JOHN WILSON FOSTER manages to say an amazing amount in this brief study. Circling out from those fateful early hours of April 14/15th, 1912, when the Titanic collided with a rogue iceberg, taking most of the passengers and crew down with it, Foster has written a stunning portrait in miniature of Belfast, the art of memory, prefirst World War English society, fiction of the 1890s and 1900s, and a polemical defence of what he calls "the local dialect of modernism", the applied science culture which gave birth to the Titanic and the thousands of men who built the ship.
"That dialect," writes Foster in his introduction, "Darkness Visible", "has been drowned out by the Romantic tones of Irish ruralism, behind which sound occasionally the harsher tones of Irish nationalism."
He charts the path to destruction before "astonishingly, the ship's debris is scattered over an area the size of London". "Town, city, metropolis, theatre: the sunken ship has also been called - with a lapse of historical sense - a `haunted Victorian mansion': the metaphors, like the representations, proliferate."
And what Foster has done in this fascinating "manifest" is to identify how and why the Titanic still lives on; how its fate was in some way anticipated in the literature of the time; and why the myths set up by the disaster survive to this day. He also criticises those who, stereotypically, overlook the city out of which came the Titanic and other comparably magnificent liners. "To their enemies, the Ulster working and artisan class is merely bigoted, the Ulster managerial class merely philistine."
This caricature is similar to that set tip by Sean O'Faolain in his An Irish Journey (1940), and which has been recycled ad nauseam since: `There is no aristocracy no culture - no grace - no leisure worthy of the name. It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate driven poor", which suggests a Jamesian take on the Cork of O'Faolain's younger years.
Yet, as Foster points out, 1940s Belfast "was helping directly through its industrial power to confront Nazism ... O'Faolain's fevered outburst betrayed [a] narrow idea of what constitutes culture as that which he imputed to Belfast, and an incapacity to look with curiosity at the work that filled the other days of the city's week." The Titanic Complex suggests ways in which that curiosity, can find a critical edge through examining what Foster calls "the participation by this unique Irish city of Belfast in the great international cultural project of modernity".
And before we know it, we are swimming in the surreality of postmodernity with the bizarre afterlife of the Titanic, its debris, its commemoration, its symbolism and the "intention of a Japanese company to build a fullsize replica It will be full scale and follow the designs of Harland and Wolff's for the real thing, but there will be no engines or steering mechanism; the replication will be surface, the simulation only of what is directly visible."
Foster's book is a lament for "the real thing" and a studied rebuke to those who have for generations taken the easy way out and acquiesced in cliche and stereotype rather than critical understanding. It is a process which Foster sees specifically in terms of the Titanic legacy as an example of a universal theme: "We could be forgiven for thinking that the collective attitude of denial regarding Titanic and between 1921 and 1969, Northern Ireland, its government and loyal citizens were in a chronic stale of denial, in several senses of the noun - changed only when the ship completed the voyage from manufact to artefact, from industry to culture, from the apparently discredited modernity of the ship to the creditable post modernity of heritage vessel and the post industrialism of serious private sector merchandise."
What The Titanic Complex is about is the place within history of ordinary people, their culture, their desires and their fate, and how this was dramatically transmuted as the White Star Royal Mail TripleScrew Steamer Titanic was launched on Wednesday, May 31st, 1911, at 12.15 pm and within barely the twelve month was, in three hours, as Foster eloquently has it, "borne under the waves, departing on that interminable voyage into the abyss".