The “Unspeakableness” of Life in Northern Ireland Anna Burns’s Milkman

Abstract

The paper discusses Anna Burns’s Milkman, which was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2018, in the context of new Irish fiction which breaks the silence about women’s lives in the Troubles. Like many other Irish women writing fiction or remembering the past, Burns denounces the culture of violence in both communities and portrays the devastating effects it had on the individual lives. The analysis draws on Hayden White’s notion of the scandalous in language in order to demonstrate that in writing about life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the author develops an extraordinary style which combines seemingly contradictory elements such as logorrhea and silence and to argue that Burns develops a form of traumatic realism effectively portraying the mechanisms of insidious trauma (Brown 1995). The paper points to Burns’s affinities with such experimental Irish writers as Laurence Sterne and Eimear McBride and proposes to read her novel as a foreshadowing of the Irish #MeToo campaign.