“The Art of the ‘Good Step’ in Colm Tóibín’s Bad Blood : A Walk Along the Irish Border(1987)”.

Résumé En

"The art of the 'good step' in Colm Tóibín's Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (1987)." In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit emphasized how the action of walking generated a unity of the body, the soul and the landscape: Walking […] is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart […] Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes making a chord. (Solnit 5) In her words, the apparent paradox between intention and unwilled actions made walking a unique way to apprehend a territory, favouring active and mobile interactions capable of adapting to the various terrains or situations. The territory examined in this paper is the contested space of the Irish border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and more specifically the account given by author and journalist Colm Tóibín of a three-month journey along the border in 1986. The nature of this borderland corresponds to Homi Babbha's definition of 'thirdspace' as a place of invention and transformational encounters, a dynamic in-between space that is imbued with the traces, relays, ambivalence, ambiguities and contradictions with the feelings and practices of both sites, to fashion something different, unexpected. (Bhabha 1994) We will therefore focus on the ambiguities and paradoxes Tóibín invariably stumbles upon in his book and question the transformational nature of his journey, especially its capacity to welcome the unexpected. To what extent does the invisibility of the border in some places and the palpable tension in parts of the territory open out creative possibilities, as artists choose to inhabit the blurred spaces and create horizons of reconciliation and re-connection? In the light of anthropologist Tim Ingold's work on lines and walking, we will discuss how in walking along the border Tóibín uncovered new meanings that might have been concealed or simply not been expressed in dominant discourses. Tóibín followed a specific method to walk along a violently contested space. In turn, we will follow the sometimes invisible line of the border he uncovers in his text. Just as 'thirdspace argues for the breakdown of binaries, and the emergence of anOther , a third space of enunciation and political and cultural resistance'