Introduction

Roddy Doyle(1958- ) made himself known to Chinese readers at a time when Ireland in their eyes was a land of heroes and fairies, a bastion of the Catholic Church, an ally in the struggle against colonialism and recently the “Celtic Tiger”model for other small economies．Although many people still hold the emerald-tinted view, some have begun to realize that within Ireland there exists a more self-critical view of herself．Against the glowing praise for the Irish Cultural Revival and the Irish economic miracle of the 1990s are some less complimentary voices that question the idyllic vision of rural Irish life, the parochial character of Irish nationalism, and the self-complacency of the Irish rich．All these voices that call for redefining Irish identity are audible in Doyle's novels.

Born into a lower-middle class family in 1958, Roddy Doyle published his first novel, The Commitments (1987), privately with a loan from the bank．The publication of the book was quite a struggle, but its film adaptation quickly created a world-wide audience, helping Doyle launch his successful writing career．He then followed The Commitments up with The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991), both of which were translated into movies and won BAFTA awards．Doyle decided to devote himself to full-time writing after his Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) became the first Irish novel to win the Booker Prize．Paddy Clarke sold more copies than any other winner of the Booker Prize. The next novel Doyle published was The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), which was developed out of a mini-series titled Family he had written for BBC in 1994.

These five novels, the first three of which were compiled into The Barrytown Trilogy in 1993, have made Doyle a “phenomenon”in contemporary Irish cultural field．The films based on the Barrytown trilogy win Doyle a reputation as “the author of hilarious comic novels dealing with the lives of working-class (and chronically unemployed) folk on a north Dublin housing estate”(Donnelly 17)．Paddy Clarke continues to testify his popularity by having been the best seller in the history of the Booker Prize and having “been translated into at least nineteen languages”(White 1)．Despite being highly controversial, the Booker Prize is “the most significant and most intensely coveted award”(Mulkerns 21)．It attracts much media attention and, unsurprisingly, guarantees high book sales．Talking about his experience with the prize, Doyle says “where the Booker has made a difference is that the first time I went to the States there were very few newspapers interested in talking to me．Afterwards, I was talking to all of them”(Lacey 56)．According to Stephen Frears, the director of the film versions of The Snapper and The Van, Doyle is “the only Irish writer [he] know[s] of who's actually read by the kids he writes about in Dublin”．He goes on to stress that “[y]ou don't see them walking around with Ulysses”(Christon 5).

Such a great popularity with the reading public, though indebted considerably to the influence of visual media, has not been unaccompanied by serious academic attentions．A cursory look at the literary bibliography collected for this study reveals the worldwide publication of one academic article on The Commitments in 1993, one on Doyle in 1995, one on Paddy Clarke in 1996, two articles and one chapter of a book on The Snapper in 1997, two articles on The Commitments and one published MA thesis in 1998, two articles in 1999, one article and one chapter of a book in 2000, one published PhD thesis on Doyle in 2001, one chapter of a book on The Woman in 2002, one monograph on Doyle in 2003, two articles in 2004, five articles in 2005, one book on the films of the Barrytown trilogy in 2006, and one article on Family in 2007. This existing literature on Doyle, despite its contrast with the academic industry that has grown up around such modern Irish writers as James Joyce and W．B．Yeats, suffices to crown Doyle as one of the most important contemporary Irish writers whose representation of and response to the transformative present-day Ireland merits an in-depth critical reading.

All those articles and works shed their light on Doyle's writing from different angles and highlight different aspects．While Doyle's emphasis on Dublin vernacular has received constant attention, a more ringing scene presents itself pertaining to the various interpretations of the main themes of each novel and the author's political position．Three major approaches to the reading of Doyle's works are reviewed here．Firstly, that Jimmy Jr., the protagonist of The Commitments, describes Ireland's anomalous relationship to Europe as “internal colonialism”(Kirby 92) has engendered a postcolonial reading of the Barrytown trilogy．Doyle's valorization of Dublin working class is seen as an attempt to give voice to the people from lower social strata in post-colonial Ireland．In this sense, Doyle is acclaimed as a “social analyst”by Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland (611)．Other works in which the similar views can be found include Gerry Smyth's The Novel and the Nation：Studies in the New Irish Fiction, Ulrike Paschel's No Mean City？, Mary McGlynn's “Why Jimmy Wears a Suit：White, Black, and Working Class in The Commitments”, Timonthy D．Taylor's “Living in a Postcolonial World：Class and Soul in The Commitments”, Lisa McGonigle's “Rednecks and Southsiders Need not Apply：Subalternity and Soul in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments”．Secondly, some critics have approached Doyle from feminist perspectives, trying to develop gender studies on his fiction．They focus on the family problems (crisis pregnancy, abusive father, etc.) represented in The Snapper and The Woman, and discuss the construction of female subjectivity and the reinforcement of patriarchal values．Among the works echoing this perception are Jennifer M．Jeffers' The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century, Mary McGlynn's “Pregnancy, Privacy, and Domesticity in The Snapper”, Ellen-Raissa Jackson's “Gender, Violence and Hybridity：Reading the Postcolonial in Three Irish Novels”, Jarmila Mildorf's “Words that Strike and Words that Comfort：Discursive Dynamics of Verbal Abuse in Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors”, and Margaret McKimmey Harada's “Grotesque Circumstances：The Bildungsroman of Deformation in Contemporary Irish Literature (Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe)”．Thirdly, adopting a post-nationalist viewpoint, some critics probe into Doyle's nationalistic outlook which they believe to be quite a departure from that of conventional Irish writers．They base their argument on the findings that “[t]he historic concerns of nationality, land, language, and religion that had engaged Irish writers since the time of Thomas David and The Nation are absent in Doyle's fictional setting”(qtd．in Roche 247)．In their eyes, Doyle is a rebellious writer and “his works have run counter to the traditional preoccupations and conventions in Irish fiction and drama”(247)．Such an argument is also audible in Dermot McCarthy's Roddy Doyle：Raining on the Parade, Richard Kearney's Postnationalist Ireland, Ray Ryan's Ireland and Scotland：Literature and Culture, State and Nation, 1966-2000, Rudiger Imhof's The Modern Irish Novel：Irish Novelists After 1945, Mary McGlynn's “‘But I keep on thinking and I'll never come to a tidy ending’：Roddy Doyle's Useful Nostalgia”, Lorraine Piroux's “‘I’m black an' I'm proud'：Reinventing Irishness in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments”, Fintan O'Toole's “Going West：the Country versus the City in Irish Writing”, and Maureen T．Reddy's “Reading and Writing Race in Ireland”.

While the above interpretations focus on the themes of Doyle's works, the controversy over his “script-like”style constitutes another hot point in Doyle studies．According to critics like Rudiger Imhof and Noel McFarlane, Doyle's dialogue-based narratives are screenplays rather than novels, for they lack proper descriptions and perceptive comments. Mary McGlynn, however, embraces Doyle's dialogue-based style from a cultural point of view, arguing in her “The Poor Mouth：Versions of the Vernacular in Twentieth-Century Narrative”that Doyle's normalization of the speech of Dublin suburban working class derives from Bakhtin's explorations of the “common language”as the structural basis of the textual heteroglossia．Meanwhile, Doyle himself defends this writing style as a strategy：

I deliberately didn't want descriptions, because I think they interfere．Around the time when I wrote The Commitments, I read The Sicilian [which] was interrupted so often with unnecessary …… and ridiculous descriptions …… All I could think that meant was that he had some kind of speech impediment and he sprayed people．I deliberately just let the words do the talking and it didn't seem necessary to describe places．(qtd．in White 9)

The existing scholarship has inspired this study in two ways．Generally speaking, the afore-mentioned comments try to develop a cultural critique despite their difference in theoretical approaches, which acknowledges the close tie between Doyle's writing and the social ground of contemporary Ireland．Much of their argumentation is to be reconsidered later in this study．It is affirmed that such cultural aspects as class, gender, nationalism, etc., constitute key factors to an understanding of the dialectic relationship between Doyle's fictional writing and the rapid transformation of the contemporary Irish society．Moreover, the previous studies have helped this study identify possible thematic links binding Doyle's first five novels together and a clear rupture between these five novels and his more recently finished trilogy The Last Roundup including A Star Called Henry (1999), Oh, Play That Thing (2004) and The Dead Republic (2010). Whereas the first five novels, with their concerns more over the on-going quotidian life than about the memory of Irish colonial history, mark a “radical force in Irish writing”(246) that reorients Irish studies and redefines Irish identity, A Star Called Henry is considered an excursion into historical fiction, which should be dealt with separately from the preceding five books.

Based on the previous studies, this study chooses Doyle's first five novels as its object of research, and reads them in Jameson's theoretical framework that will be able, at least in certain degree, to offer a balanced interpretation between “the ideology of structuralism [and] that of vulgar materialism”(Jameson Political Unconscious, 82). Taking this criterion as a yardstick, readers would find the existing interpretations of Doyle's fiction arguably inadequate．On the one hand, to conclude that Doyle's writing stands for the power of discourse of the underprivileged population is to reduce Doyle to a mouthpiece of the class he was born into．When the argumentation is basically grounded on the extent to which Irish working class life and their language are represented, the social ground is so reified as to be understood not as a subtext but merely as some inert “reality”that the text passively reflects．To deem the “absence”of nationalism in Doyle's fiction as an “apolitical”gesture is a similar misreading．Despite its seeming absence, nationalism has never ceased to be an important factor either in the political discourse of contemporary Ireland or in its literary reproduction．A close reading of Doyle's works would show how they have reorganized the textualized contemporary political history of Ireland (namely their subtext)．The five novels under study form a good revelation of the way such conventional nationalist elements as Catholicism, sexual politics, and geopolitics work and metamorphose in private as well as public life．Doyle's writing, as this study would argue, participates in an ongoing process of redefining Irish identity．On the other hand, to read The Woman as an optimistic feminist novel overemphasizes the focalized female perspective (including female monologues) to the extent that the subtext of a patriarchal society, which Doyle actually rewrites, is underestimated.

As to the controversy over the dialogic form of Doyle's first five books, people who criticize Doyle do not do him justice because they have based their denial of Doyle's craft on his use of “indecent language”and the lack of authorial interruption, which are not considered directly relevant here; the positive views will be developed as follows：if Doyle's dialogic style is a deliberate act or a strategy, it has achieved more than an effect of heteroglossia—the coexistence and conflict of voices; behind these voices lies “the very content of a class ideology [that] is relational”, in the sense of which, the “class discourse …… is essentially dialogical in its structure”(Jameson Political Unconscious, 84, his own emphasis)．An effective reading of Doyle's writing, therefore, has to be predicated on the revelation of its “dialogical”structure in which the dominant ideology “‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects”(Althusser 48).

The above critical review of the existing scholarship on Doyle is, as it manifests, very much indebted to Fredric Jameson's theorizing of narrative as a socially symbolic act, which will provide theoretical insights that advance the present study．For Jameson, novel is such a genre that conveys “essentially a socio-symbolic message”as “an individual utterance”of the “national unconscious”(Political Unconscious, 141)．In fact, as the title The Political Unconscious indicates, the Freudian metaphor is applied to Jameson's book in more than one sense, not the least of which being its attempt to achieve a Marxian dialectical synthesis of the challenges posed to Marxism by contemporary critical perspectives ranging from psychoanalysis and archetypal criticism to post-structuralism．His own critique of Freud assumes that social, political, and collective life studied by Marx gives meaning to psychological analysis of individual development．He advocates in the book that literature as well as literary criticism, as one of the representational machineries, provides the means by which the subject could break down the dichotomies of private vs．public, individual vs．collective, and subjective vs．objective.

To understand the difference between Jameson's perspective and other Marxian approaches to literature means in the first place to see how Jameson views the social ground of literary writing．Jameson affirms that there is always a social ground, which is “historical”and “ideological”, “prior”to an individual literary utterance (Political Unconscious, 81)．Meantime, he refuses to put that social ground outside the form of text when he argues “that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization”(82)．Therefore he terms the social ground of literary writing the “subtext”which, as has been used in the preceding paragraph, is “not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality, nor even the conventional narratives of history manuals, but rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact”(81)．In this sense, when any background information appears in this study, it is not presented as inert or absolute reality, not even as the “context”, but as the social ground of Doyle's writing, namely its subtext, in the form of a textualized history both materialized in and constituted by legal changes, public debates, political campaigns, media intervention, etc．A Jamesonian approach to Doyle's fiction is, therefore, to grasp his writing as the reproduction of a prior subtext of contemporary Ireland in the literary field.

The biggest collective subtext, according to Jameson, is the history of class struggles, what Marx and Engels call “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society”(81)．Jameson affirms Marx and Engels' assertion and views that history as a textualized one：a “single vast unfinished plot”or an “uninterrupted narrative”(20)．As Jameson indicates, in however disguised and symbolic a form, texts can be interpreted as sharing a single fundamental theme of this biggest subtext．Hence, an ultimate attempt of this study on Doyle's novels is to go beyond their textual surface and to restore the ideologies of contending classes hidden behind Doyle's seemingly “a-historical”, “a-political”“engagement with the present”(Head 3)．This renders Jameson's theory integral and indispensable to the present interpretation, recalling again Jameson's words that “[i]t is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity”(20).

The accomplishment of such an effort, i.e., restoring the class horizon of Doyle's fiction, relies heavily upon Jameson's specifying the “units”of “this larger system”of class antagonism (Political Unconscious, 87)．Appropriating Saussure's opposition of a parole (utterance) and a langue, Jameson defines the minimal units of the discourse of class as something able to convey “the dynamics proper to a class langue …… that is never wholly visible and never fully present in any one of its individual utterances”(87, his own emphasis)．Jameson coins his own term “ideologemes”to designate “the minimal units”, and describes the relationship between them and the subtext of class antagonism as such：“[t]his larger class discourse can be said to be organized around …… ideologemes”(87, his own emphasis)．“The analyst's work is thus first that of the identification of the ideologeme”(87), specifically for this study, the ideologeme in Doyle's novels which, as the following discussion bears out, is best identifiable with “the sense of belonging”embedded in the “family”theme.

Nothing is more consistent in Doyle's first five books than his focus on “family”．Essentially the same characters, the Rabbitte family and their friends, populate the Barrytown trilogy．All the stories including those of Paddy Clarke and The Woman take place in the same fictional setting—the blue-collar, Northside neighborhood Doyle invents and names Barrytown．While The Commitments is a joyful story about the life and death of a music band managed by the son (Jimmy Jr．Rabbitte), the plot of The Snapper (1990) unfolds as the Rabbitte family helps the daughter (Sharon Rabbitte) cope with the unmarried pregnancy, and The Van (1991) examines the struggles of the father (Jimmy Sr．Rabbitte) in the face of unemployment and entrepreneurship．Together they create a picture of Barrytown in which comes to life the whole of the Irish suburban working-class family in its language, its daily life and its social limits．Also set in Barrytown, Paddy Clarke tells a story chronologically falling before those of Doyle's earlier novels which take place in the 1980s．The book, narrated by Paddy Clarke, a ten-year-old boy, unfolds in the 1960s, telling the story of his daily life during the dissolution of his parents' marriage．The fifth novel, The Woman, narrated by the protagonist Paula Spencer, proves to be the revelation of a battered working-class woman's inner life, as she simultaneously recalls the happy days of her childhood and marriage and the seventeen years of abuse by her husband Charlo Spencer.

With the Rabbittes, the Clarkes, the O'Learys (the family Paula was born into) and the Spencers, Doyle concentrates his attention on a fairly narrow strand of Dublin society during the period from 1950 to 1990．Characters from these lower middle class and working-class families include the decently waged husband Mr．Clarke, low-paid workers Jimmy Rabbitte Sr．the father, Jimmy Rabbitte Jr．the son, and Mr．O'Leary, full-time housewives Mrs．Clarke, Mrs．O'Leary and Mrs．Rabbitte (Veronica), the convenience store salesgirl Sharon Rabbitte, the house cleaner Paula Spencer, and the professional thief Charlo (Paula's husband)．Farm owners, policemen, priests, journalists, and bank officials have only made guest appearances．The main characters' world is one of the self-owned houses or rented Corporation houses in a newly emerging suburb of the city, where they deal with internal and external life events．At the beginning of the story, all the households comprised a two-parent family unit headed by a male breadwinner and supported by his full-time homemaker wife who devoted herself to household management, raising children and taking care of all the domestic chores．The Clarkes differ from others in terms of class background．Among all the families, the Rabbittes are presented as a joyous even “chaotic”working-class family struggling with the unexpected problems and negotiating the compromises that make a life in common possible．The Clarkes and the Spencers, however, have a maladaptive reaction to changing environmental or developmental demands; they cannot balance continuity and change to further the socio-emotional well-being of family members．Although both families with serious disturbance, abuse, and neglect are living on the verge of break-up, Paddy and Paula still view a loving and cosy family as one of the most important sources of life happiness, even if those “happy moments”only survive in their memories．Recalling social and legal concerns over family issues in contemporary Irish society, we can quickly recognize that fictional representations of crisis pregnancy, unhappy marriage and domestic violence all have their immediate associations.

Many critics have noticed that “family”constitutes a central theme throughout Doyle's writing．Donoghue's words, for example, ring clear：“families may break up …… but no other social institution in Barrytown has replaced the family”(3)．However, none of them has shown so much serious concern as to present a separate interpretation of Doyle's family theme．This lack of critical attention, which can be partially attributed to “a male cultural perspective since the family does not require any great commitment of men's emotional or physical energy”(qtd．in O'Connor Emerging Voices 89), is a deficiency especially when O'Connor's comments help see that “[w]ithin an Irish cultural tradition the family is an important symbol of collective identity, unity and security”(89).

Doyle's invention of Barrytown families has its literary resonance, for “family”has been a dominant theme in Irish literature．Modern and contemporary Irish literature prominently features ineffectual, punitive or absent father, hardworking, angry and bitter mother, as well as rebellious, radical and troubled sons．“The pressure and intensity of family life in a colony cannot be overestimated”, as explained by Kiberd, “for …… the family is the only social institution with which the colonized can fully identify”(The Irish Writer, 179)．Locating Doyle's narration of everyday family lives within the context of various representations and interpretations of “what is my nation/family”, this study identifies “the sense of belonging”as an ideologeme of the subtext brought into being and at the same time transformed by Doyle's exploration into such ideological dichotomies as individual/community, margin/center, essentialism/pluralism, the local/the global.

The very word “family”seems to evoke a “natural”piety in us and provide us with a “natural”sense of belonging．In the dominant capitalist discourse the nuclear family is always portrayed as a place of intimacy, safety, and happiness; a place where the desire for privacy is satisfied and one can enjoy his/her freedom; a place where one's sense of relatedness is secured and one can be accepted for who he/she is; this is, however, a constructed myth．When family ties are recognized as a construct, they have much in common with other attachments like gender, class and nationality．With such an awareness, this study attempts to reexamine the family, calling to mind the old liberalist feminist slogan：The personal is political．For all its emotional evocations, the family is not only “a social institution”in Donoghue's sense, but also “an Ideological State Apparatus”in Althusserian terms．According to Althusser, the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes an authoritative and reproductive discourse, such as familial patriarchy．This is particularly true with the case of contemporary Ireland, where the subtext of class antagonism is organized around the patriarchal family.

The patriarchy has been enforced and legitimized in contemporary Ireland since the Catholic Church's concept of the Holy family was enshrined in the 1937 Irish Constitution, the second constitution to change the country's name from the Irish Free State to Ireland and to consolidate its independence and sovereignty．In the field of literary production, “the dysfunctional family”headed by the alcoholic abusive father began to operate as a recurrent trope in post-independence Irish novels and plays which enacted the subversion of sexual repression and reproductive politics as presented in the 1937 Constitution and therefore launched the critique of the church-state alliance the Constitution stood for．After 1958, the state elites began to face up to their position as modern Europeans who should look outward to a larger Ireland．Where political culture led, literary criticism followed．The satirical works that had been censored by Catholic nationalist intelligentsia in the 1950s and 1960s received great critical acclaim in the 1970s and 1980s．In the period leading up to a wider cultural program of capitalist modernization, outspoken critics of “Fianna Fail's version of nationalism, the rural traditionalism of the countryside and the inordinate influence of the Catholic Church”conceived themselves as the heroic creators of the liberal consciousness of a new state (Cleary 98)．Gearing their writing towards an allegorical reading of the institutional and ideological failings of the conservative Catholic nationalism, novelists like Edna O'Brien, William Trevor, and John McGahern continued to set their fictional world in the countryside and cultivated a bleak naturalistic aesthetic which the new intelligentsia of a more liberal character read as a rejection of the cultural provincialism.

Doyle started writing in this ideological climate．Adopting an oppositional stand against “the rural complex”in Irish literary writing, he has made a conscious effort to convey through his writing something of the reality of suburban life in a changing Ireland．In the first five novels, he has mined his acute perceptions of life in his home town in the north of Dublin in an attempt to express alternative truth concerning the rapid process of social, political and economic change that Ireland has undergone．Like Joyce in Dubliners, Doyle (pace Jimmy Jr.) has tried to forge in his soul the disenchanted consciousness of his class through an attentive observation of particular situations at particular times, and the consequent expression of that observation through art．But unlike Joyce who turned to the physically, intellectually and emotionally paralyzed life of Dublin for his literary inspiration at the turn of the 20th century, Doyle focuses on a changing landscape where the stumbling progress of Ireland's cultural and economic revolution has mobilized its citizens．Notably, family crisis expressed in the form of unmarried pregnancy, marital break-up and domestic violence is no longer merely restricted to literary imagination．The perceived decline in the ideal nuclear version of familialism, fuelled by sexual liberalization and empirical evidence of single parenthood and clerical sex and child abuse scandals, gave rise to an ongoing debate over the changing face of the Catholic Irish family and its relation to “Irish way of life”．As indicated by a series of legal changes since the 1970s, political rhetoric, policy agendas and news have cooperated to produce a public recognition of “family diversity”and hence to promote a fusion of “family revolution”and “national secularization”．Against such a social ground, Doyle's representation of family dysfunction, measured against Church doctrine in family matters, though censured by conservative defenders of “family value”, is more than readily subsumed into the prevailing liberal democratic framework of Irish politics.

This acknowledgement of the central role that “family”has played in Ireland's changing political agenda and Doyle's literary response reaffirms “the sense of belonging”as a minimal unit around which the Irish subtext is rewritten．This does echo what Jameson has defined as “ideologeme”, but still not suffice to establish “belonging”as an “ideologeme”in Doyle's fiction．The identification cannot be made until Doyle is seen to have inscribed into his representation of family the different dimensions by which “ideologeme”is constructed．Taking “ideologeme”as a fundamental element of his approach of interpretation, Jameson charts the dimensions of the ideologeme by specifying “three progressively wider …… semantic or interpretive horizons”(Political Unconscious, 76).

The first is a “narrowly political horizon”(76), in which “history is reduced to a series of punctual events and crises in time”(77)．Jameson admits that “the notion of contradiction”arising from political sphere is “central to”his interpretation as “to any Marxist cultural analysis”, but rejects as utterly unacceptable “the conventional sociology of literature or culture, which modestly limits itself to the identification of class motifs or values in a given text, and feels that its work is done when it shows how a given artifact ‘reflects’ its social background”(80-81)．His approach to texts in the political horizon, therefore, is not to take them as direct products of politics, but to “specify [an] individual text as a symbolic act”, which seeks to “grasp it as a determinate structure of still properly formal contradictions”(77, his own emphasis)．In this horizon, the ideologeme, as “a construct …… susceptible to both a conceptual description and a narrative manifestation all at once”(87), tars the rupture between ideology and cultural texts and interprets their relationship as such：“ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic act [the dialogic form for example] is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right”(79)．Given the horizon, “ideologeme”is then to be seen as a recognizable unit which is not only (re)shaped by the political discourse but also incorporating the motifs, values, and controversies into its being and operation, hence a “political construct”.

The second horizon is a “social”one, in which “individual texts are grasped as ‘utterances’ in an essentially collective or class discourse”(80)．Jameson emphasizes that Marxian analysis could not achieve its goal in unmasking the false consciousness of class ideology without positioning the individual subject within the social totality．According to him, the social horizon “becomes visible, and individual phenomena are revealed as social facts and institutions, only at the moment in which the organizing categories of analysis become those of social class”(83)．This horizon thus touches upon the core proposition of Jameson's hermeneutics：an effective reading of the object text is ultimately to retrieve its path towards being an episode in the “single vast unfinished”(20) narrative of class discourse．Particularly instrumental to such an effort, even more so than the recognition of “ideologeme”as a minimal unit of the class discourse, is the recognition of the ideologeme's “capacity to mediate between conceptions of ideology …… and the narrative materials”, or between “a pseudoidea—a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice”, patriarchy for example, and “a protonarrative—a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the ‘collective characters’ which are [actually] the classes in opposition”(87)．Therefore, to restore the buried antagonistic discourse to the surface structure of pseudoideas, often appearing non-class, involves an understanding of the second dimension of “ideologeme”as “a social mediation”.

The third horizon is the mode of production, “which [Jameson has] proposed to term the historical in the larger sense of this word”(89)．Jameson removes the traditional “temptation to classify texts according to the appropriate mode of production”because this schema is generally considered “typologizing”without proper recognition that “a given social formation consist[s] in the coexistence of various synchronic systems and modes of production”(94-97)．Specifying “cultural revolution”as the “moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic”, Jameson suggests that “all modes of production have been accompanied by cultural revolutions specific to them”(95-96, his own emphasis)．Thus Jameson characterizes the third and “final horizon”as “the organizing unity”transcending the political and the social, in which novel as a genre “may be grasped as part of a properly bourgeois cultural revolution [with] precapitalist as well as working class values …… discourses …… habits and the daily space systematically dismantled so that their place could be set the new conceptualities, habits and life forms, and value systems of a capitalist market society”(89, 96)．With this effort to synthesize cultural forms and economic impulses, Jameson builds up his historical horizon as a totalizing unity of “code, sign system, or system of the production of signs and codes”of antagonistic modes of production (88-89)．Recalling Jameson's denial of any existence of ideology outside aesthetic or textual forms, we can see that a mode of production becomes visible and productive only when it is encoded into texts．In this regard, “ideologeme”is rendered a “code”of competing modes of production．To interpret a novel against the horizon of capitalist mode of production, therefore, presumes an understanding of its “ideologeme”to be a “capitalist code”.

To analyze Doyle's representation of “family”under the above-specified three dimensions of “ideologeme”is what this study intends to do．This intention recalls Doyle's defense of his first five novels, despite their thematic concentration on domesticity, as political books．Speaking in the antithesis of typical Irish politics (the “big issues”like the Independence War and Northern Ireland violence), Doyle argues：“It's the difference between politics with a small ‘p’ or a big ‘P’ …… A book about a woman in a violent marriage is a political book．A book about two unemployed men is a political book.”(qtd．in White 180) This politics with a small “p”, lurking in such family issues but not lying dormant, is as ideological as and more aesthetic than a form directly and superficially bearing on the subtext of class antagonism．The retrieval in Doyle's family theme of a rewriting about contemporary Irish class discourse is made possible at least by the author's own confirmation of his class-rooted writing impulse．Describing himself as being brought up in a “lower-middle-class family”and in a working class neighborhood undergoing the process of industrialization and urbanization, Doyle admits that he feels more comfortable portraying the working class in its own language (vernacular)：“If I were to write a book in a more solidly middle class setting and I needed that sort of knowledge, I'd have to go off and find it, whereas if I'm writing about a working class context, I rarely have to research it．It seems to be in me already.”(qtd．in Paschel 150-151, my emphasis) In a sense, this has revealed the internalization of the class discourse in Doyle, which reminds the reader of the very title of Jameson's book The Political Unconscious.

Taking Jameson's hermeneutic approach as its interpretive perspective, this study intends to decode Doyle's narratives of everyday family lives in the following three ways．The immediate way is to juxtapose Doyle's representation of “family issues/problems/crises”with the political debate over “family”and the legal changes brought about in response to it in the last decades of the 20th century．To investigate the specific social conditions from which Doyle's writing emerges bears out the literature's dependence on textualized history．Nevertheless, it should be noted that the history evoked here does not serve as an empirical explanation of literary facts．That is to say, a crude correlation of literary and social detail would only lead to some vulgar literary sociology．What we will attempt to do is to identify the “deep structure”of a literary text, and to diagnose its relations to individual imagination and to collective identity．From this perspective, what is political in literature is never merely a surface layer, a question of political debate, government policies or legislative initiatives; it is the matrix within which all other items are shaped．Since “family”has been distinctly political in the reality of Irish life, this study concerns itself with identifying in Doyle's fiction a recurrent “sense of belonging”which could be claimed as something simultaneously constructed by and reacting to the political discourse.

Another way of reading Doyle's representation of “family”is to interpret it as having imaginatively grasped and transposed the political history of the late 20th centuty．Across Doyle's novels is embedded a constant struggle between two sets of beliefs and values．On the one hand are ranged the values of “Holy family”that reinforce an orthodox Catholic morality and justify a specific configuration of gender inequality; on the other hand lie the liberal principles of “families of choice”that accentuate individual rights and celebrate “family diversity”as a way of challenging the orthodox Catholic family．Beneath the political debate between the two value systems lies the struggle for dominance between the “old”, conservative land-owners and the “new”, liberal middle class of administrative, technical, managerial and intellectual professions．In order to understand the church-state alliance in Ireland's post-independence era, it is a must to apprehend the centuries-old Catholic dominance in Ireland．Apart from its religious and political strength in Irish history, the Catholic Church has also “maintained significant power in Ireland through its substitution for the State in the provision of social services, particularly in education, health and welfare”(Bacik 30)．In effect, the Catholic Church has been the owner of great tracts of land on which schools, hospitals and care institutions are built．Moreover, the laws upon which the Irish education, health and welfare systems are based allow the Church to retain overall control of the basic structures of the society．Generally speaking, the political debate over “family”in the past decades is indicative of a gradual but growing resistance to the domination of and influence over the State apparatus by the Catholic Church．The early resistance came from women and was afterwards undertaken by the new beneficiaries of the liberal economy and those of the expanded higher education, who support secular liberal individualism and are supported in turn by the media as well as the State．Doyle employs the family as a metaphor of the increasingly disjointed society, with the clash of old and new, the Nation and the State internalized in the family home．Since the new social consensus is embodied in a “reassertion of fatherhood”, “family”functions as a primary mediation between the literary representation and the social ground, a crucial nexus between fiction and history.

A third way of interpreting “family”is to trace the reproduction of domesticity (to produce an increased awareness of the difference in domestic space, life style, commodity access, but a diluted sense of the confrontation between groups of people) to a complicity between the ruling bourgeois classes in the face of a nationwide embrace of consumer capitalism．Despite the conflict of their values, the actual relations between landed and industrial classes in Doyle's times are more complex than purely antagonistic．Beyond their real clashes of political interests, the industrial bourgeoisie and the capitalist landowning class are allied by common economic interests．It is the new media that vividly exemplify the bridgeable nature of the distance between the old and the new middle-classes．As UCD sociologist Tom Inglis has pointed out, “[t]he owners and directors of newspapers, radio and television may have been conservative Catholics, but they operated in the marketplace; and the editors, journalists, producers who worked for them were quick to see and exploit changes”(6)．In party politics, the landowners still dominate Fianna Fail's political interest; however, in order to command a political majority in front of the economic “common good”, they have to share power with the industrial bourgeoisie who represent growing commercial interests．Even the Labor Party which at first “led the campaign against integration”into the EEC eventually reversed its position after the economic leap and “became one of the standard-bearers for increased integration”(Cleary 207)．In this climate, the victory for the forces of liberal secularism, especially in terms of legal changes in contraception, abortion, divorce and domestic violence, embodies a complex structure of convergence and antagonism between the landed and the industrial sectors of the contemporary ruling class in Ireland.

The integration into the global capital produces and distributes new wealth, leading to the normalization of an individualistic consumerist ethos which not only notably challenges the Church's moral teachings but innately subverts the capitalist idealism of self, family and community．The debate over the State's role in regulating family reproduction has been characterized by swings between liberal democratic celebration of “the family diversity”and conservative moral panics about “the family decline”．The ensuing legal changes indicate a fusion of tensions between the two social classes that dominate Doyle's world：the landed conservatives and the industrial bourgeoisie．Within this landscape, the family has been launched as a powerful ideological construction that organizes the material reality by consolidating a culture of consumption in which the ruling middle classes share their interests．Therefore, to read Doyle's “family”in terms of the consumerist mode of production involves decoding not only the complicity and compromise between the two competing middle classes but also a critique of capitalism with which the patriarchal structure is saturated.

This study is divided into three chapters, dealing with Doyle's representation of “family”respectively under political, social, and historical horizons．Chapter One, “‘I look modern’：Family as a Political Construct”, identifies the political dimension of “family”in Doyle's fiction, exploring how his representation of family in change informs the political confrontation between Catholic conservatism and secular liberalism．Chapter Two, “‘What went wrong with Daddy’：Family as a Social Mediation”, examines the mediating role “family”plays between the social construction of gender and the regulating power of a class discourse．It argues that Doyle's representation of family in crisis probes into the reproduction of family ideology and its “interpellation” of individual men and women into subjects．Chapter Three, “‘The market's huge’：Family as a Capitalist Code”, goes further to argue that consumerist mode of production constitutes a determinant factor in constructing domestic space．Throughout his works, “family”is represented as a way of life, a signifier of class．Doyle's efforts to depict Barrytowners' dream for a “respectable”way of life prioritize “family”as a key site where desires of “upclassing”through struggles with the market are (re)produced.

1. Hereinafter Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is referred to as Paddy Clarke or P.
2. Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a particular example Richard Todd used to illustrate the changing relationship between the mechanics of commerce and the formation of literary canon．For further reference, see Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions：The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London：Bloomsbury, 1996)．
3. See Tim Appelo, “Films”, Nation, 04/16/2001．Commenting on Doyle's popularity in America, Appelo says, “Which Booker Prize-winner could give Hollywood the boot in the arse it needs and secretly craves？Roddy Doyle, that's who．His Barrytown trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van) is somewhat more consistent than the Godfather trilogy and less dependent on film tradition.”
4. Hereinafter The Woman Who Walked into Doors is referred to as The Woman or W.
5. The list is not exhaustive and only includes those with which this study intends to enter into dialogue.
6. In McCarthy's monograph on Doyle, each of his six novels published up to 2003 receives critical attention．It should be noted that McCarthy's book remains to date the most comprehensive academic study of Doyle, to which this study owes a huge debt.
7. Doyle's craft was disputed by McFarlane：“There's an over-reliance on incessant wise-cracking, funny incidents, and teed-up punchlines”．See Noel McFarlane, “Raucous Days in Barrytown”, Irish Times Limited, 10/08/1991.
8. When people got used to the absence of “big politics”in Doyle's fictional writings, he surprised them with A Star Called Henry, a novel set against a backdrop of the Easter Rising．Until then, Doyle had never made a direct social commentary on the political revolution of Ireland．Through deconstructing the origin myth of the Irish nation in A Star Called Henry, he echoes O'Casey by suggesting that the political revolution has not cleared the way for a social one．Following up the first five “present-centered”novels with such a historical one, Doyle might be tracing contemporary class and gender inequalities back to the nation's founding moments．However, appropriating the child (Henry) as an emblem of the Irish nation, Doyle also expresses a persistent faith in the possibility of a newer Ireland, for A Star Called Henry only begins the projected trilogy.
9. Fredric Jameson states that the symbolic act serves two functions：to reorganize actively its subtext, and to form an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction in its social ground．He goes on to argue that “to overstress either of these functions …… at the expense of the other is surely to produce sheer ideology, whether it [is] ……the ideology of structuralism, or…… that of vulgar materialism”．See The Political Unconscious：Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca：Cornell University Press, 1981), p.82.
10. Whereas Jameson in his The Political Unconscious uses “subtext”to denote the social ground, he takes “context”, like text, as part of “the rewriting or restructuration”of the subtext when he says：“[t]he symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation”．See The Political Unconscious：Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca：Cornell University Press, 1981), p.81.
11. Jameson believes he has revolutionized Marxism essentially in the sense that he drives “a ‘text’ into the traditional disciplines by extrapolating the notion of ‘discourse’ or ‘writing’ onto objects previously thought to be ‘realities’ or objects in the real world, such as the various levels or instances of a social formation：political power, social class, institutions, and events themselves．[This] liberates us from the empirical object …… by displacing our attention to its constitution as an object and its relationship to the other objects thus constituted”．See The Political Unconscious：Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca：Cornell University Press, 1981), pp.296-97.
12. Here the word “dimension”is used in its most usual sense—“aspect”or “extent”—as one can find in any dictionary．So “the three dimensions of ideologeme”means “ideologeme”can be understood in three aspects or three “horizons”as to be shown in further arguments.
13. Here the word “mediation”is used in its sense specified by Jameson who defines the concept in terms of “the relationship between the levels or instances, and the possibility of adapting analyses from one level to another.”According to him, mediation “is the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationship between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground, or between the internal dynamics of the political state and its economic base.”See The Political Unconscious：Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca：Cornell University Press, 1981), p.39.
14. Having specified the three dimensions of “ideologeme”as “the political construct”, “the social mediation”, and “the capitalist code”, this study reminds its audience that the concepts, like “construct”, “mediation”, and “code”, are all borrowed from Jameson's terminology．Therefore, despite the difference of levels or “horizons”in which they are termed, they share a common referent, i.e., Jameson's principal argument：“narrative as a socially symbolic act”.
15. The regulating role of patriarchy in the Irish situation can be traced far back to the Catholic image of “father”：“In the hands of medieval Church and State, the image of the patriarch became the over-arching image of patriarchy in both heaven and earth, with one layer of fatherhood resting on another．In this imagery, God is the father and ruler of heaven and earth; the king is the father and ruler of his people; the priest is the father of his flock and the man is the father and head of the family．Throughout generations, this imagery and more particularly, the structures which support it, has conferred power and status on men, or at least on some men, in the public spheres of work, politics, and religion.”See McKeown et al., Changing Fathers？：Fatherhood and Family Life in Modern Ireland (Cork：The Collins Press, 1998), p.14.
16. The term is borrowed from Althusser who claims that “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing：‘Hey, you there！’”See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, in Essays on Ideology (London：Verso, 1984), p.48.