Traumatizing Images of Belfast in Mary Costello’s Novel Titanic Town

Abstract

This chapter focuses on mental images of traumatic experiences in Mary Costello’s semi-autobiographic novel Titanic Town, published in 1992. The action is set in Belfast in the 1970s, during the most violent period of the Northern Irish conflict somewhat euphemistically referred to as the Troubles. In the novel, the city of Belfast is described as a place in which “trauma is the shared reality” (Costello 1992: 227). While the plot is inspired by the author’s adolescence in Republican West Belfast, the book was actually written in Melbourne, where Costello has lived since her emigration to Australia in 1981 (Caterson 1994: 6). The action is told from the perspective of Annie McPhelimy, a young girl growing up in the midst of the Troubles with her younger siblings Sinead, Thomas, and Brendan. The novel shows the different ways in which the city, as the center of violence, enters the life of children and adolescents. Its focus lies on the traumatic images that are generated in the protagonist’s mind. In the following chapter, a traumatizing image or picture will be conceived as “a picture of the mind” (2005: xiv). According to W. J. T. Mitchell, a mental picture is “the imagination or memory of an embodied consciousness” in which “a state of affairs” is projected (2005: xiv). Mitchell’s perception of a picture as a mental image can be seen as an extension of Heffernan’s reading of an image as “a verbal representation of a visual representation” (1993: 3). Mitchell explains that the word “image” is “notoriously ambiguous” as it can denote both a “physical object” such as a painting or a sculpture, or a “mental, imaginary entity,” which he calls a “psychological image” (2005: 2). This mental image he sees as the “visual content of dreams, memories and perceptions” (2005: 2). Mitchell further states that a picture does not present the world as is it, but the world as it is “conceived and grasped” by its observer (2005: xiv). Apart from Mitchell’s “picture of the mind,” Kevin Lynch’s concept of “mental maps” (1983) will guide our analysis of Titanic Town. Lynch’s “mental maps” can be compared to Mitchell’s “pictures of the mind” (1983: 1–2). However, they differ from Mitchell’s concept in the sense that they specifically refer to the cognitive perception of urban space. According to Lynch, citizens have personal “mental images” of their environment, which are “soaked in memories and meanings” (1983: 1–2). In the context of Costello’s novel, the traumatic “mental