic expression of the political ideas found in Deane ‘ s nonfiction. Deane seeks to find new, less-destructive approaches to these categories and the complex, heart-wrenching conflicts they represent. Although ultimately impossible to eliminate, such binaries form a destructive model of Irish identity. When these binaries are aligned with good/evil, for example, and then used to construct identity, they can be and, indeed, have proven destructive. Deane explores key binary oppositions that make up Irish identity, including Irish/English and Catholic/Protestant, that are inherited from history and per petuated in present-day Ireland. Binary oppositions are pairings of opposites-such as black/white, good/evil, masculine/ feminine-that allow for simplistic identification. Īs with many perceptions of identity, the model for Irish identity explored by Deane is built on binary oppositions. Rather, Deane illustrates-char is, gives an aesthetic form to-the problems and paradoxes of defining Irish identity. But in Reading in the Dark, Deane is nor attempting a simple reconstruction, or rereading, of Ireland ‘ s history in the darkness of the present. It therefore may be tempting to read Reading in the Dark as a movement to produce a nationalist recon struction of Ireland’s history. The boy’s search for identity parallels author Seamus Deane ‘s broader attempt in his nonfiction to explore the mystery of Ireland ‘s past and its present identity, an attempt which is particularly evident in Deane’s political work in the Field Day enterprise¹. For the boy, knowing himself requires knowing and situating himself in his family’s history and Ireland’s history, both of which prove to be elusive. The story is concerned with the complexities of how we know, particularly how we know ourselves. He uncovers only a partial picture of the truth as he tries to put together the tragic, mysterious past of his family. The image of reading in the dark expresses the difficulty of reconstructing the past from fragmen tary accounts available in the present: the narrator’s family history “came to in bits, from people who rarely recognized all they had told” (236). The novel takes its title from a scene in which the boy, after the lights are turned off, tries to imagine the story he had been reading. As the boy stumbles through the complexities and ironies of the adult world, he slowly increases in social and politic al awareness.
In Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Deane presents us with the childhood of an unnamed narrator who tells the story of his troubled family in postwar Northern Ireland.
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