The Obscurity of Written Graffiti in ‘Belfast Confetti’ and ‘Eureka Street’

This paper is an investigation into the role and representation of political graffiti within Ciaran Carson’s ‘Belfast Confetti’ and Robert McLiam Wilson’s ‘Eureka Street’. In the context of Northern Ireland, the symbolism behind written graffiti has often been overlooked in favour of murals. However, by relating written graffiti to Edmund Burke’s understanding of obscurity, this study proposes that a productive critical encounter can be found within these missives. Drawing on ‘Belfast Confetti’ and ‘Eureka Street’, this paper employs the Burkean sublime to illustrate how written graffiti in Northern Ireland makes “known” what, according to Guy Debord, is the “unknowable” face of terrorism. Furthermore, the paper will illustrate that whilst ‘Belfast Confetti’ is apposite at outlining the mechanisms by which written graffiti becomes an important symbolic discourse within Belfast; ‘Eureka Street’ focuses on the effects of written graffiti to calcify the novel’s critique of Belfast’s violent culture. As this suggests, these texts do not simply serve as case studies within a broader investigation of written graffiti. Rather the written graffiti within these texts contributes to their function as pieces of Irish Writing. Ultimately, this relationship is brought into sharp focus when the conclusions to ‘Belfast Confetti’ and ‘Eureka Street’ are read in conjunction. Through such an alignment, moreover, these texts appear trapped in a double-bind between art and politics: at once subverting the political effect of Belfast’s written graffiti, while simultaneously replicating its violent strategies.