under the umbrela

In story we believe…..BY L.H.R. Msc Psychology*

ABSTRACT
I use narrative to analyse a film, In the Name of the Father (Sheridan, 1993), and an autobiography, Prove innocent (Conlon, 1989). Particularly, for the film, which is a semiotic entity, I use Barthes’ praxis of narrative to analyse. To the autobiography, I applied the concepts in narrative psychology. History as a background of a narrative is a narrative itself. Narrative as new paradigm is in a polemic position. It is against or to complete positivism that implied in the modernist project. It seems logically in line with Derrida’s hermeneutics which proposes the process of interpretation is the changing of the contexts and is the process of difference.

I think this stance give the global world a suitable mentality, but have the possibility of binary thinking. Because in the story it often has protagonist/antagonist structure which is not only simplify the reality, but also maintain the conflict between communities.

Key Words: narrative, Northern Ireland,film, autobiography

1. INTRODUCTION

This dissertation has two form of narrative, one is autobiography and another is a film. The autobiography is titled 'Proved Innocent' (Conlon, 1989). The film is 'In the Name of the Father' (Sheridan, 1993). The film is based on the autobiography. Both the book and the film are about the first proved case of miscarriage of justice of IRA bombing.
From narrative point of view, the autobiography is a first person narrative while the film can be seen as a semiotic entity. Narrative is a general category and a developing concept. From narratology to narrative psychology, narrative can be just a structural language or the delicate model to approach subjectivity.
Both narratives are related a contemporary Northern Ireland history. History is the factor of subjectivity and also written in a structural language. It is necessary in this introduction to provide the historical background to locate us to understand both narratives in the film and in the autobiography.

1.1 Historical background

Plantation of Ulster
It is indisputable that the colonial plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century is the cause of the existence of Northern Ireland and the conflict within. (O’Leary & McGarry, 1996)

The pre-Plantation of Ulster is not a political unity; rather it is reigned by various Gaelic kings bestowed feudal earldoms by English monarchy. (Curtis, 1965)

After nine years war, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Rory O’Donnel, Earl of Tyrconnel and Cúconnacht Magquire, Lord of Fermanagh sailed from Longh Swilly, never to return. This is called ‘Flight of the Earls’, which cleared the way for the Ulster plantation. The estates of the earls were declared forfeit to the Crown. (O’Brien & O’Brien, 1972) Before long, the old policy of changing Ulster through a slow process of anglicising it’ native population was abandoned in favour of a through colonisation by Englishmen (Anglicans) and lowland Scots (Presbyterian), which would both instantly anglicise much of the socio-agricultural framework of the area and help to achieve the original goal sooner, by transmitting ‘civility’ and ‘true religion’ to the natives at first hand. (Clarke, 1976) The settlers of seventeenth century Ulster Plantation are called ‘new English’ to be distinguished from ‘old English’ which is the descendants of the Norman conquerors at twelfth century.

By 1641, Protestants owned 41 percent of the land and held a majority of the seats in both house of the Irish parliament. During Cromwell period, the Catholic land was wholesale confiscation. After the defeat of the supporters of Catholic king James II, further confiscation happened. By 1703, the Irish Catholics only owned 14 per cent of the land in Ulster. (Ruane & Todd, 1996) The religious conflict in seventh-century England, when extended to Ireland, to give a special prominence, not so much to the religion as such, but to the religious domination as the badge distinguishing exploiter from exploited.

‘The Protestant ascendancy’ existed though the long eighteenth century. Northern Ireland was owned and administered by new English Protestant oligarchy with their own parliament in Dublin. (O’Leary & Mc Garry, 1996)

Eighteenth-century Catholics were much less a single community than either Anglicans or Presbyterians. The vest majority were locality-centred in their concern and consciousness. Catholic church was politically repressed and stayed at local level. If there was any united feeling, it was a shared sense of displacement and subordination. (Ruane & Todd, 1996)

Eighteenth century Presbyterians as a group was disadvantaged by the theological and political opposition of the Anglican establishment. Politically, their status can be seen as a middle group between Anglican and Catholic.

From 1820s the evangelical movement was forging links across the Protestant denominations. Later in the nineteenth century industrialisation (particular in Belfast) brought closer and more intimate.

The industrialisation in the nineteenth century helped Catholics extended its middle and lower-middle-class, which conditioned the possibility of political mobilisation to achieve ‘Catholic emancipation’ and repeal in the 1820s and 1840s. Such a single political identity was reinforced by the movement of the ‘Devotional Revolution’ gave Catholics a standard religious practice therefore a religious unity and discipline.

‘By the late nineteenth century the nineteenth century the structural preconditions existed for the emergence of just two communities, one Protestant, one Catholic. All that was need was a catalyst.’ (Ruane & Todd, 1996, p.36)
This catalyst is home rule.

The home rule bill
In the 1880s, Irish politics were transformed by the constitutionalist movement. Home rule movement was led by Charles Stewart Parnell and represented in parliament at Westminster by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). The success of IPP at 1885 general election converted William Ewart Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party and four times British Prime Minister.(Buckland, 1981)

Gladstone’s home rule bill planed a local assembly charged with responsibility for Ireland’s internal affairs, while Westminster retained control of such areas as foreign affair, armed forces, currency, security, and major taxation.(Loughlin, 1998)

The campaign of home rule bill can be seen as a political movement mixed nationalism and religious bigotry. For the Protestants, their slogan: ’Home rule equals Rome Rule’, which is not only embodiment of their hostile opinion that Roman Catholic as a backward religion, but also of their ‘nationalism’. The Protestants is strongly grouped together opposed the idea of Home Rule, as the Catholics politically mobilised in a unity.

Partition and the birth of Northern Ireland
After the first war, the failing of the home rule, Easter Rising and the independent war led by Michael Collins, the British government decided the partition as the solution of Ireland problem.

The Partition started at May 1921, and created a 26-county Irish Free State which gave it dominion status like Canada. Rest of the northeast Six Counties remain under British rule. The former later became Republic of Ireland and the latter is Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland’s sovereignty was retained in Westminster, as was responsibility for defence, foreign policy and other UK concerns. London left most Northern Ireland matters in the hands of the new Stormont government.

Partition separated Northern Ireland with the majority of Protestants from which the south of Ireland with majority of Catholics.
After Partition, the Stormont government was dominant by Protestant politicians. Premier Craig chose to consolidate the power of Protestant community enormously, which had far-reaching impact on Northern Ireland. He adopted policies that changed the electoral system from PR to First Past the Post. He also altered local government boundaries to the advantage of unionism enabling his party to control the Catholics city of Londonderry. In order to maintain control, the Six Counties was turned into a police state, and institutionalised discrimination against Catholics, denying them equal access to votes, jobs, and housing.

Civil right movement
The civil rights campaign began in the mid-1960s as an attempt to draw attention to grievances felt by Catholics community in Northern Ireland. It began with the techniques of a pressure group, letters campaign and pamphlets publishing. The letters and pamphlets set out their case that Catholics in the region were experiencing disadvantages in relation to public sector housing and jobs, and also because of certain electoral practices.

The campaign only became a mass movement when public demonstrations were organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). Initial demonstrations passed off peacefully although they were opposed by Loyalists who felt the campaign was a cover for Republicans who wanted to end the Northern Ireland state rather than reform it. The situation accelerated when a march are organized in Derry on 5 October 1968. The march was banned and when the 400 people taking part tried to precede in defiance of the ban the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) used batons to break up the march. The police action was filmed and Nationalist opinion was outraged to such an extent that the next march over the same route attracted over 10,000 people.

Further conflict in 1969 led to the British government taking the decision to deploy troops on the streets of Northern Ireland. The British troop landed in Northern Ireland caused the rejuvenated militant republicanism and the emergence of the Provisional IRA. This in turn prompted violence from Protestant loyalist militants. To respond the situation, the Stormont government persuaded London to use internment as a solution.

Internment
At dawn on Monday 9 August 1971, 3,000 soldiers swooped on houses throughout Northern Ireland and arrested over 300 men. Within hours rioting and shooting had broken out in Belfast and spread to Derry, Strabane, Armagh and Newry. At 11.15am that morning Faulkner, Northern Ireland's third Prime Minister, announced that his government was at war with the terrorists.

Many internees were severely beaten, deprived of food and sleep and subjected to white noise. Detainees thought likely to have important information were physically weakened through sleep deprivation. They were then spread-eagled for hours against a wall with hoods over their heads and subjected to disorientating electronic white noise.

Thousands of people had been forced to leave their homes in Belfast because of sectarian attacks and many left for refugee camps across the border. Internment not only provoked more violence. It galvanised support for the IRA and enabled republicans to raise money in the United States. It also led to hundreds of street demonstrations one of which culminated in Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday is named after the events that occurred on Sunday 30 January 1972 when British soldiers shot dead 13 men and injured 14 others. The killings took place in the predominantly Catholics city of Londonderry.

The victims had been taking part in an illegal march against internment without trial. It had been organised by NICRA and was both a protest against internment and a protest against the ban on the right to march.

Beforehand, for the march should pass off peacefully, the organisers had sought and received assurances from the IRA that it would withdraw from the area during the march.

On the day of the march some 10,000 people had gathered in Creggan Estate and proceeded towards Guildhall Square in the centre of the city. Loyalist Para-troopers had sealed off the approaches to the square and the march organisers, in order to avoid trouble, led most of the demonstrators towards Free Derry Corner in the Bogside. Groups of local youths stayed behind at the army barricades to confront the soldiers. The soldiers’ orders were to move in and arrest as many of the rioters as possible. At 4.07pm 1 Paratrooper requested permission to arrest rioters. At 4.10pm soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Less than 30 minutes later 13 civilians were dead.

The soldiers claimed that they had been fired on as they moved in to make arrests.

The killings provoked outrage. The British Embassy in Dublin was burned down and a Republican MP, Bernadette Devlin, physically attacked the Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons.

Direct Rule
Following Bloody Sunday there was a rise in support for the republicans of Northern Ireland. In February the British Embassy in Dublin was burnt. As a result, in March the Northern Ireland government was suspended - Northern Ireland was to be directly ruled from Westminster. Although day-to-day matters are still handled by government departments within Northern Ireland itself, major policy is determined by the British Government's Northern Ireland Office, under the direction of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and legislation is introduced, amended, or repealed by means of order in council (effectively, rule by decree). Catholics welcomed the fall of Stormont but the IRA saw direct rule as further evidence of British intent to remain in Northern Ireland and they stepped up their bombing campaign.

IRA’s campaign in mainland
The first IRA attacks on England came in 1939. But it was more than 30 years later in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday in 1972 that a new campaign began.

At this period, so called Northern Ireland trouble time, the first bomb detonated at the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment, whose soldiers had opened fire and killed 13 nationalist protesters in Londonderry.

A year later, the Provisional IRA sent its first unit to London.

The first and still one of the most infamous operations involved sisters Dolores and Marion Price and nine others who placed four car bombs in London on 8 March 1973. One of which was outside the Old Bailey, exploded, killing one man and injuring some 180 other people.

Guildford and Woolwich bombing
This bombing belong to a series of IRA bombing campaign which was planed to be conducted at main land England to increase the power of Republican’s political muscle.

On 5 October bombs were placed in two Guildford pubs, the Horse & Groom and the Seven Stars. Both were popular with young Guard recruits from Pirbright and Aldershot, girls from WRAC training camp at Stoughton, near Guildford. The Horse and Groom bomb exploded at 8.30 p.m., killing five people, including four army recruits, and injuring many more. By the time the Seven Stars bomb went off an hour later the landlord had cleared his pub, and there were no casualties.

One month later, at 10.00 on 7 November, a bomb was hurled into the King’s Arms in Woolwich, opposite the Royal Artillery depot. Two people were killed and there were many injuries. (Woffinden, 1987)
Guildford and Woolwich led to another two cases of miscarriage of justice: the Guildford four and Maguire seven. The case of Guildford is the resource of the topic of this dissertation.

Balcombe Street Gang/Unit
Following the failure of secret talk between the IRA and the British government and the collapse of the IRA's 1974-1975 ceasefire, a fresh campaign began, led by a four-man who became known as the "Balcombe Street Gang/Unit". Joe O’Connell, Edward Butler, Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty carried out a wave of bombings detonating their first ten devices in just five days.
The gang/unit also killed Ross McWhirter, the co-editor of the Guinness Book of Records, after he had offered £50,000 for information leading to the arrest of the team.

However, after a botched attack on a Mayfair restaurant, the four men took local residents hostage (in an apartment on Balcombe Street) and began a tense stand-off with the police. After six days, the four surrendered.

The men were charged with 10 murders and 20 bombings and jailed for life.

During the trial they claimed responsibility for the Guildford pub bombings and another incident in Woolwich, acts which were not added to the list of charges.

Ceasefire
The bombings of Bishopsgate and Warrington were to heighten a sense of fear in English cities over the capabilities of the IRA. Then, on December 15, 1993, a Downing Street statement made by the British prime minister, John Major, and the Irish taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, agree in principle on talks on the future of Northern Ireland. Any party that "renounces violence" is invited to take part, opening the way for Sinn Féin if it can prove the IRA is committed to giving up its weapons.
1994, the IRA announces a ceasefire in August and Loyalist groups follow suit in October. The first formal talks between the British government and Sinn Féin begin in December.
At 7.01pm on 9 February 1996, the IRA ended its ceasefire with a massive bomb at London's Canary Wharf offices development, killing two men and causing at least £85m of damage. Then, as the prospects for some kind of political talks appeared fragile, the IRA bombed Manchester's Arndale Shopping Centre - injuring 200 people and creating so much damage that it took years to rebuild the area.
1997, the IRA announces a second ceasefire in July.

The Good Friday Agreement
In May 1997 the Labour Party leader Tony Blair took power with a massive parliamentary majority. He quickly set about drawing Sinn Féin into the political process. By mid-June, the demand for decommissioning prior to Sinn Féin’s entry into talks was dropped. The IRA declared another ceasefire on 20 July 1997, and Sinn Féin entered the talks on 9 September. In April the chairman of the talks, George Mitchell, set a target date of 9 April for an agreement in order to facilitate a referendum in May. A copy of the Good Friday Agreement was delivered to every home in Northern Ireland in April 1998. It had five main constitutional provisions. First, Northern Ireland’s future constitutional status was to be in the hands of its citizens. A referendum was held on 22 May to ratify the Agreement. Seventy-one per cent of Northern Ireland’s voters supported the Agreement. (Darby, 2003)
After solving decommission issue with both loyalist and republican’s paramilitaries, now policing is the next agenda need to be finished.
History has intimate relation with politics; the interpretation of history is a tool of control, a way of taking a stand, and a method of resistance.

In the history of Northern Ireland, because of the complicated political situation, the history is also very complicated.

Therefore, there are two issues at stake here; the first is history itself, which is not the chronicle but a narrative arranging events and the second is what represented to us as fact actually is composed of competing narratives.

History as a narrative is created by human being and affected by human factor like culture or language.

Now, let's have a close look at what is narrative.

1.2.

Narrative

and narrative methodology

in book and film

Narrative

Narrative as a new paradigm

Narrative belongs to a movement of paradigm shift in human science. In the post-positivism, post-modern era, the objective aspect and the concept of universal truth seemed problematic. Narrative study looks at and looks for the diverse, historically concrete stories and focuses on social, discursive and culture forms of life. Study human science in narrative way challenges longstanding psychological and social-scientific efforts of elaborating a body of authoritative knowledge like that of classical natural science. (Hinchman and Hinchman, 1997)

The object experience doesn’t exist; unlike the claim of positivists and modernist, there is not an objective reality out there, and only some people have way to access it. Although narrative is seemed as an alternative paradigm to break the 'grand theory', there are still some persistent fallacies in narrative analysis. So, before say what narrative is, let's discuss what narrative is not.

In Brockmeier and Harre’s study (2001), there are two fallacies resist in narrative research:

First,

the ontology fallacy, narrative study does not have meta-linguistic existence. Much of the metalinguistic framework within which the study of language has been pursued since antiquity has laid a trap. When examining words, sentences, and propositions, it is easy to treat these categories as real exist. (Harris, 1996)

‘Words, sentence, proposition, and meaning are imposed categories. They do not have anything other than a shadowy theoretical existence. From the viewpoint of discourse (and here that means “language in use”), there is no such thing as an isolated sentence or a proposition.’ (Brockmeier and Harre, 2001, p.46)

This ontological fallacy of meta-linguistic existence can also happen when doing narrative analysis. When we identify certain plot in a narrative, there are always other possibilities to produce different combinations of plots. There is not the 'true story' out there waiting us to discover.

Second,

the representation fallacy, there is no pre-narrative truth to be correctly represented by a certain narrative.
This fallacy is to think that there is a kind of gradation of truth values from the one and true story based on documented facts to the distorted and false story, often based on lies and self-deception. Narrative is not imposed on the experience, rather, narrative is that experience itself.

To identify these fallacies is to make it clear that narrative as a new paradigm is against positivism’s implication of a metaphysical assumption of an accessible reality as a foundation of the only one truth.

Thus, to avoid thinking that narrative ‘as a kind of transformation, or even a translation, of prelinguistic meanings into words and sentences’, and prevent from narrative being ‘conceived as presenting an external version of some particular mental entities floating in a kind of presemiotic state’, Brockmeier and Harre (2001) propose we should think narrative as a mode of operation.

As a mode of operation, narrative is less to do with what script theory (Schank & Abelson, 1975) or role-rule theory (Harre & Secord, 1972) suggest that as an instruction by which individuals are guided, than permeate in the culture in which individual growing up and learning the convention of the narrative. ( Brockmeier and Harre,2001)

We are habituated in our narrative culture and cultural narrative. We listen and enjoy story from very early age. We are educated in stories. Gradually, we grow into a cultural canon of narrative models. The cultural canon makes any particular analogue in a story be appreciated. At the same time, narrative works as an interface between individual self and the cultural. ‘Narratives are both models of the world and the model of the self, it is through our stories that we construct ourselves as part of our world.’ (Brockmeier and Harre, 2001, p.54)

Narrative and time

'time becomes human time to the extent it is organised after the manner of narrative; narrative in turn is meaningful to the extent it portrays the feature of temporal existence'

(Ricoeur,1984, p.3 )

Human experiences are understood in the structure of time: past, present and future. We cannot even experience anything as happening, as present, except against the background of what it succeeds and what we anticipate will succeed it. To a more active level, not only just ‘make sense’, rather is to answer the reason of existing being, e.g. the question: ‘Why am I doing here?’ we inevitably consult past experience and envisage the future. (Carr, 1986)

Personal narratives are like histories which ‘are not only about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that those events can be demonstrated to figured. These sets of relationships are not immanent in the event themselves, rather, they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting upon them.’ (White, 1978)

The sets of relationships are the plots. The plot, exists in the mind of every narrator, decides the selection, evaluation and attribution of the events. (Jacob, 2000) The events we remember because they are fit in our narratives. The plots decide the relationships of events.

Hence the speed of time changed. Sometime we skip the event and time became faster, and sometimes in short time several important events happen intensively so time slow down.

Time makes narrative possible and human being makes time has different frequencies. Moreover, being in time, the cause and the result have opposite emerging order in narrative and in the process of producing such narrative.

The past experience is stored in memory. If the every present experience neither objective nor independent from us, the past memory is more subjectively and temporally unreliable. Like the ability of attention is selective, so is the memory.

The past experiences are constructing our narrative for now. Because our memory is always partial and selective, our narrative is not fixed. When some events suddenly happen to us and have the weigh of changing our life, our narratives will change too. What happens now will change our way of seeing the past experiences.

‘…. in the very act of telling is the idea of starting at the beginning, when in reality “you have started at the end”.’(Freeman, 1993, p.95-96)

This dissertation is examining a book and a film which both contain the same event. Therefore it is necessary to look at each of narrative in books and films.

Narrative methodology in book and film

Narrative methodology in book

Autobiography research

There are two ways of conducting narrative psychology research. One is the researcher rewriting the interview into the autobiographic form, and another is directly using the written autobiography already exists. In this dissertation I use the written autobiography.

Almost all the autobiography is narrative. It is in autobiography that the author is the narrator. Autobiography is the written from of the sense of self or selves. There seems a touchable subject is in the position of author/narrator and travels in memory to tell a coherent life story.

Accountability and autobiographical identity
'Autobiographical identity, as it developed through the autographical process, emerges in line with specific social, historical and discursive conditions regarding the importance of individual as well as the importance of accounting for the life one has led in line with an overarching cultural system of ethical and moral value.' (Freeman and Brockmeier, 2001, P.83)

Autobiographical identity emerges in the accounting of life, by reflecting the accountability in the autobiographical writing, we may find useful approach to autobiographical narrative study.

The first autobiography is Augustine's Confession (1980; originally 397). Like the title suggested, its first personal narrative is the autobiographer's confession. Confession as a religious practice is a self examination. Till now the writing of autobiography continently 'requires that one take stock of one's past, seizing it as something to be weighed, assessed, and evaluated in the light of a normative model of life.' (Freeman and Brockmeier, 2001, p.80)

The accounting of personal narrative not only includes the valuation of the past. It is the situation of the present defines how the autobiographer recalling the past. Weintraub (1975) argues: the autobiographer ' imposes on the past the order of the present. The fact once in the making can now be seen together with the fact in its result. By this superimposition of the completed fact, the fact in the making acquires a meaning it did not possess before. The meaning of the past is intelligible and meaningful in terms of the present understanding; it is thus with all historical understanding' (p.826)

Hart (1969-1970) characterize autobiography work with three distinct intentions: as confess, as memoir, and as self-justification or apology. In anyway, autobiographical writing is always with certain more or less distinct audience in mind. To fulfil those social functions, the personal narrative must be ' in line with an overarching cultural system of ethical and moral value'. (Freeman and Brockmeier, 2001, P.83)

Plot and Characters

Plot is the organising principle of events and fills the content of a narrative. The subject experience the outside world through the function of plot, everything starts to have meaning and cause. Even it is a ‘true story’ which was the subject had truly experienced, still there is the emplotment needed for telling a story.

The cliché of protagonist and antagonist reveals two things: first, the narrative often has moral implication. And second, those moral implications easily fall into binary structure and embodied by the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

As events emplotted into narratives, they shape the ‘symbolic relationships’ between the different characters in a story. (Jacobs, 2000:24)

Because plots require protagonists and antagonists, who are arranged in relations of homology and antipathy to each other, the characters of a narrative serve as embodiments of a society’s deep cultural code. (Jacobs, 2000:24)

By arranging the characters of a narrative in binary relations to one another, and doing the same thing with the descriptive terms attached to those characters, narratives help to charge social life with evaluative and dramatic intensity. (Jacobs, 2000:24)

Narrative methodology in film

I use Roland Barthes’ praxis of narrative (1966) as my methodology to analyse the film. A film can be seen as a semiotic entity. Barthes’ method divides three levels of narrative: function, action, and narration. The lowest level is the function, action level is higher than the function but lower than the narration. The higher level is the organize principle of the lower level. Barthes suggests the principle of integration, to understand the full meaning of the lower level, like the function, we need to look at the higher level.

Function is the smallest unit of narrative.
1. Nuclei (function)
It is the strict meaning of the function, which is the seed, planted in the narrative and will come to fruition later. Neclei distributes at the same level, and call for another one to reciprocate. In one story Jesus told, ‘the lost son’, when

‘The younger son told his father, ‘I want my share of your estate now before you die.’ So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons. A few days later this younger son packed all his belongings and moved to a distant land, and there he wasted all his money in wild living.’ (Luke 15)

The 'asking money' and 'leaving away ' of the younger son are both nucleis. The son is despatched away from his father and is expected to come back to his father, or another nuclei will happen to reciprocate it.

2. Catalyzer
Catalyzer distributes at the same level like the nuclei, but their functionality is attenuated, unilateral and parasitic. In the narrative above, what the son want from his father, ‘he packed all his belongings and moved to a distant land’, and ‘he wasted all his money in wild living’ are all catalyzers. Unlike the nuclei, they not the turning point of the story.

3. Index (indices)
The Index (indices) is an integrational unit. Along with the informant, they can only be completed on the level of the character or on the level of narration.
It refers to the character of the narrative agent, a feeling, an atmosphere, or a philosophy. The story Jesus told from the beginning the listen can sense it is not a joke or ghost story, rather it is a fable like story. The father is a metaphor of something else.

4. Informant
Like Index, the effect of an informant is continuous and extended over an episode, a character or the whole work. But it serves to identify, to locate in time and space. Informant is used to authenticate the reality of the referent, to embed fiction in the real world.

The action and the character

In the narrative, the action and the character should be seen together. In Aristotle’s poetry, ‘character’ is secondary to the action: there may be actions without characters, says Aristotle, but not characters without actions. Contrarily, Barthes regards ‘the characters form a necessary plane of description, outside of which the slightest reported “actions” cease to be intelligible. However, they are both at the second level, and should not be confused with the function.

‘..this second level of description, despite its being that of characters, has here been called the level of Action: the word actions is not to be understood in the sense of the trifling acts which form the tissue of the first level but in that of the major articulations of praxis(desire, communication, struggle) ’ (Barthes, 1966)

Narration

‘The narrational level is occupied by the signs of narrativity, the set of operators which reintegrate functions and actions in the narrative communication articulated on its donor and its addressee. ‘(Barthes, 1966)

If we see with Barthes that narrative can be an object is the point of a communication, a film as a narrative is a one way communication.

Because Barthes argues in the communication of the narrative, when the donor/narrator stops "representing" and reports details which he know perfectly well but which unknown to the addressee/reader/spectator, there occurs a sign of reading. In a film everything just represents.

Barthes also proposes an idea: 'narrative situation' which is the set of protocols according to which the narrative is "consumed."
There are huge efforts to create narrative devices in order to conjure away the coding of the narrative situation. The aim is to naturalize the subsequent narrative. Those devices are epistolary novel, supposedly rediscovered manuscripts, film which begins the story before the credits. Actually, all these efforts are just made the narrative situation become part of the narration.

2. Method
The aim of this dissertation is to examine the narrative in the book, the autobiography of Gerry Conlon: "Proved Innocent" and the film: "In the Name of the Father" which is based on the book. The method of analysis draws on various theories of narrative that will be described.

3 Text and analysis

3.1. The film

In the name of the Father (Sheridan, 1993) is based on the autobiography of Gerry Conlon: ‘Proved innocent’. Conlon is one of the Guildford four which were accused and convicted for the Guildford bombing in1974. The case of Guildford four was proved as the miscarriage of justice in1989.

3.1.0. The narrative of reconciliation (the action)

The film, titled ‘In the Name of the Father’,

intertwine the narrative of this legal case and the father-son relationship.

Using Roland Barthes’ theory of narrative,

the narrative of the father-son relationship—the story that the son reconciles with his father at the end—is an action. The action is co-dependent with the characters.

In our action, we have two characters: father and son.
The father represents the love, the wisdom, the persevering spirit and ideal father image.

The son is showed rebellious to his father at the beginning of the film. He is then despatched away from Northern Ireland, his father, and his family.

In the middle of film, the protagonist first does everything his own way then get into trouble.

At the end of the film, the son reconciles with his father, he starts to follow his father's way. After his father’s death, the new evidence is found, the story ends happily.

The narrative of reconciliation overshadows the narrative of a legal case,

and turns the film into a melodrama.

The action is not how to collect the evidences to prove they are innocent.

The action is reassurance of father's love and promise the lost son can be found back.

The functions which constitute the action are always referring to the father-son relationship, mainly the lost then found back of the son:

1. the despatch: Conlon leaves Northern Ireland.

2. Conlon’s life in London.

3. Conlon’s confession.

4. The temptations

5. Conlon reconciles with his father

3.1.1. Function1, the despatch: Conlon leaves Northern Ireland

After the bombing scene of the Guildford four, we see a solicitor is listening to a tape. In the narrative of the tape we are gradually into Gerry Conlon’s story.

This device doesn’t set the genre as a legal film, rather it is about the time, the spectator waits until the two third of the film to arrive at the present time.

In his own narrative we come back to the Northern Ireland in 70s. Conlon is stealing the scrap metal from his neighbours’ roofs, which are accompanied with the British Army patrol for searching IRA gunmen and IRA’s secret mission of deploy their force.

Because the Army mistake him as a sniper and in the process of trying to arrest him a riot between the civilians and Army starts. The riot also causes the trouble for IRA as it causes the crisis of exposing the weapon they just stored. They need to remove their gear and weapon. The Army does not catch Conlon but IRA dose. After his daughter tells him that IRA catches his son, Giuseppe Conlon rushes to see the leader of IRA and saves his son from being knee-capping.

This event prompts the decision that Gerry Conlon needs to leave Northern Ireland.

In this opening scene,

the spectator is introduced to the two main characters

and the setting of the story: Northern Ireland.
The son, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is first showed wild then rebellious to his father.

His wild and reckless personality even causes a riot.

Then we see the father. The father immediately leaves his work and rushes to save his son. He waves white handkerchief and bravely crosses the street which still has riot going on.

Then we see the realist-style portrait of Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland as an informant: An entertaining window contains little real context
To explain: ’Why did Conlon leave Northern Ireland?’ is also to a sum up the situation in the Northern Ireland in 70s. The Northern Ireland gaze is the copy of the footages we all too familiar form the Northern Ireland news.
We see the tanks run through streets, women can quickly gather and from a combat line to confront the British Army, and even the kids are used to the riot scene. There are predictable unusual things happen.

However, like many films about Northern Ireland, it omits any description of the co-existence of two communities, Catholics and Protestants.

This omission runs through the whole film. While omitting the essence of Northern Ireland problem, it only repeats conventionally the simple elements that the audience familiar with: the British Army, the poor Irish and IRA. This omission prevents the spectator from having a historical understanding of the situation in the Northern Ireland. The scene itself is like an exhibition window to entertain the world-wide audience.

The scene is stereotyped.

And considering the audience lack the knowledge of the Northern Ireland, it could not deepen. Otherwise the main narrative will be distracted and becomes not clear enough to indicate. The narrative strategy of the film is using the father-son relationship to have the standard Hollywood type, universal appeal, at the one hand, and documenting the miscarriage of justice of the case of Guildford four at the other.

The film almost touches nothing to shake any stereotypes of Irish and makes all the effort to pave the way stating the single truth that this ruling colonial power was once legally and ethically wrong when governing Northern Ireland.

3.1.2. Function2: Conlon’s life in London

Conlon goes to London because the leader of IRA suggests his father so. While Conlon lives in London, the Guildford bombing happens.

This part of the narrative use montage parallelly shows to the spectator,

on the one hand, Gerry Conlon’s life in London, which also tells that how Conlon relates to the rest of the Guildford four: Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson.

On the other hand, the film shows the real IRA is operating a bombing, which needed to be integrated to the whole narrative to reveal its meaning.

In the film, Conlon met Paul Hill on the boat to England. After them two arriving London, they directly head to a hippy squat where Armstrong and his girlfriend Richardson live. They do nothing all day just smoke cannabis and fool around. On the night when the bombing happens, Conlon and Hill meet a homeless person Charlie Burke, who later we know, is crucial for their alibi. And afterward they accidentally pick the key dropped by a prostitute in Kensington area. Conlon goes into the prostitute’s flat and accidentally again find a bunch of money.

The basic structure of the film is narrating legal case on the surface but underlined is the action of the father-son relationship.

So we see Gerry Conlon's activity in the London when the Guildford bombing happens. At the same time, the son disobey the motto his father gave him before they separated, which hint the spectator that is the cause of the son wrongly arrested, convicted, and put into the prison.

3.1.3. Function3: Conlon admits that he committed the Guildford bombing.

Gerry Conlon is arrested for the bombing. (Later we know it is Paul Hill gives his name to the police.) Colon is tortured by the police. This sequence of police interrogation is also montaged with Gerry Conlon’s father comes to England to rescue his son.
Repeatedly, this function serves two narratives: on the one hand, is to make an injustice case, at the other hand, is to portrait the relationship of father and son.
Worth to notice that Conlon resists police’s brutal interrogation until one of the police uses a special method to make him sign the statement. The special method is threatening to kill his father and the police which threatens him is particular identified that he is from the Belfast.

When the film is narrating this turning point of Conlon gives up his resistance to save his father, there is an additional narrative of a Belfast police.
Before this Belfast police man (Bp) starts to use his method, he has a conversation with the police in charge the whole investigation, which is English police (Ep).

Ep: Is Hill leading us up the garden path?
Bp: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know…..I can make him confess
Ep: Why don’t you have a word in his ear? You’re from the same town. He’ll understand you.
Bp: Will you have the bomber?
Ep: Our job is to stop the bombing.

Here, the Belfast police man shows he is not sure that Conlon is the bomber. But he offers the skill that can make Conlon confess. The English police’s understanding by which he can make him confess is because they are from the same town. Why? Let us see what happens after:

The two police then walk into the interrogation room. The Belfast police man starts to circle around Conlon slowly, at the same time he is observing him and thinking. Then he comes close to Conlon and speaks near Conlon’s ear quietly.

Bp: I’m gonna shoot your da.
Conlon: What did you say to me?
Bp: Little Bridie’ll have no daddy. I’m gonna shoot Giuseppe.

Conlon becomes hysteria. Very quickly, he gives up his resistance.

Conlon: Give me the fucking statement. For fuck’s sake, give me the statement.
The Belfast police man leaves.
Conlon: Give me a fucking pen.
Conlon signs on the statement.
Conlon: Right, that’s my fucking name there. You can write what you like.

After the English police says to him: ’ you’re from the same town. He’ll understand you’, the Belfast police man uses his method which he is sure that can make Conlon confess. The method is saying to Conlon that he is going to kill his father.

But what is the reason of that the English police man says to the Belfast police man:’ you’re from the same town. He’ll understand you.’?

If we only search in the film there is not any indication. If it is not a failure to give the spectator a reason then it is a code. The understanding of the situation of Northern Ireland maybe can help us to decode.

In the book about the same situation, Conlon wrote his feeling toward the threatening:

‘I lived in Belfast. I knew from everyday experience how bad the street violence was, senseless shooting happening every day and nobody being arrested for them. …it would be so easily put down as a sectarian murder against the family of an arrested bomber. The RUC, as everyone in Belfast knew, had links with a lot people who could make this happen. ’ (p.81)

The RUC is represented by the Belfast police man in the film.

The experience of hometown sectarian murders and the corruption of police force sustain the power of the death threat.

It is this kind of ‘understanding’ the English police talks about.

This understanding in Conlon’s personal narrative has its own tragic irony.

Conlon came to live in England because the turmoil in the Northern Ireland. The turmoil in the Northern Ireland, including the civil right movement, the internment, and the bloody Sunday, which made IRA started the bombing campaign in the England. One of the bombing campaigns is the Guildford bombing which Conlon is arrested for. And the turmoil of the Northern Ireland made the death threat to his family more believable, therefore he decided to confess. His escapism made him can not escape now.

To the film itself, because the whole film erase all the fact of sectarian conflict, the line of the English police to the Belfast police: ‘You’re from the same town. He’ll understand you’ becomes impossible to understand in the bare narrative provided in the film.

3.1.4. Function4: The temptation

This function appears before the reconciliation of father and son.

The IRA is the big signifier of the Northern Ireland story.

In the film,

the IRA is violent and functions as the temptation to test the son before he follow his father’s right path.

When Gerry Conlon and his father already stay in the prison for a while,

the real IRA bomber arrives.

Because they are IRA criminals another prisons do not allow the Conlons to eat with them, they are forced to eat in their cell.

When the true IRA bomber arrives, he shows Gerry Conlon there can be another option.

Although the other prisoners still attack the IRA at the moment he starts to eat, the IRA bomber fight back. Gerry Conlon excitedly joins this fight.

After the solitary for the fighting, Gerry Conlon introduces the IRA bomber to his father.

The IRA bomber tells the father that he did the Guildford bombing and he told the police already. Then the IRA bomber tries to persuade the father the whole thing is war,

the father invoke the religious rhetoric:

the people died in the bombing are God’s children.

The conversation then stops because of their different opinions.

The son apologises to the IRA bomber and has an argument with his father after.

Before the son leaves, the father said:

‘Go to your newfound friend.’

Later,

the IRA bomber subdues the leader of the gang of the prisoners.

After he leads Conlon to be accepted by the rest of the prisoners, he organises a demonstration in the prison. The demonstration attracts the attention of the media and the demonstration itself is violently suppressed by the chief of the warder.

To revenge, the IRA bombers attacks the chief of the warder by burning him.

This activity makes Conlon turn away from the IRA bomber and go back to his father’s letter writing campaign.

The IRA in the prison is different from the IRA in Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, the father is more acquaint with IRA than his son.

When the moment the father arrives to save his son, he immediately calls the name of the leader of the IRA.

The reason the father uses to persuade the IRA not to punish his son is ‘He is only young.’ If we also consider the age of the leader of the IRA is close to the father, we can say that the IRA is belong to the order generation of the father.

Here Gerry Conlon as a son is excluded outside the negotiation of these two men which belong to the order generation.

In prison,

the IRA from the father’s friend changes to the son’s friend.

It is the son knows the IRA first then introduces to his father.

During the conversation, the son confidently stops his father: ‘See what he has to say, Da’, and when the father said: ‘you should be sorry the people you killed’ the son seems embarrassed.

After the IRA bomber left,

the son reproaches his father for his manner to the IRA bomber and being a victim all his life.

From Northern Ireland to the prison,

Gerry Conlon seems grown up.

He is not excluded from the conversation between the IRA and his father.

He actively arranges the conversation between his father and the IRA.

Although the necessary of arranging the conversation implies he has not completed his adulthood, he still belongs to a younger generation,

but he is not as young as before. He is grown up because of the IRA.

He has more resource than before, than his father.

Unlike the IRA in the Northern Ireland, which is a threat that the father tries to prevent from his son, in the prison the IRA bomber is a choice competing with Conlon’s father.

A choice of violence approach compare in the film with the father’s peace, legal approach.

And the son,

as a protagonist that the spectator identifies with, in the middle,

needs to make the choice between the two.

The final rejection to the IRA of Conlon as well as the spectator

After the IRA bomber’s attack to the chief of the warder, Conlon makes a decision that he stops following the IRA bomber.

At the same time, the spectator is oriented to make the same decision.

Why?

There is a sufficient reason to support the IRA bomber to launch this action as the chief of the warder brutally suppress his demonstration.

Why is there still a feeling that Conlon’s decision is right?

Before the chief warder was attacked, there is a scene that he friendly talks to Conlon’s father. The conversation starts with he mentioned the congress discussed Conlon’s case and he brings up the forename ‘Giuseppe’ of Conlon’s is more Italian than Irish. Giuseppe replies that it is because his mother falls in love with the name which is the name of an Italian ice cream maker. The chief then curious about did Giuseppe’s mother have affair with the Italian ice cream maker and this question seems to Giuseppe quite ridiculous. They have a bit laugh. The tone of the conversation is relaxed and light. You can tell the chief warder respects Conlon’s father and his respect makes him more human not just a representation of cruel authority. The whole conversation is overshadowed by the gaze of the IRA bomber. The IRA bomber is like a fundamentalist see the friendly connection between the Irish Giuseppe and the British chief warder as an anathema. Conlon’s response to the IRA bomber is a sign that later they two will depart into different direction. His attitude is neutral and not cares very much.

All this is prepared for the violent scene which happens later on and charge Conlon as well as the spectator enough emotion power to turn away from IRA to Conlon’s father.

The chief later is burn by the IRA bomber. There is a point of view shot emphasis the chief warder’s suffering. We clearly see his burning body twitches on the ground and the empathy is inevitable.

This is Conlon’s point of view.

He is shock by this attack and public challenge and against the IRA bomber. This becomes the end of Conlon’s embrace of IRA and the beginning of his new relationship with his father. He reconciles with his father and starts to help his father’s letter writing campaign.

So does the spectator.

We receive strongly that the IRA means violence and is not an option.

3.1.5. The completion of the whole narrative: Conlon reconciles with his father

Now the father-son relationship is good.

The father considers his son has trouble of writing so he gets a recorder for his son to record his oral statement for their solicitor.

This brings us to the beginning of the film.

We are in the ‘present’ now. Conlon as a son now starts to take care of his father. His father tells him he feels he is going to die.

The son promises to his father he will be trustable enough to take care of his mother.
After Conlon’s father’s death and several street demonstration organised by their solicitor, Gerry Conlon’s case reopen.

New evidence emerges.

Conlon’s alibi is hold by police and even attached note writing: ‘Not to be shown to the defence.’

That is it.

After the final court scene which is supposed to be climax of the film,

Conlon is directly release from the court.

The final revelation

Before the revelation of the new evidence, the police seem quite innocent. T

hey seem just mistake Conlon as a true bomber.

Or,

like the Belfast police, uncertain whether Conlon is true bomber or not, but make a hard decision about it.

When the true bomber later appears and confesses he also did the Guildford bombing,

they just can not change the decision.

So they do not intend to lie or cause the miscarriage of the justice.

The new evident changes the story of the police from passively to actively put innocent people in the prisons.

From the point this change happens in the whole narrative,

the time after the son reconciles with his father, and from the way how the evidence is found, accidentally the solicitor has a chance to open the box of Conlon’s data,

the whole narrative seems like a moral tale,

when the protagonist finally do the right thing, then good things happen.

‘In the name of the father – like at the start of prayer.’ (Sheridan, 2003)

There are only two place in the film can relate to religion.

One

is a scene in which Conlon’s father is practice his daily Catholic ceremony.

Another

is his response to the IRA bomber’s argument of the bombing is part of the war, he said: ‘It’s God’s children…’ Rather, the religion in confined to the moral realm in the film. And Conlon’s father, which is more holy than real, is the embodiment of the moral of the film.

The rebellious son is set off a journey in the beginning of the film,

he makes mistakes,

he criticises his father can not stand up for himself

and he follow the wrong direction of the IRA bomber for a while,

at the end,

he realised his father is right,

then he reach the destination,

another door is open,

he is released.

When Conlon completes his moral journey, the narrative is completed.

The film is a 'based on true story genre'.

Its opening and ending scenes even confirm this.

The Guildford bombing scene at the beginning scene are appeared before the credits, which is try to neutralised the following sequence as we discussed at the methodology section.

And its end scene, most of the part is duplicate famous news footage.

However, the film is criticized for its inaccuracy.

There are many differences between the book and the film.

The differences can be divided into two categories: one is narrative itself and another is caused by different mediums.

Let's first see what the narrative of the book is about, and then we can compare the two in the discussion.

3.2. The book

The autobiography ‘Proved Innocent’

was written by one of the members of the Guildford Four: Gerry Conlon,

and was published in 1989,

after Gerry Conlon’s was proved innocent by the prosecution’s claim that the Guildford case is no longer sustainable,

then the judge quashes the verdict. (p.226).

The book covers Conlon’s thirty five years life

including

his childhood and adolescent period in Northern Ireland,

his ordeal of being tortured during the process of police interrogation,

on trial in the British court,

and fifteen years in the prison.

3.2.1 The narrative of innocent

Conlon’s autobiography starts at the moment the court quashed his case,

when the British judicial department official announced his innocence.

The Book ends at the same moment.

The book was writing at the ‘high’ emotion generated by his ‘proved innocence’.

His innocence is a victory which lifted him up to a celebrity status.

He became a famous case belong to Northern Ireland contemporary trouble.

His innocence also followed him when he started to look back and narrate his life. If he tries to legendize himself, his innocence is almost at the core of his sainthood.

Inevitably,

as a person born at 1954, Belfast,

the conflict between Protestant and Catholic two communities is very important to his personal story.

When he states his childhood and adolescent period,

which interwound with the conflict,

he remained innocent.

However,

there is anxiety toward his innocence.

Conlon’s petty thieving is one.

His confession of admitting that he committed the bombing hence involved many of his family members is the other.

He also pretended that he really is IRA bomber once.

Under the theme ‘innocence’, Gerry Conlon’s autobiography starts from his ‘proved innocent’ legal case, continue proving innocence in his telling of personal story.

The innocence as a victory

‘At this moment, at this exact moment, I jump up and pull back my arm. With all the strength I can find, I toss my white carnation high above the well of the court. It curves up and over and down like a shooting star.
And by then he’s said it – QUASHED.
I jerk up both my arms in the air like I’d scored for Ireland in the World Cup… ’

(Prologue, p.1)

Conlon’s account of the moment his case was quashed repeated at the final second chapter of his autobiography,

‘Then the Lord Chief Justice pronounced his judgement. He looked like he was eating a scalded cat and was barely getting the words out. I don’t remember much of the detail, but I was hanging on his every word, because there was one I was waiting for. He came towards his conclusion, telling the court that for all these reasons their Lordships no longer felt the verdicts were safe, and it was therefore his duty to pronounce them –
In this very moment I jumped up and tossed my carnation high into the well of the court, and it was followed by the flowers of the others.
And then he said –QUASHED. ’
(Chapter 28: Verdict Quashed, p.228)

Both accounts are narrated in the pace of slow motion,

with the climax described in capital word: ‘QUASHED’.

It emphasizes the joy of being proved innocent.

The first account used the metaphor of football and added the element of Irish identity: ‘I jerk up both my arms in the air like I’d scored for Ireland in the World Cup....’

From a wider cultural narrative, the combating football matches always a significant way to demonstrate a group identity.

This gives us a clue to interpret what follows in Conlon’s account of his childhood in Northern Ireland.

The second times of the description of ‘QUASHED’ moment, it included a negatively described authority figure: the Lord Chief.

Through out Conlon’s book, the authority often being described as stupid and mean. It is logical to Conlon’s story. He was once wrongly convicted and abused by the authority.

He is innocent at the Northern Ireland issue.

In the chapter ‘Us and Them’,

Conlon first stated that the picture hang on the wall of his family is Virgin Mary rather than Patrick Pearse or James Connolly.

Then he recalled the annual event of Catholic community in Northern Ireland.

Although he said it is a response of Protestant’s annual event happens before Catholic’s,

but he painted their own even just ‘exciting and fulfilling’ without put in much antagonism.

Then he wrote:

’But the sense of Us and Them was nowhere more apparent than at certain Irish League football match.…(The fans of Protestant football team) would then march away triumphantly down Distillery Street, waving flags, blowing their tin whistles and smashing all the windows, Then they’d looting shops and stealing things from people’s front rooms, they’d chant “Fuck the Pope” and filthy slogans about the Virgin Mary, and the RUC would just stand by and watch them.’(Chapter3: Us and Them, p.24)

Conlon’s innocence then followed:

‘When I first heard these cries I couldn’t understand what it was all about, what they had against the Pope or Our Lady. Nationalism meant nothing to me, because Irishness meant nothing.’

(Chapter3: Us and Them, p.24)

He is innocent in the sense that not only he didn’t have the reciprocate hatred toward the Protestants, but also he totally felt confused about Protestant hooligan’s hostile.

This passive therefore innocent logic, also appeared as He is cold to the ‘Northern Ireland’ topic

After Conlon was caught for Guildford bombing, he imaged a response from the IRA if the RUC did put the word out to check whether he is the member of IRA or not:

’Conlon? He’s half a hood – shop-lifter, likes a drink, mad gambler. Jesus Christ, the IRA wouldn’t have him. He was kicked out of the Fianna, so he was.’ (p.71)

He joined IRA once, but then got kicked out for his stealing behaviour. His attitude after he got throw out Provo Fianna was:

‘I was told if I behaved myself for a few months and kept away from the Finna kids, I’d be allowed to rejoin. But I never did. I only went there because it would’ve been dangerous not to. Now I was delighted my services were no longer required. ’(p.37)

He is innocent and abused by authorities

Conlon’s innocent story not only mixed with his Irish identity, but also is interwound with abusive authorities: the RUC in the Northern Ireland, the police who tortured him and the prison officers in the prison.

The RUC
Very early in the first chapter ‘First Memories’, the power abusive figure RUC already appeared. The RUC was like the intruder of his community:

‘It was through playing football we first came into conflict with the police. Black-bastards we called them: black after the colour of the RUC uniform and bustards because they liked nothing more than to come up the Falls and break up whatever going on in the street – card games, football games it made no difference.’(p.12)

The feeling of being abused was accompanied with RUC’s different attitudes toward Protestant communities. When sometimes Conlon had chances to go to a Protestant area, his description of the experience was:

‘I could see that those streets were much like ours. The card-schools were out on the street corners, exactly the same as on our street corners. But now I noticed one glaring difference. Here the RUC would be standing around watching the card games, and having a laugh and a joke with the men there. Down where I lived they’d be breaking them and taking the money off the ground. Up here, they might even be joining the gambling.’(p.24)

The identity in Conlon’s narrative is as a member of Catholics community, compared to Protestants is unfairly treated by RUC, the authority. This also fitted well to the overall innocent portrait he gave us.

The police abused him during the bombing interrogation.

There are plenty of descriptions of how police abuse Gerry Conlon during the bombing interrogation.

When Conlon was detained in Mulhouse Street Army barracks in Northern Ireland, he suffered a lot of physical abuse during the interrogation. Particularly, a detective constable McCaul who

‘hit me (Conlon) a punch on the nose’, ‘grabbed me (Conlon) by the hair, pulled me to my feet and dragged me along’ (p.67), ‘slapped me (Conlon) again, more digs in the ribs and back, dead legging me in the thigh.’ (p.69)

Furthermore, when Conlon was transferred from Northern Ireland to England, on first of the December, Conlon was transferred to Addlestone police station in England. He was forced to be naked, deprived sleep, and also physical abuse (p.74-75). The next day, he was moved to another police station, there he remembered a extreme way Detective Inspector Timothy Blake used to cause him a ‘indescribable’ pain.

‘He was feeling for two spots behind my ears, just where the lobes join the skull. For a moment his two middle fingers rested there, and then suddenly he drilled them into my skull and yank me upwards, lifting me completely out of the chair.’ (p.79)

Besides those physical abuses, Conlon also suffered mental threatening. At London, Detective Chief Superintendent Wally Simmons threatened to kill Conlon’s mother and sister. He called to the RUC in Northern Ireland and showed Conlon clearly that his ability to arrange the murder of his mother and sister. This made Conlon stopped his resistance. On the third day of staying in London’s police station, Conlon started to write his statement admitting his crime of bombing. In the process of writing his statement, it is obvious that the police breached the law as they fed Conlon the details of bombing that Paul Hill had written in his statement for conducting two coherent statements. (p.83)

There is a sense of anxiety. The account of policemen’s torture used to justify Conlon’s confession. Conlon’s confession not only harmed himself but also involving his many family members to the Guildford bombing case. In the case of Guildford, because of Gerry Conlon, another case of Maguire Seven was produced. Maguire Seven are all charged with possessing explosive after Conlon put into his statement that he learned how to make bomb in his aunt Annie Maguire’s kitchen. There is a clear description of the reason Conlon wrote this was because Paul Hill did first and the police forced him to follow Hill’s statement. (p.85-86) With Guilt, through his suffering he justified his behaviour of involving his relatives.

‘I shut my eyes. I had been deprived of sleep, food, smokes. I’d been stripped naked, spat at, jeered at, slammed in a freezing cell. I’d taken beatings. And now the live of my mother and my sister were threatened……At this stage I was agreeing to anything they wanted. If they said put down the Queen, or the Duke of Edinburgh, or the Pope I would have put their names.’(p.86)

The reason Conlon is involved in this case is because Paul Hill pointed to him. In Conlon’s autobiography he described when he and Hill were in prison on remand, he eagerly wanted to talk to Hill and clarify the whole situation. Hill only gave Conlon two truths: first, he did not do the bombing, second, the police threatened to charge his girlfriend, Gina. (p.107-108) In the description, after revealing Hill is also innocent the text then goes to Conlon’s thinking of the whole situation would be fine, mixed with his retrospective view of how naïve he was at that time. There is no blame on his mate. Maybe there is but it did not show up in Conlon’s narrative. In his narrative, what emphasised are the innocent and abused victims. Moreover, he names to shame the villains: the detective constable McCaul, Detective Inspector Timothy Blake, Detective Chief Superintendent Wally Simmons, and more. In constructing this narrative, Paul hill rather than a betraying friend is just another victim like him.

The prison officers intend to dominate the prisoners

The day when Conlon was announced by the court his case was squashed, the prison officers aside the court still reminded him a lot of bad memory:

‘They pissed in my food. They tore my mother’s photograph. They gave me injections of pethidine. They kicked me around the block like a football.’ (p.2)

To Conlon, the prison officers of the prison are another kind abusive power figure. The prison officers are not just the operators to maintain the discipline of the prison but seemed to be evil by nature and with the motivation of trying to dominate the prisoners. Conlon described that how the prison officers used the cigarette to dominate the prisoners. Conlon’s observation of prison officer’s pleasure in doing this: ‘love to’, ‘revelled in it’ made the prison officers looked like just sadistic monsters.

‘The screws loved to play domination games with prisoners. They’d get to perform little tricks. If you had a man who couldn’t do without tobacco on the block and he was there with on privileges, then the screws had him eating out of their hands – he’d do anything, anything for a cigarette. The crews revelled in it. They’d get some hard man in, taking liberties, mouthing abuse at them for a week, but then his snout would run out. And suddenly he’d be at his door calling out to the screws, begging them, pleading with them for a cigarette.
“Give us a cigarette, boss. I’m dying for a smoke.”
It was horrible to see and hear how they’d laughing at the screws jokes, calling them by their first name, doing humiliating little tasks and tricks. They’d do a tap dance, they’d do things they could never admit in front of their wives and girl friends and children. They’d selling their dignity and self-respect for one Benson & Hedges.’ (p.177)

Here, Conlon did not give the dominated prisoners specific names. It is a general picture that if any prisoner not strong enough then the consequence is becoming the victims of the prison officers.

Although Conlon did mention the dangerous relationship between prisoners in general:

‘Every day in prison is like walking through a minefield. It’s full of danger, full of people who can set off into acts of unbelievable violence by any trivial thing..’ (p.159)

But, those acts of unbelievable violence between the prisoners are omitted in Conlon’s whole description of the prison. Conlon’s narrative tends to favour the prison officers as the antagonist and the prisoners are like him, being humiliated and dominated, are the protagonists as victims.

His struggles of his innocence

He is a petty thief

1974 when Gerry Conlon lived his girl friend, Eileen at Southampton, he worked on the motorway link, he said:
‘We thought at first we had it made. Eileen was working in a café, I had the motorway, and we were both earning good money and quietly enjoying ourselves.... ‘

Then he said:

‘..for the moment I didn’t even think about stealing.’

Thieving is Gerry Conlon main activity along side with his gambling. He described his routine:

‘People would ask me to get them something, we’d negotiate a price, and I’d already be in the frame of mind that I was just collecting something that belonged to me. I’d go into the shop, and if it was possible I’d take the thing then and there. If not, I’d go back an hour later, walk over and lift it, and just walk out.’

He admiringly quoted from ‘a very funny, lively character’, who with ‘a lot of panache’, (p.33):

‘There was a well-known shop-lifter in Belfast who inspired a whole generation of kids who were of a criminal mind. He had a catch-phrase: “All you need in life is an overcoat and a fast-clutching hand.”’

Gerry Conlon’s thieving, put into his whole life story can be quite easily dismissive. Because that the British police and court made more serious mistake to him and his father. But even we ignore, there is one event exists cause Gerry Conlon’s innocent crisis.

Conlon’s innocent crisis

After Conlon’s trial at 22nd, October, 1975, he was convicted of Guildford bombing.
He stayed at his first prison, Wandsworth for four months, and during that time there are policemen went to visit him. They treated him as an IRA bomber, asked he to be a informer, and hinted that the he maybe can exchange information with his father’s benefit. Unknown by Conlon, police recorded this conversation, in which Conlon talked as if he is an IRA bomber. The record of the conversation became the evidence of the prosecution, to prove Conlon is guilty at Conlon’s appeal. After the appeal, Conlon was transfer to a prison called Wormwood Scrubs.

The prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs are organised in to different clans: Irish, Black and cockney etc. It dangerous in this prison being left alone and this is the case of Conlon.

‘The reason was that the story of how the prosecution had tried to produce those conversations in Wandsworth at the Appeal had gone round the republican prisoners, and they don’t like the sound of it. It seemed to them that I had co-operated with the police. I had been talking about people as members of the IRA and making out I was a member of the IRA – a senior one at that. At the very least they thought I had been blundering around in an area I knew nothing of, and should have stayed well clear. At the worst I could have unwittingly put their own members in Mortal danger. ’ (Chapter 23: Wormwood Scrubs, p.181)

This is Conlon’s innocent crisis.

In his whole narrative of innocence,

the world divided into two sides; the good and innocent side is the Catholics community, his family and him, the bad side are RUC, the Protestant, the judges, the prison officers, and most of all the policemen.

The typical scenario is the good side verses the bad side. But this event actually is the inner division of the good side, and he co-operated with the bad side.

As I mentioned before, the three distinct intentions of autobiography work is as confess, as memoir, and as self-justification or apology. This part of narrative is mixed with confession and self-justification.

Conlon spends the whole chapter to describe this 'Police offering' even, and the title just vaguely say: 'More Questions'. Considering one part of his more than sex years prison period just assigned as one chapter, this even is singled out.

After the account of police offer him his father's benefit, before his response, Conlon states how he though:

'As far as I was concerned, there was only one response I could make, even though it was a terrible thing to have to do. If there was any way I could help my father - however bad it make me look - then I would it and justify it later.' (Chapter19: More Questions, p.145)

Besides the intention of saving his father, Gerry Conlon always emphasizes that he did not provide any useful therefore harmful information.

'I threw everything at them I could think of - first of all names. There were names from Kilburn, names from Southampton, names out of West Belfast, names out of the newspaper and names out of nowhere but my own imagination. Then there were addresses. I gave them streets without numbers, house numbers without street, vague location…' (Chapter19: More Questions, p.146-7)

'The stuff was absolute cock and bull, completely useless. Either it was invented or it was common knowledge. They could do nothing with it in the short or the long run, because I knew nothing worthwhile to tell them, But I hope it would be enough to help my Dad. ' (Chapter19: More Questions, p.147)

As if this not enough, Conlon show what the conversation would be like:

'At one point the conversation went like this:
LEWIS (one of police): Now 23, 24, 25 are photofits so, you know, they are not picture, but do they remind you of anyone?
PRISONER: Kenny EVERETT, first one, definitely.
IMBERT (one of the police): Who?
LEWIS: Kenny EVERETT?
PRISONER: Aye.
LEWIS: What's that, 25?
PRISONER: Kenny EVERETT, on television! On radio!
LEWIS (laugh): Oh!
IMBERT: Who?' (Chapter19: More Questions, p.147)

In the autographical writing the narrator has hindsight. Quickly Conlon describes the outcome of his behaviour, and full of regretting:

'I was not thinking strait. When these conversations became known about two yeas later they caused enormous problems for me in my relation with other prisoners. Also, what reason could I have had - after what happened to me - to think I could put my trust in police goodwill?' (Chapter19: More Questions, p.147)

AS if all of them are not enough, Conlon immediately quote from a governor's report at the time Conlon had this conversation, which to show how confused he was. (Chapter19: More Questions, p.148)

Conlon's legitimate innocent influenced his autobiography writing. The innocent theme runs through the whole the whole autobiography. In retrospective view, his childhood and his attitude toward Northern Ireland issue during adolescent year are remembered and narrated with the strong sense of innocent. From a certain narrative point of view, it doesn't mean Conlon fake his account of past, there is not any true memory he holds back and not telling us. We will now discuss each of the narrative and the methodology.

4. Discussion

In this discussion I will discuss first, the narrative of which the differences in the autobiography and the film; second, Barthes’ narrative theory particular it’s linguistic rather than psychological definition; then I will discuss the influence of phenomenology and hermeneutics on narrative research.

4.1. The narrative

The film claims that it is based on the book. They both have the same elements: the same protagonists and the same legal case. However, not only the focus of the narrative is different, but also the narrative itself is changed in the transformation from the book to the film.

In the part of Gerry Conlon's life when he was in London, the film describes Conlon and Hill go to a hippie squat to meet Armstrong and Richardson. They seem do nothing all day. On the day of one IRA bombing, Conlon and Hill argue with an English hippie over the Irish issue, so they leave the squat. At the same night, while the Guildford bombing happens, the two young men meet a homeless person called Charlie Burke. Afterward, Conlon accidentally picks a key dropped by a prostitute. After he goes inside her flat he accidentally again finds a huge amount of money.

Compare to the autography of Conlon, Proved Innocent (1989), what happened to Conlon, Hill, Armstrong and Richardson are very different from the descriptions in the film.

1. There was not a hippie squat in Conlon’s London life.
2. Conlon and Hill had jobs in London.
3. Charlie Burke was not a homeless person.
4. Conlon did not accidentally pick the house key of the prostitute, rather he was taught by his friend and planned in advance to burgle the prostitute.

The possible result or affect of changing these events mainly are first, it produces a simple binary opposition, and second, it makes Conlon more innocent than real.

The simple binary opposition

According to the book ‘Proved Innocent’, Conlon and Hill lived in a hostel in Kilburn. And the Charlie Burke is Hill’s roommate in the hostel. Conlon and Hill worked on a building site at Mornington Crescent.

The erasure in the film vacuum the social context, in which the Irish communities exist in London throughout the period of the IRA bombing campaigns in England, and the historical context, in which the Northern Ireland has close economical relation with England. The vacuum of the context produces the simple binary opposition: the English and the Irish. And this simple binary opposition is corresponded to a false ‘common sense’ that the problem of Northern Ireland is because the opposition of Briton and Ireland.

The holy portrait

Moreover, Conlon as a protagonist in the film was portrayed as more innocent than real.

According to the book Conlon confessed how he got the money from the prostitute.

There is an anonymous friend pointed to Conlon some advertisements on the notice board outside the newsagent are for the prostitute. He said:

‘Them place is handy to break into. There’s always a few quid lying around.’ (p.56)

Conlon then copied down some phone numbers of the advertisement. He called one of these numbers to know the address of the prostitute. He came to see that place and made a phone call to make sure there is no one inside. He broke the glass of the door to get in, and got the money amount to seven hundred pounds.

The innocent portrait of Conlon in the film changed this into he just picks the key a prostitute accidentally dropped on the street. He walks in and accidentally again he finds out a bunch of money.

An advanced plan crime became a just naughty activity which brought some lucky money.

The innocent portrait of Conlon is just one example of the better portrait of the ‘Irish side’ in the film. Another example is the father became more religious and with more rigid moral standard. It changes the way Conlon portrayed his father in his book: of course his father was respectable and decent in Conlon’s description but his father enjoyed gambling as much as his son. Conlon never mentioned once in his book that his father is religious; it is his mother very into the religious activity.

The holy portrait of the father in the film served the whole narrative of the film. The narrative of reconciliation is the reconciliation with the father. Symbolically the father is the answer, which can be misunderstood but not have a fault. Crucially, at the same time the spectator is put to be identified as the son in the midst of the Northern Ireland trouble.

The son, described in the film as wild, rebellious but innocent, actually provide the first person narrative in his autobiography. He is not just a son in his autobiography. He is an untrustworthy boyfriend, a sensible friend, a surviving prisoner, and a guilty confessor. His account serves as one of the autobiographical function: apology. In the description of the thieving of a prostitute, there are plenty apologetic gestures: in tone and in words.

If we compare between the film and the autobiography, we found that the son in relation to the two narratives is different. First, the son in the film is a character to be seen but in the book is the narrator can tell. The mediums of the two narratives are different, and the positions of the son with these two narratives are also different.

These differences can be further explored by our investigation of different assumptions of text and subjectivity derived from methodology.

The methodology

In Barthes’ ‘Structural analysis of narrative’ (1966),

when discussing of the character he defines the characters in terms of psychological essences is rather not a ‘being’ but a ‘participant’.

A character is just a unity of an action, who participates in a sequence of an action.

Moreover,

he refuse to accept the assumption that ‘the existence between this “person” and his language of a straight descriptive relation which makes the author a full subject and the narrative the instrumental expression of that fullness.’ (P.282-283) ‘who speaks (in the narrative) is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is.’ (p.283)

Such an unpsychological view should not be overlook.

Narrative for Barthes is literary invention and not a psychological indication. Also, in a narrative, a character is under the very categories of the grammatical (and not psychological) person and those categories can only be defined in relation to the instance of discourse, not to that of reality. (Barthes, 1966)

In the narrative of the film, the character of the son is displayed by the effect of discourse. He is in the story with his father. This dual supposedly has certain relationship according to the narrative discourse.

To achieve a story,

what more important is the relation of each other in the narrative than the maybe discontinuously appearing psychological features.

Thus,

how should we look at when psychologists try to use narrative as a tool to understand and interpret human experience?

This dissertation just uses partial of narrative theories in psychology and human science.

In the development of narrative study,

phenomenology and hermeneutics became the source of it.

From phenomenology, the temporality as a reachable phenomenon outside the bracket of various human experiences, is close to what Freeman means ‘ontologically essential’, gives narrative research a profound historical sense and an ontological boundary.

At the same time, hermeneutics offers narrative study wider range definition of

interpretation

when discussing the relation between life and story, or life as story.

Crossley’s narrative psychology (2000) uses Carr’s phenomenological research of narrative (1986) which claims human experiences and memory are inherently narrative.

Carr (1986) starts from Husserl’s concepts of ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ to argue the existence of the temporality in passive experiences,

and gradually developing to the idea that the individuals’ experiences are all narrative configured.

There is not a pre-narrative experience exists and then be imposed with narrative feature.

‘Historicity’ this concept of phenomenology, emphasized by Husserl and Heidegger (Carr, 1986), is changed by psychologists. (Freeman & Brockmeier, 2001)

Historicity to Husserl is the consciousness cognitively belongs to a community in history,

and to Heidegger is authentic self-understanding need to encompass the perspectives of the being with others and the death. (Carr, 1986)

To Freeman & Brockmeier (2001), it is the individual self reflects and narrates him/herself conditioned by his/her own society’s contemporary’s convention.

In Widdershoven’s research (1993), psychology are hermeneutic is because psychology try to understand the story of life. The hermeneutic activity in psychology varies depending on the view of interpretation.

‘There are at least three different views on interpretation.

The first sees interpretation as re-enactment (Collingwood).

According to the second view interpretation is a dialogue with the text, resulting in a fusion of horizons (Gadamer).

The third view holds that interpretation is a process placing a text in a different context (Derrida). ‘(Widdershoven, 1993, p.2)

Collingwood propose the idea of ‘re-enactment’ to explain how a historian understand past events.

He compares the re-enactment of a thought from the past with the performance of the ancient music.

En-enactment means past thoughts reappear in a present situation like the performance of ancient written music.

Moreover, he says that the distance in time separates the important from the unimportant and gives the historian access to the essence of an idea.

Applying re-enactment to personal narrative, a story is a reconstruction of past experience, but more purely, clearly, and more essential.

While Collingwood holds on the notion that there are more essential meanings can be distilled through interpretation,

Gadamer

claims that the every act of interpretation changes the meaning.

The interpretation as the fusion of the horizons (1960) creates a new meaning from the integration of the reader and the text. In narrative psychology, it is that by telling a story about our life, we change our life. Past experiences are invoked for and in the present situation. To understand the past in the present is to communicate these two, like a dialogue. The understanding generated by a dialogue is the fusion of the horizons of the participants, which is like our interpretation of our stories in life, towards a coherent end.

Gadamer’s ‘fusion of the horizons’ is a further step to a united truth. For Derrida (1988), interpretation implies taking the text out of its context and placing it in a different context.

‘For Derrida

there is neither origin nor continuity in the history of interpretation. With Gadamer, Derrida refutes the idea of an origin of meaning, which Collingwood cherishes. Against Gadamer, he underlines that there is no unity in the history of interpretation. Interpretation implies a process of difference, diffusion of meaning. ’ (Widdershoven, 1993, p14)

Derrida’s idea of interpretation

in a line with Bakhtin’s ‘unfinalizablity’ (1973) means the possibility of a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. From narrative point of view, every narrative self-account is itself part of life, embedded in a lived context of interaction and communication.

Therefore there is always, posibbilly, a different story to tell as there occur another situation is which to tell it.

As mentioned at the introduction,

narrative as a new paradigm objects the assumption of objective and authoritative knowledge.

Collingwood’s‘re-enactment’

implies a correct version of a story which is incompatible with this new paradigm and categorized as a form of fallacy.

Accountability and interpretation

Also in my introduction,

I mentioned the ‘accountability’ in the methodology in book.

From aspect of accountability in autobiography writing,

when the narrator of the present recalls and evaluats the past,

his or her present understaning makes past experience intelligibal.

At the same time, autobiographical identity is constructed in this temporary distant second reading.

Reflecting on the different theories of interpretation by Gadamer and Derrida,

when the autobiographer at the present use narrative to interprete the past experience, in which identity appears, there are two different opinions. One is Gadamar’s and another is Derrida’s.

Gadamer defines interpretation as the fusion of the horizon.

If we apply this to the interpretation of life, in which the present narratives interpret the past experiences. (I use ‘narratives’, because it is possible that a person narrate his or her past experience more than once.)

According to Gadamer, the narratives will be in a fusion, and becomes a unity. It is like some narrative psychologists propose the ‘coherent story’ of identity in narrative writing (Crossley, 2000 and Freeman, 2001).

Contrarily,

Derrida defines the interpretation is take a text out of the original context then put into a different context, which itself is the process of difference.

For this, there is not a coherent story, as our life stories are diffused, changing with various contexts, and guarantee the ‘identity’ is plural.

Different identities of one person in narrative psychology studies can be seen at Sehulster’s account of Wagner (2001) or Voneche’s account of Piaget. (2001)

The contextual being of narrative identities, implies the pluralism which is emphasized in the polemic with the positivism and modernism. Also, the aspect of context, link the individual to the cultural and society.

Pluralism and binary

From historicity to see the pluralism in the narrative, I think it provide a proper mentality to the global society.

The definition of postmodern is the abandon of the grand theory.

The pluralism in narrative study not only can ’marshals the diverse, historically concrete stories and experiences recounted by non-elite people against the version of reality allegedly sanctioned by mainstream social science and philosophy’ (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001, p.9), but also create the possibility of plural existence of different stories of different races or communities at the same historical moment.

In this dissertation, relate to the conflict of two communities in the contemporary Northern Ireland history,

the pluralism in narrative perspective provide the peaceful co-existence of both sides of stories.

However,

the narrative can also create binary thinking continually fuel the antagonism of two communities.

Binary structure is common to see in a narrative.

Through our stories that we construct ourselves as part of our world, and not only we set up ‘me’ as the most important protagonist, but also we often include the people close or similar to us as a ‘we’ group and antagonize other people we don’t like or feel threatened by. Along with the pervasive existence of narrative in human culture in which ‘we’ connected, communicated and educated, the alien ness seems like an inevitable element.

It is clear in my case.

The antagonism reappears in the history, the narrative in the film, and the narrative in the autobiography. There is the opposition of the Protestant and the Catholics communities. There is the IRA as a violent and evil temptation in the reconciliation narrative of the film. There are protestant hooligans, police and prison officers as abusive antagonists in the innocent narrative of the book.

The crisis of anatagonism-binary way of thinking maybe is due to the nature of my topic. However, it is hard to see a plurism as a foundamentalism, even in the academic discourse. (Freeman, 2001) Moreover, the plurism maybe make the binary-anatagonism fixed. Especially when most people apathy, some people just doing monologue with their own group, but the politicians keep dramitizing the same old story to mobilise their crowd and gain power from it.

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