In speaking of what he calls the ‘pathological-therapeutic’ level of memory, rooted in ‘wounds and scars’, Ricoeur notes that there are places where there is an excess of memory and others where there is an excess of forgetting, urging a balance between a duty to forget and a duty to remember so that the egregious acts of the past are not repeated. According to Freud’s writing on trauma, such excesses are on the side of repetition and melancholia, which prevent reconciliation with the lost ‘object’ of the past, be it person or ideal. Classing this failure as an ‘abuse’ of memory, Ricoeur notes that ‘the diseases of memory are basically diseases of identity’, a displacement of selfhood to its external affiliations (from ‘who’ to ‘what’.) Narratives may abuse memory through various manipulations – and amongst these he cites certain ‘heroic’ commemorations (including their rituals, festivals, myths), which ‘attempt to fix the memories in a kind of reverential relationship to the past’. The monument is a civic obligation to the community to memorialise its collective memory, but Adrian Forty suggests that such objects are the ‘enemy of memory, they are what tie it down and lead to forgetfulness’, insofar as ‘they permit only certain things to be remembered, and by exclusion cause others to be forgotten.’ If, in the monument, the past is abstracted, idealised and institutionalised, what is ‘forgotten’ is the pain, loss and resentment that accompany violent conflict, a poignant reminder of which returns in the simple plaques and shrines, which may be protection against the loss of memory – or perhaps against the loss of reasons for sustaining resentment…

One such shrine now exists on the Letterkenny Road, which Doherty presents as To the Border: A Fork in the Road, 1986/2012. Among a group of photographs titled Lapse, from his archive but newly printed, it presents an unusual temporal displacement. The image marks the site of an event that had still to happen at the time the photograph was taken; and in an uncharacteristic elaboration of the title, Doherty notes gruesome details of this death. Two related works assign historical significance after the event: Face Down: Alleyway used for cover on January 30th, 1972, 1992/2012; and Silence: After A Kneecapping, 1985/2012. All tell of stories and places unremarked by the grand narratives memorialised in monuments.

Ricoeur notes another form of narrative directed towards justice and the future that he calls ‘telling otherwise’, in which not only the victors but also the victims of history get to tell their stories. This resonates in the works cited above and is consistent with Doherty’s refusal to reduce complexity to an exclusive duality, or ‘divide’, that renders ‘unseen’ other perspectives. Indeed, the artist’s various allusions to the blurring of topographic boundaries may be taken as metaphors for the unstable criteria by which the self seeks to distinguish itself from the other.

Hence, if Doherty’s work is a ‘telling otherwise’ it is in its disclosure of what is shared by, not what separates self and other. In this respect Doherty’s images of urban neglect render indistinguishable the housing estates on both sides of the ‘divide’. Contemplating these, the outsider wonders why the working class poor didn’t unite across sectarian lines against the political élite – but then one recalls Antonio Gramsci’s commentary on how the socially disenfranchised are coerced into identifying with the values of the middle classes against their own political interests, exacerbated by the divisive legacy left by British imperialism wherever in the world its tentacles have reached.

The bathos of this history is condensed in several works that contemplate the relationship of the Loyalist/Protestant Fountain Estate to the city, which Doherty identifies as an inner city ‘enclave’ (Enclave: Dividing Wall, 1987/2012). The Siege of Derry took place in 1689, and yet a siege mentality is still tenaciously held and materialised in the ‘gated’ Bishop’s Gate entrance to the Fountain, and in the defensive walls and fences that Doherty captures in several other works, including Last Bastion, 1992, and Fountain Walls, 1993, (and, of course, in the Apprentice Boys commemorative parade.) I first took God Has Not Failed Us (The Fountain, Derry), 1990, and At the Verge, 1992, to be reproaches about such sectarian intransigence, but on reflection they seem far more nuanced. God Has Not Failed Us shows the narrow lane between the palisaded city walls and the dilapidated Fountain, but it leads the eye only to the surviving tower of the old Derry Gaol flying the Union Jack. Thus the local residents seem imprisoned by an allegiance that (in an ironic inversion of Doherty’s title) failed them and by a past that could have taken a different path to the future. At the Verge, 1992, shows the now demolished Fountain flats in the background, whose residual lives Doherty captured in, amongst other works, Abandoned Interiors, 1997; but, inscribed with the word ‘MUTE’, the work prompts thoughts of how the marginalised of society of whatever allegiance become silenced by the rhetoric of the powerful.

The nightmare of history is a leitmotif weaving through the first (‘Telemachian’) episodes of Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, and it is couched as a quest for self realisation in the face of filial dispossession by what Gilles Deleuze in another literary context called ‘monstrous devouring fathers’: ‘if humanity can be saved, and the originals reconciled, it will only be through the dissolution or decomposition of the paternal function’ whereby the ‘sons’ can find their own space of agency through not predetermined concepts but percepts of living conditions. For Stephen Dedalus this paralysis of the future is attributable to ‘the imperial British state and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.’ More than a hundred years later, we catch echoes of Joyce’s exasperation with a past that obscures a productive vision of the future in the artistic practice of Willie Doherty: despite modest concessions, the baleful effects of these ‘fathers’ still resonate in the affiliations of their heirs in Joyce’s ‘black north and true blue bible’ – heirs who remain bereft of origins that they can fashion into a commonality beyond the filial constraints of religion, nationalism and ideology.

Joyce and Doherty’s work share the search for an exit from the more crippling effects of history as it resonates in the memories of the living. Among the structural devices common to writer and artist is a critique of the medium of transmission, in itself an act of resistance against the manipulative use of words and images by vested interests. Both deploy multiple perspectives in acknowledgement that no single viewpoint can guarantee the ‘truth’ of the past. Moreover, Doherty’s work is as intimately associated with Derry and what it has come to signify, as Joyce’s work is inseparable from Dublin; but if this is where their work begins it is by no means where it ends. As Joyce said, ‘For myself I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’ If a city can represent a ‘universal’, it is in the way place and lives are mutually articulated, where repetition may be a source of comfort or constraint, and memory a palliative or poison. Joyce described art as the production of ‘epiphanies’, and it is in its provocation of such insights that Doherty’s work may be seen as an ethics of memory and action that seeks a balance between a duty to forget and duty to remember, and a ‘space of agency through not predetermined concepts but percepts of living conditions,’ the ground from which a truly collective future may be wrought.