Lost Futures: Hauntedness, Memory and Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

This article examines the haunted nature of Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane. The primary focus of reading is through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology which he discusses in Specters of Marx. The novel is given to anachronism and moments of inertia as the past constantly intrudes upon the present moment of the characters lives. The inhabitants of the city are haunted by the past, which in the novel is referred to as the ‘lost time’, and are unable to move towards a future free from the shackles of memory, tradition and violence. Indeed, Mark Fisher’s thinking on the twenty-first century is important to consider in the context of his writing on hauntology and lost futures. While the characters are bound to the ‘lost time’ they are by implication prone to lost futures as they cannot escape the past as it sutures itself within the present moment in new and different forms. The only futures that they can attain are lost futures.