“Too Much Arunning and Awalking”: Sites of Revelation in Anna Burns's <i>Milkman</i>

Abstract This article examines the narrative function of walking in Anna Burns's 2018 novel Milkman and offers an affective reading of the novel that unsettles established frameworks of interpreting the past and exposes how certain kinds of violence continue to resonate in the present. The article proposes that the descriptions of the protagonist middle sister's movements—her walking, her running, her reading while walking—throughout the novel offer an articulation of gendered violence through the affective encounter, where such violence has been rendered illegible. The article demonstrates how the codification of language and emotions in Milkman works to exclude certain kinds of nonpolitical violence, making them invisible and unnameable. It argues that, by focusing on Burns's presentation of a particularly feminist theory of affect in the novel located in middle sister's movement, the interstitial space that affect occupies offers a site of revelation that enables an articulation of gendered violence outside the restrictive linguistic and emotional culture in which it occurs. In this way, Milkman is instructive in illustrating how insidious forms of violence are enabled to occur within the environment of conflict, and therefore how they become embedded and allowed to endure into the postconflict space.