Ben Sherman shirts versus beige chinos? Are you a Devils bit or a Heineken drinker? Do you possess body artwork that possibly says, mammy or Aslan or sports the crest of your favourite soccer team? Are you designed with Adidas and Lizzy Duke bling? Or on the other hand within your wallet is there a Brown Thomas/Butlers loyalty card and a treasured Leinster season ticket. These are not questions that have divided our nation but a symbol of identity, specifically a Dublin identity. The slight mispronunciation of “car” as “cor” signals not alone that you are a Dubliner but more importantly that you are from the south of the Liffey.
A Dublin city identity and its inhabitants are what drive the pages of The Undecidable: Jacques Derrida and Paul Howard. I have attempted to script a narrative that ultimately investigates what our contemporary twenty-first century Dublin self is. The pages unfold by opening up a dialogue between Paul Howard, aka Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction, in order to provide a not so serious account of our Dublin self from the Celtic Tiger to its aftermath. What makes a person who says “Ah Jaysus” different from or similar to a “like HELLO” person where everything is like, oh my God and “roysh” is no longer “right”?
Indeed, I have used Howard’s fictional satirical depiction of Dublin as, in my opinion, he is the only writer in the last decade to capture what Dublin and its people are truly like. To borrow the famed Joycean analogy of the looking glass, Howard held up a mirror to the face of the Celtic Tiger and set in ink its reflection. Although these boundaries of identity that divide north from south Dublin are merely constructs and are amplified within Howard’s characters, I have used these “larger than life” individuals in order to deconstruct and prove how unstable this distinctiveness is.
For instance, at points within the fictional series Ross’s southside persona becomes fused with aspects of the northside. He has had a son with a woman from the northside of Dublin, his father spends time in prison, and he ends up being unemployed and having to work for a living. He also spends time living beside “poor people” whereas Ross describes their runners must have ‘cost the price of a week’s holiday somewhere’ (Howard, 2010). His southside position within the opposition north and south becomes fused with aspects of a north side identity, thus, making the geometry that divides north and south not so different.
[ The Undecidable: Jacques Derrida and Paul Howard (Cambridge Scholars, £36.99)Opens in new window ]
