'Images ... at the absolute edge of memory': memory and temporality in Hidden Symptoms, One by One in the Darkness, and Time Present and Time Past

This chapter analyses Deirdre Madden’s repeated concerns with memory and temporality by comparing two of her earlier works, Hidden Symptoms (1986) and One by One in the Darkness (1996), with her latest novel Time Present and Time Past (2013). Her exploration of the impact of the past on the present is exemplified in her two ‘Troubles’ novels, but is also a major concern of her last work that is set at the height of the Celtic Tiger’s economic success. In all three novels, characters are faced with a past which intrudes into the present in quasi-traumatic form and has notable visual qualities. Drawing on ideas by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Nora, the chapter argues that in all these works, memories are embodied in physical spaces, especially domestic interiors, but most notably crystallise in images, in particular photographs, that are translated into ‘prose pictures’. These created memory images oscillate between the traumatic and the nostalgic and ultimately help to reconcile the past and the present, thereby challenging the notion of progress that underpins contemporary historical-political developments on both sides of the Irish border.