Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian's Diaries and Walter Benjamin's 'Theses'

It seems important at this point in the conversation on Medbh McGuckian to look at her prose. This article close reads two autobiographical pieces, the diaries ‘Women are Trousers’ (2000) and ‘Rescuers and White Cloaks: Diary, 1968 – 69’ (2001). The focus here is the form: I consider these diaries as diaries, war diaries particularly, crafted through a poetics of the fragment in a close reading in which their performative functionality is contemplated together with contexts, principally the relation to history that founds the diary and the specific era, Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. These texts are not merely remarkable literary achievements but remarkable in being strikingly analogous to Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. While McGuckian names her form, in fact her texts push back on every boundary of it and, familiar from the poems, all expectations of craft and language. All this is true of Benjamin’s text: while we understand the ‘Theses’ to be philosophical writings, they are as abstruse and literary as McGuckian’s. These peculiar, fragmentary texts are generically esoteric and they are so in extraordinarily similar ways. I consider both authors as literary artists in order to suss out the rich and efficacious insights that come in ‘forgetting’, if temporarily, that Benjamin was a philosopher and ‘hearing’ him as the literary artist he (also) was, next to literary artist Medbh McGuckian.