The shadows of exclusion : ideology and the literary text

Abstract

Three texts (journalistic , cinematic and literary) are analysed,using propositions derived from Althuss er and Macherey, to indicate their relationship to the historical circumstances of their production. The analysis of the narrative structure of a ( Northern Irish) literary t ext constructs from the 'disorder' of the text the form of a significant missing term by which the disorder might be transcended, but a term rendered unseen by the problematic of the ideology which the text puts to work. The absent term is shown t o be the fictive (non) representation of one of the terms of an ideological con tradiction based on irreconciliable class positions within the Northern Irish Catholic social formation. The narrative o f the text is shown to be the fictive transposition of a real contradiction recast into the form of its preconstituted resolution within Catholic Nationalist ideology . It is proposed that the literary text reflects history as it is 'lived' in ideology. Historical contradictions are reflected in the text in the (recast ) form of their simultaneous resolution within the terms of the ideology which the text uses, i.e. , as the absence of contradiction. At the same time the text is seen to reveal to criticism - in its internal dissonances - the inadequacies of the ideological resolution and thereby to reveal , at its margins, the excluded terms of a real historical contradiction. The text may thus be seen as both reflection o f historical contradictions and the absence o f such a reflection .