Dublin à la Noir: Dermot Bolger’s "The Journey Home"

Abstract

The article discusses the presentation of Dublin in the novel The Journey Home by Dermot Bolger (1990) with reference to both the novel’s historical and socio-economic setting in the 1980s and the literary tradition of urban representations, particularly Charles Dickens and the conventions of noir fiction. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of nonplace (Marc Augé) and site (Edward S. Casey), it argues that the modernization of the city centre and the sprawling of Dublin’s suburbs lead to the transformation of places, understood as locations of history, identity and community, into non-places/sites, i.e. non-differentiated, uniform spaces destructive of a sense of community and political responsibility. An analysis of the descriptions of the city centre and suburbs demonstrates that in the novel the urban setting becomes at once a cause and a reflection of the psychological and social problems of the protagonists. In this way, far from being a passive location of the action, the city becomes an active force, which shapes the lives of the protagonists with the inevitability characteristic of literary noir.