Communities under Erasure in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996)
Communities under Erasure in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996)

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), showing that the lingering presence of ghosts on the brink between death and life signals that the work of mourning for history’s victims is incomplete and that the immunity of communities erected on sacrificial violence is provisional, at most. The plethora of ghosts besieging the narrator’s conscience, with their constant threat of erasing the boundaries that keep the entities of family, community and nation intact, appears to encapsulate the foreignness that needs extrication in order to preserve the purity of these communal structures. However, as the spectral reinstantiations of former members of these communities, these ghosts betray a disquieting familiarity that insistently reveals the fragility and volatility of communal bonds.

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