Patrick McCabe's Ireland: The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood: 23 (Dialogue) 9004388990, 9789004388994

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Patrick McCabe’s Ireland

Dialogue Executive Series Editor Henry Veggian (unc Chapel Hill) Editorial Board Manisha Basu (University of lllinois at Champaign-​Urbana) Jennifer Keating (Carnegie Mellon University) Jason Stevens (University of Maryland, Baltimore) Richard Purcell (Carnegie Mellon University) Thomas Reinert (unc Chapel Hill) Founding Editor Michael J. Meyers† (DePaul University, Chicago)

VOLUME 23

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​dial

Patrick McCabe’s Ireland The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood

Edited by

Jennifer Keating

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: John Carson. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2018963902​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. ISSN 1574-​9 630 ISBN 978-​9 0-​0 4-​3 8899-​4 (hardback) ISBN 978-​9 0-​0 4-​3 8900-​7 (e-​book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For Dad, because this is your Ireland too

∵

Contents Preface ix Colin MacCabe Notes on Contributors xiv 1 Introduction 1 Jennifer Keating 2

Attack of the Killer Clones: Attachment and Trauma in Patrick McCabe’s Films and Fiction 10 Luke Gibbons

3

The Social Fantastic: Graphic Violence in Patrick McCabe’s Fiction 27 K. Brisley Brennan

4

A Portrait of the Artist as a Madman 45 Barbara M. Hoffmann

5

Specters of a Border Town: Irish History and Violence in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy 65 Aisling B. Cormack

6

Exploring Home from Stranger Shores: the Irish Experience in Patrick McCabe’s Mondo Desperado 93 Flore Coulouma

7

Violence, Peace, and Priests in Adapting Breakfast on Pluto 110 Lindsay Haney

8

Possible Worlds in Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood 125 James F. Knapp

9

‘It Ain’t Like the Old Place Anymore’: Contemporary Ireland and the Postmodern, Fragmented Individual in the Fiction of Patrick McCabe 140 Kristina Varade

viii Contents 10

‘Sinking the Pail into the Self-Conscious,’ Bubble Gum Ballads and Other Conversational Circles: Patrick McCabe, London 2015 164 Jennifer Keating

Index 181

Preface Colin MacCabe My mother’s birthday was March 10. We were a family that celebrated birthdays; they were major events. My mother was devoted to writing. Not the histories and essays that my father read but poetry and drama; and often, with a focus on Ireland. At the end of the war my mother and father moved to England. My father hated Ireland: the sexual repression, the social hypocrisy, the terrible poverty. But my mother felt very strongly that, however much she loved London, she was an Irish woman and that we were an Irish family. Every March 17th fresh shamrock would arrive in tobacco tins and we would pin it in the lapels of our school uniforms before going to school, where a select number of other boys would be similarly attired. But the real connection was poetry: above all, Yeats’ s early poems –​the poems of the Celtic twilight. And plays, always plays. I remember as a teenager going to Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. My mother’s birthday often involved going to a play, and quite often, the theme was an Irish one. In retrospect, my mother’s identification as Irish –​to the extent of getting us Irish passports as teenagers –​is something of a mystery. Her brother and sister, who also moved to England after the war, made no such identification. As is perhaps common with immigrants, family ties were unusually strong and our three families lived almost as one. But my cousins were brought up English, they did not go to Ireland once or twice a year. They were not drowned in Irish literature. My father died the year before I became an economic migrant and began a lifetime of teaching from January to April each year in the United States. By chance, the University of Pittsburgh’s spring break was in early March. My mother’s birthday, therefore, became a particularly charged encounter to which I looked forward with both anticipation and dread each year. I found the London theatre more and more irritating and, attending with my mother, I was inexcusably incapable of not letting that irritation show. There were magnificent exceptions –​Brian Friel’s Translations remains vividly in my mind –​but often, my reaction to the stage was sullen and ungrateful. A variation on the routine occurred in March 1998, when my mother suggested a film: The Butcher Boy (BB). I was delighted at the choice for Neil Jordan was one of the great directors of my generation. Nothing, however, prepared me for the film. From the opening moments we were in an Ireland that I had

x Ma c Cabe never known. In the county of Monaghan, in the town of Clones and in a rural poverty that I  had glimpsed but not seen. But this was no “miserabilist” account of Irish social conditions. If one of the centers of the film was the abuse of vulnerable children by the Church that had taken power but not responsibility in 1922, this was not a “social drama” of victimhood. Francie Brady might easily have been portrayed as such: drunken father, mad suicidal mother, abused by priests. It was difficult to imagine making a carnivalesque hero out of that material. But carnival hero Francie Brady was and there were two saving graces. First, there was the Irish language. It was not the Gaelic that a terribly beaten and humiliated people had abandoned in the early nineteenth century but that extraordinary version of English that we find in the texts of John Millington Synge and James Joyce. It is the language that we hear in the accents of Monaghan that animate the film. Second, the incredible energy of the Anglophone popular culture (film, comics, television), which allows Francie to produce an imaginative structure for his life. Here was a film that celebrated the realities of Irish culture and its “miscegenations on miscegenations,” as Joyce called them. It had no truck whatsoever with the manufactured mythic Irish culture of Padraic Pearse and Eamonn De Valera, with its mendacious version of a past that never existed and a language that lived on signposts and in compulsory school classes but gave no access to any living cultural reality. Indeed, the film situates itself in the early sixties when the introduction of television to Ireland signaled the death knell of the narrow and bigoted Catholic Irish culture. The Church’s centrality to symbolic civil life was ushered in with the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell and the formation of the Free State in 1922. Its erosion, however, was laid in the introduction of pop culture through television. McCabe’s presentation of Irish culture in the film was one that I had known as a child. If it had its version of warmth and security, it was imbued with a vicious hatred of both the sexual body and the inquiring mind. My teenage judgment on a culture, which locked its congregations into the Churches once Mass had started, was deepened and intensified as I wrote a dissertation on Joyce in counterpoint to the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and their cult of violence. For me, the Ireland of 1922 was still the Ireland of my mind. I knew that joining the European Union in 1973 had made some difference in Ireland’s isolation and I also knew there had been striking developments in the culture in music and film in the eighties. My mother kept me supplied with contemporary novels and the news that the Bishop of Galway had fathered a child. I  also knew that Mary Robinson had produced a completely different version of Ireland in which the question of borders were dissolved into a question of a diaspora and of a people for whom exile was the dominant condition.

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But I also knew that the Provisionals,1 however committed to a peace process that would provide the perks of office, offered the most limited and unappealing version of the nationalist tradition. As I watched BB my frozen image of Ireland was dissolved in a maelstrom of images and emotions. The Provisionals are simply irrelevant in Francie Brady’s world of the sixties and Irish politics are confined to the ramblings of Tom Brady’s hilarious gardener. What is celebrated has nothing to do with the frigid vision of Pearse and de Valera and everything to do with language and image. BB is the most realistic of films. Pat McCabe spent three days schooling Stephen Rea in the Monaghan accent, a sound and cadence markedly different from the perhaps more familiar tones of Belfast and Dublin. The town square in Monaghan, the center of Francie Brady’s imagination, is rendered with all the money of Warner Brothers and the skill of the team that Jordan had built around himself over the course of two decades. But this is a realist film, which understands that surrealism is the indispensable addition to the procedures of the nineteenth century novel. The pulp fiction that gives Francie Brady the energy and the courage to narrate his own life also provides the content of his psychotic collapse. His desperate denial of his father’s death returns in the hallucinatory real of the destruction of Clones. And it is that same surrealism that allows Francie to symbolize an image of a mother. Jordan’s choice of Sinead O’Connor to play the Blessed Virgin must be one of the most inspired casting decisions of all time. The real mothers in BB are either desperately inadequate or overpoweringly domineering. But by the end of the film, they are both dead and the last words are left with Sinead O’Connor. I do not think that I have ever been so affected by a film, not by Godard as a teenager nor by Performance as a young man. As the film unspooled, as Francie’s mind mushroomed into an explosive psychosis, as Jordan, ever a master of screen violence, forced us to watch Francie’s bloody execution of Ma Nugent, I found my image of Ireland, honed and chiseled over five decades, exploded. It was as though, in an extraordinarily abbreviated psychoanalysis, I was understanding for the first time the country from which my parents had chosen to emigrate. I couldn’t thank my mother enough for suggesting it for her birthday. I don’t think I have ever had a more surprising or more welcome telephone call than the one I received about a year later. The Irish Film Institute was planning a series of short books on Irish films, would I like to write one on BB? This was a gift from heaven. But life goes on, and I kept on postponing it. Finally it was 2005 and the book, one of the first commissioned in the series, would be 1 Provisional Irish Republican Army broke from the Irish Republican Army in 1969.

xii Ma c Cabe the last to be delivered. I went back to Ireland with some purpose. This was not a visit to give a talk or attend a conference. I was going to work in Ireland and going to work with a novel that had thrilled me to the core, even as I read it for the first time after viewing the film. I had known Neil Jordan since I started producing films in 1985 and, indeed, his The Company of Wolves of the previous year was the first film that had made me think that our generation could use the medium to real purpose. We’d always got on well and when I contacted him he was extraordinarily generous with his papers. I had thought to focus my study of BB on adaptation and the five versions of the script offered a wealth of material. One of Andre Bazin’s most original articles is on adaptation, in which he argues that the greatest adaptions are those which use the resources of the cinema to develop the force of the book so that book and film come to produce an “ideal construct,” greater than the sum of their parts. As I read and re-​watched, re-​watched and read, it was clear that BB was not just a good example of such an “ideal construct;” it was possibly the greatest example for which Bazin had argued. There are many reasons for this. One, certainly, is the extraordinary delayed arrival of the production of cinema in Ireland, together with a generation who had not had television in their childhood. McCabe was movie-​mad and Jordan, a major writer. They worked as equals. Writing BB (Ireland Into Film) was un retour au pays natal except, of course, Ireland is my parents’ pays natal, not mine. But as I saw, for the first time, the Atlantic breakers making towards the pebbled shore in Sligo, as I  lodged in one of the castles with which England had kept this turbulent country in its iron grip and as I spoke with Jordan and McCabe, without unnecessary English politeness, I felt (for the first time since I had ceased my annual Irish holidays at 15) that I was beginning to recognize Ireland. In his great working-​class novel Border Country Raymond Williams deals, in the context of a father’s death, with what is handed on from generation to generation. This, for Matthew Price, the protagonist, is above all a question of class. The working class village of his youth, which has formed him, is now a foreign country when he comes back to his father’s deathbed as an adult. The book is a long meditation on what is gained and lost across the distance of generations and economic displacement. His final words in the book are to the wife to whom he has returned: Only now it seems like the end of exile. Not going back, but the feeling of exile ending. For the distance is measured, and that is what matters. By measuring the distance, we come home. (Williams 341) BB –​film, novel and study –​measured the distance.

PREFACE

xiii

While I was writing the book my mother was dying. It gave her great pleasure that I was visiting Ireland so often and that I now agreed with her that my Joycean images of Paddy Mud and Micky Stink were a thing of the past. I dedicated the book to her and the first copies arrived before she died. She kept it by her bed and it was placed in her coffin. Works Cited MacCabe, Colin. “Bazinian Adaptation: BB as Example” in True to the Spirit: Film adaptation and the Question of Fidelity ed. Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Williams, Raymond. Border Country. Wales: Parthian, 2006.

Notes on Contributors K. Brisley Brennan K. Brisley Brennan is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, having received an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh’s Critical and Cultural Studies program. Brennan broadly researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, music, and film from Ireland and the Caribbean, and her investigation into shibboleths can be found in Caribbean Irish Connections from the University of the West Indies Press (2015). Her doctoral research looks at how contemporary Caribbean and Irish poetry formally reflects the ambivalence of poets in response to the state of the English language—its ineluctability—and its historical roots in the ­island regions. Aisling B. Cormack Aisling B. Cormack received a B.A. in English from Columbia University in 1998, an M.Phil. in Anglo-​Irish literature from Trinity College Dublin in 2000, and a Ph.D. in English, with a certificate in critical theory, in 2012 from the University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches English at Pasadena City College and continues her research on twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century Anglo-​Irish literature and film within the context of postcolonial criticism, cultural studies, and psychoanalytic theory. Flore Coulouma Flore Coulouma is an associate professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre. She is the author of Diglossia and The Linguistic Turn:  Flann O’Brien’s Philosophy of Language (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015), and has written on contemporary Irish and American literature and on American and Irish TV series. Her other research interests include ecocriticism and social justice, law and linguistics. Luke Gibbons Luke Gibbons has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland, and at the University of Notre Dame, U.S.A. His publications ­include Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism and Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Charles O’Conor: His Life and Works, co-edited with Kieran O’Conor(Four Courts Press, 2015); Limits of the Visible: Representing the Great Hunger(University of Quinnipiac/Cork University, 2014); Edmund Burke and

Notes on Contributors

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Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime(Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gaelic Gothic(Arlen House, 2003); The Quiet Man (Cork University Press, 2002); Transformations in Irish Culture(Cork University Press, 1996); and Cinema and Ireland, co-authored with Kevin Rockett and John Hill (Routledge, 1987). Lindsay Haney Lindsay Haney is an Assistant Professor of English at Bellevue College in ­Bellevue, WA. He is currently at work on a book on performing masculinities in Irish literature and popular culture in the EU era. He earned a Ph.D. at Notre Dame University. Barbara M. Hoffmann Barbara Hoffmann has a Ph.D. from the University of Miami. Her dissertation, entitled “Over the Edge of the World:  Irish Convict Writing and Contemporary Australian Literature,” explores the effects on national identity of Irish convict transportation to Australia. Her research interests include Irish and Australian literature, nationalism, prison literature, oceanic studies, and neo-​ Victorian literature. While at the University of Miami, she served as the managing editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement, and helped to organize the 18th Miami J’yce Conference and the 2015 acis conference. She has presented at the A ­ merican Conference for Irish Studies (acis) several times; the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (isaanz) conference; the North American James Joyce Conference; and the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (aaals) conference, at which she won the Albert Wertheim Prize for the Best Presentation by a Graduate Student. She currently teaches at Miami-​Dade College and convenes a monthly Finnegans Wake reading group. Jennifer Keating Jennifer Keating is the Assistant Dean for Educational Initiatives in Dietrich College, where she also teaches regularly in the Department of English. Her writing has recently appeared in acm, Critical Quarterly, New Hibernia Review and in Outrage: Art, Controversy and Society; and her book, Language, Identity and Liberation in Contemporary Irish Literature, was awarded the Michael Durkan Prize for Best Book on Irish Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2011. She earned a Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and holds a B.A. in English and History from the University of Rochester.

xvi 

Notes on Contributors

James F. Knapp Recently retired from his position as senior associate dean, James F. Knapp’s responsibilities extended from initial hiring to the retirement of senior faculty. Much of his work has involved the effort to support faculty development by making the administration of faculty procedures as fair and efficient as possible and making those procedures transparent to faculty. He has been particularly concerned to understand and recognize the different kinds of work faculty do, including grant-​supported research in laboratories, the intensive teaching of lecturers devoted entirely to the classroom, and that of tenure-​ stream faculty whose responsibilities include both teaching and research. Knapp came to the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor of English in 1966, after earning his BA from Drew University and PhD from the University of Connecticut. He teaches and writes on literary history, Irish literature, and British and American modernism. He is the author of books Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work and Ezra Pound, as well as many articles on topics such as primitivism in modern art, the Irish Literary Revival, modern British and American poetry, futurism, and the culture of modernity. He is currently working on the Arts and Crafts Movements in the United States and Ireland. Colin MacCabe Colin MacCabe teaches across the range of Early Modern and Modern Literature with particular emphases on modernism and the Renaissance. He also teaches courses on Film. His research interests include the history of English since 1500, psychoanalysis, Joyce, Godard, and linguistics. He is the author of inter alia Godard:  A Portrait of the Artist at 70, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, T.S. Eliot, BB, Performance, and Diary of a Young Soul Rebel (with Isaac Julien). He has edited numerous volumes including Signs of the Times: Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics, The Talking Cure:  Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language, High Theory/​Low Culture, The Linguistics of Writing, Futures for English, and James Joyce:  New Perspectives. Most recently he co-​edited a volume with the Oxford University Press, True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011) (with Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner), two volumes on Film and Empire (2011) (with Lee Grieveson), and Godard’s Contempt: Essays from the London Consortium (2012) (with Laura ­Mulvey). He edits the journal Critical Quarterly.

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Kristina Varade Kristina Varade is an Assistant Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, cuny. She received her Ph.D. from the cuny Graduate Center in 2012. Her research interests focus on Irish literature and culture in the late nineteenth and late twentieth/​early twenty-​first centuries, with a critical lens focused upon comparative cultural studies, postcolonialism and postmodernism. She is particularly interested in comparative Irish/​Italian studies. Professor Varade’s publications include articles and reviews on contemporary Irish and Italian fiction. She recently published an article and a book review concerning Irish dance culture for the New Hibernia Review and has shared recent work on Patrick McCabe and Roddy Doyle at several national and international conferences. Professor Varade has published an article on Petrarchan convention in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl for Annali d’Italianistica and is currently completing a book on the nineteenth-​century Anglo-​Irish writer and consular representative Charles Lever.

Chapter 1

Introduction Jennifer Keating In Patrick McCabe’s fiction, Ireland’s borders reign supreme. A native of Clones, County Monaghan, a town nestled in the borderlands of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, McCabe’s work is informed by his birthplace. It is haunted by residuals of Ireland’s colonial past. In our contemporary moment, the concept of border could not be more salient, instructive of turbulent histories throughout the West and current interruptions to geopolitical stability worldwide. In the context of McCabe’s fiction, there is also a focus on I­ reland’s relationship to the United Kingdom, and by extension, Europe, the United States and the world. The historical and cultural significance of McCabe’s work, especially in relation to borders, was reiterated on March 29, 2017, when Prime Minister Teresa May signed a letter to formally begin the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. Ireland’s border came to matter again to many beyond its tiny region. It would become a nominal and literal border between the European Union and the United Kingdom. In this context, McCabe’s explorations of borders between the historic and the contemporary, the topographical and the political, and the fluidity of identity expression and gender play, particularly in the Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto (BoP) and Winterwood (W), take on a poignant layer of meaning. His timely work that documents and explores Ireland’s language and culture at the fringes of mainstream society indicate the significance of his contributions to Irish letters at the turn of the twenty-​first century. McCabe’s sensitive consideration of a nation coming of age economically and culturally in the midst of a changing world order is both poetic and politically subversive as his novels BB, BoP and W, capture the complexity of the region’s political and cultural tensions in the 1960s, 1970s and the late 1990s, respectively, and the nation’s emerging position in a global economy. A distinguishing feature of McCabe’s writing is the influence of James Joyce, a predecessor whose commitment to capturing the particular speech patterns of English as it is spoken in Ireland is a defining feature of his work (FitzSimmons). Within this context of demonstrating linguistic and cultural particularity in Ireland, Joyce also insisted on Ireland’s membership in the cultural and literary context of Western Europe, not least instantiated with his Jewish protagonist, Leopold Bloom, whose wanderings through cosmopolitan Dublin at

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_002

2 Keating the turn of the twentieth century, also invoke an ancient Greek antecedent in Ulysses. Like his predecessor, McCabe’s turn of the twenty-​first century fiction captures the intricacies of speech patterns along the borderlands and in the West of Ireland, to signify but also to explore the manner in which hyper-​local cultural and political particularity is continually in tension with cultural and political influences from the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States in Ireland. Such tensions are not simply symbolic or aesthetically configured in Ireland, however, as the recent “Brexit” scenario illustrates. Beyond international disputes associated with sovereignty, cultural and linguistic particularity in our global economy, inner-​city and inter-​regional disputes continue as well. Within the city limits of Belfast, Northern Ireland, for example, more than one hundred walls, gates and waste-​grounds separate historically contentious nationalist and unionist populations. Divisions and borders are robust in Ireland, two decades after the historic 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement and one hundred years after the violent founding of the Irish Republic with the Easter Uprising of 1916. McCabe’s fiction attends to these cultural realities in the past and present, as he carefully explores fluidity and subversion through fiction. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown delineates three paradoxes to characterize tensions between our global economy and residuals of nationalism throughout the west: … even as those across a wide political spectrum –​neoliberals, cosmopolitans, humanitarians, and left activists  –​fantasize a world without borders (whether consequent to global entrepreneurship, global markets, global citizenship, or global governance), nation-​states, rich and poor, exhibit a passion for wall building. Second, within the ostensibly triumphant universal political form, democracy (heralded by European post-​Marxists, Islamic secularists, or American neoconservatives, even if each inflects democracy differently), we confront not only barricades but passageways through them segregating high-​end business traffic, ordinary travelers, and aspiring entrants deemed suspect by virtue of origin or appearance. Third, in a time featuring capacities for destruction historically unparalleled in their combined potency, miniaturization, and mobility, from bodies wired for explosion to nearly invisible biochemical toxins, these deadly but incorporeal powers are perversely answered by the stark physicalism of walls. … What is also striking about these new barriers is that even as they limn or attempt to define nation-​state boundaries, they are not built as defenses against potential attacks by other sovereigns, as fortresses against invading armies, or even as shields against weapons launched in interstate

Introduction

3

wars.  Rather, while the particular danger may vary, these walls target ­nonstate transnational actors –​individuals, groups, movements, organizations and industries. They react to transnational, rather than ­international relations and respond to persistent, but often informal or subterranean powers, rather than to military undertakings. (Brown 21) In the context of McCabe’s fiction, “individuals, groups, movements, organizations and industries” are the fodder for characters who explore individual resiliency and vulnerability in the face of nationalist hegemony. Subversion in contrast to the dominance of the state in the Republic of Ireland or the British State in the context of the North of Ireland, are placed in relation to the “stark physicalism of walls” that are both literal and figurative in places like Belfast but also along the borders that divide Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland as well. In this region, individual relationships to the state(s), reflect a complex and often contentious relationship between Britain and Ireland. In addition, a long history of paramilitary activism and violence to agitate state hegemony, whether in Ireland or in Northern Ireland, colors even the most basic familial and community relationships, which are depicted in McCabe’s novels. Divisions are acknowledged or undermined in McCabe’s fictional worlds, where his satire, capture of the rhythms of language as it is spoken in Ireland and irreverence when addressing historically taboo questions (ranging from sympathy for paramilitaries to clergy sexual abuse of parishioners to gender bending protagonists), demonstrate that the border is and will likely continue to be, the richest grounds for aesthetic and social exploration in Irish contemporary fiction. In Clones, economic stagnation and elements of isolation have been at play for generations, influenced greatly by Britain’s imposition of a border that has separated the North of Ireland from the Republic of Ireland in 1921. In the context of the Northern Irish civil war dubbed “The Troubles,” from the late 1960s to the turn of the twenty-​first century, regular flows of “custom” were suspended almost indefinitely in the region, and relief from such isolation and provincialism has yet to come. In the late 1990s, Clones hoped the peace brought by the Belfast Agreement would usher in a new era of prosperity. Local Veronica Monahan says, “All the roads to the North were cut off for a long time because of the Troubles and we thought when they reopened custom would come back but I am afraid it didn’t come back.” (Edwards) While the historic Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 articulated the promise of a transnational future, the new political order suggests something quite

4 Keating different. In the last two decades, British demilitarization of the Northern Irish border has facilitated far higher numbers of individuals and businesses crossing and straddling the border. But a porous border that suggested a promise of cultural fluidity between the regions now seems compromised yet again in the context of the “Brexit” referendum and the March 2017 invocation of Article 50. But these developments simply continue trends of recent events. Groundbreaking referendums like the Thirty-​Fourth Amendment1 and the recent vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment, have indicated Ireland’s position to lead the world with legislative liberalism and yet, McCabe’s fiction uncovers the ways in which Ireland’s nationalist and religious conservatism can also hamper the exercise of individual identity and political will. His fiction explores an Irish history that inherently damages the region’s ability to build robust democratic systems north and south of the border regions. Very few Irish writers have produced the sheer volume or deeply subversive critiques that are emblematic of McCabe’s work over the last three decades. BB is the most recognizable and widely acclaimed of McCabe’s novels, and not surprisingly, the most academically criticized of his work. It was short-​listed for a Booker Prize and became something of an international phenomenon with a successful screenplay adaptation for film (1997) with director Neil Jordan.2 This followed closely on the heels of Jordan’s predecessors The Crying Game and Michael Collins, underscoring the high quality of film and literary production emerging from Ireland in this period. The screen adaptation was the subject matter for Colin MacCabe’s BB (Ireland into Film) and Kate Hall’s analysis of McCabe’s portrayals of Irish childhood in We Won’t Make It Out Alive: Patrick McCabe and the Horrors of this Irish Mundane. In addition, both film and novel have been the focus of innumerable peer-​review academic articles, literary reviews and film reviews. In BB, McCabe offers a depiction of 1960s Ireland that is distinct from the central narrative of Eamonn DeValera’s isolationist and culturally austere theocratic government. Although set in a rural and culturally stagnant border town, Francie Brady’s Ireland is one that is at once stifling, and yet overrun with American and English pop cultural influence from the kapow of children’s comics to the bang-​bang of country westerns. These elements punctuate a soundscape in McCabe’s fiction that is saturated with musical references contemporaneous with the period in which each story is set. Violence and madness are showcased alongside cultural and spiritual dominance of the Catholic 1 Legalization of same-​sex marriage in Ireland and the right to abortion, respectively. 2 In addition to the successful novel and film, an adaptation of BB was staged as “Frankie Pig Says Hello” (1992).

Introduction

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Church. The boy-​murderer in Francie Brady offers contemporary Ireland an unflattering view of itself, analogous to Joyce’s “cracked looking-​glass of a servant” (Joyce 6).3 BB colors most readers’ interactions with McCabe’s later work. But it is a novel that is born of its time and proves emblematic of its culture. This is accomplished through the particularly raw characteristics of his protagonist’s voice and a dismal depiction of Ireland at crucial moments in its history. By showcasing violence as a central cultural tenet, alongside mental illness, alcoholism, clergy abuse of parishioners and pervasive British and American cultural influences, McCabe’s BB is one of the most significant Irish novels of the twentieth century, for its depiction of the bleak in a classically distinct Irish voice that is laden with proper doses of wit and black humor. McCabe’s later novels, BoP (1998) and W (2006) received noted acclaim. BoP was a finalist for the Booker Prize and in 2004, Jordan and McCabe again teamed up to adapt the novel into a feature film released in 2005. It was greeted with considerable success. W, a chilling post-​Celtic Tiger gothic tale, found warm reception in Ireland and on the international literary scene.4 In both novels, McCabe refuses notions of rural Ireland as a placid pastoral landscape as he peppers audiences with harrowing tales of sexual abuse and violence. The subversive buoyancy of Pussy’s voice in BoP, linked with the fantastically colorful pageantry of her explosion of static notions of gender (and the cultural expectations ascribed to such gender roles in Ireland as well), exhibit an energy and pulse in Ireland’s late twentieth century that distinguishes McCabe’s style and artistic practice from many of his peers. He positions dynamic characters like gender bending Pussy in dialogue with her foster mother, who represents violent forms of repression and provincialism. The sleepy small town, nestled in a mythologized rural Irish landscape is placed in contrast with London, an urban landscape associated with sexual debauchery, labor exploitation and violence as a target for ira paramilitary activity. As he positions misfits in the foreground of his tongue-​in-​cheek pastorals, McCabe nudges his audience to consider the seduction of flagrant and mad tropes, who oftentimes spout lyrical language in tension with the muted and stifling language (and mind frame) depicted in repressive figures like Mrs. Nugent in BB. McCabe pulls his readers along a cultural safari where nostalgia of small town Ireland is intertwined with icons of pop culture from the United States and Britain. His audience is immersed in depictions of theocratic 1970s Ireland in BoP that 3 “The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he (Mulligan) said. If Wilde were only alive to see you. –​It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking glass of a servant” Ulysses. 4 See articles ranging from Welsh, Irvine “The Man from the Mountains,” Guardian, November 4, 2006; to Cowles, Gregory, “The Silver-​Tongued Devil,” New York Times, March 4, 2007.

6 Keating illustrate the potency of a beautiful landscape and reverence for a history and culture, which are rent by the novel’s end in a demonstration of the region’s susceptibility to cultural claustrophobia. These elements are literally blown to smithereens by homegrown vigilantism associated with the violence of The Troubles. McCabe’s work explores a cultural and political closeness and conservatism that can smother its citizens, pushing them to the brink of insanity, North and South of an arbitrarily drawn border. But his fiction also offers a necessary plane for testing the implications of an inheritance of violence in Ireland, and its influence on the prospect of a robust democratic politic in the region. McCabe unapologetically questions whether the nation can afford individuals the tolerant cultural and political environment necessary for a more fluid exercise of identity, suggested in legislative changes like Amendment 34. While satirical critiques of nationalism, cultural and social hegemony in Ireland associated with the Catholic Church and intolerance for gender fluidity are relentless in his novels, there are still threads of optimism. Oftentimes this is captured in McCabe’s reverence for the English language as it is spoken in Ireland, foundational to his work. In his depiction of the dynamic rhythm of this language, and its variation throughout Ireland, McCabe suggests a faith that Ireland will indeed come of age and deliver on its promise of a democratic republic that embodies cultural hybridity and tolerance of difference. In W (2006) McCabe introduces a study of Ireland in the post Celtic-​Tiger, pre-​economic meltdown, period. Only with the passage of time, can we fully appreciate the poignancy of this fleeting reality that was Ireland’s short-​lived economically vibrant period. McCabe’s portrayal of a rural west, marred by the violence of mythologies, are set in direct tension with a cosmopolitan Ireland of the late nineties through the early years of the twenty-​first century. Elements of W prove a timely warning against the seduction of a booming real estate market, loosely regulated banking and a boom cycle throughout the west –​from the United States through most of the European Union and other developing nations. In later years we understand that this bust, much to the chagrin of the starry-​eyed believers in the bubble of Irish “progress,” left much of the Irish population horror-​struck. The necessary International Monetary Fund bailout in 2008 indicated that recovery would likely take a decade or ­longer. W’s macabre tale is distinct from BoP and BB, as readers are transported through linear and web-​like passages of time. McCabe’s central character, Red Hatch, and his interview subject, Ned Strange, come to illustrate the ill fate of Irish masculinity in a culture haunted by its past. Unlike Pussy in BoP or Francie in BB, Red is a recognizable twenty-​first century Irish professional. McCabe’s tale depicts the fragility of a perceived cosmopolitan Ireland; where

Introduction

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the ethereal relationship between citizens and the landscape, and ghosts of a socially intolerant past, rise up and overtake a new Ireland. While W is not the gothic tale of the post-​2008 Irish ghost estates, it captures the tensions in Irish culture that created such a tragedy (Hancock). McCabe teases out the cultural particularities in Ireland that include a deep aspiration to stand alongside the culturally dominant forces of Britain and America in a globalized economy. Participation in the European Union affords the government and its citizens an alternative narrative to generations of oppression in an unfair relationship with Britain. Characters like Red offer a contemporary Irish man who demonstrates many of the trappings of modern professionalism and urbanity that distinguishes him from the mythic bog and mountain men. Yet, he is subsumed by those figures in W. McCabe’s novels suggest the futility of efforts to completely abandon the past or place. The novel’s chilling journalese style serves as a warning against simplistic notions of economic development or “progress” as a solution to all societal ills or challenges. As McCabe drains the language and the landscape of its color, to be replaced by a cold and haunting, gray-​scale, he suggests the deadening effects of such philosophies in Ireland, and the world over. Not unlike Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” McCabe’s reader looks on the wreckage of Red’s life much like the wreckage of Benjamin’s characterization of “progress” in the early twentieth century. McCabe’s novel demands pause, illustrating the implications of a violent past coloring the region’s economic and social future.5 Each of McCabe’s novels introduce readers to distinct periods in Ireland’s history and a myriad of anti-​heroes to foreground that backdrop. His characters live on the margins of dominant Irish society, where they play out the cultural and social tensions endemic to the region in the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively. These periods, reflected in the three novels to be addressed in this volume, demonstrate Ireland’s challenges and shortcomings as a fledgling nation-​state. These implications are often borne out in individual lives as a shaky government over-​asserted its power on its citizens, while falling to the whims and ethical shortcomings of a dominant Catholic Church and international economic pressures and conflicts. McCabe’s fiction addresses the rhythms of such elements in Irish culture in the periods depicted in BB, BoP, and W. His work articulates a fairly unbridled critique of the region’s cultural and political shortcomings through recent history, while cataloging the details of the mundane and everyday in a loving and faithful fashion. McCabe frequently refers to James Joyce as the primary influence, even after thirty years 5 Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” in “On the Concept of History.”

8 Keating of writing; an influence that is discernable and a distinguishing feature of his work. McCabe has an uncanny ability to capture Irish-​English as it is spoken in various regions of the country, a soundscape that is masterfully composed in each novel. It distinguishes his style, shapes the portrayal of his Ireland, and might even begin to influence how Ireland continues to examine its own trajectory in the decades to come. Until now, McCabe’s fiction has not been the central subject of a critical volume. Although this collection of essays is not comprehensive, a deliberate focus on BB, BoP and W triangulates the historical significance of McCabe’s fiction at the turn of the twenty-​first century. As snapshots of the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1990s, respectively, McCabe’s novels offer a poignant and unique window onto Irish culture in significant cultural and political moments. McCabe’s depictions are neither romantic nor reverent of mainstream characteristics associated with Ireland in these periods. Yet they are tender, painstakingly detailed constructions of and tributes to an Irish world that echoes the complicated relationship with a home country that is often also associated with James Joyce and his relationship to Dublin. The contributors to this volume span geographic locations throughout the United States and Europe, offering a cross-​section of seasoned and emerging critics. We open with Colin MacCabe, whose Preface serves as a coda to his 2011 book, BB (Ireland into Film). Luke Gibbons, K. Brisley Brennan, Barbara Hoffmann and Aisling B. Cormack each address strands of madness, cultural stagnation and the inheritance of violence presented in BB. Widening the purview of analysis, Flore Coulouma engages with McCabe’s Mondo Desperado within the context of BB and BoP, suggesting that McCabe’s mondo “ushers in a form of political subversion against the norms of its time.” Emerging critic, Lindsay Haney, delves into the musicality of McCabe’s work, touching on the political and aesthetic influences of glam rock in BoP. James F. Knapp masterfully mines the political alternatives that McCabe suggests as possible worlds that rewrite staunch cultural and political staleness that has frequently characterized the region. In the final chapter, Kristina Varade argues that McCabe’s fiction illustrates post-​modern fragmentation of the individual subject in Ireland and in a global context. The collection closes with McCabe’s own voice; presented in a July 2015 interview in London. McCabe’s contributions characterize a particularly fresh, unapologetic and energetic Irish voice that indicates its historical and political relevance and poignancy with each passing decade. The musicality of language that serves as the foundation of his work offers readers a window into the recent fifty years of Irish history, a record that is not always consistently palatable or celebratory, but consistently requires navigations of literal and figurative political, cultural and social boundaries.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History,” Illuminations. Germany:  Shocken Books, 1969. Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Soverignty. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2014. BBC. “Article 50:  UK Set to Formally Trigger Brexit Process,” March 29, 2017. http://​ www.bbc.com/​news/​uk-​politics-​39422353 Edwards, Rodney. “Clones, Co. Monaghan: ‘It’s a Sorry Sight to See Businesses Boarded Up.” Irish Times, October 11, 2016. http://​www.irishtimes.com/​news/​ireland/​ irish-​news/​clones-​co-​monaghan-​it-​is-​a-​sorry-​sight-​to-​see-​businesses-​boarded-​up-​ 1.2824354 FitzSimmons, Christopher. “Minnie the Minx and Mondo Movies; Elliptical Peregrinations through the Subconscious of a Monaghan Writer Trauma.” Irish University Review, Vol. 28, Issue 1, 1998. Hancock, Ciarán. “Nama to Resolve Remaining Ghost Estates by end of 2017,” Irish Times. January 5, 2017. http://​www.irishtimes.com/​business/​financial-​services/​ nama-​to-​resolve-​remaining-​ghost-​estates-​by-​end-​of-​2017-​1.2926635 Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage International, 1990. McNamee, Eoin. “May and EU Can’t Dictate That Line of Malice be Redrawn,” Irish Times, March 16, 2017. http://​www.irishtimes.com/​news/​social-​affairs/​may-​and-​eu-​ can-​t-​dictate-​that-​line-​of-​malice-​be-​redrawn-​1.3011477 The Guardian. “EU Referendum: Full Results and Analysis” https://​www.theguardian. com/​politics/​ng-​interactive/​2016/​jun/​23/​eu-​referendum-​live-​results-​and-​analysis The Guardian. “David Cameron Resigns After UK Votes to Leave the European Union” https://​www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2016/​jun/​24/​david-​cameron-​resigns-​after-​ uk-​votes-​to-​leave-​european-​union

Chapter 2

Attack of the Killer Clones: Attachment and Trauma in Patrick McCabe’s Films and Fiction Luke Gibbons Quizzed as to whether he ever had the ambition to be the Great Irish Novelist, McCabe insists that no such thought had ever entered his mind, but he does confess to a desire to be the great Clones novelist. He stresses that he was always convinced that “If I could get this place right then everything else would flow.” Colin MacCabe ( MacCabe BB 2007, 2)

∵ At one point in Dara McCluskey’s documentary on Patrick McCabe, Blood Relations (2009), Gerry McMahon, McCabe’s primary school teacher in Clones, Co Monaghan, reads from an essay the writer had produced as a young boy. The essay was called “The Day I Robbed an Orchard,” and one passage in particular caught the teacher’s attention, recounting how the walls of the orchard proved no obstacle to the intrepid thief: But I soon hit a solution. I curled the handle of the umbrella around an overhanging bough and scaled the fence. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Lovely plump apples were bending the branches. (McCluskey) As the words are read out, the clear cursive strokes of the boy’s handwriting come up on the screen, the words making such a mark that the teacher (wisely) held onto his star pupil’s copybook. The essay title, like ‘ “A day on the bog” and a “A day at the beach,” was standard-​fare on the school curriculum, but these staples also provided set-​pieces for some of McCabe’s later work, not least BB. The overhanging branch became, in a sense, the golden bough in a childhood paradise on whose trail many characters come to grief, or are led to their downfall. One of the opening scenes of the film, BB (Neil Jordan 1998), features an orchard raid by the errant Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) and his best friend

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_003

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Joe Purcell (Alan Boyle). As the voiceover laments, not entirely with conviction, “Of all the wrong things I done I suppose the apples were the first. They started all the trouble, and Francie Brady didn’t need any oul’ snake to give him one. He robbed them himself.” Francie is shown clambering a tree, announcing to Joe down below, “I’ll shake the living shite out of her, Joe.” This scene is preceded by a sequence set in another paradise, that of an imaginary pre-​Conquest America, but as Francie dressed as a schoolboy Indian sends his whoop across a ravine to his soulmate Joe, and scans the horizon shielding his eyes from the sun, his voice drops. “White man, he come.” The expulsion from paradise is a recurrent theme in McCabe’s work, but unlike its pastoral counterpart, there is no going back. In the opening scene of The Quiet Man (1952), Sean Thornton (John Wayne) holds an apple as he alights from the train on his return to Innisfree –​“another name for heaven” –​but as the film unfolds, it becomes clear that nostalgia is the reverse side of trauma, and the garden is never far from the grave. The romantic tryst between Sean Thornton and Mary Kate Danagher (Maureen O’Hara) actually takes place in a graveyard, recalling the fatal moment in Virgil’s pastoral Eclogues in which the shepherds discover a tombstone in Arcadia (Gibbons 2002). That death stalks the golden age is implicit in the opening idylls of BB, for the despoiling white man has already arrived, in the form of none other than Francie himself. Likewise, the snake has no need to steal the apples, for Francie, as he cheerfully admits, has got there before him. In BB, Francie’s predicament is not the provincial malaise of being sheltered from the outer world. In fact, the world is too much with him in the form of contemporary popular culture, whether Hollywood westerns or science fiction films, English comics with their snobbish fascination with public schools, or the commodification of Irish ballads for the expanding markets of the music industry. Francie has no difficulty parodying these voices, and indeed impersonating all around him, down to the gossiping family friends and ultimately –​ and tragically –​his mentally unstable mother. His problem, rather, is to establish his own muted voice, to lay claim to anything that might count as original or unique in the endless cacophony of mass culture. There is no psychic space that might act as a repository for the self: as a result, when Francie’s fantasies proliferate, there is no way of secluding them within the mind and they take on a life of their own, inhabiting both inner and outer worlds. Though the entropy of family life is laid at the door of faith and fatherland, as attested by the harsh disciplinary regimes of both Church and State, the film inserts these into a wider cultural void created not just by nationalist isolation but also by modern culture industries. The “backward” religious apparitions that appear to Francie are indistinguishable from the phantasmagoria of the mass media. The

12 Gibbons action in the film is set during the period of Ireland’s opening up to multinational investment in the early 1960s, but instead of liberating a closed culture, the winds of change bring the Cuban Crisis. Images of impending apocalypse recur throughout, juxtaposed against the fortunes of returned emigrants, poverty, popular devotion, and the dysfunctional legacies of the Great Famine. Food becomes an obsession in the film. It is as if the Bradys themselves were survivors from another century, living like pigs in the kind of hovel ascribed to the emigrant Irish in the slums of Manchester or New York. In The Quiet Man, the exile is drawn to Innisfree by the voice-​over of his dead mother (echoing in memory), and it is the devastating loss of the maternal and home that brings Francie down in BB, as well as haunting Patrick ‘Pussy’ Braden’s quest for the ‘phantom lady’ in BoP. According to Freud, food is intrinsic to natal narratives:  the “child sucking at its mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (italics added) (Freud 147). In the earliest pre-​Oedipal (or “Oceanic”) phase, unison with the maternal body is such that the child does not know where it ends, and the mother begins. As D. W. Winnicott describes the initial fusion of self and other, “At the beginning babies do not know about breasts being part of mother. If the face touches the breast they do not know at the beginning whether the nice feeling comes in the breast or the face. In fact, babies play with their cheeks, and scratch them, just as if they were breasts …. ” (Winnicott 46). For Freud, needs and instincts, modelled on the hunger appetite, are the compelling forces. While acknowledging these internal impulses, Winnicott argues that an external object, the presence of the “other/​mother,” is equally primordial (hence the founding of the ‘object-​ relations’ school in psychoanalysis). The child is not driven solely by biological needs but is also subject to the desire for attachment, for affection, intimacy and human contact. As Ian Suttie, one of the pioneering figures of the object-​ relations approach, expresses it, desire emerges out of bonding: “I thus regard love as social rather than sexual in its biological function, as derived from the self-​preservative instincts rather than genital appetite, and as seeking any state of responsiveness from others as its goal” (Suttie 49). By satisfying nourishment, the breast also awakens the erotic pleasure of sucking and physical stimulation, but while this lends itself to gratification, the source of the pleasure proves more elusive. Unlike needs, which can be gratified or satiated, desires know no bounds, and even when requited, are unfulfilled –​always “leaving something to be desired.” By virtue of this striving or incompleteness, loss besets desire from the outset, if for no other reason that the child discovers its own limits: food can be ingested but the love object cannot be, and is not always there at its beck and call.

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It is the very independence of the care-​giver –​the dawning awareness of an object outside the subject –​that precipitates desire, but which also exposes its precarious attachment to all it holds dear. There is gain as well as loss in this separation: released from dependency, the child discovers that it too is an independent entity, thus creating the conditions for another incomplete project, the making of the self. Winnicott tends to emphasize the child’s “dependency” on the love-​object rather than its attachment to it (a term more associated with John Bowlby), but this does not compromise independence. Rather, it cultivates trust in “dependability,” and it is this that prevents absence and separation from collapsing into feelings of abandonment. The fraught nature of this developmental path is already evident, leading some commentators to posit an elemental trauma as the cost of even normal entry into the ‘Symbolic order’ of family and social life. Certainly, when this process is disrupted and loss leads to despair and abandonment, it is clear that trauma itself is here to stay. Early in BB, the fractious rows between Francie’s parents dispel any illusions that home is where the heart is. When he returns from school one day, Francie has difficulty getting into the house: but when I got into the kitchen who’s there only ma standing there and a chair sideways on the table. What’s that doing up there ma I says it was fuse wire belonging to da just dangling but she didn’t say what it was doing there she was just stood there picking at her nail and going to say something and then not saying it. (BB 7-​8) It was soon ‘off to the garage’ for Mrs. Brady, but when she comes back from her treatment, there is little sign of full recovery, nor is her dissolute husband Benny Brady making life any easier. A series of elliptical connections with The Quiet Man is set in play when, after a particularly violent row between Benny and Annie. Francie runs away from home to Dublin. To make restitution on his return, he buys a kitsch version of the kind of thatched cottage idealized in Sean Thornton’s homecoming to Innisfree. The peace offering is too late. He arrives back, ornament in hand, to witness her funeral crossing the village square. An apparition of the Blessed Virgin (Sinead O’Connor) later “appears” at the cottage door, and it would seem that the kitsch souvenir is functioning, in Winnicott’s terms, as a ‘transitional object,’ bridging the gap between the loss of the actual mother, and an idealized consolatory version (a veneration of the Holy Mother not out of keeping with cults of Mariolatory in strife-​torn societies, as shall be noted below).

14 Gibbons Food is perhaps the most immediate comfort zone and on Ma Brady’s return from ‘the garage,’ she concentrates her manic energies on baking comfort food (of no nutritional value) for her brother Uncle Alo’s return from England: Then off she’d go off again rolling pastry and stacking butterfly buns on tray after tray. The house was full of cakes. Full of cakes, for Uncle Alo I said. That’s right she says, Alo loves cakes. If that’s one thing your Uncle loves its  cakes. And butterfly buns, I said. You’re right, she said. I’ll make some more. It got so bad you nearly had to tunnel your way into the house with all the cakes, etc. (BB 21) With the breakdown in attachment, cakes and pastries become the food of love, but there is so much on the table it does not manage to be filling, let alone fulfilling. Francie’s endless fantasizing about spending money on millions and trillions of Flash bars also falls into this category. As Maud Ellmann notes, food in these situations serves not only nutrition but another primary function, that of distinguishing the outside from the inside of the body: “eating, in its turn, exceeds the biological demand for nourishment, for it expresses the desire to possess the object unconditionally” (Ellmann 39). By gorging himself, Francie hopes to take in his mother as well, and later merges with her in a hapless fashion as he wears her apron and fusses over the housework in their dingy, neglected slum. In the film, the endless display of “buns” is charged with additional resonances of the missing mother through a pun on Bundoran, the seaside resort where Benny and Brady spent their honeymoon. The association of the town with his mother is intensified when a disconsolate Francie writes a list of all his lost friends on the condensation of a grimy kitchen window, his betrayal by Joe (now at a boarding school in Bundoran) cutting him to the core. No sooner does Bundoran come to mind than the Blessed Virgin (Sinead O’Connor) appears once again in the film version, singing the words of the song: “Beautiful Bundoran/​By the silvery sea/​Your golden strand and charms so grand/​Are ever calling me …” Francie answers the call –​“You’ve given me an idea!” –​and sets off on his desperate last journey to Bundoran. Bereft at the destructiveness of his parent’s marriage, his last ray of hope is that he was at least conceived in love –​the “lovebirds,” as he imagines them, cooing to each other on their honeymoon. On visiting the seedy ‘Over the Waves’ Hotel where they stayed, expecting to find confirmation of his fantasy, the landlady only remembers the

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drunken violence wreaked by his father, and so the last slender filament of the golden age is broken. Francie’s fantasy can be seen as a version of what Freud termed a “family romance,” an idyllic version of parents’ past lives conjured up by a child to block out painful memories of violence, abuse and shame. In one sense, Francie is unwittingly conforming to Freud’s own blocking out of the possibility of original childhood trauma when, in his controversial abandonment of the “Seduction Theory” (the seduction of children by adults) in 1896, he wrote that his patients were projecting later traumatic experiences onto their childhoods: “… I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up” (Freud 33). The defense mechanisms built up by patients were, according to Freud, responding to transgressive forces within, incestuous Oedipal desires for the mother and the consequent threat of castration. Repression accordingly consisted in the thwarting of prohibited wishes, but faced two decades later with incontrovertible evidence of external traumas, in the from of the post-​traumatic stress disorder (“shell-​shock”) experienced during World War I, Freud conceded that defense mechanisms were not directed solely at internal forces. Unable to explain its traumatic impact in terms of repressed wishes or sexuality, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud posited the death drive, “thanatos,” as its destructive counterpart, an instinct that co-​existed from the outset alongside (and bound up with) the life force of eros (Leys 18–​40). Freud was not wrong in positing the need for a nostalgic “family romance” to block out trauma but as Francie Brady’s predicament suggests, the sundering comes from external as well as internal forces. For object-​relations psychoanalysis, attachment to an external love object was the primordial bond. “Freud omits reference,” according to Winnicott, “to the original dependence, double because not yet sensed”(Winnicott 133). Attachment is sensual and tactile but the mother, still less the breast, is not an invasive presence, disrupting a primary narcissism; as Juliet describes it, ‘There is no primary narcissism –​only primary love … the neonate cannot be a baby without a mother’(Mitchell 282). It is not the presence of the mother but rather separation that causes anxiety and panic, leading, as Ian Suttie notes, to violence in cases of acute abandonment: We can reject therefore once and for all the notion of the infant mind being a bundle of cooperating or competing instincts, and suppose instead that it is dominated from the beginning by the need to retain the mother –​a need which, if thwarted, must produce the utmost extreme of terror and rage, since the loss of the mother is, under natural conditions, but the precursor of death itself. (Suttie 3)

16 Gibbons In this schema, it is only when Francie’s defence mechanisms fall away like the flies around the corpse of his dead father that he is forced to confront the “original sin” of his parent’s violent marriage. Violence itself becomes dependency, habit, compulsion. As Mary Marcel writes of this descent into horror, “A baby cannot survive without nurturing care, without help. One can say the same about trauma victims…. [In this case] no one is able to pursue healing, because healing requires help. Instead they may identify with their perpetrators and repeat in some form the crimes committed against them” (Marcel 9–​10). Violence is learned behavior; the bad apple does not fall far from the tree because this Eden is already an object lesson in original sin. The difficulty with Freud’s positing of the “death-​instinct” was that it confirms a grim Hobbesian view of humanity as having innate propensities towards violence and evil, a tendency that militated against any wider investigation into the impact of social factors such as deprivation and poverty on anti-​social behavior, delinquency and even extreme violence in children (Alexander 159).1 For his show of good behavior at the Industrial School, Francie is keen to award himself “the Francie Brady not a bad bastard anymore diploma.” But contemporary opinion in Ireland, whether in Church, legal or in conventional psychological circles, did not need Freud to confirm its dim view of human nature. Francie would have been a prime suspect for what were known as “evil companions,” and indeed Mrs. Nugent, and the parents of Joe Purcell, have no illusions over the young delinquent’s baneful influence on their respectable sons. The ‘tough love’ of the Irish family structure, what has been called in one film documentary “Sex in a Cold Climate,” contributed to the emotional austerity of home, in which the dangers of sex were considered closer to the death drive than to eros and desire (Humphries 1998). Writing about the silences and repressions of family transactions, the Limerick Rural Survey noted with deadpan understatement in 1962 (the year BB is set) that “there is some evidence that fathers believe that the expression of too much interest in children is a sign of immaturity”: Adult male offspring say that they never discuss anything of importance with their fathers, and even though they might be dissatisfied with their position at home, they obey without question … Even when a man is thinking of marriage, he does not approach his father directly. If the mother is in favour of the marriage, she breaks the news to the father; if she is not, the son will ask some friend of the father to broach the subject to him. (Limerick Survey 38–​39) 1 Freud did not appear to take factors such as poverty into consideration at least until 1918, according to Alexander.

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Benny Brady does not even have moral authority at home. His inflictions of corporal punishment testify more to loss of self-​control than to the instilling of duty and obedience in his son. Winnicott cites Oscar Wilde’s line, “each man kills the things he loves” to underscore his observation “that it is brought to our notice every day that along with loving, we must expect hurting” (Winnicott 84). One of the many scenes of emotional ambivalence in the film concerns Benny Brady’s visit to Francie at the Industrial school, where he reminisces about the old days, his honeymoon, the time he met the famous trumpeter Eddie Calvert. “It wasn’t always like this, son. You’ll never know how much I loved that woman.” The damaged boy can only repeat his father’s vitriol against his mother during the row that drove him from home: “May the curse of Christ light be upon you, you bitch. The day I took you out of that hole of a shop in Derry was a bitter one for me.” To which his father replies in heartfelt tones: “I loved you like no father ever loved a son, Francie” –​: “It was hard for him to say it,” the older Francie muses in voiceover, “I could barely hear him. It would have been better if he drew out and hit me.” When words run out in the film, Benny Brady takes to the trumpet and belts out the tune of Eddie Calvert’s major hit: “O Mein Papa/​To me he was so wonderful/​O my Papa/​To me was so good.” The words are not voiced, and in these unspoken or unseen presences lie much of the haunting effects of the story. As is clear from the Limerick Rural Survey, moreover, the mother was the medium of communication in the household. The fact that the mother controlled the emotional management of the household meant that in her absence, the lines were down, and father/​son relations could often deteriorate into emotional stand-​offs or violence. This ascetic climate contributed to the emotional indifference, not to mention cruelty, that presided over the regimes of custodial care that have been the subject of so many revelations and s­ candal, and Government Tribunals, in recent years. It is notable in BB that incarceral or punitive institutions take the place of any kind of welfare or preventative measures (Smith 175–​194). As against the Freudian emphasis on innate aggression, the orientation of the object-​relations school towards the effects of deprivation and environmental factors on the home lent itself to the widespread reforms in child health, maternal support and family care undertaken by social democratic states following World War ii. John Bowlby’s classic, Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953), originated as a report to the who (World Health Organization), addressing the problems of family disruption, urban planning, childcare and education in the new economic conditions of post-​World War ii society. Such provisions for measures that might head-​off or reduce inequality, social alienation or delinquency met with little support in Ireland, as was evident in the hostility to state “intrusion”

18 Gibbons in the home, most notably in the determined opposition of the Catholic church and the Fine Gael-​led government to Dr.  Noel Browne’s “Mother and Child Scheme” in 1951. It would be misleading, however, to portray this as having a monopoly on thinking about the plight of mothers and children in conditions of poverty, particularly in advanced nationalist or republican circles. In an article in The Irish Press in the early 1930s, “Children and the Law: A Test of Civilization,” Dorothy Macardle wrote of the moral panic about juvenile delinquency, leading to the building of new Borstals in Britain. She asked: And what of Ireland? We, the custodians of the ideal that the men of Easter Week fought for –​are we giving substance to the vision of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse? … It does not seem so: the Teachers at their Congress complain of morbid interests in their pupils; the papers report the doings of young “gangsters” every week, dozens of small citizens are charged in the children’s courts. Society knows how to protect itself against these little delinquents; that is not the trouble. But how are the children to be protected against society –​against the conditions which make them enemies of the law? (Macardle 1932) She continues, taking issue with the moralism leveled at young offenders, “No one who, in any capacity, has worked or played among Irish children can suppose that their law-​breaking is due to natural badness of disposition.” She protests that the industrial schools that receive “the most incorrigible delinquents” are also the only place to receive homeless children. As if with the likes of Francie Brady in mind, she notes that “for homeless children, except those boarded out from the union, there is no resort at present but these industrial schools. The father whose wife dies and who cannot keep the home together,” or the widow without means, have only these criminal institutions to take their children off their hands. “Poverty is the root cause of the trouble” –​the “quick wits and high spirits” of mischievous kids in “well regulated homes” are disciplined, but “they would not be sent away to Reformatories of Industrial Schools. There is no room for quick wits and high spirits in the slums. Daring, independence, initiative –​the rebel virtues that have kept the nation virile, are vices there.” As if drawing on Winnicott’s ideas before their time she continues: What but the spirit of play is the impulse behind half the delinquencies for which these boys and girls are tried … .[These activities] are more necessary … than sport to the adult, and if they are not allowed natural scope in games they will outlet in dangerous ways … [The child] has no place to go. So he moves about the streets, seeking diversion, until some mischief

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presents itself for idle hands to do. And after that, the law takes its course. But is it the guilty parties who are tried? (Macardle 1932) Macardle’s views were clearly out of the step with the pitiless thinking and practices that condemned thousands of young children to miserable lives in custodial institutions. But it is her linking of deprivation and maladjustment in the home to deleterious social conditions and to clear deficits in social policy that stands out –​all the more so as it was published in The Irish Press, established by de Valera who has just come to power the previous year. Fianna Fáil’s electoral platform included wide-​ranging plans for slum clearances and urban housing reform but while some schemes, such as the ambitious Crumlin housing project took off, conservative retrenchment eventually prevailed as before. Macardle did not directly address the more acute psychological consequences of deprivation, homelessness and separation. But less than two decades later, she returned to the theme on a broader canvas in her book Children of Europe (1950), dealing with the catastrophic effects of World War ii on millions of destitute children across Europe. She writes, “The experiences of childhood cannot be studied in isolation, because a child is forever reacting to the atmosphere of his home …. I talked with child-​psychologists in many countries. They are appalled by the dimensions of the problem which is gradually being revealed” (Macardle 13). So far from attributing Nazism to brutal and evil instincts along Freudian lines, she argues the real tragedy was that the exploitation of patriotism and national regeneration appealed initially to nobler qualities. It is “only by an admixture of what is true and sound and generous can an evil cause to be made to attract the young …. It is the tragedy of these lads that that they were seduced at first by an appeal to everything in them that was unselfish and chivalrous as well as boyhood’s less civilized traits” (Macardle 23).2 She noted research that showed how “defects of behavior,” especially after the famine years in the Netherlands, could be remedied by diet and nutrition (Macardle 227). But sowing seeds of trust proved more difficult, especially in children who seemed so lost to love as to “present a surface of marble to the people about them” (Macardle 231) or to erect “a barrier of make-​believe” (Macardle 257) –​qualities that came easily to Francie Brady as well. In keeping with Mary Marcel’s account above of victim’s being so deprived of psychological resolve as to identify with their tormentors, some children “turned 2 Nazi brutality was explained in Freudian terms of the death-​drive: “Hitler and Nazis failed to grasp the extent to which their moral conception resembled the idea of an eternal struggle between life and death, eros and thanatos, expounded in Freud’s books, which were publicly burned” (Ferrara 177).

20 Gibbons half savage. In many boys between twelve and sixteen years of age there was a restless cruelty; they seemed to feel a need to discharge their pent-​up fury by inflicting on others something like the torment and humiliation that has been inflected on them …. Some had vigour enough to be filled with hunger for revenge” (Macardle 244). Macardle noted, however, that feelings of being abandoned took the greatest toll, even in the midst of the devastation wreaked by modern warfare: The bad dreams of refugee children were less frequently about bombing than about being hunted or abandoned or shut out of their homes. Children who had fled from scenes of terror, or had seen their parents seized or killed, often fell into a condition of apathy and became unable to form any real attachments … It was a phase often followed by delinquency. (Macardle 254) It is this that allows her to re-​interpret, for her argument, Freud’s claim that trauma is induced by inner rather than external causes. By drawing on a wide range of research, Macardle claims the effects of externally induced trauma (bombings, artillery, etc.) are mediated through inner states, and wreak greater damage on exposed, vulnerable personalities. Furthermore, she cites a warning by a Dutch psychiatrist about “misinterpreting erratic behavior which occurred after shock, because one might mistakenly attribute to the shock itself an affect actually due to some change which the incident had produced in the child’s emotional relationships” (Macardle 255). She concludes, “To feel secure in his place within the family group has once again been proved to be the child’s best protection against ill effects from all misadventure” (Macardle 254). It is in this context that we might view the framing of individual crises against the backdrop of public paranoia whipped up during the Cuban Crisis of 1962 in BB, or the bombing campaigns in Northern Ireland and in London that tear apart the life of ‘Pussy’/​‘Kitten’ Braden in BoP. The sense of Armageddon that grips small town Ireland is indeed notable for its inversion of priorities. Its absurdity is clear in the film of BB when one of the local gossips presents the small town of Clones as if it is the epicenter, on a cosmic scale, of an attack of the Killer Clones: “It will be terrible day for this town if the world comes to an end.” In an interesting speculative attempt to bring attachment theory to bear on certain aberrant cultural phenomena in Ireland such as moving statues and charismatic cults, Peter Mulholland suggests that fragile or traumatized pasts underlie many symbolic attempts to overcome marginality and powerlessness through recourse to spiritual interventions. “Quests for healing and orientation towards experiential and magical practices could [also] originate in much less

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severe forms of abuse such as those that left people feeling they had been neglected or rejected and unloved as children” (Mulholland 4). Drawing on the research of William Christian in southern Europe, he notes: “the recent ‘trans-​ national pattern’ of religious apparitions and ufo sightings represented ‘the crystallization of the Cold War not only within a community, but even within the family.” Linking this to Michael Carroll’s influential The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins, he notes that “Carroll made similar observations regarding the historical pattern of Marian apparitions and suggested that they originated in personal attempts to re-​establish the presence of a reassuring mother during times of general distress”: The Irish media kept the country well informed of the threat posed by the Cold War and the development of the Irish television station, Telefís Éireann, in the ‘60s meant that Irish people were exposed to vivid and almost daily coverage of the war in Vietnam and of the “Northern ‘Troubles’ ” that threatened, and occasionally spilled over into, the Republic. (Mulholland 5) This helps to illuminate Francie’s own paranoia at the end of the fim of BB, hinting that it may not be entirely of his own making. As the grown-​up Francie (Stephen Rea) leaves the mental asylum where he has been incarcerated for decades, his hopes come alive once again in the form of a moving statue of the Virgin Mary, a belated apparition just when he thinks he is over all that. If we were to follow Freud’s view that trauma is ultimately due to internal projections rather than external sources, we might conclude that the apparition has no basis in reality. “Ah, missus,” says Francie, “you’ll have to stop this appearing and disappearing crack, for they’ll put me back in there.” But then a “miracle” of sorts occurs. When Francie asks the Virgin Mary “are all the beautiful things gone?,” she throws him a snowdrop, which happens to be out of season. “They are late this year,” Francie explains to the psychiatrist sitting beside him, trying to account for its mysterious appearance. The narrative leaves it open whether there is an “external” source for Francie’s imaginings, and whether his nightmares have a grounding in history after all. As to the nature of this ground, one possibility becomes clear as Francie walks away from the apparition, momentarily framed against the redbrick Victorian fortress of Portrane Lunatic Asylum. Behind the building, barely visible over the roof, a round tower breaks the skyline, a reminder of Ireland’s shattered past. This monument is an evocative symbol of Ireland’s Golden Age, the island of “saints and scholars” brought to an end by the Viking and Norman invasions, but in this case it a “folly,” erected as a memorial in the decade of the Great

22 Gibbons Famine. This conjunction gives an ironic twist to the ruin of Francie’s own foundational family myth, the myth of the idyllic honeymoon in Bundoran. Like the honeymoon, the round tower at Portrane also turns out to be a romance, a fiction of a later dark age. In Samuel Beckett’s early story “Fingal,” published in More Pricks than Kicks, two of the wayward characters Bellaqua and Winnie travel through North Dublin and come across the buildings at Portrane: “Look” he [Bellaqua] pointed. She looked, blinking for the focus. “The big red building,” he said, “across the water, with the towers.” At last she thought she saw what he meant. “Far away,” she said, “with the round tower?” “Do you know what that is,” he said, “because my heart’s right there.” Well, she thought, you lay your cards on the table. “No,” she said, “it looks like a bread factory to me.” “The Portrane Lunatic Asylum,” he said. (Beckett 25) It turns out that there is a relation to a bread factory of sorts, as Belaqua discovers when he asks a local man about the tower: “Belaqua asked was the tower an old one, as though it required a Dr. Petrie to see that it was not. The man said it has been built for relief in the year of the Famine, so he had heard, by a Mrs. Somebody whose name he misremembered in honour of her husband” (Beckett 26). The impact of the Famine has seen to it that the process of misremembering has already begun, for the ruin is, in effect, a monument to the unnameable, a trope that was to recur in Beckett’s fiction. Yet the recurrence of destitution in the back streets of Clones, recalling Victorian images of pigs living in a hovel, the obsession with food and emotional paralysis, suggests that the Great Famine throws a long shadow over BB. That starvation was not a memory in the new Irish state is clear from Dorothy Macardle’s bleak report in The Irish Press, “Some Irish Mothers and Their Children,” in which she protested over the struggle for survival among the urban poor (Macardle, September 13, 1931). Printing a bare subsistence diet in the paper prepared by a Dublin doctor as a remedial measure, it was noted that the meager fare still cost almost double official relief for each child in a household: “The children can be kept on it from dying of starvation. They can’t be kept from becoming weak and rickety from malnutrition or to be saved from suffering hunger and cold” (Macardle September 15, 1931). Yet, Macardle notes that even the purpose of foraging for food is not bare survival but to prevent the break-​up of family attachments, and to counter the threat of custodial care:

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They keep the home together, if it is only a cellar, to ‘make out somehow,’ keep out the Union –​that is the resolve that sends men everyday for years to the labour Exchange and sends woman searching for a shop where a loaf costs a farthing less. For, if once the home is broken up, never, they know well –​never in a lifetime, will they get a home together again. But while there is a home, and children growing up, and Ireland’s history still in the making, there is hope. (Macardle, September 13, 1931) In BoP, there is an attempt to find hope itself in the “cellar,” and to provide a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, the underground where Pluto himself resided in Greek mythology. Freud often modeled the topography of the unconscious along subterranean lines, most notably the ruins of Rome. But, as Charlotte Brunsdon has noted, the London underground has also lent itself to explorations of “inner” states (Brunsdon 2006)–​not least in Patrick ‘ “Kitten” Braden’s (Cillian Murphy) quest for his missing mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), the Mitzi Gaynor look-​alike exiled in London. Patrick’s hometown is located on the border, but he crosses his own borders as a transvestite in rural Ireland, styling himself as “Patricia” and embarking on futile affairs with troubled men. Patrick is almost drawn into the Irish political underground in the form of the ira, as his links with Billy Hatchet (Gavin Friday) and his friend Irwin (Laurence Kinlan) entangle him in a gunrunning plot. Fleeing to London, he finds work with a less threatening underground movement, the Wombles who live under Wimbledon Common, and who feature as an attraction in a theme park (itself a reversion to childhood). Falling in (and out) with the short-​tempered lead Womble, another Irishman (Brendan Gleeson), he moves on after a succession of abusive episodes to team up with another lost soul, fairground magician Bertie Vaughan (Stephen Rea), to whom he confesses that he has come to London in pursuit of another disappearing act, “the phantom lady.” During a performance, Patrick is hypnotized into believing random members of the audience, and even a loudspeaker, are his mother, and on a journey on an underground train, he confides that one of his mother’s favorite songs was Don Partridge’s 1960s hit, “Breakfast on Pluto.” Ascending an escalator on the London Underground, he recognizes his mother travelling downward on the other side, and desperately tries to catch her, but to no avail. When he eventually tracks her down in suburbia, he poses as a door to door researcher surveying telephone use and meets his alter ego first, her young son Patrick. On entering the house, he faints on seeing her and barely gathers his composure while he remains incognito during the bogus interview. He returns to Ireland and is reconciled with his clergyman Father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) but then decides to tempt fate again by

24 Gibbons accompanying his pregnant friend Charlie (Ruth Negga), who decides to have her baby in London. Wheeling Charlie’s new baby at the maternity hospital, he bumps into young Patrick by chance and asks him what he is doing there. The motif of the “bun” surfaces once again when the boy relates that his mother is there because she “is with the Doctor, you know, she’s got a bun in the fireplace.” The older Patrick corrects him: “I think you mean the oven, young man.” When the boy asks him his name, he replies, “Phantom Lady.” The original phantom lady, Eily, emerges from a door in the distance, but rather than re-​uniting with her, their paths cross briefly, only to go in different directions. In an early scene in the film set in a schoolroom, Patrick McCabe himself acts as a schoolteacher giving his students essay titles not unlike those at which he excelled at school, including “A Day in the Life as an Old Boot.” As Patrick begins his essay, “Breakfast is Served,” the introductory music of The Quiet Man comes over the soundtrack, and the essay proceeds to luridly re-​imagine his sordid conception as Father Liam loses control during breakfast and forces himself on his new housekeeper, Eily, to the theme of “Return to Innisfree.” Unlike McCabe’s real life teacher, Gerry McMahon, there is little appreciation of Patrick Bredin’s literary efforts. He is all but expelled from school (if not quite from paradise) and home for bringing disgrace on the community. When Patrick and his friends meet a group of bikers, the lead biker announces that they like to see themselves travelling in space, on “the astral highway” from the past to future. He recites some lines from the song “Breakfast on Pluto”: “We’ll visit the stars and journey to Mars/​Finding our breakfast on Pluto.” He then explains the discovery of “Pluto the planet: named by Percival Lowell and William H. Pickering after the invisible king of the underworld. You think about that.” The pathos of the original discovery of Pluto was that its presence was detected through its effects, the perturbation of other heavenly bodies, while it remained invisible to the eye. It is difficult not to see in this a metaphor for negotiating the loss of the missing mother, or other everyday expulsions from Eden. Sometimes a body is all the more present by being absent, and lives on by virtue of its fall from grace. Works Cited Alexander, Sally. “Primary Maternal Preoccuptation:  D.W. Winnicott and Social ­Democracy in Mid-​Twentieth Century Britain,” in History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past. Edited by Alexander, Sally and Taylor, Barbara. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Beckett, Samuel. ‘Fingal,’ in More Pricks than Kicks. London: Picador, 1974.

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Brunsdon, Charlotte. “ ‘A Fine and Private Place’: The Cinematic Spaces of the London Underground,” Screen, 47:1, Spring 2006. Carroll, Michael P. The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Christian Jnr., William. “Religious Apparitions and the Cold War in Southern Europe” in Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities:  The Northern Shore of the ­Mediterranean. Edited by Wolf, Eric. The Hague: Mouton, 1984. Ellmann, Maud. The Hunger Artists:  Starving, Writing and Imprisonment. New  York: ­Virago, 1993. Ferrara, Allessandro. “The Evil That Men Do,” in Re-​Thinking Evil. Edited by Lara, Maria Pia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexulaity,” in On Sexuality. Edited by Richards, Angela. London: Pelican Freud Library, 1979. Freud, Sigmund. “An Autobiographical Study,” in Historical and Expository Works on  Psychoanalysis. Edited by Dickson, Albert, Pelican Freud Library. London: Penguin, 1986. Gibbons, Luke. The Quiet Man. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. Humphries, Steve. “Sex in a Cold Climate, Testimony Films / Channel 4.” 1998. Leys, Ruth. “Freud and Trauma” in Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Limerick Rural Survey. “Social Structure,” Third Interim Report. Maynooth: Department of Sociology, 1962. Marcel, Mary. Freud’s Traumatic Memory: Reclaiming Seduction Theory and Revisiting Oedipus. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005. MacCabe, Colin. The Butcher Boy (Ireland into Film). Cork: Cork University Press. 2007. Macardle, Dorothy. “A Diet For Children,” The Irish Press, September 15, 1931. Macardle, Dorothy. “Children and the Law,” The Irish Press, April 14, 1932. Macardle, Dorothy. Children of Europe:  A Study of the Children of Liberated Countries:  Their War-​time Experiences, Their Reactions, and Their Needs with a Note on Germany. London: Victor Gollancz, 1950. McCabe, Patrick. The Butcher Boy. New York: Delta, 1992. McCluskey, Dara. “Blood Relations.” Midas Productions. 2009. Mitchell, Juliet. Women: The Longest Revolution. London: Virago, 1984. Mulholland, Peter. “Anthropology and Attachment,” Irish Journal of Anthropology. Volume 10 (1), 2007. Suttie, Ian. The Origins of Love and Hate. New York: Routlege, 1935. Smith, James M. “Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment:  “Telling” Stoires in The Butcher Boy and ‘States of Fear,’ Eire-​Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-​Winter, 2001. See also Brian W. Shaffer, “Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy,’ in Reading the Novel in English, 1950 –​2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

26 Gibbons Winnicott, D. W. “Close-​up of Mother Feeding Baby,” in The Child, the Family and the Outside World. London: Penguin, 1985. Winnicott, D.W. Human Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1988. Winnicott, D.W. “Aggression and Its Roots,” in Deprivations and Delinquency. Edited by Winnicott, Claire, Shepherd, Ray and David, Madeline. London: Routlege, 2012.

Chapter 3

The Social Fantastic: Graphic Violence in Patrick McCabe’s Fiction K. Brisley Brennan In a 2007 interview for Estudios Irlandeses with Mathias Lebargy, Patrick McCabe explains that at one time he preferred to think of his work as styled by the social fantastic rather than the Bog Gothic, a term which had been used in the popular press. He references an earlier, 2003 interview for The Guardian with John O’Mahony, in which McCabe says that he came across the term, the social fantastic, while reading a Sight & Sound piece on American director and novelist Sam Fuller. He thought it had some degree of accuracy in describing his own work. In response to readers who immediately identify a dark humor, black comedy, or violent insanity in his fiction, McCabe redirects the conversation from mental health or questions of stability to mediums that give shape to social feelings: “People have often commented that everyone in the books is mad or damaged. But you should view them as prisms through which the feelings of society are reflected. These are not naturalistic fictions” (O’Mahony). The social fantastic remains an apt descriptor for the way in which McCabe’s graphic violence, or the depictions of violence and the literary and visual work done by them, cues readers to pay attention to the structures of feeling refracted through the characters. A structure of feeling can be understood to be the experience of social relations, or as cultural theorist Raymond Williams says, “social experiences in solution” (133–​4). As will become clearer, the social fantastic outstrips the Bog Gothic. Indeed, “bog” actually signifies an Irish setting that McCabe rarely employs; the landscapes of Monaghan, Cavan, and Longford, where many of McCabe’s novels are set, do not have many bog lands, if any at all. It appears to be more of a method of identifying the author and the text as Irish as opposed to describing important textual elements like form and style. And what of the gothic? Certainly, it has relevance to the melodrama of psychoses and failed relationships, not to mention Francie’s cohabitation with his father’s corpse. It represents violence, terror, and horror of the sort that readers find in novels like Call Me the Breeze (2003), The Dead School (1995) and W (2006). But it hardly seems appropriate for novels like BB (1992) and BoP (1998), which do not serve a romantic ideal of Sublimating violence and horror into an aesthetic experience. As hinted in the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_004

28 Brennan above interview, McCabe’s texts serve to illuminate violence and horror as social experiences, which themselves take on an aesthetic form in the literature. One of the central tenets of the social fantastic in McCabe’s fiction is to color the experience of violence with the social conditions in which it is perpetrated and encountered. McCabe loosely shapes the social fantastic around the “fantastic, ordinary fantastic, next-​to-​ordinary fantastic … anything but Bog Gothic” (Lebargy). The social fantastic captures an essence of style in which an excess of violence is folded into what otherwise might be called social realism (sans any claim to objectivity). The depiction of violence arrests readers and, when translated from fiction to film by Neil Jordan, becomes a spectacle of the ideologies that engender violence through alienation and social disparities. As Patrick R. Mullen writes, McCabe’s texts “understand the broad historical resonances of the fight against imperial domination. They explore the social realities of a fractured post-​colonial life—​both in terms of political partition and in terms of scarred psyches—​through the lens of particular characters” (118). Representations of violence have as much to say of their voyeurs as of their provocateurs, a dynamic which is indexed according to the reader’s observation of horror in McCabe’s texts. The fantastic in the social fantastic is an operant for McCabe’s style that is analogous to the figure of Fantômas for early European surrealists. The ghostly (hence, phantom) “genie du crime” (genius of crime), created by writers Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, provided surrealists with a model of how to create disorder through a violent mischievousness (9). Any reading of McCabe’s fiction relies on an observation of horror, the likes of which Fantômas brought to serial fiction and then to early film. A major aspect of that horror is textured by what Colin MacCabe calls a “weave [of] objective description and subjective hallucination” (MacCabe, The BB 10). The psychosis of a character, for example, Francie Brady in BB and Redmond Hatch in W, is often a filter through which experiences are narrated and which becomes a lens in Jordan’s filmic adaptations. The social fantastic is employed to achieve that very aim: to render the experience of social relations of class (BB) and gender (BoP). What I am calling graphic violence is a key device that allows the social fantastic to work in fiction and film.

Cultural Forms and Structures of Feeling

Williams uses the phrase “structure of feeling” in order to differentiate it from “other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available,” by which he means that social experiences in solution are as-​yet-​to-​be articulated and have not been given form

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and semantic significance (Williams 133–​4). One can think of a structure of feeling as one of the found materials available to writers and other artists who translate that mixture of pre-​semantic significance into text, be it written, verbal, visual, or aural. McCabe’s novels reliably include the political violence of sectarian conflict in and along the border of Northern Ireland, yet the texts do not dramatize that violence in narrative. Instead, that violence forms part of the setting and the narrative itself is structured by the formation of new beginnings without the resolution of older ones. In the case of BB, Francie experiences trauma after trauma, from his mother’s suicide and his father’s death by drink to his sexual molestation by a priest; in the end, Francie remains without any consolation as he creates a new beginning for his coming life in lockup for the murder of Mrs. Nugent. In the case of BoP, the narrative begins with a priest’s rape of Eily Bergin, the mother of the protagonist who forfeits the child for adoption and leaves small-​town Ireland for London. Patrick “Pussy” Braden eventually makes the same voyage, looking for her mother but never finding her (BoP 198).1 Even the death of Irwin (executed by the Irish Republican Army) does not come to a resolution; his killing is referenced three times throughout the novel, and his fiancée Charlie and Pussy visit his grave. She recounts having seen his face in the morgue and cries, as they are leaving for London, but the death is left in airs of mystery (BoP 196). Francie never finds a home and Pussy never finds her mother. The structure of feeling—​these social experiences in a solution of ever-​ emerging new beginnings and never-​ending, old beginnings—​is the environs of social relations, the substrate on which habitus takes shape, and the fantastic element of the social fantastic is the interpellative force of the structure of feeling. Pierre Bourdieu’s infamous formulation of habitus remains of interest because it provokes us to think of how culture materializes among us, within us, and on us—​in short, how culture is a living practice. Bourdieu’s formulation connects the everyday cultivation of our non-​discursive dispositions and the larger communal project of history through shared memory building. In that sense, habitus as an analytical tool isolates the mediation within which subjects take on forms and projections—​the negotiation of the structure of feeling. For as haphazard or unorganized as the structure of feeling might seem, it is remarkably structured by competing habituses influenced by the relations of production and the ideological state apparatuses of the superstructure. Altogether, these structures of feeling comprise cultural practice when they are given form like the normative heterosexual 1 In Neil Jordan’s filmic adaptation, Pussy (re-​named Kitten) finds her mother.

30 Brennan marriage, hierarchical class divisions, generational divides, and conceptions of high brow versus lowbrow. Culture always arises out of experience, but it’s different from experience because it finds significant form for it” (MacCabe, “An Interview” 30). It is interesting, then, how a writer like McCabe uses extraordinary characters as opposed to normative ones; he chooses a transsexual protagonist for BoP, a deranged and murderous boy and social pariah for BB, a pair of Dublin teachers intent on collective self-​destruction in The Dead School, a delusional father who kidnaps and drugs his own daughter and who is also an anagram for a murderous pedophile in W, and a young fledgling and hallucinating writer who becomes a prison graduate in Call Me the Breeze. If readers think of these protagonists as extraordinary it is because ordinary is a norm that is disciplined, or highly defined and delineated by the interpellative forces within the structure of feeling. McCabe’s extraordinary characters are the form he gives to the structures of feeling in the borderlands of Ireland. Bourdieu draws on the phenomenology of perception and action developed by Maurice Merleau-​Ponty and because of that habitus is adept at clarifying the interpellative dynamics of social life. In an analysis of the symbiosis of Bourdieu and Merleau-​Ponty, Nick Crossley explains how the interpellative dynamics within the field of language practice constitute “a moving equilibrium” much like Williams’s structure of feeling as social experiences in solution. Of course, this equilibrium shifts into disequilibrium at times, precisely because the practice of language is “subject to ‘coherent deformations’ that modify and transform [its] structure” (Crossley 95). Language lives in more than just the sense of its daily use; it lives in continuous if not slow transformation, when a change or mutation becomes codified as correct. Crossley explains that this is possible because some actions deform and thereby transcend their own habitual root, modifying that root and, on occasion, giving rise to new habits. Just as habits generate practices, so too creative and innovative praxes generate and modify habits. The circle of social life, in which practices generate habits that generate practices, is an evolving circle. And the impetus for evolution within it derives from the creative and innovative potential of action itself (95). As a complex phenomenon, social life is a plurality of sets of recurring developments that spawn ever-​new possibilities, themselves spawning recurring developments and ever-​new possibilities. Importantly, Crossley

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elucidates the role of human action in social life, showing that social life is more powerful than a singular agency but nonetheless susceptible to collective action. The ideas used to legitimize some habituses and to denigrate others—​ideas that are employed more covertly (as in common sense or unconsciously) and ideas that are not yet discursively critiqued—​are part and parcel of the ideological sinews of the relations of production. Media like literature and film play a special role in the perception of the functions of ideology. Hall explains that media can colonize ideology: [The media of Modern Capitalism] have progressively colonized the cultural and ideological sphere …. This is the first of the great cultural functions of the modern media: the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge, of social imagery, through which we perceive the “worlds,” the “lived realities” of others, and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible “world-​of-​the-​whole,” some “lived totality.” (Hall 340) Media then have the special political power of organizing the fractures of social life’s un-​ended and newly-​formed beginnings into a totality or whole that is structured according to a certain kind of sense that defines its intelligibility. Narrative itself gives coherence to an array of loose threads by knotting them together. This is another of media’s functions: to provide audiences with the resources required for deforming the operant ideologies and, in turn, to identify others. As to whether or not an ideology can be transcended is a matter of the social conditions, material and immaterial, that structure the field of practice. Inasmuch as media have the potential to encode ideologies, they also have the potential to provide the critical space in which a viewer or reader decodes them. As screen theory would have it, that space is a form of culture: the literary text and the film. By examining the legibility of graphic violence in McCabe’s texts and its role in constituting the social fantastic, the structure of feeling becomes discernible.

Graphic Violence and the Social Fantastic in BB and BoP

McCabe’s novels critique the legacies of the longue durée of colonial and postcolonial conflict in Ireland and its entrenchment in popular discourses of formal politics and paramilitarism. In the BB, Francie and his parents are rendered as low-​class pigs that are shut out of the process of building a normative

32 Brennan model of the family. In BoP, the transsexual Patrick “Pussy” Braden in the fictional border town of Tyreelin is even passed over for an ira execution (BoP 44). This is an approach unlike Roddy Doyle’s Henry Smart from The Last Roundup series, who literally lives through every historio-​graphed moment from twentieth-​century Ireland. In contrast, McCabe’s novels speak to the history of violence and political conflict in Ireland from the particular vantage of the young, dispossessed, and excluded as they come of age. Published in 1992, two years before the 1994 ceasefire in Northern Ireland, BB follows the neglect and abuse experienced by the novel’s young protagonist, Francie Brady, as he grows up during the early 1960s. The novel appeared in sync with unfolding criminal investigations into the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Much of the abuse targeted the children charged to the care of the state of Ireland, a child welfare system that took children who were orphaned, insubordinate, or criminal (as well as unwed mothers) and placed them in orphanages, industrial schools and work houses administered by the Roman Catholic Church. The scandal of its cover-​up unfolded over the course of the peace process in Northern Ireland, but the acknowledged abuse and neglect of children dates at least as far back as the origins of the child welfare system in the 1930s, following the partition of Northern Ireland and the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State. Whereas a writer could choose to include political and military events as historical washes for a story, McCabe chooses the state of social welfare for children in the mid-​twentieth century in a way that correlates strongly with studies conducted by sociologist Caroline Skehill. The history of the social welfare of children in Ireland begins under British rule with the Children’s Charter of 1889 which gave permission to officers of the law to arrest anyone harming a child and which made begging, an activity for many children at the time, illegal. The charter was amended in 1894 to include the prevention of mental cruelty towards children and to criminalize the denial of medicine to ill children (Batty). The next major legislative action came in 1908 with the Punishment of Incest Act, a statute particularly relevant to McCabe’s text because it marks a legal transition in the social welfare of children. This removed the jurisdiction over cases of incest from the Roman Catholic Church and grants jurisdiction specifically and solely to the state, which can be seen as part of a major trend in the changing sociopolitical climate of mid-​twentieth-​century Ireland. Skehill’s research on this transition period finds an increase in the number of social workers in Ireland, largely because the rehabilitation of children had become the state’s responsibility. Although legal obligation was held by the state, the Roman Catholic Church retained its influence on the discourse of social work in Ireland at the time. Skehill writes:

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An ideological battle existed within [social work’s] own discourse over the mid-​20th century. While signifying a clear skirt away from voluntary and primarily religious-​based charities, much of the discourse of early charity work, particularly in relation to moral issues, continued to permeate professional social work in the mid-​20th century. This is hardly surprising, given the influence of the Catholic Church maintained, not only over social service provisions, but also within Irish society in general. (150) The notion of charity continued to play an important role in the child welfare system, but it also created a tension between the movement away from the Church and the effort to retain the idea of charitable action. As Skehill explains, social work for children became a codified public duty that was bound up with the ethos of volunteerism closely resembling Catholic charity. The tension was compounded by another dynamic: the overwhelming concern over Protestant proselytization held by a majority of the public meant that the welfare of children would be segregated. Catholic children were not placed within Protestant homes out of fear that the child would not be raised in the Catholic tradition, which is a fear that was substantiated by the state’s power to place a child wherever it deems appropriate, indiscriminate of religious differences. Irish society privileged the Roman Catholic Church in deciding such matters, and so the state reprimanded children to institutions run by Catholic clergy. McCabe uses this period of state-​controlled and Church-​administered child welfare as the backdrop for Francie’s first-​person story. Francie narrates his discovery of his mother’s body hanging in the kitchen and his father’s death by drink. His mother’s suicide is his first recognizable trauma amidst a home life of vociferous fighting, perpetuated by his father’s drinking and violence. His mother’s acute depression was matched only by his father’s alcoholism and abuse, but Francie’s father blames him for his mother’s death. After Francie burglars and vandalizes the Nugent family home, he is sent into the welfare system for a short time. Later he is taken back into the system when authorities find Francie living with his father’s decaying corpse. Francie internalizes the blame his father placed on him for his mother’s suicide, and Francie internalizes the image of a pig as the class to which he is made to feel to belong, as propogated by Mrs. Nugent. The abuse and neglect continue at the Catholic workhouse to which he is sent by the state. The degradation that Francie experiences early in life is exacerbated by the sexual and physical abuse he later experiences at the hands of Catholic priests (BB 88). As for whether or not state obligation or voluntary charity is best able to rehabilitate children, neither is conducive to Francie’s case.

34 Brennan Francie’s descent into a totalizing self-​delusion and his infamous act of murder are prefigured in an earlier attack on the Nugent family, when Francie breaks into their home and writes “pigs” in feces all over the house. The novel’s plot culminates in an attack on Mrs. Nugent during which Francie physically assaults her alone in her home, kills her with a captive bolt pistol (a bolt gun used to slaughter animals), guts her, and reaches into her stomach for bloody contents with which to write “pigs” on the wall again (BB 209). The work of a pig butcher and the location of the abattoir feature prominently in the novel’s thematics, tying together the fates of Francie and his father, both of whom worked in a slaughterhouse. The abuse and neglect fuels Francie’s self-​image as both pig and pig butcher. As the pig butcher, Francie’s narration of killing Mrs. Nugent is characteristic of his run-​on-​syntactical voice and comic-​book overtones. He recounts: She stumbled trying to get to the phone or the door and when I smelt the scones and seen Philip’s picture I started to shake and kicked her I don’t know how many times. She groaned and said please I didn’t care if she groaned or said please or what she said. I caught her around the neck and I said: You did two bad things Mrs Nugent. You made me turn my back on my ma and you took Joe away from me. Why did you do that Mrs Nugent? She didn’t answer I didn’t want to hear any answer I smacked her against the wall a few times there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth and her hand was reaching out trying to touch me when I cocked the captive bolt. I lifted her off the floor with one hand and shot the bolt right into her head thlock was the sound it made, like a goldfish dropping into a bowl. If you ask anyone how you kill a pig they will tell you cut its throat across but you don’t you do it longways. Then she just lay there with her chin sticking up and I opened her then I stuck my hand in her stomach and wrote pigs all over the walls of the upstairs room. (BB 209) In this tumultuous moment of graphic violence, Francie’s saturation in an environs of violence leaps from the printed page. According to his sensibility, the suicide death of his mother and Mrs. Nugent’s class-​based derisions are appropriately met with butchery. In this way, Francie forcibly reverts the status of pig onto the Nugent family by becoming the pig butcher. His expert knowledge of how to cut the throat of a pig stands out as an indicator of how interpellative pressures have informed his self-​delusion. The emotional triggers of losing his mother and losing his friendship with Joe constitute Francie’s conclusion that Mrs. Nugent is responsible for his duress. Francie executes her for (as he sees it) making him an orphan.

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The variations of style within the above passage suggest that readers should note dramatic shifts in the cadence and rhythm as tensions escalate. Run-​on sentences draw readers into the frenzy of Francie’s revenge. These contrast the sudden change to a concise declarative statement (the verdict) and an even more curt interrogative before the rhythm returns to the run-​on structure to describe Mrs. Nugent’s murder. Francie’s unfolding psychosis takes form in the run-​on syntax as interpellative forces turn him into the Butcher Boy. This is made palpably clear by the graphic violence within the text. It is worth noting here, however, that BB includes very few direct representations of violence—​ Mrs. Nugent’s murder being one and the sexual molestation by Father Tiddly as the other. Even his mother’s suicide and his father’s death are not rendered as the same kind of graphic violence because the representations are indirect and mediated through the thematic of flames and ashes; at the end of the novel, before burning down his family home, Francie plays “The Butcher Boy,” a song loved by his mother as he lays down in the fire ready to become ashes, because, as he explains in the novel’s opening, “its just as good sitting here staring into the ashes” (BB 6 & 223–​4). In Jordan’s film adaptation of McCabe’s novel, Mrs. Nugent’s murder is remarkably brief.2 The scene opens with a shot of Mrs. Nugent walking into a room and Francie stepping out from behind a tinted glass pocket door, approaching her quietly and unseen from behind. The camera tracks left to capture Francie as he grabs Mrs. Nugent and then the camera settles in a medium shot of the mirror in which Mrs. Nugent is looking. Viewers can see her frightened expression on discovering that Francie holds a bolt gun to her head. Unlike the novel, there is no beating and Francie says very little. After Francie shoots the bolt into her head near the carotid artery, the camera cuts to a medium shot of Mrs. Nugent’s newly dead corpse falling to the floor with an audible thud. Within a canted close-​up shot, the camera swings up and down to graphically match the motion of Francie’s arm as he hacks at Mrs. Nugent’s body, blood splattering en course with a selective focus on Francie’s now-​ transformed face: from pig to pig butcher. The medium shot of the mirror which frames the faces of both Francie and Mrs. Nugent makes for an interesting moment in the film. In this instance, viewers can use the critical space of the image screen. Rather than compare this to Lacan’s mirror, the mirror in the film suggests an on-​screen synthesis of the perpetrator’s confrontation with his victim and the voyeur’s 2 For a sustained discussion of differences between the film and the novel as well as about the adaptation itself and the collaboration between Jordan and McCabe, see Colin MacCabe’s book (42 and 53–​4) and see Mullen.

36 Brennan simultaneous confrontation with immanent graphic violence. It is the same moment when the film renders just how essential graphic violence is to the adaptation of the elements of the social fantastic in McCabe’s novel. Graphed or written into the composition of the shot is the unbridgeable divide between the social stations, instantiated in Francie and Mrs. Nugent; one derelict and the other endowed. For Mrs. Nugent, the last moment of her life is clearly defined by overwhelming fear, whereas Francie’s facial expression is best characterized by delight and cathartic release—​a kind of satisfaction. The sequence in which Francie murders Mrs. Nugent is bookended by shots of the town festivities in anticipation of Our Lady’s arrival amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis’s apocalyptic omen. A voiceover of an adult Francie (performed by Stephen Rea who also plays Francie’s father) remarks how Francie the pig butcher showed up even when the Virgin Mary did not. The real explosion comes not in a nuclear fashion but in that ancient way of killing with the hands and in the slow but compounding forms of violence that bring Francie to his undoing. The end of Francie’s world appears to be fated following his maltreatment at the Catholic workhouse. When Francie tells the priests running the workhouse that he sees images of the Christian saints and martyrs, the pedophiliac Father Tiddly targets him. He offers cigarettes and Rolo candies as a lure, exploiting the child’s simple desires. Then the next time he starts this breathing into my ear. He said I smelt like St Teresa’s roses and he’d give me as many Rolos as I wanted if I told him the worst bad thing I ever did. I told him things about the town but he kept saying no no worse than that and I could feel his hand trembling under me. No matter what I told him it still wasn’t bad enough. No he says you must have something worse than that something you are afraid to tell anyone something you are so ashamed of you don’t want anyone in the wide world to know about. I told him to stop I didn’t want him to do it I didn’t want him to say it anymore. But he wouldn’t stop. I could barely hear him but he was still saying something you could never forgive yourself for a terrible thing Francis a terrible thing please tell me I said stop it! But he wouldn’t then I heard ma again it wasn’t your fault Francie I got a grip of him by the wrist I just grabbed on to it and sank my teeth in he went white and cried out No Francie!, I said stop it don’t ever say it again! I didn’t go near him after that. I never wanted to see him again him and his smells and his breathing and his terrible things. But the bite only made Tiddly more mad for me than ever. He took me out to a cafe in his car and he says I love you. (BB 87–​8)

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Much like the novel’s murder scene, the scene of molestation above features a syntactical variation wherein Francie’s run-​on fashion appears as the molestation begins. At the climax of the molestation the narration shifts to short, complete sentences. This has the effect of indicating Francie’s fear. In comparison to the run-​on fashion associated with the explosion of Francie’s anger during the murder, this molestation passage demonstrates a different emotional state:  fear and self-​preservation. In this instance, Francie knows that Father Tiddly’s abuses are wrong, yet the message that he is to blame for his mother’s death never escapes him. During the sexual abuse, Francie hears his mother telling him that he is not to blame for her suicide. Without a doubt, the sense of responsibility that Francie feels for his mother’s death is the shame that excites Tiddly. The shame Francie feels triggers the anger that leads him to bite Tiddly; Francie calls out, “don’t ever say it again” rather than what one might otherwise expect, “don’t ever do it again.” As for the graphic violence in this scene of the novel, the sexual abuse is one more additional traumatic experience among the many. Francie’s trauma begins, as it does for many, at home. His mother’s suicide becomes his defining trauma, the one against which Francie comes to understand his father’s death and Tiddly’s abuse. Tiddly’s behavior continues to the extent that Francie, in an effort of self-​preservation in a situation that he fears and that he does not control, begins to role play a relationship with the priest. “Tiddly said wouldn’t it be lovely if we could get married. I said it would be great. I could buy you flowers and chocolates and you could have dinner ready when I come home he says.” Francie continues, “Ha ha I laughed, like a girl, and did Tiddly like that! Little Miss Snowdrop, I said, Queen of All The Beautiful things in the world!, and that nearly drove him astray in the head altogether. The sweat hopped off him” (BB 92). Altogether, the graphic violence within BB can be catalogued:  the abuse of Francie’s mother by his father, the suicide of his mother, his father’s death (another kind of suicide), and the sexual abuse. The catalogue represents the variegated but interrelated forms of violence that do the literary and filmic work of rendering the experience of characters in a structure of feeling defined by violence against women and children. This indicates a criterion for the social fantastic: extra-​ordinary forms of violence and grotesque conduct do not stand alone. Placing Francie Brady alongside Ned Strange from McCabe’s W produces a startling comparison. The haunting Ned Strange, known for his explosive anger, operates in the novel as a representation of Irish tradition and history in the fictional mountain-​valley village of Slievenageeha: “Ned, unencumbered as he was by any new and imported orthodoxy, had, by common consent, come

38 Brennan to embody the authentic spirit of heritage and tradition. It was as if it has been decided that simply having Ned was sufficient. That was enough to keep them in touch with their fast-​fading traditions and customs of the past” (W 16). In this way, Ned is the spirit of a past that retains a hold, even a possession, over Ireland’s present. The abusive Ned represents a history of Ireland that is in some sense a prequel to Francie Brady’s traumatic experiences; Ned Strange’s sexual molestation and murder of a child (Michael Gallagher) preludes Father Tiddly’s abuse of Francie. What is even more compelling from this comparison of Francie and Ned Strange is how Ned Strange also represents the re-​creation of that history of abuse because Ned, who beats and drowns his wife before raping and murdering Michael Gallagher, is also Redmond Hatch, the protagonist of W who kidnaps and drugs his own daughter and who was himself sexually molested as a child by an adult male, seemingly Ned. Ned Strange hatches fully within Redmond Hatch’s mind—​the abused becomes oddly one with the abuser. The purpose of this comparison is not to suggest that all abused children become abusers as adults. Rather, Ned/​Redmond forces readers of McCabe’s fiction to consider how Francie Brady’s fractured, post-​traumatic child selves (the pig and the pig butcher) place the extra-​ordinary specter of alter egos and ghosts up against ordinary cases of violence; such is the comparative function of the social fantastic. The violence present in BoP often takes, like W, a sexualized form; the novel features a great deal of homophobic violence amid a backdrop of sectarian violence along the northern border, including an ira bomb planted at a London club. The protagonist, Pussy, dreams of a borderless place and, as a transsexual woman, she desires “home, belonging, and … peace” (BoP xi). The novel’s title comes from a 1969 hit song by Don Partridge that registers Pussy’s dream of finding her birth mother, who was raped by a Roman Catholic priest and who left the infant Patrick behind on her exit to London. When Pussy goes to London looking for her mother, she takes on sex work and during that period she is both strangled (nearly to death) by a John and arrested by British authorities for the club bombing. Set during the 1970s, mostly in the borderlands of Ireland, the violence of the Troubles takes on a more prominent role in narrative events. McCabe situates Pussy’s birth—​the figure of a young and queered Ireland—​ within the history of colonial conflict in Ireland, beginning as tends to happen in 1690 with the Battle of the Boyne. From there, McCabe jumps immediately to 1955 and the birth of baby Patrick to an unwed mother who must have faced being sent to a Magdalene laundry or another institution; leaving the baby for adoption and leaving the fictional town Tyreelin for London would have been better options for her. Tyreelin itself is described by a catalogue of political

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violence, including the garroting of a crofter in 1745, that stretches to include partition in 1922: “a geographical border drawn by a drunken man, every bit as tremulous and deceptive as the one which borders life and death” (BoP x). Pussy’s transgression of gender boundaries and social mores reflects the challenges of crossing the Irish border and the difficulty of finding a borderless, even androgynous, and peaceful place. In the course of navigating the perils of military and paramilitary checkpoints in the borderland, the novel references the 1972 shooting of unarmed civilian protestors and civil rights advocates in Stroke City (Derry/​Londonderry) known as Bloody Sunday (BoP 39). The London club bombing by the ira is preceded by an earlier bombing in the novel, when Pussy’s double-​dealing Republican politician boyfriend (affectionately named Dummy) is assassinated and she imagines his penis having been blown from his body by the bomb that killed him. “I often think of him,” she says, “blown up like that, his poor little mickey in slo-​mo coming back to earth, like a flower pink and bruised, an emblem sent by all the dead men who’d crossed over. There are those who say it was the ira and others the protestant Ulster Defense Association and then some who say it was the two of them together” (BoP 33). BoP includes a number of victims of political violence, perhaps the most of any of McCabe’s novels. But the most prominent events of political violence occur for two particular deaths: those of Irwin Kerr and Laurence Feely, two of Pussy’s friends. Irwin joins the ira and is sent on operations, only to be unable to murder a Protestant person, so the ira kills him (BoP 22 & 83). His execution by the ira is referenced three times throughout the novel, and his undignified death is used as a foil to the violent death of Laurence Feely, who has Down’s syndrome. An ira car bomb kills Laurence.3 Their two murders are the few instances when Pussy responds to loss and violence with sadness, as opposed to how she typically responds with “pastiche, wickedness and cheek,” as McCabe describes her in the prelude (BoP x). A more typical response occurs when the John sexually assaults Pussy: For no sooner had I  my gold chain removed and my long brown hair tossed back than he had slipped his hand in his pocket and removed his silky string—​although if it was indeed from that fabric fashioned, I could not say for sure. All I can accurately state is that it was a ligature of some sort, soft but not so when about your Adam’s apple it’s drawn tight as it will go. For some reason, at that precise moment, when he began to 3 BoP see 58, 103–​4, 169 for Irwin’s murder and 47 for Laurence’s murder.

40 Brennan strangle me, I saw Charlie standing there tossing back her scarf and going “I want to read you a poem. It’s by Adrian Henri from Liverpool. It goes like this: ‘I want to paint two thousand dead birds crucified on a background of night …’ ” As I’m sure you can imagine—​each and every one of those silly birds I saw as Silky String pulled tight. “So you believe in love?”, he was saying—​hammering away at his tootle now, of course, into the bargain! … He released me for a moment to turn up the music—​the theme from “A Summer Place” now, would you believe! (BoP 69) Pussy’s coping mechanism in dealing with acts of grave violence and immanent death to herself is a kind of submission to events outside of her control; when two ira men visit her, she throws herself against the wall and calls out, “Go on—​do it then! Murder me! But please—​please make it quick!” (BoP 44). She thinks of her friend Charlie from Tyreelin who was to marry Irwin, and a poem by the musician-​poet Adrian Henri featuring a strong symbolist image that conjures up James George Frazer’s 1890 work on myth, “The Golden Bough.” Yet, it is death which follows death, not rebirth. The image of two thousand dead birds under the cover of night serves as an analog for the blackening vision of Pussy as she is strangled, and it speaks to her fatalism. Clearly influenced by surrealist art, Henri’s poem “I Want to Paint” (1968) is a hybrid ars poetica and painter’s statement in which the artist aims for “A SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT OF ALL THE SENSES.” The graphic violence in McCabe’s text performs that very work of deranging the senses as evidenced in Pussy’s typical reaction of fatalist acquiescence. This is not the reaction that Pussy has in Jordan’s film adaptation BoP, wherein she is called Kitten. Rather than acquiesce to the strangling, Kitten fights off her attacker with some perfume to the eye and then she makes her escape. The novel makes no mention of fighting back or fleeing. Additionally, the film makes it clear that the attacking John picks up Kitten as if she were a prostitute; it only renders her as such as if she were a sex worker, and the attacker is not shown to be masturbating himself as he does in the novel, thus de-​sexualizing the violence. Moreover, the protagonist’s vulnerability is transformed from hapless to mobilized in the translation from fiction to film. The film’s close-​up shot of Kitten while she is being strangled visually stands out for viewers amidst regular medium shots from within the car where the attack takes place. Her fear is evident and motivational; the violence pushes Kitten to fight back, unlike an earlier scene in the film when two ira men show up to the caravan for guns that she has disposed into the water off the cliffs and she tells them, begs them even, to kill her, which is more in line with Pussy in the novel and how she tends to concede.

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Despite those serious differences between the violence in the novel and the violence in the film, the way that the violence is represented and its role in the story—​the graphic violence in the texts—​are far more similar in that they together provoke readers and viewers to question the social factors and interpellative powers at work. Pussy and Kitten are in many ways migrants, members of the diaspora. Many Irish have left and continue to leave for England and other destinations around the world, and there is strong evidence that Pussy’s migration is induced by the conflict and economic pressures: If things had improved even a little bit, I think I might have considered staying around Tyreelin for another while but if you look at those first six months of 1972, you would have to ask: “What person in their right mind who had a choice would stay five minutes in the fucking kip!” Especially if they’ve just gone and lost themselves a lover, and were most likely soon to be chucked out of house and home? I think what put the tin hat on it was when they decided to top young Laurence Feely. (BoP 45) The graphic violence in the texts, both fiction and film, drives the protagonist to England and represents an excess that cannot be avoided (hence, her fatalism). The fact that she leaves Ireland because of the violence only to be met with more violence after arrival constitutes a specific structure of feeling: an oversaturation of violence that gives rise to one beginning (baby Patrick) after another (Pussy or Kitten herself) and another (Pussy or Kitten looking for her mother). The film does offer endings to these beginnings—​Kitten seems content living in London with Charlie and her baby (fathered by Irwin), and she does eventually find her mother, without the reunion she had imagined. However, the novel leaves the beginnings without endings and with only more beginnings forming. Pussy never finds her mother and never finds a place to feel at home as herself. Instead, she is alone, left searching for her mother and dreaming of birthing a baby with a doctor, Terence, whom she will never see again (BoP 199). Like Partridge’s song, Pussy’s narrative is defined by daydreams but ones which are subsumed by the nightmarish reality of ubiquitous violence.

Photo-​Graphed: the Social Fantastic in Print and on Screen

When violence becomes an image, it can undergo transformation qua Marx’s commodity fetishism in which the social character of the violence is obscured. For example, in the image of the ira gunman popular in thrillers that use

42 Brennan Northern Ireland as a setting or Irish paramilitaries as characters, the black balaclava is a veil that covers the social character of the man wearing it. Always seen as a man, the image of the ira fighter occludes the role of women in the ira, such as Cumman na mBan (the Women’s Council). A pathology of the violator as a militant rebel masks the structure of feeling out of which that figure is manipulated, and the image of the ira fighter is extracted from its milieu of revolutionary, anti-​imperialist war fought by a largely rural and impoverished population seeking sovereignty and self-​determination. In order to be intelligible to a worldwide audience, the image of the ira fighter does not require the context of brutal and discriminatory policing and even makes the ira’s relationship with the British military entirely antagonistic. While not wholly inaccurate, it is a distortion that overshadows the reality that British troops were at first welcomed by Republicans living in Northern Ireland, when the force was sent to protect the Catholic communities from Loyalist paramilitaries and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The twist occurs when the British soldiers turn their guns around, as the military begins to collude with the Loyalist fighters. Graphic violence tends to be coded with personal tropes like the ira gunman, and the creation of the violent image serves as a pretext to justify its own necessity. Although a logical fallacy, this is the estranging operation of the society of the spectacle that Guy Debord describes. Debord’s theses on the society of the spectacle critique a model of society that is devoid of authentic social life precisely because of the magnitude of its obsession with representations of social life. In this formulation, the image is the supreme form of cultural communication and social life itself is carried out through images; its structure of feeling is mediated through imagery. Comptrollers of the market of images retain and reproduce their hegemony by coding images of personal tropes with negative affects and associations, composing the language of the society of the spectacle (DeBord 7). The market of images is a collage that reinforces the power differentials of privilege and precarity. It reproduces the images themselves, producing yet more disparity. Operant in many of these images are socially racialized, gendered, and sexualized figures. Graphic violence, though it can take on the above forms and it can be complicit in the society of the spectacle, need not necessarily be seen as only complicit in this process. McCabe’s novels and Jordan’s films demonstrate that graphic violence can be made to critique and to resist the prefigured interpretation of society. When captured in text or on film, the spectacle’s significance is illustrated in how the artist constructs it in the work. Closely reading and viewing the seams along which the artist creates the texture of the violence at the level of the printed page and the image allows one to see the methods

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used by McCabe and Jordan to mediate the interpellative force of the society depicted in the spectacle. Jacques Lacan claims, “the screen here is the locus of mediation” (128). The printed page and image screen are the sites at which the graphic violence is coded for the audience, making them the location where any mediation must happen as well. The screen and page are permeable membranes, masks that can be removed but only when the spectator examines the practice of viewing and reading. “Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is a gaze,” Lacan suggests (128). In effect, this is a double revelation—​the spectator-​viewer’s gaze and the gaze of the image producer—​rendered in the coding of the graphic violence. The coding built into the graphic violence by the artist is how the image is photo-​graphed. Althusser breaks photograph into its constituent roots in order to show how photo denotes the capture of an image made of lines and shapes of light and darkness, whereas graph denotes the pliability of the photo—​how it must be created and manipulated. The graphic part of the image, whether it is textual or filmic, is how its internal relationships are configured—​how deranged or how acquiescent a subject of representation is made to look and how the background context of an image affects and effects interpretations of the image. In this way, to photograph something is to capture an image and to code it in a way that directs a spectator’s understanding, so that a reader or viewer must look to the printed page and the image screen in order to see the code in critical relief. If graphic violence is an example of ideology embedded in the material and immaterial processes of producing and consuming images, then the text remains the optimal site to contest hegemonic readings, where one can see the structure of feeling in full display. Works Cited Allain, Marcel & Pierre Souvestre. Fantômas, Vol. 1. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1961. Batty, David. “Timeline: A History of Child Protection.” The Guardian. May 2005. www. theguardian.com/​society/​2005/​may/​18/​childrensservices2 Crossley, Nick. “The Phenomenological Habitus and Its Construction,” Theory and Society, Vol. 30.1, 2001: 81–​120. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 2010. Hall, Stuart. “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect,’ ” collected in Mass Communication and Society. Edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevtich, and Janet Woollacott. Berkshire, UK: Edward Arnold in association with the Open UP, 1979. Henri, Adrian. “I Want to Paint.” Adrian Henri: Selected and Unpublished Poems, 1965–​ 2000. Edited by Catherine Marcangeli. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007.

44 Brennan Lacan, Jacques. “What Is a Picture?” The Visual Culture Reader. Edited by Nicholas ­Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2013. Lebargy, Mathias. “Draining out the Colours: An Interview with Patrick McCabe.” Estudios Irelandeses: Journal of Irish Studies, 2014: 134–​42. www.estudiosirlandeses.org/​ 2013/​03/​draining-​out-​the-​colours-​an-​interview-​with-​patrick-​mccabe/​ MacCabe, Colin. The Butcher Boy: Ireland into Film. Cork: Cork UP, 2007. MacCabe, Colin. “An Interview with Stuart Hall, Dec. 2007.” Critical Quarterly, Vol. 50, 2008: 12–​42. Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. O’Mahony, John. “King of Bog Gothic.” The Guardian, 30 Aug. 2003. www.theguardian. com/​books/​2003/​aug/​30/​fiction.patrickmccabe Skehill, Caroline. The Nature of Social Work in Ireland. Lewistown, NY:  Edwin Mellen, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Chapter 4

A Portrait of the Artist as a Madman Barbara M. Hoffmann The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact

Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

…

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

∵ After attempting to navigate the hegemonic forces controlling his life –​family, religion, nationality, education, class –​Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man realizes that through self-​exile to the Continent he can free himself not only to become the artist he is meant to be, but also to learn to appreciate these forces in their role in shaping his identity. In a country debased by a colonizer for much of its history, anything that compels Stephen to follow its rule, to give up his freedom and bow to an outside authority, necessarily becomes metonymic of England. Even the forces pushing Stephen to become “more Irish” –​such as Davin’s encouraging Stephen to stay in the Irish League –​are in themselves hegemonic and thus somewhat paradoxically symbolic of English colonial power in the form of reactionary resistance. The Continent is a place of multiplicity; free from the forces pushing Stephen to be one thing or another, it represents that place where Stephen can forge a new self from the sludge of forces trying to control him. What if there were no “Continent” to which such a young man might escape? What if the forces of control ranged not just from the familial, to the local, to the national but to the global and the universal as well? Such is the situation over half a century later for young Francie Brady, the narrator of Patrick

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_005

46 HoffmaNn McCabe’s novel, BB. The lives of the two young protagonists are strikingly similar in relation to family situations, class, religion, education, and, above all, outsider status. Despite these similarities, however, Stephen finds himself free to become an artist while Francie descends into the psychopathy of a killer. If Portrait is the story of how competing hegemonic forces in Ireland produce an artist out of a young man who feels himself alien to that society, then BB is the story of how those similar forces acting on the same type of young man can also create a murderer. The character Stephen Dedalus, as well as Joyce’s views on the relationship between artistry and exile and on the arbitrary circumstantial limits that shape a life, offer ideological frames through which to re-​imagine Francie Brady as a potential artist. Francie and Stephen reveal the effects of a repressive culture that is steeped with cycles of violence. They illustrate Joyce’s and McCabe’s respective explorations of the tenuous boundaries between alienation, monstrosity and creativity. The idea that the characteristics of psychopathology mirror those of creativity has a long literary as well as scientific tradition. Creation itself bespeaks a nonconformity and willingness to see the world in a new way. Philip Sidney writes in A Defense of Poesy, “the poet … lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature … nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done” (Sidney 957). Seeing things that are not really there, cultivating a false sense of reality –​these are the trappings of madness. Yet, the definition of madness as seeing a different reality has much to do with questions of conformity. Emily Dickinson writes: Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. ‘T is the majority In this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur, –​you ‘re straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain. The “majority,” Dickinson concludes, rather than some essential reality, prevails in defining what is or is not appropriate behavior; thus the difference between “madness” and “sense” is merely majority rule. T.S. Eliot, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” juxtaposes the complacency and ennui of modern life with the possibility of action. His protagonist convinces himself that there

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will be time yet to act, “time to murder and create,” joining these two seemingly contradictory actions together in opposition to apathetic conformity (Eliot 28). The impulse behind murdering and creating is the same: to “disturb the universe” (Eliot 46). Scientific evidence also points to the interrelatedness of psychopathology and creativity. In a review of studies on that relationship entitled “Are Genius and Madness related?” from the Psychiatric Times, Dean Simonton, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and author of several books on genius, notes that “creativity and psychopathology are intimately connected.” Both are associated with increased “independence and nonconformity,” “the capacity for defocused attention (e.g., reduced negative priming and latent inhibition)” as well as “bizarre thoughts”  (22). Simonton also notes that “environmental experiences and conditions” can nurture the “creative cluster” of characteristics in a person; “creative development is frequently associated with traumatic experiences in childhood or adolescence, experiences that may also contribute to depression and suicidal tendencies” (22).1 Yet creative development is also “linked to an enriched and diverse intellectual and cultural environment.” However, “[creators] operating in less-​constrained domains will also exhibit these [psychopathological] symptoms to a greater extent” (22). So, a person’s creativity can be nurtured by an environment offering intellectual and cultural stimuli, while a “less-​constrained domain” –​one which allows for non-​conformity, bizarre thoughts, and de-​focused attention to flourish –​can exacerbate psychopathological tendencies. The power to murder and to create, it would seem, can come from the same impulses, and yet something –​perhaps environment –​ contributes to a human embracing creativity or descending into psychopathology, perhaps into ­madness. Francie Bradie and Stephen Dedalus  –​one an artist and the other a psychopath –​allow Joyce and McCabe to respectively raise questions pertaining to divergent paths in the context of a shared national and individual history of political and familial strife. Considering the similarities among the forces acting upon the identity formation in both characters, Stephen arguably had 1 Simonton also notes studies that link psychopathological symptoms not only to creativity, but to specific types of creativity: “psychopathology is higher among artistic creators than among scientific creators …. Thus, according to one study, 87% of famous poets experienced psychopathology whereas only 28% of the eminent scientists did so, a figure close to the population baseline” (21). For a fascinating look at the relationship between madness and artistic genius in a variety of creators –​from Sylvia Plath and Earnest Hemingway to Judy Garland and Brian Wilson –​see psychologist Jeffrey Kottler’s book Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle (San Francisco: Jossey Bass. 2006).

48 HoffmaNn higher potential to descend into madness while Francie might have become an artist, rather than the reverse. Through the episodic structures in each novel, Joyce and McCabe explore the importance of a single moment on the development of a boy’s character. They each suggest that one moment  –​one epiphany, one rejection  –​might make the difference between a murderer and a creator, as an individual asserts identity in the context of a society in strife. The intimate connection between narrative structure and character development so prominent in Portrait provides a frame through which to analyze BB. It reveals Francie’s potentiality for becoming an artist, as well as the possible moment or episode, if any, that prevented him from so being. The stories’ narrative styles parallel the process of development of each boy.2 Stephen’s and Francie’s lives are shaped by moments representing turning points in their development. The significance of certain episodes on the later development of the boys is reinforced by the use of motif combined with prolexis and analexis. Joyce and McCabe subtly introduce those factors that will have the greatest influence on the boys –​the hegemonic forces attempting to control their development –​very early on in each narrative. The stories thus circle in on themselves, making each episode synecdochic of the entire story, as each episode, through the use of motif, contains in part the entirety of the boys’ experiences. Through this narrative compression, Joyce and McCabe indicate the significance of each moment in each of the boys’ lives, and their ensuing trajectories. The initial episode of Portrait, an imagistic amalgamation of Stephen’s earliest memories, contains the symbolic forces that Stephen and the narrative will confront for the remainder of the text. These forces –​family, religion, nationality, history, class –​conspire and compete to shape Stephen’s identity through fairly explicit external influence. Joyce also introduces the incipient inner impulses struggling to proclaim themselves as the real Stephen, the artist, in this initial episode as well. Identity and alienation begin their recursive relationship, as the factors at play in shaping an individual identity cause alienation, which in turn forges elements of that identity. From the first words of Portrait, Joyce prefigures Stephen’s genesis as an artist with the deliberate choice to begin with the archetypal opening of a childhood story: “Once upon a time” (5). Joyce immediately complicates this deceptively 2 Much has been written on the relationship between Portrait’s structure and Stephen’s psychological development. For example, in The Antimodernism of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Weldon Thornton suggests that “Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist is the ‘archetypal’ Bildungsroman largely by virtue of the amazing number of structural patterns –​which are simultaneously patterns of Stephen’s development –​that ramify through the novel” (74).

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positive and simple start in several ways, signaling the difficulty that will succeed not only in Stephen’s transformation into an artist, but in telling a story as well. The story of the “moocow” that happened “once upon a time” was told to Stephen by his father who “looked at him through a glass” and “had a hairy face” (5). Not only is Stephen’s father looking at him through glasses, indicating the difficulty Stephen’s father has in truly seeing and understanding Stephen for who he is, but his father is also obscured from Stephen by his beard. Joyce reasserts this alienation from father introduced in the initial episode at several points throughout the remainder of Stephen’s development. On their trip to Cork, for example, Stephen listens “without sympathy to his father’s ­evocation … of the scenes of his youth” (Portrait 76) and wonders how his father, “whom he knew for a shrewd suspicious man, could be duped by the servile manners of the porter” (78). As Stephen watches Simon Dedalus drink with a friend from his youth, who appears to Stephen as “little old man,” he senses that “an abyss of fortune or temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs” (Portrait 83). The physical separation by beard and glasses transforms into an internal dissonance as Stephen recognizes his separation from all ‘normal’ young men who feel “the pleasures of companionship with others” and the “vigour of rude male health,” as his father had felt (83). This sense of detachment multiplies by the time Stephen is in college to the point where Simon no longer even directly addresses his son, asking one of the other children, “Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?”(Portrait 152). Stephen likewise is not able to speak back to his father, responding mostly to himself that his father “has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine”(Portrait 153) – a flippant response, certainly, but one that shows that they cannot connect meaningfully to one another. Thus the separation from his father in the earliest episode not only foreshadows the disconnect between father and son, but also reveals the formative effects of early episodes in a child’s life on later development. The remainder of this initial episodic relation of Stephen’s early memories introduces other forces that will vie for control of his identity. Religion (father being also the heavenly father and his earthly fathers, the Jesuit priests; his punishment regarding the Protestant neighbor), nationality (the “little green place” and Dante’s brushes for Parnell and Davitt); language (his story and his song) –​all are represented in this earliest episode. Joyce also establishes motifs that will recur at significant moments of development: birds, water, and punishment, among others.3 Not only are the various images examples of narrative

3 To hash out just a few of these initial proleptic images, for example, Stephen’s seeing his father “through a glass” (5), recalls Paul’s description that earthly understanding of the Father

50 HoffmaNn prolepsis, but they are also formative in terms of Stephen’s later character formation, indicating the importance of environment on development. Many of these same forces –​family, religion, national identity –​collude in Francie’s life as well, coercively fabricating his identity while reinforcing his alienation and outsider status. These common alienating features, combined with the episodic, motivic nature of both stories suggest that BB’s initial episode likewise offers synecdochic representations of these influential forces in Francie’s life. Thus the differences between these forces introduced within the initial episodes, as well as their repeated and restyled representation throughout the rest of the texts, offer insights into Stephen’s development into an artist and Francie’s into a psychopath. This difference in the characters’ respective development speaks to the perspectives of the authors: while Irish home rule was still a potentiality for Joyce, McCabe wrote BB with seventy years of perspective on what an independent Ireland meant. It was not the unified Ireland, free from colonial control, that Parnell imagined, but an endless cycle of violence, and internal conflict. The differences between the characters depicted development bespeaks the historical moments that the authors inhabit. Freedom –​self-​rule –​still seemed an option for Stephen; escaping colonial hegemony could still present as a panacea. For Francie, the dream of peaceful freedom and an end to violence has always already failed. Francie’s development is merely “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12). The reference evokes Paul’s previous line –​“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” –​connecting the obscured understanding of the father with Stephen’s eventual break from all of the forces attempting to control him in his youth. Stephen will face a disconnection from his biological father as well as from his heavenly Father, a combination that also suggests a rejection the Jesuit priests as his earthly fathers, and thus of the priesthood itself. His preference for his mother’s smell over his father’s again brings up issues of family and disconnection from the father, as well as an affinity for the mother, the Virgin Mary. His mother also acts as a muse to Stephen (as EC will), playing the piano while he dances, and likewise momentarily freeing him of the burdens of language as he sings “Tralala lala”. Issues of patriotism, religion, and class and exchange are introduced by Dante: the brushes in her press represent leaders of the Irish Home Rule movement; she teaches him the rules of economics and gives him a taste for capitalism by giving “him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper” (Joyce, 5); and, perhaps most significantly, Dante emphasizes the dangers of both Protestantism and sexuality by threatening that eagles will pull out his eyes unless he apologize for wanting to marry a Protestant girl. That Dante’s threat comes in the form of a song –​“Pull out his eyes, /​Apologise, /​Apologise, /​Pull out his eyes” (Joyce, 6) –​further complicates Stephen’s idea of himself as an artist by connecting punishment with art by the vehicle of the bird, prefiguring Stephen’s identification with Icarus, that bird-​like figure of punishment as well as of freedom and escape who becomes Stephen’s vocational muse.

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as a psychopath rather than an artist, even when confronted with the same hegemonic forces that colluded against Stephen Dedalus, suggests that McCabe sees Francie as synecdochic of Ireland in the 1960s. As suggested by Simonton’s study, lack of constraint, freedom, and self-​rule might lead to creativity, but it might also lead to instability and psychopathy. Like the opening of Portrait, the initial section of BB introduces forces that will shape Francie’s development. McCabe introduces several important motifs within the story’s first line: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent” (BB 1). Like Portrait’s “Once upon a time,” Butcher Boy starts with a traditional story-​telling trope: “When I was a young lad” (1). Like Joyce, McCabe immediately complicates this deceptively simple beginning with the confusion over time. Francie as narrator cannot be sure if that was “twenty or thirty or forty years ago” (1). The initial complication introduced in the story is also one of self-​identification: Francie does not know when his childhood began, a problem that can affect his identity as an adult as he does not have a basis for knowing his current stage of development. McCabe has Francie focus on the early influential stages of development –​the moments that started it all. He elides or even erases the intervening years and experiences. Francie’s obsession with determining what or who, exactly, “caused all the trouble,” not only does not help him to get over the troubles he has, but is actually part of his psychopathy (BB 2). McCabe again works with the synecdoche between Ireland’s search for its self before British colonialism and Francie’s search for the self that might have been without outside ill-​intended forces.4 He simultaneously suggests that the events and incidents of childhood are 4 This questioning of the integrity of a pure, original Ireland, an original “Irish people” –​of a self that exists before the influence of outside forces –​on the part of McCabe parallels Homi Bhabha’s reframing of the idea of présence Africaine forwarded by Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and other founders of the negritude movement. In his chapter “DissemiNation” from The Location of Culture, Bhabha draws a distinction between nation as performative and as pedagogical; the latter suggesting that a nation is a fixed, essential identity, and the former suggesting that nation is always becoming and never stable. He locates the people themselves as “the cutting edge between the totalizing powers of the ‘social’ as homogeneous, consensual community, and the forces that signify the more specific address to contentious, unequal interests and identities within the population” (Bhabha 146). By suggesting that nation is both performative and pedagogical, Bhabha allows for a tension to exist in the idea of nation. McCabe is doing something similar here: focusing on origin as important to understanding nation –​the moments that started it all –​but also suggesting that obsessive focus thereon misses the point of identity as performative. Francie, like a nation, is naturally and necessarily performing identity, is constantly becoming self, but is oppressed by the focus on a sort of primordial self, one that parallels the championing of volkish national origins.

52 HoffmaNn significant to later development, but also that an obsessive focus on an origins story can have later deleterious effects. The differences between the introductory storytelling tropes of Portrait and of BB are telling. Stephen’s story starts with a trope of childhood while Francie’s starts with one of adulthood. The teller of a story beginning “when I was a lad” is expected to be imparting a story that has held importance through the distance of time, perhaps a moment of gained wisdom that still affects the teller in the present. Portrait, though told mostly in the past tense as a story that already happened, actually starts with youth and follows Stephen’s development chronologically; those important, shaping moments in Stephen’s life are yet to happen, creating a tone, if not of hopefulness, then at least of potential fulfillment. While Portrait deliberately structures itself as a Bildungsroman, BB immediately denies this structure of progress and development. Francie’s story begins quite deliberately with the outcome of the story, and thus implies a feeling of the inevitable, as though Francie’s end is a foregone conclusion. Unlike Joyce, McCabe already knows the end of the story of the struggle for independence that Stephen, Francie, and Ireland fight. Francie’s story becomes one of finding that moment that changed everything –​that made his experiences of alienation and difference in childhood result in his being a murderer. The implication of the circular nature of the effects of past on present and of each moment of youth on the development of the individual is thus even more clearly stressed in the beginning of BB than in Portrait. In addition to complications connected with identity, the initial line of BB presents the motif of alienation. As Stephen is presented as alien from his father and his homeland –​both of which should potentially be sources of comfort, acceptance and belonging –​so Francie is alienated from his “small town.” Connecting the phrase “they were all after me” to his “small town” problematizes any expectation of the “small town” as an archetype of coziness and love.5 McCabe’s twentieth-​century audience would have been aware of the double layered experiential confusion: surface-​level perfection belies a sinister underbelly to small town life in the 1960s. This understanding speaks back to Portrait: not only does the idyllic image of Ireland as a “little green place” hide its

5 The idealization of the “small town” in Ireland has a long history in relation to Irish nationalism. Consider, for example, Eamon de Valera’s description of the “ideal Ireland” in his St. Patrick’s Day speech in 1943: “a land whose countryside would be bright with cozy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live” (Moynihan 466).

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history of repeated cycles of violence, but the father as a figure of harshness or misunderstanding rather than love and comfort pre-​exists Stephen’s discovery of that possibility (Portrait 5). In both stories, a figure that should be comforting but that in actuality often proves to be alienating folds back on itself in meaning, paralleling the circular nature of the entire narrative. The insidious, hunter-​like quality ascribed to a “small town” in the first line of the book reappears throughout BB. McCabe plays with the roles of hunter and huntedto reinforce the subjective nature of normalcy that exists at the whim of the majority. When he runs away to Dublin, Francie goes to see a movie in which an alienated figure (quite literally an alien) is set at odds against the good people of Earth. Francie’s association with the alien is implied when he first sees the advertisement for the film: “The creatures were coming to take over the planet earth because their own was finished there was nothing left on it” (BB 40). Like the creatures, Francie later finds himself with nothing left of his home life, resulting in his infiltrating the Nugents’ house. In the movie, the mayor, a representative of the small town, “squared up to the alien leader and told him he’d never get away with it” (BB 42). This scene recalls the first line of the book –​in which the townsfolk were “all after” Francie –​and therefore also prefigures the ending of the story, because of the novel’s circular structure. Francie’s reactions to the alien movie complicate the idea of alienation and of who powers notions of normalcy: while the mayor is clearly the representative of the “small town,” it is the alien with whom Francie associates the women. The alien responds to the mayor’s threat, saying, “neither you nor anyone else in this town will stop us”; Francie notes that the way the alien says “in this town” makes him “think of the women and Mrs Nugent they were always saying that” (BB 42). These complicated associations reveal the slipperiness with which the idea of the normal or the good is formed. To the women, Francie is the ‘alien,’ part of the ‘pig family’ and outside of normal town life. Yet, from Francie’s perspective, the hypocritical women parallel the alien depicted in the film. It is an alien who has “a human body that he stole off of some bogman of a farmer … but you knew by the twisted sneer that inside he was a fat green blob with tentacles” (BB 42). The townspeople hunt the alien while the alien hunts the townspeople; Francie hunts Mrs Nugent because it was she who “caused all the trouble,” precipitating his own hunting by the townspeople (BB 2). The power of normalcy in the town, associated with Mrs Nugent and “the women” (presumably Mrs Connolly and the others in “the shop”), also connects them with the mayor in the film. Francie plays the role of alien in the town, however, from their perspective. Francie does not fit in with the majority opinions in town regarding the appropriate way to act. When the town priest, Father Dominic, asks Francie to run home “like a good lad,” Francie does not;

54 HoffmaNn the implication of the line is that morality is a choice (BB 18). Obedience, as an identity feature that can constitute a “good lad” is suggested in the priest’s coaxing. Francie’s awareness that normalcy is a choice emerges, however, in his interactions with “the women” in the shop. He is able to make small talk with them and mimic their language. When the women talk over-​effusively about Alo, Francie “didn’t mind. I said now you’re talking and all this” (BB 15). His overt cognizance of the fact that he can fit in simply by mimicking their small town jargon implicitly chides the women’s hypocrisy. They do not have a sense that such double-​talk is wrong since they all engage in it: what is part of the majority is “good.” Francie expresses his initial realization of this underbelly in regards to Mrs Nugent. He says, “Mrs Nugent all smiles when she met us and how are you getting on Mrs and young Francis are you both well? It was hard to believe that all the time what she was really saying was: Ah hello Mrs Pig how are you and look Philip do you see what’s coming now –​The Pig Family!” (BB 5). The difference, then, between Francie’s acting and the women’s hypocrisy is one of both alienation and creativity. As an outsider, Francie consciously creates the persona of “fitting in with the townsfolk” –​an act that comes naturally to the women who buy into (and uphold) collective definitions of normalcy. In addition to the “small town” as a locus of hypocrisy, the priesthood in both BB and Portrait represents an institution whose ostensible province of offering comfort and acceptance belies an underbelly of malevolence. When Francie first arrives at the “school for bad boys,” the priest in charge whom Francie dubs “Father Bubble” presents himself kindly and sympathetically (BB 71),. He calls him “the famous Francie Brady” and he stops the sergeant from chastising Francie (BB 71). Yet, when Francie gives Father Bubble “a big wink” and says “good man yourself” in an attempt to express socially agreed upon friendly behavior, and even to gain the priest’s approval, Father Bubble’s “face goes all cloudy” and he himself chastises Francie: “You’d do well to keep a civil tongue in your head, Mr Brady” (BB 72). This disconnect between expectation and reality caused by the priest’s practically schizophrenic change in attitude somehow manages to present Francie as the “bad article” because he engaged in inappropriate niceties (BB 72). The line separating “good” from “bad” behavior seems eternally obscured from Francie’s understanding. These incidents establish a rule of behavior for him that the goodness of an action is defined by the level of favorableness of its outcome. Francie’s interactions with “Father Tiddly” reinforce this moral relativism, as the priest rewards Francie with cigarettes and Rolos in exchange for fulfilling his ethically transgressive pedophiliac desires. Despite his apparent discomfort with the situation, and his awareness of the act he is putting on for Father Tiddly, Francie continues because the outcome for himself is superficially positive. Yet,

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Francie has one moral, one immutable rule: that he would not let his mother down “in a hundred million years” (BB 5). Only when Father Tiddly’s desires butt against this rule does Francie decide, “I don’t like you anymore Tiddly” (BB 96). Father Tiddly asks Francie to describe his “nice house” and keeps making him say “more and more” about it so Francie feels, “I could never go back and say that I wasn’t telling him about our house at all but Nugents” (BB 97). He connects this reconfiguring of his house into the Nugents’ as betraying his mother. He imagines Mrs. Nugent saying to his mother, “Do you know what he did? He asked me to be his mother. He said he’d give anything not to be a pig. That’s what he did on you Mrs. Brady. That’s why he came to our house!” (BB 97). The priests, seeming embodiments (like a “small town”) of comfort and acceptance, morph into grotesque pedophiles. Francie too comes to embody a definitive force of immorality, shaped by such influences. Francie’s parents’ role in shaping his moral codes is also prefigured from the first lines of the novel. Quite unlike Portrait, Francie does not mention his parents in the initial episode, yet he does name two people: Joe and Mrs. Nugent. Joyce’s focus on the father and mother in the initial episode of asserts the expectation that parents have a formative role in children’s development, aligning with Portrait’s Bildungsroman structure. The beginning of the story is the beginning of Stephen’s development, thus the parents are naturally present at this birth of sorts. Stephen is free to move among various levels of acceptance and rejection of his parents because they are always present. Francie’s story, though, begins at the end, making Francie a posthumous child of sorts. It is in the first lines of the book that McCabe envisions Joe and Mrs. Nugent as distorted parental figures for Francie. They are the two figures who will be important in his development in his parents perennial absence. The conspicuous absence of Francie’s parents at the start of his story and their replacement with an impressionable youth and a woman prejudicially contemptuous of Francie suggests that all figures of authority and guidance for Francie are positioned in a solidarity built on their shared rejection of him. Francie’s actual parents symbolically reject him by abandoning their own lives. Francie’s mother’s suicide and Benny’s alcoholism, and subsequent death, somehow become Francie’s fault. When he returns to his town from Dublin, his father blames him in no uncertain terms: “You did it, what happened to ma” (BB 46). Prior to this outright accusation, however, Francie suspects that he could have helped his mother, as revealed through half-​hearted excuse for his inertia during a fight between his parents. “I knew I should have gone down but that’s no use now is it I didn’t did I? I didn’t go down and that’s that” (BB 7). During his parents’ fight about Uncle Alo, Francie again does not intervene, but instead recalls, “I just lay there with my eyes closed pretending I was

56 HoffmaNn asleep” (BB 35). This self-​immolation about his lack of agency belies the truth that his parents’ well-​being should not be this child’s responsibility. It reinforces the power that his mother’s moral code –​to not betray her –​has on his image of self. Francie’s attempts to assert agency in rejecting his parents’ fighting by running away, and then in embracing familial ties by returning home are vitiated by apparently causing his mother’s death. Francie transfers guilt about his mother to his already dead father, attempting to avoid feeling responsible for his parents’ rejection of him. Hence, the rejection by Joe and Mrs. Nugent places them as parental figures, allowing Francie to create an imaginary reality idealizing his biological parents and placing blame and feelings of rejection somewhat onto Joe and definitively onto Mrs. Nugent. This issue of agency at the core of both Portrait and Butcher Boy offers a lens through which to view Stephen’s development as artist and Francie’s as killer. Francie feels his lack of agency, exacerbated by the seeming arbitrary nature of social norms. Stephen has a tremendously deep sense of injustice and unfairness, wherein several of his actions in asserting agency result in punishment, not unlike Francie’s experience with Father Bubble. One of the most significant examples of this jilted agency in Portrait, the pandybat incident, reinforces the double evils of both injustice and hypocrisy. Father Dolan accuses Stephen of being a “lazy idle little loafer” using the “old schoolboy trick” of having broken his glasses, affronting Stephen’s sense of justice and truth (Portrait 44): It was unfair and cruel: because the doctor had told him not to read without glasses and he had written home to his father that morning to send him a new pair. And Father Arnall had said that he need not study till the new glasses came. Then to be called a schemer before the class and to be pandied when he always got the card for first or second and was leader of the Yorkists! (Portrait 45) Even Stephen’s attempt to assert agency in correcting this injustice by going to the rector about it –​an action that seemingly resulted in the renewed equilibrium of a just world, and accorded Stephen the admiration of his peers –​turns out, as his father later reveals, to be merely adult duplicity. Far from respecting Stephen’s request, the rector recalls to Simon, “I told them all at dinner about it and Father Dolan and I and all of us we all had a hearty laugh together over it. Ha! Ha! Ha!” (Portrait 63).6 These continually thwarted attempts to exert 6 This motif of injustice is prefigured in the incident of Dante and the Protestant neighbor in the first episode. Stephen feels himself unjustly punished for merely asking a girl he likes to marry him, as many small boys do, mimicking appropriate adult behavior: when you like a

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agency in a world whose ethical structure seems subjective reinforce both Stephen’s and Francie’s feelings of alienation and pushes each further outside of the realm of the majority. The narrative structures of the novels themselves, though, reveal differences in the degree of vitiated agency each boy feels. In the initial episodes of both books, the boys have similar responses to getting in trouble, or failing in the expectations of society. Stephen hides under the table when he is chastised by his mother and Dante for wanting to marry Eileen (Portrait 6). Francie hides “out by the river in a hole under a tangle of briars” (BB 1). Both of these responses are types of self-​exile and self-​alienation, conscious separations from the societies that rejected them. Society tells them they are wrong and they incorporate that into their actions, which become their identities, making alienation part of their identities. Yet Butcher Boy starts at the end, so, temporally, Francie’s self-​imposed exile by hiding in a hole parallels Stephen’s self-​exile by fleeing to the Continent. That Francie has no real chance for escape, that his end is pre-​determined, that he is already trapped by the circumstances of his life is embedded in the narrative structure itself. For Francie, all options have already been experienced, and the only viable path is one to escape through madness. Just as the initial sections of both texts contain the motif of hiding as self-​ alienation, both sections also end with an escape motif. In Portrait, the image of escape is more subtle and depends on understanding offered by the rest of the text, but the proleptical presence of birds (eagles) at the end of the first episode speaks to Stephen’s eventual escape as Icarus, the “hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings” (Portrait 198). From his hiding place, Francie also sees an image of escape, of “weeds and driftwood and everything floating downstream …. Sailing away to Timbuctoo” (BB 1). These images of escape, though, differ significantly. The weeds and such escape on a current, moving according to the direction of the water, and thus bound in ways that differ with the freedom associated with a bird in flight. When Stephen imagines himself leaving Ireland like a bird, he thinks of birds as “ever going and coming, building ever an unlasting home under the eaves

girl, you marry her. That Dante seemingly arbitrarily threatens Stephen with horrifying punishment (and, of course, in the Freudian sense, having one’s eyes pulled out is a figure of castration) foreshadows his pandying not the least because of the motivic repetition of bird-​ cum-​punisher: the eagles that will pull out his eyes are re-​figured as Father Dolan with his “whitegrey not young face, his baldy whitegrey head with fluff at the sides of it” (Portrait 44). This motif of undeserved punishment by birds repeats again when Stephen’s friend Heron with his name and face of a bird hits Stephen with a cane simply for preferring Byron to Tennyson.

58 HoffmaNn of men’s houses and ever leaving the homes they had built to wander” (Portrait 198). For Stephen this fusion of escape and punishment allows him to re-​ appropriate the hegemonic forces influencing his development so that failure and success are coincident. In rejecting his father’s control, Icarus flies to the sun. In flying to the sun, he falls to his end. Alienation becomes part of Stephen’s cyclical identity formation and thus allows him to become an artist, a creator: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!” (Portrait 150). McCabe’s reference to Timbuktu, though, brings up an important element related to constriction and freedom. The freedom for self-​exile is partially dictated through the national imaginary of the outside world; thus, Stephen can imagine the Continent as a place of multiplicity free from the judgmental and hegemonic forces of his youth. To escape from Ireland is necessarily to escape from British colonial control, and to be able to explore existence in the sovereign and autonomous nations of Europe. Instead of hiding from his oppressors, he can “fly by those nets” of “nationality, language, religion” while still embracing that those very nets make him who he is (Portrait 179). “[T]‌his race and this country and this life produced me …. I shall express myself as I am” (Portrait 178). Francie is not so lucky. While Timbuktu is certainly a real place, Francie uses it in its common slang form, meaning a place far, far away and inaccessible. When he attempts an escape to Dublin, the big city that has room for all types of people, he is still constrained by his assumption –​which turns out to come true –​that by leaving he is abandoning the one immutable moral code he has, to not let his mother down. He cannot even imagine a real place that would offer escape, only sailing to the imagined exile of “Timbuktoo”. The void in Francie’s imagination for a place to which he can escape is tied to the arbitrariness with which society defines abnormal behavior. Since the “majority” casts some things as “madness” and others as “sense” (to use Dickinson’s terminology), Francie learns that he may cast that which is abnormal or hateful to him (such as Mrs. Nugent) as monstrous and alien. In her essay on the way horror films influenced McCabe’s writing in general and BB specifically, Laura Eldred notes that those considered “monsters –​those who are expelled from a community and written off as ‘filth’ and thereby ‘abjected,’ using Julia Kristeva’s term –​often go on to label others as monstrous.” This transference figures “monsters as scapegoats, not demons” (Eldred 54). Yet in 1962, it is not just Francie or his small town that hunt monsters; society “as a whole has apparently also learned and applied these lessons, as it manufactures its own scapegoat in communism” (Eldred 54–​5). The ubiquitous threat of communism presents the outside world as even more threatening and alien than his small town. Francie literally has nowhere to run. Francie hears the woman in

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the chip shop in Dublin say, “she hoped the communists won she said they’re no worse than the rest of them” (BB 40). This statement reveals a moral chord in the novel, the suggestion that no one ‘monster’ or ‘alien’ is any worse than any other because all are fabricated. The hero motif is just as poignant in McCabe’s work as any hero or savior –​be it John Wayne, John F. Kennedy or the Virgin Mary –​is also bogus. Francie’s madness, it turns out, is divined sense in particularly poignant moments. In a society that waits with bated breath for the imminent arrival of communist bombs from “Mr Baldy Kruschev” and in which a medical doctor spreads cardboard letters on his lawn reading “AVE MARIA WELCOME TO OUR TOWN,” the sanest thing Francie can do is descend into madness (BB 183 & 207–​8). It is his only true escape. Considering reactions from Stephen’s friends and family to his thoughts and behaviors, perhaps it is merely the fact that he has not killed someone that makes him an artist rather than a murderer. Many of Stephen’s peers consider him something of a monster. His “demurring” (again, to use Dickinson’s term) from the actions of the majority makes him, if not necessarily dangerous, then at least bizarre. In Stephen’s society –​one in which it is considered normal to subject young people to a three day sermon describing the grotesque punishments of hell –​Stephen’s sins of the flesh and of disbelief cause his friend Davin, the representative of the good Irish boy, to lose his appetite and his sleep. Stephen’s friend Cranly suggests that on judgment day, Stephen will hear the words, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire” (Portrait 212).7 Stephen simply refuses to be a hypocrite; he does not take communion in fear of “the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration” (Portrait 215). He cannot follow the false authority figures that attempt to establish what is normal and what is monstrous or sinful. Neither can Francie: were he to simply act as Mrs. Nugent and Mrs. Connelly and the rest of the town wanted him to, and acted that way without a sense of its hypocrisy, he, too, would be paying “false homage” to an arbitrary authority. Stephen explains his deliberate choice of self-​alienation to Cranly: I will not serve that in which I  no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and

7 A rather ironic term, considering that, for Stephen and Francie and everyone else in their societies, every day is judgment day.

60 HoffmaNn cunning …. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too. (Portrait 218) Stephen’s language here suggests that he is quite capable of committing, if not murder, at least some mortal sin, condemning him to hell. While murder and rejection of church authority might seem quite disparate transgressions, in Catholic Ireland, such a huge variety of sins are put on equal footing before him: the vision of hell Father Arnell presents at the retreat is not restricted to any single mortal sin. Masturbation, sex, disobedience to parents, murder: all will land him in eternal hellfire. Stephen perceives that “[e]‌very word of [the sermon] was for him,” eliding his sin with all other mortal sins to which Father Arnell was alluding (Portrait 101). Stephen’s explanation to Cranly shows he is prepared to part both literally and figuratively from his society.8 If Stephen might as well be a killer  –​all mortal sins being equal in punishment  –​Francie is most definitely an artist. He is able to create personas required of him in certain situations. He fabricates a rather happy life with his dead father, and, though clearly an example of psychosis, this creativity also fits with Philip Sidney’s idea of a poet as one who creates things “quite anew, forms such as never were in nature.” He recounts stories –​such as those about his meetings with the Virgin Mary –​with such fervency and realism, despite his full awareness of their fictiveness, such that those to whom he tells them believe their veracity, or at least believe he believes them (as with the doctor in the mental hospital). He spontaneously creates names for the people in his life –​among others, Sergeant Sausage, Humpty Dumpty’s brother, Fathers Bubble and Tiddly  –​as though they are characters in a story:  “I don’t know why I called her Mrs. Nooge, it just came into my head” (BB 12). Francie also has an inherent sense of aesthetics (even if he can’t discuss it at length like Stephen can). While making sandwiches for his father (notwithstanding that he is dead), Francie looks out the window and says “to da about the snowdrop and the children playing in the lane; They do make a difference these beautiful things da. It is good having them” (BB 140). He is actor, raconteur, sculptor, poet, and painter. And above all, unlike Stephen, who merely writes a villanelle and a few journal entries, Francie is the author of his own story. 8 In Ulysses, however, Joyce reveals that Stephen’s departure did not last long: he returns to Dublin to sit at his mother’s death bed and throughout Ulysses is still constrained and alienated by the same forces that acted upon him in Portrait. Perhaps, then, for Stephen too, true escape is impossible, and Francie’s method the only real way out.

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Francie and Stephen are both “fabulous artificers” who use the sludge of their own experiences to forge art. Stephen, by name, is the fabulous artificer Dedalus, and is also the son of Dedalus, Icarus. He is both creator and creation, and as artist will “forg[e]‌anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being,” making something new out of the old (Portrait 148). And, when that “soaring being,” that Icarus, falls, it, too, will become the sluggish matter out of which to continue creating into eternity. Eldred suggests that Francie’s name and the thematic element of “the nature of monstrosity” connect him to another creator working with the sludge of the earth, Frankenstein (BB 60). As Stephen is both Dedalus and Icarus, Francie’s name connects him to both doctor and monster: “though ‘Frankenstein’ is technically the name of the creating doctor, popular culture has long attributed this name to the monster” (Eldred 61). These significant name choices reveal an important distinction between Francie and Stephen via their symbolic counterparts. Whereas Icarus purposely defied his father, his creator, in order to fly to the sun, Frankenstein’s monster sought acceptance by the father and by society, and only when rejected, did he turn to violence. Though both Francie and Stephen reject society, the difference, perhaps, is in the level of consciousness of the choice to do so. Stephen feels his whole life as an outsider and waits for the moment when he “would meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his souls so constantly beheld” (Portrait 56). He longs for that epiphanic moment that will confirm his feelings of alienation. Francie, on the other hand, tells his whole story looking for the moment that deprived him of normalcy, the moment when “all the trouble started.” He has several proposals: since Joe suggested they steal Philip’s comics, “you could say it was him started it and not me” (BB 3). Since they would “have given them [the comics] back if he had asked for them” it could be Philip’s fault (BB3). Things were even “all going well until the telly went. Phut!” (BB 10). While Stephen’s story is episodic, it is also –​as a Bildungsroman –​developmental: it works towards its moments of epiphany and escape. Francie’s story is episodic in hindsight and in many ways degenerative, as it looks to find an original moment of decline. Francie eventually has to rest on one central cause, and, very sanely, he relates it to his moral code to not betray. As he is about to kill Mrs. Nugent, Francie explains: “You did two bad things Mrs. Nugent. You made me turn my back on my ma and you took Joe away from me” (BB 209). Unlike the arbitrary and hypocritical social norms that the rest of his society exercise when it is convenient, Francie actually has an immutable ethical core. In a world that threatened to cut out part of his brain when he did not fit in with its norms, that tells him that whoever nukes the other side first wins, his choice to eliminate the object that rejected his ethical code makes sense.

62 HoffmaNn Stephen and Francie both find outlets for rejecting the societies to which they were alien and which were in turn alien to them: art and exile; murder and madness. But one outlet that Francie has that Stephen does not is laughter. Stephen, sensitive child and youth that he is, keenly feels the injustice of his life, his alienation from friends and family, the importance of his art. Stephen takes himself, his art, his nonconformity very seriously. Francie, on the other hand, has a sense of the absurd in all that happens to him –​and of the shortcomings of his fellow man. While the pathos of Francie’s situation is clear, and while, like Stephen, he has a sense that he has been wronged, Francie often sees the incredible array of forces working against him as ridiculous, and cause for laughter. After finding out that Joe has gone off to boarding school –​facing rejection from the last person whom he could possibly imagine as sympathetic to him –​Francie goes out to the river in the rain:



I pulled at the grass along the edge of the bank and counted all the people that were gone on me now. 1. Da 2. Ma 3. Alo 4. Joe When I said Joe’s name all of a sudden I burst out laughing. For fuck’s sake! I said, Joe gone! How the fuck would Joe be gone! That was the best yet. (BB 174)

Francie’s laughter is divinest sense; that an orphaned boy raised in an abusive household would be abandoned to his fate by his best friend, as well as his entire town, is absurd. Laughter and madness have a long history of kinship –​ as notes the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, questioning the futility of life: “I said of laughter, It is mad” (kjv 2.1). Francie’s laughter responds to all the ways that the world does not make sense to him, but it is, as Francie describes it, “sudden” –​ not a planned or controlled response, but one that the body naturally and pre-​ consciously undertakes in the face of the absurdity of life. The laughing body, like the mad brain, is uncontrolled, unrestrained, and as such it is free from the hypocrisy of conscious, planned action or speech. It makes sense for Francie to laugh like a madman; it is the world that is mad, not he. Language in this world of hypocrisy runs the risk of being mis-​taken, so Francie must communicate the absurdity and wrongness of the world in non-​speech acts, like laughter and murder. Francie expresses himself as he is. Returning to Simonton’s study, the difference between Stephen the artist and Francie the madman might come down to Stephen’s intellectually

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nurturing environment –​despite everything, his parents worked hard to make sure he was in very decent schools –​and Francie’s “less constrained domain” with a lack of parental guidance and support (Simonton 22). Psychoanalysis aside, the novels suggest the arbitrary way in which all personalities are formed. What if Stephen had not met on the beach that image his soul so constantly beheld? Consider the circumstances: waiting to find out about the University, “For a full hour [Stephen] had paced up and down, waiting: but he could wait no longer” (Portrait 144). After putting in that much time waiting, Stephen decides to leave and walk towards the beach –​causing him to cross the bridge at the same moment that “a squad of Christian brothers” passes him on it, showing Stephen their “uncouth faces” and reassuring him of his decision not to enter the fold (Portrait 145). His decision to leave off waiting places him on the beach at the same moment that his friends are there jumping in the water –​allowing him to stand “apart from them” thus reconfirming his difference and alienation –​and calling out to him a Grecian version of his name, reminding him of his connection with the fabulous artificer (Portrait 147). Then, of course, there is the serendipity of his seeing a girl in the water “whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird” with legs “delicate as a cranes,” drawers “like featherings of soft white down” and skirts that “dovetailed behind her”–​completing the circle of birds, punishment, escape and artistry (Portrait 150). This, according to Hugh Kenner in “Joyce’s Potrait –​A Reconsideration,” is the dominant Joycean reality: that “it is only by a series of accidents that anyone becomes what he does become, and though he can only be what he is, he can look back along the way he has come, testing it for branching points now obsolete” (357–​8). That same sentiment, of course, can be applied to Francie. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes, “Do I contradict myself? /​Very well then I contradict myself, /​(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (Verse 51). For the modern and postmodern conditions in which Stephen and Francie find themselves living, multiplicity is not contradiction but truth. Self is not unified, identity not teleological, but erratic, determined by circumstances some within and some beyond an individual’s control. The difference between a murderer and a creator, madness and divinest sense, Francie and Stephen, might be but a moment. Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. The Bible, King James Version. New York: Meridian. 1974.

64 HoffmaNn Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924; Bartleby.com, 2000. Eldred, Laura G. “Francie Pig vs. the Fat Green Blob from Outer Space: Horror Films and BB.” New Hibernia Review. 10.3 (2006): 53–​67. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Prufrock and Other Observations. From Poems. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1920; Bartleby.com, 2011. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by John Paul Riquelme. New York: Norton. 2007. Kenner, Hugh. “Joyce’s Portrait –​A Reconsideration.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. New York: Norton. 2007. Kottler, Jeffrey. Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. 2006. McCabe, Patrick. BB. New York: Delta, 1992. Moynihan, Maurice, ed. Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera:  1917–​73. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. 1980. Sidney, Sir Philip. “A Defense of Poesy.” Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3rd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Vol. 1. New York: Norton. 2006. 954–​974. Simonton, Dean. “Are Genius and Madness Related? Contemporary Answers to an Ancient Question.” Psychiatric Times. 22.7. (2005). 21–​23. Thornton, Weldon. The Antimodernism of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Syracuse: Syracuse UP. 1994.

Chapter 5

Specters of a Border Town: Irish History and Violence in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy Aisling B. Cormack 1922; a geographical border drawn by a drunken man, every bit as tremulous and deceptive as the one which borders life and death. Patrick McCabe, BoP, 1998

∵ In the prelude to his novel BoP, Patrick McCabe includes a timeline of significant events in the centuries-​long conflict over the question of British rule in Ireland. It begins in 1690 with the Battle of the Boyne, includes a series of gruesome agrarian murders in the 1700s and 1800s, and continues in 1920 with the eruption of guerilla warfare (“ditch murder”) in Dublin during the War of Independence (BoP xii). The year 1922 marks the partition of the island into the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland as a result of the Anglo-​Irish Treaty, which brought a temporary cessation of hostilities. The prelude ends in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which promised lasting peace after decades of the violent struggle—​dubbed the “Troubles”—​between defenders and opponents of Britain’s continued dominion over the six Northern counties. The timeline provides historical context for BoP’s representation of violence by paramilitary groups and security forces at the height of the Troubles in a town that lies south of the Irish border. The town, Tyreelin, where the narrator is born—​which is “[a]‌pproximately one mile from . . . a place that looks mysteriously like his but yet is a separate state” (BoP xi)—​mirrors McCabe’s own hometown of Clones, located in County Monaghan just across the border from Fermanagh in the North. Partition led to long periods of sustained unrest in the region through which the “tremulous” state border meanders (xii). In several novels, McCabe represents the social and psychological toll of living in the Irish borderlands. The history of this area is crucial to an understanding of the political and cultural legacies that inform McCabe’s fiction, but it has received

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_006

66 Cormack little attention in studies of the writer. Previous readings of the acclaimed novel BB, for example, interpret the conflict between the novel’s two principal families, the Bradys and the Nugents, based on the binaries of English/​Irish, Protestant/​Catholic, colonizer/​colonized, and modern/​provincial. However, an understanding of the novel’s setting helps to redefine the inter-​family conflict as a product of identity insecurity. As inhabitants of a border town in the early 1960s, the characters occupy an interstitial space between the uncannily similar yet separate Northern state—​still under British rule—​and the Republic, which is moving rapidly toward economic and cultural modernization. They view themselves simultaneously from the perspective of the colonizer, which engenders a sense of cultural inferiority, and from that of postcolonial subjects, who must assert their national separateness. BB, published in 1992, is one of several works by McCabe—​including Music on Clinton Street (1986), Carn (1989), BoP (1998), Call Me the Breeze (2003) and The Stray Sod Country (2010)—​that feature social outcasts growing up in various Clones clones, or fictional versions of the writer’s hometown. The novels are set mainly during a period that spans the late 1950s through the 1980s, decades when Clones found itself at the epicenter of the conflict between Irish republicans and the British state, as well as its unionist supporters over the politically contentious border. In The Emerald Curtain: The Social Impact of the Irish Border, Brian Harvey et al. assert, “Clones was arguably the southern border town most severely affected both by the border and by the conflict” (87). In fact, according to them, “Clones became . . . a microcosm of the conflict, exhibiting in sharp relief the experience[s]‌of the southern border communities as a whole” (89). These included “waves of economic decline,” “the effects of physical violence” and “tension arising from the militarization of the surrounding area” (89). Born in 1955, McCabe culls images of life on the border from his own youth, which was bookended by the Irish Republican Army’s Border Campaign of 1956 to 1962 and the Troubles, which lasted from roughly 1968 to 1998. In his border works, McCabe represents the frequent attacks on custom posts and police barracks as well as the heavy security presence and harsh policing tactics that were familiar aspects of life in Clones from his earliest years through to adulthood. Except for the adolescent narrator of BB, Francis “Francie” Brady, the protagonists of the writer’s border fiction all recall their childhoods spent in the Southern borderlands during the tense periods of the Border Campaign and/​or the Troubles. For example, the unnamed narrator of McCabe’s early short story “Frontiers” pushes his mother in a wheelchair on a shopping trip over the border during the late 1970s or early 1980s. Signs of the Troubles—​the “charred skeleton” of the customs post; a detective with a threatening Alsatian investigating an overturned “burnt-​out car”; and “the dark figures of ruc men

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mov[ing] like insects beside the security spikes, their guns slung low, dark eyebrows creased”—​are interspersed with memories of the past Border Campaign (“Frontiers” 65, 70). The young protagonist, Des, of McCabe’s first novel, Music on Clinton Street, similarly recalls this campaign and the sense of foreboding it created in his hometown: [T]‌he town curled further in on itself. Police arrived at the terraces and took away men in the early hours of the morning. The customs post was blown to pieces three times, an empty husk marking the frontier. People watched even more who they were talking to, their ears twitched with each new bulletin. The small hills that encircled the town seemed more sinister as night approached, it was as if the ditches and drains were sprouting raiding parties. After a northern police barracks was torn asunder, southern troops were stationed on the outskirts of town, trackerdogs stalked the rubble of blown bridges. A young man from the town was riddled in crossfire after a failed raid on a barracks, his coffin draped in a tricolour in the local cemetery. (86) McCabe most explicitly represents the deleterious effects of partition and violent conflict on border residents in Carn. The novel alludes to all the major points, both political and economic, in Clones’s post-​partition history:  the Clones Affray, a railway battle between the ira and the Ulster Special Constabulary (usc) in 1922; the resurgence of violence in 1956 with the start of the Border Campaign and the Troubles a decade later; the closure of the cross-​border railroad in 1959, which transformed Clones from a vibrant border market town and bustling railway hub into a “ghost town” (Harvey et al. 153); and the bombings of the town in October and December of 1972 by loyalist paramilitaries. McCabe’s depictions of paramilitary violence become more explicit and lurid in his later novels BoP and Call Me the Breeze. The protagonists yearn for a sense of home and belonging, the absence of which cannot be separated from unrest in the border region. McCabe concludes the prelude to BoP with a note that captures this feeling of homesickness: Belfast Good Friday 1998 The war over, now perhaps we too can take—​however tentatively—​ those first few steps which may end unease and see us there; home, belonging and at peace. (xiii) Call Me the Breeze similarly ends with the narrator Joey Tallon’s melancholic fantasy of “total belonging . . . like home or something” (337).

68 Cormack Among his border works, BB stands out for confining the reader to the mind of a narrator who seems unaware of the troubled frontier that his town straddles. For a reader not attuned to a few scattered geographical markers—​such as the “border shop,” “Newtown Road,” “Fermanagh Street,” “Jubilee Road,” “Church Hill,” the “Tower Bar,” and “the Diamond”—​the novel’s unnamed town could be almost anywhere in rural Ireland during the early 1960s (BB 7–​9, 22, 110, 163). In fact, most critics and journalists refer to the setting of the novel as “small-​town Ireland,” overlooking the geographical specificity suggested by these place-​names. This oversight is not entirely surprising since the few references to the border town of Clones are buried within the larger narrative. More interestingly, this seems to be what McCabe intended. When the journalist Eamonn Holmes suggested to McCabe that “the presence of a Fermanagh Street and a central Diamond suggest a proximity to the Border, as in [his] previous works,” the writer insisted, “The location is not important. It could be in any town, anywhere. Obviously I made a few mistakes if people are suggesting it’s a town near the Border” (qtd. in Holmes 9). Yet, even if a reader overlooks the geographical markers “mistakenly” let slip into the novel, it is more difficult to dismiss the fact that Neil Jordan’s 1998 film adaptation of BB—​for which McCabe co-​wrote the screenplay—​is set in Clones (renamed Carn in the film). Furthermore, despite claiming that the setting of the novel could be “any small town,” McCabe asserted—​seemingly at odds with himself—​that the “geography and topography of the town and the people living in it are important to the story” (qtd. in Holmes 9). He continued, “It is a dark, living entity and Francie Brady is the distorted lens through which they are seen.” McCabe made a similar point in response to criticism that his characters are all “mad or damaged,” explaining that they are merely “prisms through which the feelings of society are reflected” (qtd. in O’Mahony). Accordingly, a close reading of BB through the prism of Francie reveals an obscured reflection of the Irish borderlands—​more specifically, of Clones—​in the early 1960s, during the Border Campaign. McCabe’s short story “Frontiers” is a clear precursor to BB. Like the novel, the story features an alcoholic father tortured by memories of his once-​successful musical career; an anxious mother who must bear the brunt of her husband’s abuse; and a son as repelled by the weight of his father’s regret and his mother’s dependence as he is attracted by idealized memories of his hometown and the courtship of his parents. However, in BB, in contrast to “Frontiers,” McCabe does not explicitly set the scenes of domestic discord against the backdrop of political unrest and violence in the borderlands. In the novel, Francie stands in for paramilitary groups and security forces as a source of violence, terror, and tension in the town. He is also a victim of

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the type of social isolation and poverty that was widespread in Clones during the 1960s, which was caused to a large extent by the Border Campaign and the resulting militarization of the border. McCabe’s hometown became increasingly shut off from its economic and social hinterland in the North during this conflict after the cross-​border railway closed and border roads and bridges were blocked or destroyed. The damaging impact of road closures became even more pronounced during the Troubles. According to Harvey et al., “Of the four roads leading out of Clones, three went into Northern Ireland and all were blown” (88). As a result of this loss of hinterland as well as a Protestant exodus, many of the businesses in the town closed and rates of unemployment and emigration soared. By the 1980s, Clones had become, in the estimation of the eec’s Social Affairs Committee, “the most deprived area in the most deprived Border region of the entire European Community” (Carron 80). In an interview with Christopher FitzSimon, McCabe describes how the closing of the railway in Clones and the outbreak and escalation of the Troubles caused a “huge psychological wound” and contributed to the “brutalised culture” of his youth (181). Although ubiquitous, economic despair was often suppressed, according to McCabe:  “Poverty was certainly everywhere when I was growing up . . . [T]‌here’s no question that there was a deep hurt at all levels of society, certainly in the small town that I lived in. I mean, it wasn’t overt but you were always conscious of it” (181). McCabe’s account of Clones brings to mind the bleaker aspects of BB. Francie’s gradual loss of his family and friends, paranoid distrust of his neighbors, and the inward turn of his stream of consciousness evoke the sense of isolation felt by the town’s inhabitants during the Border Campaign. McCabe also gives shape to the “deep hurt” in the community through signs of domestic dysfunction in the Brady family: the alcoholism and abusiveness of Francie’s father, Benny; the mental illness and eventual suicide of his mother, Annie; and the narrator’s increasingly asocial behavior and removal from his home to a series of institutions. Similar to the protagonists of BoP and Call Me the Breeze, Francie longs to feel at home in the world, but his search for refuge is not explicitly tied to political unrest. Rather, it represents a desire to escape domestic turmoil, shame, and poverty. His father, Benny Brady, was once a respected trumpeter who had started a brass band in the town; however, although never explicitly stated, all signs suggest that he is now unemployed and spends most of his days in the pub. Annie Brady also does not work, which means the family lacks any visible source of income, that is, until Francie reluctantly agrees to accept a job with the local butcher after he drops out of school. The Brady family is not alone in its economic distress. There is evidence of widespread poverty in the novel’s unnamed town, which is caused in part by

70 Cormack limited employment opportunities. Francie only manages to get a job collecting food scraps for the butcher because the other townspeople consider it too shameful an occupation for themselves. The dearth of economic and social commerce in the town—​the streets are often only occupied by a stray dog and “drunk lad”—​is juxtaposed with the frenetic pace of life in Dublin: “The way they were going across that bridge you’d think someone had said: I’m sorry but we’re going to let off an atomic bomb any minute now. . . . Where were they all going[?]‌If they were all going to work there was a lot of jobs in Dublin” (BB 40).1 Apart from characters like Mr. Nugent, recently returned with his family from England and believed by Francie to have a “high-​up job”, and the town doctor, Dr. Roche, most inhabitants of the town seem to be struggling to get by (55). Francie overhears “the women”—​as he refers to the three town gossips who maintain an almost constant presence in the shop—​complaining about rising prices: “It[‘]s very hard to manage now oh it is indeed do you know how much I paid for Peter’s shoes above in the shop” (15). The townspeople also discuss the harsh conditions faced by the small farmers who live up in the boggy mountains above the town. There are clear traces in BB of McCabe’s experiences growing up in Clones in a family that he describes as “working class” (“St. Macartan” 177). Like Francie’s parents, both of the writer’s parents were from Northern Ireland, his mother Dympna from Tyrone and his father Bernard from Belfast (the same name and hometown of Bernard “Benny” Brady in the novel). Also like Benny, “Barney” McCabe was a songwriter and “quite a fine trumpet player,” who “started the brass band” in the town (“St. Macartan” 178). However, to survive, he had to work various other jobs, including carving headstones. The writer describes the harshness of life for “small town working-​class” families at that time: “People of that generation had it pretty bloody rough, if you think back to the mother with the mangle in the back yard and their hands grizzled at the age of 30. . . . [T]‌here was a complete lack of opportunity and making do with very, very little and everything had to be stretched . . .” (qtd. in Deevy 4L). For McCabe’s father, a lack of opportunity in Clones caused rage and resentment—​the same feelings that Benny Brady displays at the lack of appreciation for his musical talents by his wife and fellow townspeople. The connections between the actual and the fictional Bernard, like those between Clones and the imagined border town in BB, run deep. Barney, like Benny, was an orphan for whom, according to his son, “drink acted as an

1 All quotations from McCabe’s texts retain their origin punctuation, spelling, and capitalization, except where indicated by brackets.

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anesthetic to numb the pain” (qtd. in Blood Relations). In an interview with Wendy Herstein, McCabe answers the open-​ended question about the character, “If Francie’s father hadn’t drunk . . . [?]‌” by attributing Benny’s alcoholism to a traumatic childhood: “Or if the father hadn’t been abandoned by his own father, might be more to the point, because his drinking wouldn’t have come into it then” (“You Lie in Wait” 298). Francie realizes, according to McCabe, that his father’s failures are “not entirely his … own fault in that he himself [Benny Brady] had been institutionalized and bereft. So it strikes back through the generations, this sadness” (298). Even if he understands the source of his father’s shortcomings, the narrator is fated to retrace the tragic path of not only his father but also his mother. Francie is first sent to an industrial school, which he calls a “house of a hundred windows” (BB 71). The school is the image of his orphaned father and uncle’s childhood “home” (a word tinged with traumatic resonance for Benny) in Belfast (35). Later, he is sent to the same mental hospital that treated his mother after her breakdown; finally, Francie is committed to an institution for the criminally insane, or as he puts it, “another house of a hundred windows” (229). From McCabe’s description of transgenerational trauma can be implied recognition of the effects of his own father’s painful childhood (as well as his mother’s mental illness) on himself. There are undeniable traces of Dympna McCabe in the character of Annie Brady, who is hospitalized for depression. In Dara McCluskey’s documentary about the writer, Blood Relations, McCabe describes his sense of a darkness that enshrouded his mother, “A sense of … when the sun goes in. The depth of individuality to her which I think always terrified her … I’d say a battery of psychiatrists would never get to the bottom of how complex she was.” Despite the adversities faced by his parents, McCabe characterizes his childhood family life as “pretty ordinary”; however, he admits to feeling “some terrible unease that this is not ordinary, this is so not ordinary, that it’s almost asphyxiating” (qtd. in Blood Relations). McCabe’s parents—​both of whom died estranged from their son, foreclosing the possibility of reconciliation—​haunt his novels, especially BB. The departure from Clones of McCabe’s close friend, with whom he would swap comics in a relationship echoed in that between Francie Brady and his best friend, Joe Purcell, was a prelude to the more traumatic loss of his father. The relationship between Bernard and Patrick McCabe had come to an impasse following an exchange of “coldly chosen” words about the fact that McCabe had played the role of Lady Macbeth in his boarding school play (qtd. in Blood Relations). The unexpected death of his father soon after forced McCabe to confront at a young age the terrifying realization of mortality: “He died at 52, which is ridiculous … At the age of 16—​before that happened—​well, you think you’re

72 Cormack immortal … When that happens: ‘No. The whole thing is a trick; this is what it’s really all about’” (qtd. in Deevy). His mother died fifteen years later after a disagreement with her son that (as with that between father and son) reached a stalemate. A comment made by McCabe in Blood Relations points to unresolved grief as a source of the darker elements in his work: “I think maybe that’s where fiction comes in. Maybe fiction is all about filling in those gaps that haunt you.” In his border novels, in particular, the protagonists suffer from a profound sense of dislocation tied to early traumatic experiences as well as the intuition of unseen, menacing forces in the present. Critical studies as well as the film adaptation of BB focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 as the main source of dread for Francie, who absorbs the pervasive feelings of existential panic induced in the town by the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. While this historical event does shape the narrative, BB also works through the fears of mortality experienced by McCabe in his youth. In order to give form to these feelings, the writer retraces the history of a more local source of terror. Although McCabe initially denies to Eamonn Holmes that BB is “based on any specific incident,” he admits that he took “the germ of an idea” from the crime of an infamous young butcher from Clones named Joseph Fee (9). McCabe discusses the historical allusion more openly with the Irish Times’s John Waters: “There was a horrific murder took place in Clones in 1904, where a guy called Joe Fee butchered a guy called John Flanagan. They were both Clones men. And he buried him under a pile of manure and he lay there undiscovered for nine months” (qtd. in Waters A5). The sensational details of Joseph Fee’s murder of his friend John Flanagan captivated the residents of Clones and made national headlines throughout the year of 1904. Over the course of that year, Fee was tried three times for murdering Flanagan, a young egg dealer from the town, and burying the body in a manure heap at his family’s slaughterhouse. The first two trials, which were held in the county of Monaghan, ended in disagreements of the juries; however, the jury of the final trial in Belfast found Fee guilty of murder, and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging. An Irish Times article from December 10, 1904 describes Fee’s crime as follows: “The Clones murder will rank with the most cold-​blooded and hideous in criminal annals.” McCabe draws substantially from the history of this notorious murder case in BB. Francie’s murder of a townswoman, Mrs. Nugent, bears much in common with Fee’s murder of Flanagan. Mrs. Nugent is also an acquaintance, whose decomposing body (like that of Flanagan) is discovered in a manure heap adjacent to the town’s slaughterhouse. Upon discovery, the victim’s body is in a

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similar state to Flanagan’s corpse after being dug up: covered in quicklime, the skull smashed, and the throat cut vertically with a butcher knife. According to the Irish Times article “Clones Murder Case: Trial of Fee,” “When the body was discovered it presented the appearance of being killed as one would kill a cow or a pig: the man was evidently brought down by a felon blow that penetrated the skull.” There was a longitudinal wound in Flanagan’s windpipe and a hole in the base of his skull. Francie’s brutal murder of Mrs. Nugent echoes this account: “I lifted her off the floor with one hand and shot the bolt right into her head thlok was the sound it made … If you ask anyhow how you kill a pig they will tell you cut its throat across but you don’t you do it longways” (BB 209). In the historical case, as in BB, the victim’s boot first called attention to the body. A witness at the magisterial inquiry described finding Flanagan’s boot while carrying out orders from Fee to remove some manure from the slaughterhouse yard: “On scraping some of the manure from about it he stuck a graip into it, and pulled it out. Witness then noticed portion of a man’s leg attached to the boot, and saw that it had come off a man’s foot” (“Clones Tragedy”). In BB, when the sergeant to whom Francie reveals the location of his victim “pulled out the graip there stuck on the end of it was part of a leg and Mrs Nugent’s furry boot hanging” (228). Significant differences between the murders in Clones and in the novel involve the motives of the killers and their professions of guilt or innocence. The prosecutors for the Crown argued that Fee had lured Flanagan from the Clones market place with the promise to repay him two pounds he had borrowed but that Fee instead murdered Flanagan and stole his purse along with the seventy-​ five pounds it held. The judge who ordered Fee’s execution described his act as follows: “The crime the prisoner committed was of a singularly cold-​blooded and treacherous nature, and was impelled by one base and sordid motive—​the love of money and lust for money” (“Clones Murder: Third Trial” 7). However, Fee insisted on his innocence according to an article dated December 15, 1904, almost two weeks after he had received the death sentence. Even in the face of execution by hanging, Fee remained in “remarkably good spirits” and confident that he would secure a reprieve (“Clones Murder Case” 7). In contrast to Fee, Francie not only confesses to his crime but also seeks punishment. In fact, he expresses disappointment upon learning that Ireland no longer carries out execution by hanging. Nevertheless, he passionately denies killing Mrs. Nugent for money, as the “court man” accuses him of doing in words that echo those of Fee’s judge: “It was a cold-​blooded, premeditated, and deliberate crime—​one that had been cunningly planned and thought over, and above all, it was a murder perpetrated for the meanest and most contemptible of motives—​for the purpose of robbery and plunder!” (BB 228).

74 Cormack McCabe’s novel creates a more nuanced picture of a killer than one can get in newspaper articles from 1904 about Joseph Fee’s crime, trial, and punishment. The description of Francie’s crime and court case both only take about a page. Most of the novel is devoted to exploring what social, domestic, and psychological forces could cause a small-​town adolescent to commit such a brutal act against his neighbor. To provide insight into these forces, McCabe draws also from the popular Irish ballad that gives the novel its title. The song, “The Butcher Boy”—​to which Annie listens obsessively in the period after being released from the mental hospital and before committing suicide—​is about a pregnant woman who hangs herself after being forsaken by her lover. This theme of desertion and its destructive consequences are central to the relationship between Francie and his mother, Annie. After witnessing his father’s vicious verbal assault on Annie and his uncle, Alo, Francie deserts his mother by running away to Dublin. In his absence, Annie drowns herself in a lake, and Francie blames himself and, consequently, Mrs. Nugent for his mother’s suicide. Fueled by trauma and paranoia, Francie comes to believe that Mrs. Nugent caused him to desert his mother. The basis for his conviction is a tirade of abuse directed by Mrs. Nugent at his mother, which is provoked by Francie and his best friend, Joe, afterduping the young Philip Nugent into trading his large collection of pristine comics for a “pile of junk” (BB 3). Instead of asking for the comics back and demanding retribution, Mrs. Nugent launches into a diatribe against the entire family as soon as Annie Brady greets her erstwhile friend at the door: She said she knew the kind of us long before she went to England and she might have known not to let her son anywhere near the likes of me what else would you expect from a house where the father’s never in, lying about the pubs from morning to night, he’s no better than a pig. You needn’t think we don’t know what goes on in this house oh we know all right! Small wonder the boy is the way he is what chance has he got running about the town at all hours and the clothes hanging off him it doesn’t take money to dress a child God love him it’s not his fault but if he’s seen near our Philip again there’ll be trouble. There’ll be trouble now mark my words! After that ma took my part and the last thing I heard was Nugent going down the lane and calling back Pigs—​sure the whole town knows that! (4) Annie would have taken Mrs. Nugent’s side against her son; however, by blaming Francie’s behavior on the degeneracy of his parents, Mrs. Nugent draws a

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moral line not between children and adults but rather between the Bradys and “the whole town.” In the narrator’s mind, Mrs. Nugent’s condemnation of his family leads inexorably to his mother’s mental breakdown, his father’s episodes of drunken rage, and his decision to run away. Furthermore, Francie internalizes his neighbor’s negative assessment of his family, which results in his most egregious act of betrayal:  he comes to wish that Mrs. Nugent were his mother. Before killing Mrs. Nugent, he names one of her principal offenses:  “You made me turn my back on my ma” (209). In abandoning his own mother—​in both action and thought—​Francie assumes the role of the faithless young man in Annie Brady’s beloved song “The Butcher Boy.” Both this ballad and stories about Clones’s real-​life “butcher boy,” Joseph Fee, had left a powerful impression on McCabe as an adolescent. They subsequently helped the writer to give expression in the novel to the sense of loss, alienation, and menace that haunted his border town. According to McCabe, BB is based more on the feelings generated by Fee’s calm performance of neighborly solicitude after killing and burying his fellow townsman than the details of the crime itself: “So, this image of this guy walking around the town actually helping people to search for the guy he had murdered … set up a really menacing thing for me” (qtd. in Waters A5). McCabe describes how the ballad “The Butcher Boy,” which he first heard as a boy at a Feis Ceoil [music festival] in Clones, likewise reinforced his sense of horror lurking beneath the everyday: “It was a beautiful sunny day, and there was a girl singing about a woman hanging herself. And it seemed to me that … this was what it was all about” (qtd. in Waters A5). As a child, McCabe intuited—​beneath what he calls “the exterior world” of Clones—​traces of a darker interior world (“St. Macartan” 182). This shadowy world, as he describes in his interview with Christopher FitzSimon, contained widespread poverty and a “deep hurt at all levels of society” (“St. Macartan” 181). The writer also saw this coexistence of “light and shade” in his own working-​class family, which he describes as “outwardly quite normal, like any ordinary family, but inwardly—​fireworks, catastrophic domestic stuff and all that” (“St. Macartan” 177, 180). McCabe explores these two worlds in BB, the bright exterior and dark interior of a small town, through the juxtaposition of the Brady and Nugent families. Francie longs for an “outwardly quite normal” home and an “ordinary family”—​of which he finds the epitome in the Nugents’ tidy house, loving and stable mother, well-​employed and attentive father, and protected and nurtured son—​yet he cannot stem the tide of domestic catastrophe and self-​destruction. Francie’s obsessive envy for the seeming stability and prosperity of the Nugent family, which grows over the course of the novel, illuminates more

76 Cormack widespread social and economic anxieties in Ireland and Northern Ireland during the early 1960s, which were magnified in the border region. BB is set during the “Lemass era,” which is celebrated as a period of outward-​looking economic growth in Ireland. Under the leadership of Seán Lemass, who replaced Éamon de Valera as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 1959, the Irish government established policies that moved the state from economic protectionism and stagnation to economic modernization. These policies included free trade agreements and strategies to attract foreign enterprises, especially in chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Like the Republic, Northern Ireland adopted new economic initiatives during this decade to secure foreign capital investment and to encourage big international companies, such as Michelin, Goodyear, and DuPont, to locate in the state (Farrell 229). Although the reforms helped to reduce the rate of unemployment in the North—​which had increased with the decline of traditional industries like agriculture, textiles, and shipbuilding—​the benefits did not fully extend to border counties. The large border cities of Newry and Derry, where the majority of inhabitants were Catholics, were passed over in the state’s establishment of new technological industries, and there were large-​scale anti-​ Catholic policies in the areas of hiring, voting, and housing. The policies also strengthened internal partitions in Northern Ireland, not only the divide between majority-​Protestant counties in the east and the Catholic majority west of the River Bann but also between east and west Belfast. Data from the 1971 census show that rates of unemployment among Catholics were higher in Northern Ireland as a whole—​13.9  percent for Catholics versus 5.6  percent for non-​Catholics—​as well as in each of the state’s twenty-​six District Council areas (Northern Ireland; Osborne and Cormack). In the South, ­socio-​economic conditions similarly remained precarious in “peripheral regions”—​including border areas—​during the 1960s owing to a lack of state and foreign direct investment. Frontier towns, in particular, suffered high unemployment and under-​employment owing to the decline in cross-​ border economic interaction caused by custom barriers, cross-​national price differentials, the onset of the Troubles, and the severing of rail and road connections (Creamer et al. 82–​83). Harvey et al. state specifically in regard to Clones, “Not only did the government do little to help, but by withdrawing transport infrastructure [in the late 1950s] actually contributed to the town’s demise” (Harvey et al. 153). A statement made by the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, reveals much about class and political divisions in both states during this era of economic modernization and also sheds light on the emphasis on domestic hygiene (or lack thereof) in BB. After O’Neill was forced to resign in

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1969 by hard-​line unionists, who saw his policies and cross-​border initiatives—​ like meeting with Lemass in 1965—​as pro-​Catholic, he commented, It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants, because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets. They [Catholics] will refuse to have eighteen children, but if a Roman Catholic is jobless and lives in the most ghastly hovel, he will rear eighteen children on National Assistance … (qtd. in Farrell 256) According to O’Neill’s scheme, in order to “live like Protestants,” Catholics must possess middle-​class jobs and possessions. Furthermore, the Protestant lifestyle would spread among Catholics as soon as neighbors saw and desired the emblems of this lifestyle:  the “good house,” “cars,” and “television sets.” O’Neill left out the fact that not all Protestants had “good houses” and “good jobs” and, vice-​versa, that not all Catholics lacked these things. For example, many Protestant skilled workers in Northern Ireland were laid off with the sharp decline of traditional industries in the early 1960s; at the same time, the changing economic structure gave rise to firms that “didn’t discriminate or which employed a lot of mainly Catholic semi-​skilled or female labour,” according to Farrell (227, 230). However, O’Neill’s main point was that the sectarianism pulling apart the Northern state was as much about class as religion. This interpretation is supported by the apparently sectarian nature of economic decisions at the time, which located new industry and “growth centres” in strongly Protestant areas and resulted in a “dual economy” (Sales 39). Adopting policies that would ensure the Catholic minority greater access to the middle class, O’Neill implied, would result in its peaceful assimilation with the Protestant majority. In setting the “good house” of the Protestant against the “ghastly hovel” of the Catholic that is overflowing with children, O’Neill evokes the well-​established binary opposition of English cleanliness and Irish filth. In The Condition of the Working-​Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels describes the homes of Irish-​born workers in Manchester as follows: The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. … At home in his mud-​cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England. (92)

78 Cormack Gustave de Beaumont used similar terms to describe the “wretched hovel”—​ consisting of “one single apartment” and containing no furniture—​in which poor Irishmen lived in their native country (129). Engels and Beaumont draw particular attention to the pigs found cohabiting with the families in the “hovel.” Beaumont writes, “In the midst of all lies a dirty pig, the only thriving inhabitant of the place, for he lives in filth” (129), while Engels notes, “The Irishman loves his pig … [H]‌e eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England” (92). Several reviewers and critics incorrectly dichotomize the Nugents and Bradys into Protestant and Catholic. This is based in part on the fact that the Nugents lived for a time in England and maintain a middle-​class lifestyle, which includes a tidy house with a television set, car, and Mr. Nugent’s good job, if Francie is correct in his assumption: “He had that look in his eye that he had a high-​up job” (BB 55). In contrast, the Bradys dwell in a house that becomes increasingly dirty and dilapidated as its inhabitants contend with unemployment, alcoholism, mental illness, and family dysfunction. Robert Taylor writes, “The Bradys are working-​class Roman Catholic and far from respectable. The Nugents are bourgeois Protestants and pillars of prissy virtue” (C2). Moreover, in “On the Butcher Block: A Panorama of Social Marking,” Henry Sussman describes how Joe, Francie’s best friend, abandons him under the “sway of the Nugents’ alien (British, Protestant, and colonial) social code” (152). However, the differences between the Nugents and the Bradys are not related to religious or national identification but rather to family structure and social class, and even these latter differences are less pronounced upon closer examination. Just returned from England, Mrs. Nugent strives to set her family apart from the types of pig-​cohabiting “natives” described by Engels and Beaumont. Mrs. Nugent, however, uses the epithet “pig” to signify moral degeneration:  the Bradys do not literally cohabit with pigs but are themselves pigs owing to Benny Brady’s regular drinking bouts and lack of occupation, Francie’s shabby attire and undisciplined behavior, and their dysfunctional home environment. The principle reason why Mrs. Nugent attempts to draw a partition between her family and the Bradys is their proximity. Mrs. Nugent and her brothers hail from a farm on the hilly and boggy land above the town whose inhabitants Francie disdainfully describes as “bogmen” owing to their poverty (and, by implication, their “Irishness”). Francie invokes stereotypes of the denizens of “small-​town Ireland” in his description of Mrs. Nugent’s time spent “up the mountains drinking tin mugs of tea with carrot-​head Buttsy the brother in a cottage that stank of turfsmoke and horsedung,” as well as of Mrs. Nugent herself, who was once a girl with “a big gap between her teeth and freckles all over

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her face like Buttsy” (BB 61). Francie’s attitude toward Mrs. Nugent is ambivalent: on the one hand, he envies her tidy, middle-​class house and, on the other hand, he feels a sense of superiority over her “provincial,” mean origins. He contrasts the Nugents’ tidy home in the town with the dung-​and smoke-​filled cottage in the mountains: “But Nugents didn’t smell like that. Oh no. It smelt of freshly baked scones … Polish too there was plenty of that. Mrs Nugent polished everything till you could see your face in it. The kitchen table, the floor. You name it if you looked at it you were in it” (61). The homes of the Bradys and the Nugents would look a lot more alike in the absence of Annie Brady’s extreme mood swings, shifting from total inertia to manic bouts of baking, or of Benny’s traumatic past and alcoholism, which lead to violent scenes like kicking in the television. In fact, Mrs. Nugent resembles Annie more and more as the novel proceeds. Like Francie’s mother, Mrs. Nugent ends up taking pills for her “nerves,” and she likewise possesses relations, Buttsy and Devlin, who instigate violence scenes: namely, kicking and threatening Francie with a hunting knife as repayment for breaking into the Nugents’ home (118). Mrs. Nugent disavows these similarities to the Bradys because they threaten her fragile sense of self. Tim Gauthier argues that Mrs. Nugent’s hostility toward the Bradys feeds off both her identity insecurity and desire to inhabit a community uncontaminated by “old” forms of Irishness: The Nugents are not English but are Irish striving to be English, and becoming more imperial than the colonizer. A sense of inferiority, fostered by years of living in the shadow of the colonizer, needs to be constantly assuaged by the subjugation of another. For the community, that Other is the Bradys, who must be ostracized for the new conception of the community to be established; their presence simply serves to recall an Irishness that the new Ireland would rather not acknowledge. (202) Gauthier’s point that Mrs. Nugent constructs the Bradys as “Other” in order to solidify her own notion of the community is insightful; however, his comparison of the relationship between the Nugents and the Bradys to that “between colonizer and colonized” as well as between old and “new Ireland” oversimplifies McCabe’s representation of both families (205). Gauthier, similar to Sussman, sets the Nugents’ “British” cultural aspirations against the Bradys’ “Irishness.” However, there is ample evidence that the Nugents identify with stereotypical conceptions of “old Ireland” as much as—​or even more than—​the Bradys. For example, like the Bradys and several other Catholic households, the Nugents have a portrait of John F. Kennedy hanging

80 Cormack on their wall. In addition, Francie sees displayed on the Nugents’ piano the music book Emerald Gems of Ireland, which features “an ass and cart going off into the green mountains on the cover” and suggests the family’s fondness for traditional Irish music and iconography (BB 48). Another sign of the Nugents’ lack of insecurity regarding their Irishness and Catholicism is Mr. Nugent’s proud membership in the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart, an Irish organization for Roman Catholics. After invading their home, Francie studies a picture of Mr. Nugent: “He sported a pioneer pin too—​that was a metal badge the Sacred Heart gave to you and it meant you were saying: I’ve never taken a drink in my life and I have no intention of ever taking one either!” (68). The family connections of both the Nugents and the Bradys also complicate the British/​Irish binary. Far from seeking to deny her humble origins, Mrs. Nugent maintains a close relationship with her brothers who continue to farm in the boggy mountains outside the town. Furthermore, the Bradys have a respectable connection to England in the form of Francie’s uncle, Alo. When visiting the town, Alo projects his “Englishness” through his tidy appearance: in particular, the knife-​edged creases in his pants and his perfectly groomed hair and nails. The town welcomes Alo as an emigrant made good, with “the great job he has over in London” and “ten men under him” (18). Until Francie discovers the truth about his uncle from his father—​that since arriving in London, he has been “[c]losing a gate in a backstreet factory … tipping his cap to his betters in his wee blue porter’s suit” (36)—​he identifies strongly with Alo. Francie inherits a sense of superiority over the townspeople mostly from Alo but also from Benny, who boasts about his musical connections to Eddie Calvert, a successful English trumpeter in the 1950s: “Then I heard da cursing the town and everybody in it he said he could have been somebody … who else in the town ever met Eddie Calvert who else in the town even knew who Eddie Calvert was?” (6). However, Francie has mixed feelings about his father’s past musical career, which is a potential source of pride but contaminated by Benny’s later alcoholism and endless harangues. The narrator privately sustains his father’s bitter pride but publicly disavows any mention of the acclaim that once existed in the town for Benny’s talents. When a stranger from the town learns that Francie is a “Brady of the Terrace,” he first says knowingly, “O … I see” (13). When Francie presses him, “You see what[?]‌” the stranger adds, “Your father was a great man one time … He was one of the best musicians ever was in this town. He went to see Eddie Calvert …” (13). Francie responds that he “wanted to hear no more about Eddie Calvert” (13). With the history of his father’s greatness so marred by Benny’s present manifestation, Francie employs the legend of Alo as a shield against those townspeople in whose verbal hesitations he reads his family’s shame.

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The Nugents’ supposed superiority in the town, like Alo’s, derives more from the townspeople’s collective illusion that affluence and power can be gained through emigration to England rather than from any inherent difference demonstrated by the family. The Nugents are far from the only family in the town who can boast a tidy house filled with modern amenities and inhabitants living in relative harmony. However, superficial details—​involving differences in speech, clothing, and hairstyles—​nourish the widespread assumption of English superiority, which Francie also holds. One critical element separating the Nugents and Alo from the other townspeople is their use of diction and pronunciation more associated with England than Ireland. Francie says of Mr. Nugent, “I don’t know if he was English but he spoke like it. He said good afternoon when everybody else said hardy weather or she looks like rain” (55). He is also impressed by Alo’s speech, which he deems more “English” than that of Mrs. Nugent: “Nugent’s was only half-​English. The more you thought it the harder it was to believe that Nugent had ever been anything worth talking about” (28–​29). Appreciating the prestige associated with Alo’s “English voice”, Francie also uses language to separate himself from the other students in the industrial school to which he is sent after invading the Nugents’ home (28). Francie prides himself at being able to perform his superiority over his schoolmates, most of whom were “poor orphans” from the country (79). After digging for peat in a bog all day, Francie competes with them for the approval of the priest in charge: “I … made out I had a pain in my back. Gosh, my dear fellows, I said, this is hard work indeed. The look on their boggy faces. They didn’t know what to say. Oo-​er, yes, they said, or something like that. As if they could pretend they were posh, the dirty bog-​trotters!” (80). Like other townspeople, Francie also identifies the style of dress of the emigrant with social distinction. The polished appearance of Alo upon his homecoming gives Francie a vicarious feeling of superiority: I couldn’t take my eyes off Alo. Sure enough he had the red hankie in his breast pocket and the trousers of his blue pinstripe suit had a crease would cut your hand. His steel-​grey hair was neatly combed in two neat wings behind his ears. He stood proudly by the fireplace and I thought to myself Nugent? Hah! Nugent has nobody like him. I felt like cheering. (28) However, Francie’s thought that Alo stands above the Nugents is undermined by his knowledge that Mrs. Nugent does in fact have somebody like him: Mr. Nugent. To Francie, Mr. Nugent—​with his “hair … neatly combed across his high forehead in a jaunty wave,” “shiny leather patches on the sleeves of his

82 Cormack jacket,” spectacles, and briefcase—​is an actualization of popular depictions of the English gentleman: “puffing away on his pipe like an ad on the television … Yes I like Maltan Ready Rubbed Flake says Mr Nugent! with the big briar stuck in his gob” (57, 68). It is Mr. Nugent’s “tweed coat and stripey tie” as well as a certain “look in the eye” in a photograph that convinces Francie that Mr. Nugent has a “high-​up job”: “He was staring off into the distance thinking about all the high-​up things he was going to do and all the people he was going to meet” (55). Francie’s initial impressions of Philip Nugent, as of Alo and Mr. Nugent, crystallize around his suit, in this case, a British prep-​school uniform: “He had been to a private school and he wore this blazer with gold braid and a crest on the breast pocket. He had a navy blue cap with a badge and grey socks. What do you make of that says Joe. Woe boy, I said, Philip Nugent” (2). Because Philip has lived in London, Francie locates him in the “posh” world constructed in the town’s myth of the emigrant as well as in comic books from the metropolis. He identifies Philip with Winker Watson, the witty “wangler” of Greytowers Boarding School in the English comic The Dandy (that is, until Philip fails to live up to the fictional prep-​school trickster). Francie’s deep ambivalence toward Philip manifests his own precarious sense of self and his preoccupation with markers of cultural and social belonging. On one level, Francie wants to destroy the boy who gradually replaces him in the life of his best friend, Joe, and he in fact manages to lure Philip into a chicken-​house and attack him with a heavy chain. On a deeper level, Francie desperately wants to be Philip, or at least the idealized version of him that populates British comics and basks in the sense of security and self-​worth provided by seemingly loving parents. When he trespasses into the Nugents’ home, Francis tries on Philip’s school uniform—​“the navy blue cap with the crest and the braided blazer with the silver buttons” and the “pair of grey trousers with a razor crease and black polished shoes”—​in front of a mirror (63). He then fantasizes a chummy interchange between himself and Philip in which he performs both roles. The reflection addresses Francie as a Winker Watson-​ inspired, English prep-​school student: “I say Frawncis would you be a sport and wun down to the tuck shop for meah pleath?” (63). When Francie, as “Frawncis,” asks, “I say boy what is your name pleath?” the reflection responds, “Oo, I said, my name ith Philip Nuahgent!” (63). This performance of Philip represents the crucial function of naming in the novel. Embodying the role of “Philip Nuahgent”—​or “Master Algernon Carruthers,” another “posh” British character that Francie has seen in one of Philip’s comic books—​allows Francie to evade those eyes (including his own) that label him as an inferior being, a “pig” or a “bogman” (211). Philip’s school

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uniform, like Alo’s suit, serves as a synecdoche for Englishness as well as a weapon. The “razor crease” in Philip’s trousers recalls Francie’s description of Alo’s “crease would cut your hand” (28, 63). Both figures illustrate the power of such status symbols to draw sharp partitions between returned emigrants and those townspeople who have remained. Moreover, Francie’s performance of Philip discloses a guilty secret: He identifies with the Nugents—​in particular, with their “Englishness,” which is associated in his mind with social respectability, domestic stability, and tidiness—​more than with his own family and furthermore seeks to replace Philip as their esteemed son. Dressed up in Philip’s uniform, Francie revels in the fantasy of himself as obedient son to stereotypically good parents. He basks in the approval received from his bespectacled, newspaper-​reading “father” when he assures the Nugents that he was “not making any stink bombs” because it would be “naughty” (63–​64). However, when Francie admits, “I felt good about all this,” Philip (that is, the hallucinated voice of the young Nugent) divulges the narrator’s hitherto disavowed desire: “You know what he’s doing here don’t you mother? He wants to be one of us. He wants his name to be Francis Nugent” (64). Francie’s wish to assume the name of “Philip Nugent” or of the comic book character “Algernon Carruthers,” draws attention to the fact that the border town, although in a former colony, looks to London—​as well as to the six counties still under British rule—​for identification. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon discusses how children in colonized countries are confronted with the disparity between how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. Both visions are intrinsically tied to the internalization of stereotypes from popular culture, particularly “illustrated magazines for children” (Fanon 112). From the comic books he devours, Francie inevitably comes to identify with the British hero—​for example, the prep-​school trickster—​rather than with the “Pig,” which is just one name, along with “the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage” for the “Other” in comics (Fanon 113). In English cartoons, the figure of the pig was often used to represent the Irish, in particular those who were involved in agrarian protest and violence. According to Declan Kiberd, cartoonists used “porcine features” to depict members of revolutionary republican organizations, collectively dubbed the “swinish mob,” both during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the War of Independence (504–​05). In Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Lewis Perry Curtis, Jr., discusses how pigs came specifically to represent Irish insurgents in Victorian caricature. Curtis argues that the “hardy pig” continued to represent the Irish people in English comic art well into the twentieth century, “outliv[ing] both Paddy and the gorilla” (57). The following cartoon, “A Test of Sagacity,” which was published in the British magazine Punch on

84 Cormack

Figure 1 Bernard Partridge, “A Test of Sagacity,” Punch, or the London Charivari, vol. 158, 18 Feb. 1920, p. 131, cartoon

February 18, 1920, is one example of the prevalent association of Ireland (and in particular, Irish rebels) with pigs. The cartoon appeared at a time when the Liberal Prime Minister of England, David Lloyd George, was advocating for the partition of Ireland into two Home Rule entities under the Government of Ireland Act and the ira was

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fighting for a republic. Bernard Partridge depicts Lloyd George as an animal trainer, who announces to his audience that a spectacle-​wearing, “learned” pig, which represents Ireland, “will now spell out something that signifies the greatest happiness for Ireland.” However, the pig belies the handler’s claims of its “learnedness,” pondering the letters—​which spell “Home Rule”—​in bewilderment and saying, “I can’t make the beastly thing spell ‘Republic.’ ” The condescending tone of the cartoon captured a widespread English belief that myopic fanaticism prevented the Irish people from accepting the “sagacity” and “benevolence” of those leaders who wanted only to secure their future well-​being. This caricature of Irish republicans brings to mind Mrs. Nugent’s use of pig symbolism to stigmatize the Bradys in BB. When Mrs. Nugent hails the Bradys as “pigs,” she offers condescending pity for Francie’s “inherited” restiveness and shabbiness: “What chance has he got running about the town at all hours and the clothes hanging off him it doesn’t take money to dress a child God love him” (4). However, she also threatens to curb his wildness (recalling Lloyd George’s possession of both solicitous words and a whip in the cartoon): “It’s not his fault but if he’s seen near our Philip again there’ll be trouble” (4). Throughout BB, Francie employs both performance and fantasy to temporarily cast off his reputation for slovenliness and brutality. For example, he adopts the persona of “Algernon Carruthers”—​“one of these boy millionaires” from Philip’s comics—​when ordering food at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin (41). In another instance, the protagonist constructs a mirror version of the town called “pig land” (12). This fantasy most clearly suggests the border setting of the novel. Francie stands guard at an invisible customs post, proudly carrying out the widely hated but “respectable” duties of a good border official. He mimics both a folksy John Wayne-​like hero of the American frontier and a good-​natured, bantering customs man. Francie physically detains Mrs. Nugent and her son, Philip, demanding that they pay a “pig toll tax” in order to get past: “Yes, Mrs Nugent I said, the pig toll tax it is and every time you want to get past it costs a shilling … I stood there with my thumbs hooked in my braces like a Western old timer … [T]‌hat was the rules of pig land I told them … Durn taxes, I  said, ain’t fair on folks” (12–​13). Francie’s message to Mrs. Nugent—​ transmitted beneath the “civility” of characters in TV Westerns or of customs guards, who are just doing their job—​is that the partition between “pigs” and “non-​pigs” in the town is tenuous. Francie’s fantasy of the “pig school”—​like that of “pig land”—​also reveals his deep-​seated need not only to throw off the name that dehumanizes his family but also to reassign it to the Nugents. After he breaks into the family’s

86 Cormack home, Francie performs a schoolmaster whose job it is to teach Mrs. Nugent and Philip that they are pigs: Or maybe you didn’t know you were a pig. Is that it? Well then, I’ll have to teach you. … Right today we are going to do pigs … I found a lipstick in one of the drawers and I wrote in big letters across the wallpaper PHILIP IS A PIG … And you too Mrs Nugent. It[‘]s your responsibility as a sow to see that Philip behaves as a good pig should. … Then we went over it one more time I got them to say it after me. I am a pig said Philip. I am a sow said Mrs Nooge. (65) As master of pig school, Francie transforms the Nugent home from its immaculately clean state—​with flies and other sources of contamination kept at bay by plastic domes over cakes and polish on every surface—​to reflect the waste-​strewn house that attended his family’s unraveling. For example, Francie describes his home in the wake of one of Benny’s binges following his wife’s death: “The back door was open and the sink was full of pilchard tins. Da ate pilchards when he went on a skite. The flies were buzzing round them. There was curdled milk and books thrown round all over the place and stuff pulled out of the cupboards the dogs must have been in” (46). In Francie’s fantasy of pig school, the Nugents outdo the Bradys in their performance of animality. Whereas in the Brady home, it is dogs that leave their excrement “smeared on the walls”, in the Nugent home, it is Philip Nugent qua “pig” (performed by Francie) who is the source of defilement (221). When Philip deposits a “poo” on the floor of Mrs. Nugent’s bedroom, “studded with currants with a little question mark of steam curling upwards,” he wins the enthusiastic approval of the “schoolmaster” who exclaims, “Now, class! What would you call someone who does that? Not a boy at all—​a pig!” (66–​67). Francie invests himself with the power both to call his porcine subjects into life (through the power of “education”) and to consign them to death. The most violent manifestation of Francie’s attempts to invert the binary of human versus animal is the gruesome scene of murder. The razor-​sharp creases in the trousers of Uncle Alo and Philip foreshadow the butcher’s knife that Francie employs in the act. He approaches Mrs. Nugent as a butcher rather than as a fellow human, as is evident in his cold interpolation of the correct way to “kill a pig”: not to “cut its throat across,” as most think, but to “do it longways” (209). In the pig school fantasy, Francie uses lipstick to write “PHILIP IS A PIG” on the wall (65). In the chilling scene of murder, he once again exposes the Nugents as pigs, but this time inscribing the message in blood: “I opened her then I stuck my hand in her stomach and wrote pigs all over the walls of the upstairs room” (209).

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Even in the midst of his violent assault, Francie perceives Mrs. Nugent as the wrongdoer and himself as her victim. Her first “crime” consisted of drawing a border between the “whole town” and “pig land” and consigning the Bradys to the latter realm. Having banished the Bradys, the Nugents then usurped the place once occupied by the family, when Benny was considered “one of the best musicians ever was in this town,” Annie filled the house with cakes and butterfly buns for a grand Christmas party, Uncle Alo made the town proud with his “great job” in London, and Francie spent the day “hatching … plans and schemes” with Joe, his “blood brother” (13, 18, 53, 78). This act of usurpation comprised a series of events that eventually stole away the two most important people in Francie’s life: his mother to suicide and Joe to a new best friend, Philip Nugent (53). In his last words to Mrs. Nugent, Francie charges her with these two particular “misdeeds”: “You did two bad things Mrs Nugent. You made me turn my back on my ma and you took Joe away from me” (209). In court, Francie takes full responsibility for his violent act of “revenge.” However, as with Joseph Fee, Francie is accused not only of murder but also of “robbery and plunder” (BB 228). In nineteenth-​century rural Ireland, many people considered crimes involving larceny to be “dirty” but took a more “casual attitude towards violence,” according to David Johnson (279). In “Trial by Jury in Ireland, 1860–​1914,” Johnson explains that crimes deemed to be “clean” included acts of violence against people, land, or dwellings as well as rioting (277). He speculates that this attitude toward criminal violence in rural Ireland originated in the nineteenth-​century acceptance of the violent activities of secret agrarian societies against unjust land seizures or evictions as “justifiable” (279). These attitudes were then subsequently transferred to the “wider arena of everyday life” (279). The violent, and thus “cleaner,” nature of Joseph Fee’s crime—​although he was also accused of larceny—​may help explain why the juries of his first two trials in Monaghan did not agree on the accused man’s guilt. The Crown had to use two common stratagems to obtain a conviction: that is, change the trial venue to Belfast, “where jurors were more reliable” (Johnson 286), and order thirty-​three supposedly unsuitable jurors to “stand by” (“Ulster Winter Assizes”). Although “the Crown maintained the fiction that they were unaware of the religion of those it ordered to stand by,” Johnson believes that “the majority of jurors challenged were Catholics” (285). There were widespread differences in regional perspectives on crime and punishment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, according to Johnson. He cites statistics showing that conviction and punishment rates were lower in Ireland than in England and Wales between 1860 and 1914 in all categories of crime, but especially in “offences against the person,” which included murder, sexual assaults and “malicious wounding” (273). These rates

88 Cormack of conviction and punishment were even lower in rural Ireland as compared to urban areas such as Dublin and Belfast. According to Johnson, the low rates of conviction stemmed in part from the “close relationship of witnesses, jurors and defendants” in rural Ireland (278). In these communities, jurors were reluctant to convict or give testimony against friends, neighbors, and friends of friends owing to intimidation, sympathy with the accused, or fear of disturbing the social fabric of a small town. The complicated nature of social relationships in Clones is suggested in an account of the magisterial inquiry into John Flanagan’s death. The victim’s father, Patrick Flanagan—​toward the end of his testimony—​asked the accused “if he had seen John,” to which Fee responded, “not to be uneasy, that John would turn up” (qtd. in “Clones Tragedy”). Furthermore, Fee retained widespread public support as demonstrated by an article from December 15, 1904—​a week before his execution—​reporting that a petition for his reprieve was “very largely signed,” including by “a number of magistrates and public men” from Clones (“Clones Murder Case”). This support contrasts with the unyielding stance of the judge in Fee’s final trial in Belfast who declared, after announcing his conviction, “No honest jury could have come to any other conclusion” (“Clones Murder: Third Trial”). In saying this, the judge indirectly questioned the integrity of the two juries in Monaghan, who had been unable to come to a conclusion, based in part on the circumstantial nature of the evidence against Fee. The ending of BB reflects these complex attitudes toward crime in Ireland, and particularly in the borderlands. At his trial, Francie pleads guilty to all charges of violence, almost glibly: “So when he said did you do this did you do that I said yes I did” (228). However, when the “court man” charges him with committing murder for “the meanest and most contemptible of motives—​for the purpose of robbery and plunder,” Francie reacts with barely restrained violence, insisting that “the only thing [he] ever took was Philip’s comics and [he] was going to give them back” (228). For Francie, the charge of larceny has the power to place him once again in the realm of pig-​like men and their “dirty,” sordid crimes. He also shows indignation upon seeing a drawing of himself in the newspaper beneath the headline, “Francie is a pig”: “Fuck this,” he says, “even the papers are at it now” (228). He fears that the whole nation will now draw a border between himself and “civilized” society—​that is, until he notices the rest of the headline, “Francie is a pig butcher in a local abattoir” (228). While not adopting a “casual attitude towards violence,” the town sergeant seems to recognize to some degree the complex social and psychological factors that motivated the young boy’s brutal actions. Delivering Francie to his place of punishment—​an institution for the criminally insane—​Sergeant

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“Sausage” (as Francie dubs him) does not chastise the adolescent. Rather, the sergeant talks to him “about ma and da and the old times in the town” and says before departing, “There’s a lot of sad things in this world Francie and this is one of them” (229). Without excusing Francie’s horrific crime, the sergeant conveys an awareness of the profound grief that impels Francie to destroy the person whom he blames for the loss of not only his mother and Joe but also his father and Uncle Alo as well as a sense of belonging in the town. Moreover, the exchange between the sergeant and Francie is reparative, as he gives the Bradys a place in his nostalgic narrative of the town. Furthermore, after the mental institution holds Francie for an undefined period in solitary confinement, the doctor expresses forgiveness for the crime—​“that’s all over you must forget all about that”—​and invites him to join the community of patients (230). Like jurists, townspeople, and family members who struggled to determine Fee’s guilt or innocence, the reader of BB may find it difficult to come to easy conclusions about Francie and his crime. The narrative style of the novel, which limits the reader to the point of view of Francie, nurtures ambivalence: on the one hand, empathy with a young boy who grows up in a dysfunctional family, bears the shame of poverty, endures punitive hard labor and sexual abuse by a priest in an industrial school, and loses all his family and friends; on the other, disgust with the brutal murder of a woman whose “crime” was to berate a family in a fit of anger caused by the bullying of her son. Mrs. Nugent is not a one-​dimensional “villain” but rather a symbol in the novel of the pervasive intolerance that leads individuals and societies to draw rigid borders between “us” and “them.” The line she draws between the Bradys and the whole town brings to mind the physical and social barriers erected between nationalists and loyalists and Catholic and Protestants during the Troubles. These barriers reinforce the frontier between Ireland and Northern Ireland:  the “geographical border drawn by a drunken man,” as McCabe describes it in his preface to BoP (xii). The “drunken man” is presumably Lloyd George, who belligerently threatened a resumption of war if the Irish delegates to the 1921 Anglo-​Irish Treaty negotiations refused to accept the partition of Ireland into two autonomous regions. Yet, despite the seeming rigidity of the geographical border—​especially in times of unrest, when it was closely guarded by checkpoints, military watchtowers, and surveillance—​McCabe describes it as “every bit as tremulous and deceptive as the one which borders life and death” (BoP xii). BB exposes the “tremulous and deceptive” nature of borders, whether they are geographical, cultural, temporal, or interpersonal. The residents of the unnamed border town look to multiple locales for models of behavior: to popular

90 Cormack culture, news headlines, and myths of returned emigrants from England as well as religious and political icons from Ireland (like Michael Collins or Éamon de Valera, depending upon allegiances). They place more hope in Kennedy than in any Irish leader saving them from nuclear annihilation at the hands of Nikita Khrushchev but wait most confidently for the intercession of the Virgin Mary. The novel also collapses time. In prison, “twenty or thirty or forty years” after the murder (BB 1), Francie is haunted by specters of the past and fated to relive happier childhood moments with Joe for the rest of his days, whether in memory or in regressive acts of play with fellow inmates. Most critically, Francie’s antipathy for Mrs. Nugent eventually morphs into empathy. After releasing Francie from years of solitary confinement, his doctor asks, “I don’t think you’re going to take the humane killer [the captive-​bolt gun used to kill Mrs. Nugent] to any of our patients are you?” (230). Francie responds, “Humane killer! I don’t think Mrs Nugent would be too pleased to hear you calling it that, doc …” (230). His words suggest a moment of empathic identification that dismantles the borders of “pig land” and forges a path toward “total belonging … like home or something” (Call Me the Breeze 337). Works Cited Beaumont, Gustave de. Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious. 1839. Edited and translated by W. C. Taylor, Harvard UP, 2006. Blood Relations. Directed by Dara McCluskey, Midas Productions, 2008. Carron, Tom. “Clones Has Survived Epic Challenges.” Anglo-​Celt, 30 May 1996, pp. 79–​ 80. Irish News Archive, www.irishnewsarchive.com Creamer, Caroline, et al. “Tough Love: Local Cross-​Border Cooperation Faces the Challenge of Sustainability.” The Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland, no. 3, Spring 2008, pp. 80–​95, crossborder.ie/​the-​journal-​of-​cross-​border-​studies-​in-​ireland/​ #no3 Curtis, Lewis Perry, Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Rev. ed., Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997. “Clones Murder Case.” The Irish Times, 15 Dec. 1904, p. 7. The Irish Times Archive 1859–​ 2008, www.irishtimes.com/​newspaper/​archive/​1904/​1215/​Pg007.html#Ar00724 “Clones Murder Case: Trial of Fee.” The Irish Times, 4 Mar. 1904, p. 3. The Irish Times Archive 1859–​2008, www.irishtimes.com/​newspaper/​archive/​1904/​0304/​Pg003.html#Ar00300 “Clones Murder: Third Trial of Fee, Death Sentence.” The Irish Times, 5 Dec. 1904, p. 7. The Irish Times Archive 1859–​2008, www.irishtimes.com/​newspaper/​archive/​1904/​ 1205/​Pg007.html#Ar00709

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“The Clones Tragedy: Magisterial Inquiry.” The Irish Times, 7 Jan. 1904, p. 5. The Irish Times Archive 1859–​ 2008, www.irishtimes.com/​newspaper/​archive/​1904/​0107/​ Pg005.html#Ar00500 Deevy, Patricia. “Booker Boy.” Sunday Independent, 16 Oct. 1994, Living and Leisure sec., p. 4L. Irish News Archive, www.irishnewsarchive.com Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-​Class in England in 1844. 1845. Swan Sonnenschein, 1892. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 2008. Farrell, Michael. Northern Ireland: The Orange State. Pluto Press, 1980. Gauthier, Tim. “Identity, Self-​Loathing and the Neocolonial Condition in Patrick McCabe’s BB.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 44, no. 2, Winter 2003, pp. 196–​212. Taylor & Francis Online, doi:10.1080/​00111610309599946. Harvey, Brian, et al. The Emerald Curtain: The Social Impact of the Irish Border. Triskele Community Training & Development, 2005. Holmes, Eamonn. “Inside the Mind of a Teenage Psycho.” Review of BB, by Patrick McCabe, Irish Independent, 13 Oct. 1992, p. 9. Irish News Archive, www.irishnewsarchive. com Johnson, David. “Trial by Jury in Ireland, 1860–​1914.” The Journal of Legal History, vol. 17, no. 3, December 1996, pp. 270–​93. Taylor & Francis Online, doi:10.1080/​ 01440369608531163. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. McCabe, Patrick. BB. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992. McCabe, Patrick. BoP. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. McCabe, Patrick. Call Me the Breeze. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. McCabe, Patrick. “Frontiers.” Raven Introductions 3: New Writing from Ireland, Raven Arts Press/​Colin Smythe, 1984, pp. 64–​72. McCabe, Patrick. Music on Clinton Street, Finglas: Raven Arts Press, 1986. McCabe, Patrick. “St. Macartan, Minnie the Minx and Mondo Movies: Elliptical Peregrinations through the Subconscious of a Monaghan Writer Traumatised by Cows and the Brilliance of James Joyce.” Interview by Christopher FitzSimon, Irish University Review, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring-​Summer 1998, pp. 175–​89. jstor, www.jstor.org/​ stable/​25484768 McCabe, Patrick. “ ‘You Lie in Wait …’: An Interview with Patrick McCabe.” Interview by Wendy Herstein, The World & I, no. 8, 1993, Book World sec., p. 298. www.worldandischool.com/​public/​1993/​august/​school-​resource10163.asp Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland General Register Office, “Table  8:  Economically Active Persons by Religion, Occupation and Status by Sex,” Census of Population 1971:  Religion Tables, Northern Ireland, 1975, p.  45. Northern Ireland Statistics and

92 Cormack Research Agency, https://​www.nisra.gov.uk/​statistics/​2001-​and-​earlier-​censuses/​ 1971-​census O’Mahony, John. “King of Bog Gothic.” Review of BB, by Patrick McCabe, The Guardian, 30 Aug. 2003, www.theguardian.com/​books/​2003/​aug/​30/​fiction.patrickmccabe Osborne, R. D. and R. J. Cormack. “Unemployment and Religion in Northern Ireland.” The Economic and Social Review, vol. 17, no. 3, Apr. 1986, pp. 215–​225. tara, hdl.handle.net/​2262/​68782 Sales, Rosemary. Women Divided:  Gender, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland. Routledge, 1997. Sussman, Henry. “On the Butcher Block: A Panorama of Social Marking.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 143–​68. Project muse, doi:10.1353/​ ncr.2004.0027. Taylor, Robert. “Life of a ‘Pig’ in BB.” Review of BB, by Patrick McCabe, Seattle Post-​ Intelligencer, 8 Jun. 1993, final ed., Living sec., p. C2, NewsBank: Access World News, docs.newsbank.com “Ulster Winter Assizes.” The Irish Times, 2 Dec. 1904, p.  7. The Irish Times Archive 1859–​2008, http://​www.irishtimes.com/​newspaper/​archive/​1904/​1202/​Pg007.html#Ar00700 Untitled article, The Irish Times, 10 Dec. 1904, p. 12. The Irish Times Archive 1859–​2008, www.irishtimes.com/​newspaper/​archive/​wit/​1904/​1210/​Pg012.html#Ar01209 Waters, John. “Butcher Boy Makes Good.” Review of BB, by Patrick McCabe, The Irish Times, 31 Oct. 1992, p. A5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Irish Times, search. proquest.com/​hnpirishtimes

Chapter 6

Exploring Home from Stranger Shores: the Irish Experience in Patrick McCabe’s Mondo Desperado Flore Coulouma Patrick McCabe has been hailed as the “King of Bog Gothic” (O’Mahony). Violent psychosis is a recurring theme in McCabe’s stories, and his unique blend of rural subjects and crazed violence sets him apart from the “big house” Gothic tradition furthered by the likes of John Banville, Aidan Higgins, and William Trevor (Kilfeather 94). McCabe offers a dark perspective on the Irish experience and sheds his grim comic light on the impossibility of either staying or leaving home. The unnerving routine of small-​town life and the schizophrenic impulses of his marginalized subjects depict an Ireland both familiar and uncanny, torn by the sectarian violence of the Troubles (BoP 1998) and unsettled by the disruptive changes of modernity throughout the 60s and 70s (BB, 1992; The Dead School, 1995). McCabe’s novels and stories address the individual and collective psychosis brought on by the impossible reconciliation between traumatic past and threatening present. In this context, the notion of place functions both as a stage and a catalyst unravelling paranoia and violence. Mondo Desperado (1999) exposes the oppressive small-​mindedness of the Irish hometown together with its ambiguous fear of, and fascination with, foreign shores. McCabe represents the Irish experience through a series of dialectic oppositions which in turn reflect conflicting perspectives on the Irish sense of place: comedy and darkness, inside and outside, home and abroad, social norm and deviance. In Mondo Desperado, McCabe maps out his satire of Irish identity through his characters’ pathological perception of reality and schizophrenic sense of displacement. He unfolds his “bog gothic” tales of deviance and perversion around the problematic questions of space and place, making geographical distortion the primary symptom of his disturbing fictional universe. Mondo Desperado is not usually deemed worthy of scholarly analysis. Panned by many reviewers when it came out in December 1999, McCabe’s singular novel/​short-​story-​collection hybrid is considered a minor parent to his acclaimed novels BB and BoP, yet I will argue that Mondo Desperado plays a crucial part in McCabe’s representation of the Irish experience. In Mondo, the disruptive intrusion of modernity into the small-​town community of

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94 Coulouma Barnstrosna is expressed through fantasies of the elsewhere. Brought in by the new technologies of consumer society, modernity is viewed as inherently foreign to rural, Catholic Ireland: an (American) dream of mass culture and sexual liberation that comes in the guise of the outside world to shatter the characters’ vulnerable sense of identity. The book’s title already makes a foray into the foreign, albeit in an uncannily nativized version. “Mondo” (Italian for “world”) is a popular culture reference to mondo films, following the first instance of the genre, Italian pseudo-​ documentary Mondo Cane (Literally “Dog’s world,” usually translated as “it’s a dog’s life”). The film came out in 1962 and promptly inspired spinoffs and copycats, such as Mondo Cane 2 (1963), Mondo Bizarro (1966) and Mondo Hollywood (1967). “Mondo” has now come to denote a fully-​fledged genre of exploitative docu-​fiction with graphically evocative titles. The American “desperado,” derived from the Spanish original “desesperado,” evokes the familiar strangeness of a re-​territorialized word; it is also a direct reference to the exotic violence of the Wild West. From this perspective, McCabe’s title does not so much refer to the Joycean haunts of continental Europe as it hints at the influence of American culture on the collective Irish imagination. Following a theme explored in BB and BoP, Mondo Desperado explores the confrontation between small-​ town Catholic conservatism and the sexual revolution and (largely American) consumerist ethos of the 1960s: the result is the “desperate world” of McCabe’s frenzied and hopeless characters. In his article “Shockumentary Evidence: The Perverse Politics of the Mondo Film,” Mark Goodall traces the purpose and function of the mondo genre as the product of a global culture of the spectacle in which the distinction between informative reality and entertaining fiction has become blurred (118–​25). Goodall notes that mondo “emerges at a time of widespread change in attitudes to sexuality” in the Catholic Italy of the 1960s (120). This is all the more relevant to 1960s Ireland: while the country slowly transitioned from the oppressive Catholicism of the de Valera period into the new-​age values of American consumerism after Seán Lemass opened the country to US investors, its cultural and symbolic ties to America reach beyond economic agreements, to a historical and genealogical connection whose native representation hover between reality and myth. McCabe’s mondo reference reflects this complex relationship and the effects of cultural change on narrative structures. By transgressing the rules of the “serious” documentary, the mondo genre ushers in a form of political subversion against the norms of its time; McCabe in turn takes on the label to remind his readers of their morally ambiguous stance as voyeuristic witnesses to the gruesome stories of the Irish experience.

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Mondo Desperado came out in December 1999—​a year after the Good Friday agreement, another significant example of political partnership with the American administration—​following a decade of child abuse scandals in the Irish Catholic Church. The widespread child abuse in industrial and reformatory schools and at the hands of paedophile priests was exposed to the public thanks to a series of documentaries on national television, whose evocative titles tragically recall the mondo genre: “Washing away the Stain” (1993), “Witness: sex in a cold climate” (1998), and “States of Fear” (1999). “States of Fear” prompted such public outcry at the time that then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern issued an official apology to the victims on behalf of the State (Brown 370). In Mondo Desperado, McCabe denounces the shocking reality of the Irish experience through his darkly ironic use of the mondo genre, pitting the pornographic creativity of exploitative fiction against the cold facts of child abuse and violence. McCabe’s fictional editorial section introduces us to author Phildy Hackball and quotes reviewers assessing the book’s relevance to the mondo genre. Here is what “The Essential Guide to Forgotten Cinema” has to say: Thai Pop! Cantorock! Dope mules! Leopardskin-​wearing Amazons! Human transplants gone horribly wrong! Not to be found here, I’m afraid! This book is about as “mondo” as The Sound of Music! Hackball is a complete fraud! (v) The critic derides Phildy Hackball because his homegrown Irish stories lack the necessary exoticism of a genuine mondo narrative. Together with the Editor’s letter and “Author appreciation,” such fictional reviews playfully debunk some of the pragmatic expectations set up in the title, warning us that geographical exoticism is irrelevant when the sordid and the strange flourish at home. McCabe thus questions the very notion of the exotic and lays out his literary goal: to make the familiar strange, to find the foreign at home. Hackball’s reviewers finally serve as a caution to their invisible counterpart, the reader, whose voyeuristic lust is at once titillated and chastised as he enters McCabe’s mondo bog. Confirming the crucial problematic of place, the Editor’s note concludes its fictional mise-​en-​abîme with an unreserved commendation of Hackball’s “wondrous journeyings” and “eclectic voyagings into the interior” (viii). Strangeness pervades the fluctuating borders of the Irish experience as McCabe’s exploration of “the interior” uncovers his characters’ distorted perception of space and place. The question of place and home is an integral part of McCabe’s work: his novels feature characters at odds with their hometown, their national identity

96 Coulouma and more generally their place in the world. In BB, Francie unleashes his psychopathic rage against his neighbor after a life of rejection by the people of his hometown. In BoP, whose title is a constant reminder of its main character’s longing for a radical departure from home and from reality, Patrick Braden settles in London and vows never to return to his native Tyreelin. The grim location of The Dead School also integrates the dynamics of place within McCabe’s satire of the Irish education system. Yet McCabe goes further in Mondo Desperado, mapping out his vision of middle Ireland through conflicting voices and a fragmented narrative structure: here, the question of place is no longer a corollary to his characters’ pathological sense of identity, but the very core of his narrative, and the town of Barnstrosna his main character. I will examine the relationship between place and the self in Mondo Desperado by focusing first on the question of home, then on the strangeness of the elsewhere, and finally on the effects of McCabe’s schizophrenic world in terms of narrative structure. Mapping out home and the homeland becomes more crucial as the characters’ sense of place unravels, and the increasingly blurred distinction between home and away gradually exposes the characters’ schizophrenic impulses, uncovering McCabe’s dark portrait of the Irish experience. 1 Mapping Home Mondo Desperado is set in the fictional “small town” (5) of Barntrosna, whose location is only mentioned halfway through the book: “My nightmare began some thirty years ago in a small town in Ireland, not far from Mullingar and quite near Dundalk” (Mondo 75). The puzzled reader is left to speculate that Barntrosna might be somewhere in county Meath—​an apt, if vague, localization since Meath in Irish means “middle.” A rural town in the symbolic middle of Ireland, then, sets the stage for McCabe’s desperate microcosm. The main feature of the town is its genericity. Barntrosna is fictional and stereotypical, a made-​up sample of the Irish landscape, but it is also the consistent thread tying Hackball’s stories together: from “Hot Nights at the Go-​Go Lounge” to “The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan,” the seemingly disconnected chapters make up the Barntrosna story. In “The Big Prize” local writer Pats Donaghy writes “his latest opus, The Barntrosna Files” (Mondo 122), a humorous mise-​en-​abîme of McCabe/​Hackball’s chronicles of small-​town life, also mirrored in Barntrosna’s local newspaper, the Barntrosna Standard (Mondo 42). Much is made of the familiar “standards” of the generic hometown, yet the town itself is unanchored to the broader map of Ireland, leaving its inhabitants to rely solely on its internal structure in order to define their sense

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of place. In this enclosed yet unmoored microcosm, points of reference are few; the urban grid extends from “Louie’s Bar and Grill” and the “office of Barntrosna Insurances” (Mondo 5) to “the Back Terrace” and the “big house with a garden” (Mondo 21), with the railway gates and “McConkey’s field” as the town’s geographical limits (Mondo 30). Mondo “author” Phildy Hackball “divides his time between the Bridge Bar and his home in Main Street” (229) much like the characters of his tales. His biography at the end of the book is described in geographical terms: Phildy Hackball has lived in Castleblayney, Newtownforbes, Threemilehouse and Newbliss. In 1972, he left Longford and lived in Nobber, County Louth. During 1978–​79, he settled in Barntrosna, where he first began to write seriously. His work has been published in anthologies in Cavan, Monaghan and Mullingar … (Mondo 229) The knowledgeable reader will perhaps notice that Nobber is not a town in County Louth but County Meath. McCabe’s deliberate error announces the intrusion of fiction onto his realistic map, and with Hackball’s distorted landscape come his characters’ distorted selves: such seemingly insignificant discrepancies unsettle McCabe’s referential universe, thus introducing doubt into our understanding of geographic space as a stable, controlled reality. The people of Barntrosna define themselves by their address, from “Mrs Alfie Baird of Main Street” to “Fr Sean Chistleworth of Turbot Avenue” (Mondo 25). Locating home is their constant concern, starting with the introductory “Phildy Hackball: An Appreciation,” by the author’s friend, Pat Cork, who signs his name and address (Mondo ix–​x ): Pat Cork (Friend) 17 Main Street, Barntrosna Pat Cork—​who incidentally bears the name of another Irish city—​understands his identity in geographical terms, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait: “Stephen Dedalus/​Class of Elements/​Clongowes Wood College/​Sallins/​County Kildare/​ Ireland/​ Europe/​ The World/​ The Universe (Portrait 17). However, while Stephen locates his experience at the centre of the universe, integrating the outside and the foreign in his representation of place, Pat Cork does no such thing. In his comically truncated imitation of Dedalian narcissism, Pat’s universe stops at the limits of his town.This chauvinistic and claustrophobic

98 Coulouma sense of space is a recurring theme in McCabe’s work, in keeping with his characters’ quest to either escape or enlarge the confines of their native place and culture. In Mondo, cultural suffocation leads less to geographic exile as to escapist fantasies and fiction, and ultimately, to madness. For those who do leave home, Barntrosna remains the disturbed centre of gravity of a peculiar map. In “I Ordained the Devil,” evil priest Packie Cooley is sent successively to an “African parish,” back to Barntrosna, then to “the town of Labacusha, fifty miles south of Drogheda” (Mondo 60). As the paranoid first-​ person narrator follows Packie’s itinerary “from a violence ridden hamlet in the west” to the “strange goings-​on in [a]‌County Cork Village” (Mondo 65–​66) to draw up a cartography of evil, he becomes alienated from his own sense of self and gradually retreats into “the confines of the Bishop’s Palace, with [his] mouth securely shut” (Mondo 70). Silence and madness are the corollary effects of a distorted sense of place in the Irish experience. Mondo’s fictional towns, Barntrosna and Labacusha, create jarring discrepancies in an otherwise familiar map: Labacusha is located “fifty miles south of Drogheda” rather than a logically expected 24 miles from Dublin, and a myriad of small towns have replaced big cities as the cardinal points in the Irish landscape (Mondo 60). Barntrosna is lost in an ever-​expanding universe like Declan Coyningham in “The Bursted Priest,” whose “soul [has become] an infinitesimal speck circling the cosmos, pitifully crying out for someone to direct it homeward” (Mondo 26). Ironically, Mondo was published in 1999, the year that officially launched the Euro: Ireland was an original member of the Eurozone and thus found itself a smaller point on a bigger (political and economic) map. Mondo’s disrupted sense of place finds an ironical counterpoint in its characters’ recurring fantasies of homecoming. Following in the footsteps of BB (Francie comes back to find that his mother has committed suicide in his absence), and BoP (Patrick Braden never returns home), Mondo’s homecoming dreams are all doomed to fail. In “The Bursted priest,” Declan’s homecoming is a thinly veiled parody of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: Late at night (…) he would often lie awake in bed, dreaming of that glorious day when he would return to the town as a full-​fledged clergyman; cruise proudly through the bannered streets in an open-​topped bus on the side of which bright painted colours ecstatically enthused WELCOME HOME FR DECLAN! (Mondo 22) Declan’s fantasy is a direct product of his neurotic home environment. His widowed mother, who makes him wear a balaclava at school, grooms him for the priesthood, and while the dream betrays his inflated self-​righteousness, it also

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portends his untimely, martyred demise. Declan’s balaclava and violent death also hint at the nationalist myth of ira martyrdom, reminding us of the dogmatic violence common to Catholic bigotry and nationalist radicalism in the Irish context. Declan is doomed from the start because he is an outsider: his “air of ‘apartness’, that preoccupied sense of purpose mingled with sanctity that seems the lot of those destined for the religious life” (Mondo 24)  earns him the hatred of his schoolmates who literally blow him up with an air hose. In McCabe’s satire of religious devotion, Declan ultimately falls victim to the psychotic obsessions of his lunatic mother “eating flies in St Jude’s Nursing Home, insisting that she is pregnant with a little girl who is going to be a nun” (Mondo 27). In “The Forbidden Love of Noreen Tiernan,” the eponymous heroine leaves for London to become a nurse and succumbs to the depraved morals of the city. In a comically inverted homecoming, her family and friends come to London to rescue her from a life of sexual deviance:  Noreen is “embroiled in a perversely impassioned love affair with Stephanie Diggs of B wing” (Mondo 183). An incredulous narrator describes Noreen’s metamorphosis from shy village girl to East End Mack-​the-​knife, and her family’s implausible adventures in London. Noreen eventually returns to Barntrosna and gets married, but, as the narrator reminds us, “all those who made that fateful journey from the little town of Barntrosna to the city that never sleeps were never, in one way or another, quite the same again” (Mondo 228). Noreen remains secretly in love with her lesbian lover while her neighbour Augustus Halpin, “celebrated manager of the Barntrosna branch of the First National Bank,” becomes a transvestite: “London made him go quare” (Mondo 219 & 227). Again there is no true homecoming, but an irreversible contamination of home by the outside world. Mondo Desperado makes Barntrosna a paradigm of normalcy and wholesomeness, the better to expose the pathological reality beneath small-​town respectability. Parodying exploitative shockumentaries and horror-​movie styles, McCabe dwells on the harmless and the bucolic to contrast them with gore and sex, thus drawing his gothic satire of an Ireland astraddle between oppressive past and disturbing modernity, on the cusp of entering the wider world of globalized culture. McCabe’s caricature deliberately enhances the simplistic opposition between native past and foreign modernity to denounce their artificiality: the past is no repository of an homogeneous Irish identity impervious to the outside world, and Mondo’s various narrators often fail to separate the native from the foreign and the past from the present, even as they desperately try. Yet they are also unable to reconcile the rules of small-​town life with the irrepressible appeal of the imported symbols of permissive society and global

100 Coulouma consumerism. As the urban landscape changes, the seeds of modernity and madness unravel the fragile fabric of the inhabitants’ collective psyche. In “The Valley of the Flying Jennets,” the narrator, John Joe, takes stock of the changes brought on by modernity: I expect now that Ireland has become a much changed place over the past few years, with European flags and coffee shops and contemporary artworks in the vanguard of this admittedly extraordinary cultural metamorphosis (not to mention the omnipresent chirp of portable phones and the industrious purr of facsimile machines), that there are many people (…) who would find it very difficult to accept—​in these new empirical times—​the story of the Flying Jennets … (Mondo 141) John Joe’s present time is that of the book’s publication: the late 1990s, when the Celtic Tiger hits its stride. Joe’s modernized Ireland has become indistinguishable from its neighbours: the European flags, coffee shops and artworks could denote any other city in the European Union. In this regard, his description echoes anthropologist Marc Augé’s analysis of non-​places in the era of supermodernity. For Augé, the notion of place is necessarily grounded in historical relevance and identity: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-​place” (78). While modernity integrates the past into a present “that supersedes it but still lays claim to it,” supermodernity does not integrate its past and thus creates non-​ places (Augé 75). In Mondo, John Joe’s story of the flying jennet is an ill-​fated attempt to retrieve the past—​however traumatic—​in order to make sense of the present. Significantly, Augé notes that supermodernity ascribes its “earlier places” to a status of “places of memory,” “assigned to a circumscribed and specific position” (78). In his reflection on memory and space, McCabe goes even further by excluding the valley of the flying jennets from the space of narrative reality altogether, making it the hallucination of his deluded narrator. Pat Cork, the stereotypical token of de Valerian Irishness and author of the introductory “Appreciation,” has given way in this story to John Joe, the generic signifier of post-​industrial western society. Yet the global tokens of supermodernity are no remedy to the enduring tensions between past and present in Celtic Tiger Ireland. John Joe fails to reconcile his memories and present experience, instead suffering from pathological amnesia and schizophrenic reminiscence: the past comes back with a vengeance in the form of his nightmarish recollections. Joe’s story is of a scientific experiment gone wrong:  the hapless country folks of Labacusha who sought to become angels and trusted Joe’s Victorian,

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Anglo-​Irish ancestor to make the change were accidentally turned into flying ponies. “I realize,” Joe concedes, “that in these days of ‘information superhighways’, exotic bottled beers and video disc players, tales involving lost valleys, vanished relatives and ludicrous equine-​angel hybrids will most likely be dismissed as nonsense” (Mondo 161). Indeed, John Joe is an unreliable narrator who admits to his own psychological imbalance. Yet McCabe’s comic inversion of the Swiftian houyhnhnms—​Gulliver’s superior creatures become “the most unintelligent animal ever visited upon this earth”—​is also the story of a place in space and time: while myths and tales have been relegated to a lost valley in the past, present-​day Barntrosna is left with the narrator’s madness and the non-​places of globalized, “empirical” supermodernity (Mondo 160). In showing the destructive effects of cultural forgetfulness, McCabe reveals the importance of myths in the elaboration of historical discourse and national identity. Deliberately rejecting myths and tales outside the sphere of collective memory is a dangerous enterprise, as John Joe’s descent into madness illustrates; McCabe’s criticism of contemporary Irish society warns against cultural amnesia, while reminding us of the complex layering of history and myth that make up Irish identity. In “I Ordained the Devil,” the obsessive narrator identifies the permissive culture of the 1960s with the malevolent powers of his nemesis, “evil” priest Packie Cooley. Those, of course, were the days of flower power and “hippies” and the strains of the popular hits of the time, dealing as they did with young people opting out of society and what have you, delivered up their hopelessly deluded cacophony in the street as I made my way past some elderly cap-​doffing citizens, struggling with the defiantly atonal strains of ludicrously foreign instruments in an effort to gather my thoughts and formulate some plan of action. (Mondo 60–​61) For the narrator, Packie Cooley is the Devil and the cause of all social disruptions in Ireland since 1961. Coincidentally, 1961 was the year when Lieutenant-​ General Seán MacEoin was appointed UN General Commanding Officer in the Congo, and Irish National Television first started broadcasting. As television opened Irish homes to foreign—​mostly American—​influences, Irish UN troops found themselves far from their shores in the Katanga conflict—​and to many corners of the world ever since. McCabe shows how UN peacekeeping and technological advances create a double movement that both expands Irish horizons and introduce the wider world into the privacy of the home, with far-​reaching consequences on the

102 Coulouma social and psychological structure of small-​town Ireland:  while the outside world gradually becomes a familiar part of everyday life, it in turn makes it increasingly strange. In Mondo, Ireland’s involvement in its newfound global situation deeply affects the pace of life in Barntrosna. The “Georgian Room of the Barntrosna Arms Hotel” (Mondo 141) gives way to a “go-​go lounge,” a “bar and grill” (Mondo 4–​5), and a disco (Mondo 131). While they try to make sense of their suddenly unfamiliar hometown, Mondo’s narrators develop an ambiguous obsession with the elsewhere, as they gradually lose sense of the distinction between home and away and plunge deeper into psychosis. 2

Home and Away: the Strangeness of the Elsewhere

Tom Herron has analysed Patrick McCabe’s representation of Irish identity in terms of pathological contamination:  “The encroachment of the ‘new’ (the culture of global, telecommunicational, postmodern Ireland) upon the ‘traditional’ (the family, the small town, the authorized national narrative, the social and religious character of the state) (…) produces effects that range from the dislocatory through to the unmitigatingly disastrous and the monstrous” (168). In Mondo Desperado, past and present contaminate each other with grotesque results, “The Bursted Priest” offering an extreme, nonsensical echo of sectarian violence. While Declan only wears his balaclava as protection from the cold, this, his prayer book and his tormentors’ gruesome understanding of the verb “blow up,” are grim reminders of the dehumanizing violence of the Troubles. In Mondo, the symbolic contamination between past and present induces the characters’ moral and physical degradation and warps their perception of space, leading to their ultimate self-​destruction. The notion of the elsewhere primarily translates as the characters’ recurring obsession with the figure of the Devil. In “I Ordained the Devil,” the narrator denounces Packie Cooley, a seemingly harmless seminarian, who in fact—​so the narrator believes—​is Satan in disguise. The narrator starts suspecting Packie’s true nature when they both react to a news story from the faraway Congo. The first indication I had that Fr Packie Cooley might not exactly be who he said he was came on a dark night in the year 1961, not long after the terrible news had arrived that some Irish soldiers had been brutally done to death by members of the marauding Baluba tribe in the Congo region of Africa. (…) [I]‌found [him] chuckling away to himself as he held the newspaper (…). When I  examined the newspaper—​which in his “distressed” state he had discarded on the window ledge—​I noted that onto

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the image of one of the unfortunate deceased military had been added a crudely drawn pair of spectacles and ludicrously thin moustache, and beneath that again, a barely legible scrawl which formed the words—​my heart lightened—​Irish stew! It’s tasty! (Mondo 56) On November 8, 1960, Baluba tribesmen ambushed a battalion of UN Irish forces in Niemba, Katanga. Nine Irish soldiers died. In his investigation of the period, David O’Donoghue notes that “Niemba made the word Baluba—​the tribe involved in the Niemba ambush—​a byword for evil, viciousness and treachery” (7). McCabe evokes the period to expose his narrator’s Heart of Darkness terror of primitive savagery, and to remind us what the Irish public had misunderstood at the time: that the Irish troops had been tasked with the highly ambiguous—​and therefore inherently dangerous—​mission of “restoring the peace” in a foreign country embroiled in an independence conflict. This scene provides us with an ironic mise-​en-​abîme of colonial racism, a few decades after Ireland’s own independence from Britain. When Packie Cooley is later sent to an “African parish (…) as spiritual administrator,” the narrator’s suspicions grow (Mondo 60). In his mind, foreign primitivism and modern depravity are one and the same. In “The Hands of Dingo Deery,” a paranoid Dermot Mooney also confesses to a traumatic encounter with the devil. Despite his Irish name, Mick Macardle is nothing like the locals: The thin cigar hung out of the side of his mouth. A black raven’s wing of Brylcreemed hair fell ominously down over his alabaster forehead. His lips were two ignominious pencil strokes, his moustache not unlike a crooked felt-​tipped marker line as it might be drawn by a small child. More than anything (…) the slow slither of his arm about my shoulder, the hiss of his silky sibilants as he crooned into my ear:  “Don’t worry about a thing!” (Mondo 78) Macardle is as stereotypical as a child’s drawing. He is persuasive and seductive, and he owns the glittering attributes of consumer’s society: with his Ford Consul and “Photography Shop, at number 9 Main Street,” Mick Macardle “the movie man” brings Hollywood glamour to Barntrosna (Mondo 79). Dermot Mooney is yet another unreliable narrator who protests too much:  “Despite assertions—​and there have been some!—​that it is mere conjecture and foolish rambling on my part! For I, Dermot Mooney, am no erratic, fevered fantasist, and never have been!” (Mondo 80). Dermot pictures Macardle discussing evil plans in Amsterdam with “a sinister individual of foreign complexion” (Mondo

104 Coulouma 80): here too modernity is associated with foreignness, strangeness and corruption. Mick lures Dermot and his uncle to the set of a pornographic film, later opening a supermarket and completing his takeover of the town: “Mick Macardle opened a supermarket, the very first of its kind in the country, and ever since is to be seen cruising around brashly in his open-​topped convertible in streets that are now littered with drug addicts and disco bars. I understand he has entered politics and resides in a magnificent converted castle on the outskirts of the town” (Mondo 93). This ironically prefigures the Haughey-​­esque corruption of 1980s Ireland. In his irrational fear of the foreign, Dermot misses a crucial detail however:  the seeds of evil are borne at home, as his uncle’s name, Louis Lestrange, playfully suggests. The evolving mores of small-​town Ireland stem as much from a native impetus as they are shaped by outside influences, and the recurring tension between domestic and foreign threats throughout Mondo Desperado reflects the characters’ confused understanding of historical change. In “The Luck of Dympna Wrigley,” Dympna leaves her ailing mother in Barntrosna to seek her fortune in Dublin. Her subsequent descent into prostitution is eventually halted when a rich client marries her. Hers is an ambiguous happy ending, “beneath the hot, burning sun of Tuscany” (Mondo 109). While she has escaped her sadistic procurer, she still has visions of him as she “stroll[s]‌ across the terrazzo towards the villa and into the outstretched arms of her cigar-​chomping, wolf-​grinning husband” (Mondo 110). Her Tuscan paradise is more akin to the flames of hell than to the soothing warmth of Eden, both a promise of happiness and the ominous harbinger of tragic fate. Similarly, in “The Big Prize,” the elsewhere is associated with exoticism and sunny climes and viewed as a promise of escape, but it comes with a cost. This third-​person narrative set in contemporary Ireland takes on the hypocrisy of an Irish literary establishment capitalizing on the traumas of the past. Pats Donaghy wins a prize for his novel, A Kalashnikov for Shamus Doyle, hailed as “the cutting edge of the new Irish urban realism” (Mondo 117). Pats’ success as a writer of the Barntrosna life is precisely what helps him escape, first to “ the Miami Towers Estate” in Dublin, then further away (Mondo 119): … there are many exotic and beguiling lands to visit, the world opening like a dazzling oyster before him and Mammy as they board the vessel which is to take them far beyond their native shores, to the white, powdered sands of the South Sea Islands, where beneath waving palms on a wickerwork table he shall forge ahead with his latest opus, The Barntrosna Files, in which a shy young man is confronted by a series of events which eventually make him face the truth about himself. (Mondo 122)

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Yet Pats’ story also has an ambivalent happy-​ending. With his sister dead and his mother suffering from senile dementia, Pats resumes his work with a vision of himself “shot three times through the head with a .357 Magnum” (Mondo 123). Fantasies of violence haunt the dream of the elsewhere, and exile is no cure for the traumas of home. Finally, McCabe brings his fantasies of the elsewhere to comical extremes with “My Friend Bruce Lee,” in which another delusional first-​person narrator, “Helmet-​Head” McGeough, sends letters to his idol Bruce Lee through the local newspaper. When his neighbours reply to his mail and send an impersonator to meet him, his divorce from reality becomes complete. McGeough, whose sole experience of the “Orient” is the “Red Lotus Temple restaurant in Mullingar” (Mondo 40), claims extensive knowledge of “the maestro” (Mondo 44) but cannot see through his neighbours’ prank: “What I found quite extraordinary about the man when I first encountered him was that he was quite unlike himself” (Mondo 38). McGeough comically betrays his psychotic delusion early on when he describes his hero’s voice: “Avid viewers of his films will be aware that the movement of the fighter’s lips will not always correspond to the sound which is to be heard on the soundtrack, for which reason I felt for a long time that my hero suffered from a slight speech impediment” (Mondo 39). McGeough is unable to decipher the artifice of fiction, or a dubbed soundtrack; such confusion between fiction and reality is a recurring theme in McCabe’s work. In BB, Francie illustrates with gruesome violence the dangerous effects of television and movies. In BoP, Patrick Braden deliberately loses himself in a fantasy world to escape the violence of his real life, but it does not save him from the mental institution. The blurred boundaries of fiction are a significant aspect of McCabe’s satire at all narrative levels:  against the irreducible violence of reality, he opposes the ethical necessity of fiction, and his writing as a whole can be considered a cathartic coming to terms with Ireland’s history of violence. In Mondo Desperado, McGeough’s delusion is harmless, although the tale concludes with an ominous call for violence: “I (…) dream of youths who (…) course the Mao-​red skies before landing with the force of a human grenade upon those who would dare to wage war upon his much-​loved humanity, (…) exultantly crushing every bone in their heads” (Mondo 48). While McGeough’s obsession is clearly pathological, his longing for another life elicits sympathy when brought up against the “Bridge Bar Social Security Association (…) whose greatest achievement in life appeared to be the acquisition of a 10p increase in their social security payments” (Mondo 43). Barntrosna’s real world is about survival at home, not the Orient-​Express. In the end there is no exploring foreign shores for McGeough, and his fantasy of the elsewhere remains a lie.

106 Coulouma McCabe depicts the confusion of fiction and reality through the geographic fantasies of his small-​town characters, and through their distorted perception of the outside world. Between evil, primitive foreigners and the alluring promise of exotic shores, McCabe’s subjects fail to situate themselves in a new, fluctuating and forever expanding world. As the distinction between outside reality and inner world of the mind gradually fades, the Irish experience of place unfolds as a story of madness and schizophrenia. 3

Split Narratives and the Schizophrenic Subject

Mondo Desperado’s increasingly blurred distinction between outside and inside in spatial, geographic and symbolic terms reflects the schizophrenic symptoms of its paranoid subjects, who can never fully identify with a hometown that oppresses them, but are unable to leave. McCabe expresses his town’s schizophrenic traumas through the recurring themes of hallucination, alienation, and fragmentation. Such themes pervade his work as a whole and are crucial to his “bog gothic” representation of Irish society through the lens of economic, institutional and political violence. In Mondo’s first story, “Hot Nights At The Go-​Go Lounge,” paranoid husband Larry Bunyan believes his wife cavorts every night at the local dive. The incredulity of his colleague and implausible tone of his own narrative betray his locked-​in nonsensical logic. “They say a thought can grow in a man’s mind until it becomes an obsession; a tiny grain of salt swell and grow until it fills up a room. They’re right” (Mondo 8). Bunyan’s perceptive remark ironically fails to awaken him to his own delusion. He starts experiencing life-​like hallucinations and gradually loses his mind: “something unpredictable happened—​a kinda shifting of the psychological axis, maybe you could call it (…) it was as if the window display had become fiercely, insanely alive!” (Mondo 8–​9). Bunyan’s paranoid crisis is induced by a lethal blend of, on the one hand, the imported soft-​porn magazines of the newly uncensored newsagent, and on the other hand, the old Irish disease of alcoholism: “By the time the last shot went down, everything was clear” (Mondo 9). In “My Friend Bruce Lee,” the narrator’s obsession physically changes him: he wears a Bruce Lee haircut and cotton pyjamas to emulate his Kung Fu hero, but the pyjamas also ironically remind us of the patients’ uniform in a mental institution. “I Ordained the Devil” and “The Hands of Dingo Deery” are stories of psychotic paranoia, reflecting the pathological impulses of Church-​dominated Ireland far into the twentieth century: a culture of silence over child abuse and the exploitation of women in Magdalen laundries, as well as the persistent influence of the Church on social policies

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regarding issues such as homosexuality, divorce and abortion, were hotly debated issues in 1990s Ireland, and they underline McCabe’s darkly humorous stories in Mondo. In “The Valley of The Flying Jennets,” the narrator protests that his outlandish tale is not the product of “excessive consumption of white powders and opium tablets” (161). Here also, his paranoid hallucinations can be traced to the very tangible, mental and physical exploitation of the “ancestors of some law-​abiding, good-​natured Labashaca folk” by the Protestant gentry embodied by “Fortescue Hastings-​Parkes, (…) a noted Victorian biologist, biochemist and physician” (Mondo 157). McCabe evokes the pathological structure of Catholic Ireland through his darkly comic tales of devil and monsters, offering his ultimate satirical comment in “The Big Prize,” with Pats Donaghy’s clinically insane mother: “nothing would sway her from the conviction that not only was Pats not her son but that he was, in fact, His Eminence Pope John Paul, the head of the one true Church” (Mondo 121). McCabe’s psychotic characters systematically misinterpret reality: angelic becomes evil, loyalty, betrayal, and common sense, distorted logic. Their experience among their peers is therefore one of exclusion and marginality. This is expressed in spatial terms as their voluntary or forced exile, or as their gradual isolation and retreat within the confines of the town. In Mondo, spatial, physical and behavioural apartness are all symptoms of the schizophrenic small-​town Irish life. First, marginality means sexual deviance and a disruption in the superficially stable gendered structure of the Irish experience. The sudden liberalization of social norms in Barntrosna brutally reveals the deep-​seated sexual fantasies of a town that still seeks to project de Valera’s “cosy homestead” morality. As in McCabe’s other novels, the close-​knit small-​town community wields gossip and ostracism to ensure social conformism and an adherence to the Catholic stereotypes of sexual restraint and industrious virtue, yet this only leads to a growing discrepancy between people’s public life and their private fantasies and pursuits. Dympna Wrigley becomes a prostitute in Dublin, Larry Bunyan imagines his wife as a modest housewife by day and lecherous go-​go dancer at night, Louis Lestrange and his nephew take part in a pornographic movie, Packie Cooley’s nemesis claims to have been tricked into a sexual orgy at the rectory, and Thomas Gully succumbs to the advances of a prostitute. Noreen Tiernan’s lesbianism and her neighbour’s transvestism finally echo McCabe’s BoP and his reflections on the subversive power of liberated sexuality. Impulses cannot be shut out of the individual or collective consciousness, as Packie Cooley’s paranoid bishop reminds us: “the diabolic genes (…)[had been] implanted within me as I slept, the consummate consequence of which would be that, helpless to prevent myself, I would find

108 Coulouma myself running amok in the streets and villages of Ireland, murdering people, robbing and looting shops, selling drugs and burning down churches and people’s houses” (Mondo 69–​70). While this is reminiscent of the sectarian violence of the Troubles, it also underlines McCabe’s point that violence, strangeness and the uncanny constitute the very core of the Irish experience. Beyond McCabe’s portrait of the town and its inhabitants, his fragmented narrative structure directly reflects his stories of madness and disintegration of the subject. First, the narrative status of the book is unclear: while it is subtitled “a serial novel,” its fictional editor praises Hackball’s fine “stories.” Most of the stories are told in the first-​person but with different narrators, and the recurring yet distinct “I” in a book about fragmented subjectivity emphasizes the overall sense of disorientation. An answer to the ambiguous status of the “serial novel” can be found in the tradition of the chronicle: like Pats Donaghy, McCabe presents us with his own Barntrosna files, a chronicle of life in the vein of journalistic serials such as Myles na gCopaleen’s Cruiskeen Lawn and, more recently, the fragmented novels of Julian Gough. While following in the Swiftian and Sternian tradition of meta-​narrative games, McCabe’s embedded editorial layers contribute to his fragmented narrative and authorial schizophrenia, questioning the notion of a wholesome, singular “author” in control of his work. Between “Patrick McCabe” and “Phildy Hackball”—​whose name debunks the seriousness of the whole enterprise—​we are left to decide what voice tells us the stories. The “biography” at the end of the book describes a lazy author who “likes to have a few jars”:  “Mr Hackball currently lives in Barntrosna, where he is working on a novel (‘with plenty of shooting—​and a shark!), and divides his time between the Bridge Bar and his home in Main Street” (Mondo 229). Hackball is a teller of tall tales who might just be a con artist capitalising on the Irish tradition of trauma narratives. McCabe’s array of fictional narrators ultimately plays into his satire of the Irish author, depicted in “The Big Prize” as a narcissistic and possessive mummy’s boy who secretly rejoices when his sister dies. With such a dark picture of the Irish psyche, black humour and ironic distance remain McCabe’s only way out, for his characters, narrators and readers alike. Patrick McCabe’s black humour anchors Mondo Desperado in his trademark bog Gothic genre, deliberately inscribing the novel in the liminal spaces of fiction. The notion of place is crucial to McCabe’s depiction of Ireland after the 1950s: as the traumas of the past confront the challenges of the present, the chaotic dislocation of space becomes both the symbol and symptom of a fragmented Irish identity. At this stage in our analysis, Mondo Desperado can rightfully assert its claim to the mondo genre: exploiting lurid tales of sex and violence to make a truthful comment on reality is what Mondo Desperado does.

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Its dark chronicle of life in a small Irish town exploits and subverts the codes of the genre while furthering McCabe’s satire of Irish psychoses. Mondo Desperado sheds its disenchanted light on the dark side of the Irish experience, leaving another mark in the Irish literary landscape. Let us give one of McCabe’s fictional alter egos the last word as we close our reading of the Mondo Desperado stories, to confirm that No one, I feel certain, who comes into contact with them can fail to be affected by them, these wondrous journeyings, eclectic voyagings into the interior, which, for the first time, permit us a glimpse (…) into a world which is truly desperate. Works Cited Augé, Marc. Non-​Places:  Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995 [orig. 1992]. Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–​2002. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Goodall, Mark. Shockumentary Evidence: “The Perverse Politics of the Mondo Film.” In Stephanie Dennison & Song Hwee Lim (Eds.), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (pp. 118–​125). London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Herron, Tom. “ContamiNation:  Patrick McCabe and Colm Tóibín’s Pathographies of the Republic.” In Liam Harte & Michael Parker (Eds.), Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (pp. 168–​91). Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1916. Kilfeather, Siobhán. “The Gothic Novel.” In John Wilson Foster (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (pp. 78–96. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006. McCabe, Patrick. BB. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1992. McCabe, Patrick. The Dead School. London: Picador, 1995. McCabe, Patrick BoP. London: Picador, 1998. McCabe, Patrick. Mondo Desperado. London: pqd, 1999. O’Donoghue, David. The Irish Army in the Congo 1960–​64:  The Far Battalions. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005. O’Mahony, John. (2003, August 30). “King of Bog Gothic.” The Guardian. Retrieved from http://​www.theguardian.com/​books/​2003/​aug/​30/​fiction.patrickmccabe

Chapter 7

Violence, Peace, and Priests in Adapting Breakfast on Pluto Lindsay Haney The years between 1998 and 2005 saw major changes in the chief preoccupations of Irish culture and Irish letters. With peace holding in the North and economic success largely sustaining in the Republic, the continuing revelations of abuse in the Catholic Church and the increasing importance and steady pressures of globalization became for many audiences more pressing concerns than the violent legacy of the Troubles. The film adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s 1998 novel BoP reflects many of these changes. In its recounting of the adventures of the queer Pussy Braden against the backdrop of the early years of the Troubles, the novel plays Pussy’s gender indeterminacy against the porous border in the North and the violence of the Troubles. The 2005 film, directed by Neil Jordan from a script by Jordan and McCabe, re-​situates the travels of the protagonist (here Kitten) against a more cosmopolitan background, emphasizing relations to the institutional Church over the acts of sectarian violence in the novel. Read in the context of post-​scandal responses to the priesthood, elements of the film which might otherwise seem sanitized or like concessions to an international marketplace reveal themselves to be part of a key moment in the process of Irish cultural production coming to grips with the new stature of the Catholic Church and its most visible representatives. The novel centers on Patrick Braden, known as Pussy, born in the border town of Tyreelin to a priest’s housekeeper and given over to profit-​motivated foster care. As he grows up, he finds that he has to some extent a preference for men and for feminine pronouns, and [s]‌he invests substantial energy in finding a place for herself in her hometown before moving on to London and a series of adventures, including varieties of sex work and a period in jail as a bombing suspect. The novel’s treatment of violence is meticulous enough to suggest to at least one reader that Pussy is potentially a murderer, complicit even in torture (Jeffers 171). The novel emerges, however, precisely as ongoing physical force republicanism is explicitly defeated at the ballot box. BoP was published on May 25, 1998, three days after referenda supporting the Belfast Agreement passed with 71% of the vote in Northern Ireland and over 94% in the Republic. In overwhelmingly voting yes, citizens of the Republic endorsed

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_008

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a constitutional change that officially redefined their relationship to the North, releasing their present claim to the territory and undermining the primary argument used to legitimate armed struggle. The novel arrives, therefore, concurrently with a mandate to privilege an end to violence over various national, religious, and sectarian aims. The novel’s acts of violence may be read for a small degree of ambiguity, though violence in the text is never valorized. It is chiefly through the detail offered in scenes of murder and torture that violence is critiqued, but that detail may also seem sensational or (to some readers) pass without critique. This complexity fits the texts neatly into Liam Harte and Michael Parker’s category of Peace Process novels. A distinct subgenre of narratives, written between 1994 and 1998, are identified by Harte and Parker as concerned to some degree with truth and reconciliation, tending to meditate on the roots and psychological aftermath of violence, and often set in the 1970s or 80s rather than the decade of their composition. These novels are apt to include “troubled protagonists and […] narrators [who] reshape themselves against a backdrop of public and private traumas” (Harte et al 232–​254). BoP is very much the story of Pussy’s effort to reshape herself in a way that draws upon nationally-​encoded ideals of family life and is meant to heal the traumas imposed upon her by Church and state, but that is rejected by political and religious orthodoxy. Notably, while her feelings about her sexuality could be fit under a rubric of gender dysphoria or otherwise be easily medicalized, it is her traumatic abandonment (blamed in part upon religious narrowness and clerical license in the Republic) and to a lesser extent the violence that touches her (spilling over from the North) that necessitate her treatment. Not only a memoir, but an instrument of psychological recovery, the novel is framed as being written by Pussy at the urging of her therapist Dr. Terrence in an effort to address past traumas. Unreliable in narrative voice and unclear in its timelines, the greater part of the novel is concerned with cataloging the rejections and abuses perpetrated upon Pussy by family members and lovers. At the same time, it also records in great detail incidents of sectarian violence—​ both republican and loyalist—​which are construed as dreams, imaginings, parodies, and mock confessions, all through a narrative voice rooted in Pussy’s fantastical matter-​of-​factness. As is characteristic of McCabe’s work, the personal and the political are thus uncomfortably merged, and the retrospective form enacts a steady, backward gaze as part of a healing process that remains uncompleted at the close of the novel. McCabe does not write out of an interest in engaging with theories of gender, but he has a Butlerian approach to proliferation of gender, with which he risks confusing critics (Butler 66). Pussy brackets her wishes for long-​term

112 Haney gender performance from her immediate iterations of gendered behavior. In the long term, she seeks not so much to become her mother, but to become what she imagines her mother should have been. She imagines film star Mitzi Gaynor (to whom her mother is said to have a resemblance) as a homemaker, and wishes explicitly to take over that role, and to become a mother of as many as ten children. Her romantic relationships are constructed around a fantasy of addressing the lack of her mother by placing herself in that role, and to that end she has surrounded herself with sentimentality, informed by popular culture. Her ideal protector is Vic Damone, and the sentimental pop crooner is her gold standard for both music and masculinity. When Pussy meets Bertie Wooster (a London-​based benefactor) and develops a regular cabaret act, it is based around Dusty Springfield songs, a repertoire rich in sentiment and camp and a mainstay of the drag cabaret scene. At a different point in the novel, Mr. Silky String, a client who ends up trying to strangle Pussy, calls her “old fashioned” for her taste in music, but the observation could just as accurately be made about her ideas of gender roles (BoP 66). She works assiduously toward a settled domesticity for herself as a wife and mother, but in one of a small number of noncommercial sexual experiences Pussy describes, she has intercourse with her best friend Charlie (a woman) (BoP 54). Her sentimental interest in pastness and desire to perform normative femininity by providing a comfortable life for a family does not interfere with her ability to recognize and embrace a mode of connection valuable to her in the moment—​even one that runs entirely counter to her other gendered performances in the novel. She refuses binaries in ways that not only destabilize gender, but put her outside of received boundaries for the perpetration of violence. Jennifer Jeffers reads that destabilization of gender as potentially implicating Pussy in violence (Jeffers 171). Jeffers is right to recognize Pussy’s unreliability, but perhaps too eager to settle on a stable set of identities for her; she sees Pussy passing when she is more accurately just performing gender in a nonconforming fashion. Jeffers’ misreading then becomes instructive: she holds out the possibility that Pussy is involved in the violent crimes with which she is charged, reading a shifting narrative voice as though it were consistent (she presumes that Pussy is speaking at all times and can only be speaking to events of which she has direct knowledge) and investing heavily in binaries of homosexuality and heterosexuality—​in one instance suggesting that it is unlikely that “McCabe is […] just ‘having us on’ by putting both heterosexual and homosexual innuendos in the text,” as though the two types of innuendo are mutually exclusive in the homosocial cohort of the involved hard man (Jeffers 174). Jeffers’ narrower reading of gender possibilities risks falling into the same trap that the credulous London police of the narrative do:  seeing drag and

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presuming that it must be disguise rather than a proliferating performance of gender, and equating stability in gender with trustworthiness and predictability in other regards, including relationships to national struggle and violence. Jeffers’ reading is therefore show to be of its time—​an index of peace process-​ era thinking—​focusing on definition and re-​definition of identity. The presumption of stability or of iterative rather than fluid identities would recede in Ireland’s continued prosperity, as we see reflected in the more fluid identities foregrounded in the film adaptation just a few years later. For his part, McCabe describes the torture sequences in the novel as moments of contrast that are as important for their formal contribution as their content: a “stark monochrome” against the “soap bubble” color of the balance of the narrative, and something which had “passed its sell-​by date” by the time McCabe was working with Neil Jordan on a film script.1 McCabe observed that within a few years of the Belfast Agreement, no-​one wanted to read about or see torture on screen in a Northern context. It is therefore perhaps understandable that Jeffers would be caught out by this moment of permeability in the border between “old” interpretations of violence and new ones. The violence described in the novel is in almost every case rhetorically balanced and justified by its perpetrators as a recrimination for a previous action. Among its many other borders, this novel stands at the border between the period in which the logic of tit-​for-​tat violence is dominant, or credible, or at least sadly expected, and the period in which a new dispensation obtains (Mullen 128).2 In sometimes unintelligibly performing gender in ways that trouble those sorts of divisions and that refuse participation in cyclical violence, Pussy can be seen as the queer character who guides the way to that new dispensation by making peace with unresolvedness. McCabe reaches beyond the impulse to make meaning of violence, mirroring its irreducibility in Pussy’s resistance to binaries. Behind the more obvious and literal feminization—​she would like to “somehow manage to get a vagina,” after all—​this is perhaps her greater gender innovation (BoP 40). McCabe’s emphasis on gender and violence recedes for the film, which comes at a later point in a changing discourse around modernity, Europe, and especially the priest and the institutional Church. As the Catholic Church struggled with its own legitimacy in the decade following the major clerical scandals that became international news in the mid-​1990s, changing 1 Patrick McCabe, interviewed by author, Dublin, Ireland, October 13, 2011. 2 The idea of a border is a useful image in reading BoP. In a slightly different context, Patrick R. Mullen teases out some of the implications of McCabe’s assertion that the novel is “about politics and borders and gender borders,” and the disruptions that accompany borders.

114 Haney representations of the priest became a rich venue for critique. As the values of a more prosperous Ireland in many ways diverged from those of the Church, the Church’s hypocrisies were more frequently and more successfully invoked in literature to license that departure and propose alternatives. The film version of BoP stands out among this body of literature for its remarkable focus on the rehabilitation of a priest and its suggestion of shared responsibility for at least a part of the institutional Church’s crimes. In the recent period of upheaval, no major group within Ireland has suffered a loss of status comparable to that of the Catholic priesthood. Before the scandal era, the position brought with it both temporal, local power and an increased access to the resources of the international Church. Being a priest also came with a performance of masculinity that was recognized as authoritative, behaving as “the chief instruments of the Church’s social control, the means through which it could directly shape the imagination of the people from altar and pulpit” (Nugent 596–​613, 596). In a primarily American context, Lee Edelman describes the broadly normative power of reproductive futurism, the political logic of the “figural Child [that] alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed” (Edelman 11). Irish clerics have long been successful in mobilizing the population around issues relating to the “figural Child.” In one of the most glaring examples of this exercise of power, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid successfully opposed the Mother and Child Scheme of 1951, protecting the Child (in abstract) from a diminished Church, creeping socialism, and the vague threat of eventual steps toward birth control or abortion, all at the expense of the actual children and expectant mothers who would have benefitted from the plan. While McQuaid was politically powerful even for an archbishop, ordination of any priest did in practice confer at least some portion of reflected temporal power along with (and as a part of) religious rank and duties. The precipitous decline in clerical status, from a height in the Free State and under McQuaid to a point of vocational decline at which only twelve Irish men were reported to enter training for the priesthood in 2012,3 is in many ways an index of modernity in Ireland. 3 This figure comes from Michael Kelly, “Irish Priestly Vocations in Worrying Decline,” The Catholic World Reporter, Oct. 30, 2012, accessed June 27, 2014, http://​www.catholicworldreport.com/​Item/​1706/​irish_​priestly_​vocations_​in_​worrying_​decline.aspx. Much of the effect came in the 1990s, with Robert J. Savage and James M. Smith reporting a falling-​off from 164 in 1970 to 30 in 2001. Robert J. Savage and James M. Smith, “Sexual Abuse and the Irish Church:  Crisis and Responses,” The Church in the 21st Century:  Occasional

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Two waves of scandal overtook the church in the 1990s, accounting for the precipitous decline in clerical stature: the first centering on priestly sexual hypocrisy (including revelations of secret families), and the second consisting of abuse allegations. As guardians of propriety, priests have a carefully proscribed place in sexuality. Edelman highlights the irony that the “gift of life,” the “gift understood by the Church as the gift of compassion par excellence,” is unavailable to Church leaders because of “the doctrine of celibacy to which its own priests still are pledged” (Edelman 90). The fundamental importance of the divide between the manly work of begetting and the manly work of regulating the spiritual and sexual life of one’s flock was such that even as abuse revelations mounted, outrage at hypocrisy and the breaking of vows rivaled or exceeded shock at sexual violence against children. As a matter of common sense, continued attention to hypocrisy and oath-​breaking seems like a failure to respond appropriately or proportionately to child abuse, and to an extent it is. But putting aside commensurability, the two crimes involved in sexual abuse have different implications for the priesthood’s claim to legitimacy. Abusive priests transgress doubly: first by violating vows of celibacy, and second by the harm inflicted on their victims. While obviously less consequential in human terms, the breach of a vow of celibacy has immediate institutional implications. As the decade unfolded, plays like Gerard Stembridge’s Love Child (1992)4 and Michael Harding’s Sour Grapes (1997)5 took up the political and institutional implications of both clerical sexual incontinence and abuse, with countless other texts giving us depictions of the priest as a pathetic or, more often, dangerous figure, and the period’s rare good men in clericals seem always on the cusp of being forced out of the priesthood. On film and with a strong commercial need to connect with an international audience, Neil Jordan’s 2005 adaptation of BoP gives us a more cosmopolitan set of Irish characters and a functional and decent cleric who is able to stay in the priesthood (if only just).6 The film’s Father Liam is a post-​scandal priest who is not only able to perform his duties confidently and ably (for the cinema audience if not his parishioners as depicted in the film) but to be something Papers, Number 8, 2003, Boston College eScholarship, accessed June 14, 2014, https://​www2. bc.edu/​~smithbt/​Sexual%20Abuse%20and%20the%20Irish%20Church_​%20Crisis%20 and%20Responses.pdf. 4 Gerard Stembridge, Love Child, Project Arts Centre, typescript, 1992, www.irishplayography. com. 5 Michael Harding, Sour Grapes, Abbey Theatre, in New Plays for the Abbey Theatre Volume Two, 1996–​1998, eds. Judy Friel and Sanford Sternlicht (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001): 3–​57. 6 BoP. dvd. Directed by Neil Jordan, screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe. (2005; New York: Sony Pictures Classics, 2006).

116 Haney of a hero. The figure of Father Liam brings together several uncelibate priest tropes, including many from the examples cited above: the idea of a more honest life available for those who would leave behind their vows and embrace their sexuality, the dangerous complexity of having non-​pastoral relationships with parishioners or persons otherwise in the care of clergy, and the relationship of clerical power to that of the laity. But unlike earlier scandal-​era texts, the film resolves them in fairy-​tale fashion.7 While the book fits neatly into Liam Harte and Michael Parker’s rubric for the Peace Process novel, the film reflects a wider range of concerns about contemporary Irish identity, especially around gender and the Church. The basic plot’s several departures from the novel enhance this breadth of interest. The film’s Patrick “Kitten” Braden leaves Tyreelin by catching a ride with Billy Hatchett and the Mohawks, a glam rock show band, and travels on both sides of the border as Hatchett’s lover and a part-​time band member (a squaw, fitting with the band’s sequined Native American theme). After a car bomb in Tyreelin claims the life of Laurence,8 things sour with Billy, who had been holding arms for the ira. Kitten heads to London to try to find her mother, works as a Womble on Wimbledon Common, a sex worker, and eventually as a magician’s assistant, all before being detained in connection with a bombing in which she was injured. The police who interrogate her realize their mistake and get her a safer job at a cooperatively organized peep show, where her father, Father Liam, eventually finds her and tells her the whereabouts of her mother. She meets but does not identify herself to her mother and then returns to Tyreelin, where Charlie, now pregnant with the deceased Irwin’s child, has been kicked out of her house and is living under Father Liam’s care. The three of them live happily together until parishioners firebomb the presbytery and Father Liam needs to execute a daring rescue of the others. All three leave Ireland, with Kitten and Charlie departing first and Father Liam planning to take a position at a parish in Kilburn. Charlie has the baby, which will be raised by her and Kitten in London with the suggestion of frequent visits from Father Liam.

7 McCabe, interview by author. 8 In the novel, Laurence’s Down Syndrome results in a more profound disability than what we see in the film, and in the book he is made to witnesses his mother’s rape and to cheerfully fetch his rosary beads before being shot (McCabe, BoP, 46–​7). The bomb in film is meant to evoke the Monaghan bombing of 17 May 1974; the Ulster Defense Force claimed responsibility for the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1993, so while the Protestant-​ness of the violence has been toned down for the film, the responsible parties would still be clear to many audiences.

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Kitten’s association with Billy Hatchett has important connotations for the film’s engagement with modern performances of masculinity and their dependence upon a receptive audience, setting the stage for Father Liam’s eventual redemption. Hatchett takes the place of the novel’s Eamon Faircroft, a politician similarly involved with the ira. By 2005, the importance of Ireland’s rock and pop stars relative to its politicians was quite high, and in addition to the pleasing possibilities of putting on a show within the film, having Billy distance himself from Pussy over republicanism’s selective tolerance for non-​normative gender performance is a more nuanced use of the character than Faircroft’s death in a bombing. The casting of Gavin Friday, a bona fide Friend of Bono, also heightens the stakes of this particular musician’s social responsibilities for informed domestic audiences. On non-​political levels as well, there is a richness in the disconnect between the glam rock front presented by Billy and the Mohawks and the political and social conservatisms that they show beneath that surface. In this context it is helpful to understand Glam as a more European phenomenon. At least one representative example may be found in the film’s soundtrack. The song “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” was written by an Italian (Lally Stott), and recorded by the Scottish group Middle of the Road, who took it to number one in Britain for five weeks. The band didn’t crack the UK charts again after 1972, but continued to have a significant continental following thereafter. This model of mobility in composition, performance, and marketing is representative of the broader glam phenomenon, in which TV shows from continental Europe and the audiences they reached were of vital commercial importance. As the film approaches 1973 and Ireland’s eec membership, this European element seems particularly important, linking Kitten’s positive excess to cultural mobility and to the major change that would be credited for Ireland’s prosperity in the coming decades. Furthermore, given the important legal role that Europe had in liberalizing Irish policy on homosexuality, every step towards Europe is also a small victory for Kitten. While the adoption of a glam rock style should not be conflated with the advertisement of sexual preference (real-​world practitioners often found themselves attempting to clarify this point with imperfect success), the requirements of such a performance would weed out some performers entirely wedded to strict gender norms.9 Billy very quickly takes an interest in Kitten, but his first real interaction with her is to menacingly tell her “I don’t think you care either way” about the situation north of the border. Once their romantic

9 Philip Auslander’s Performing Glam Rock is the central text on the Butlerian gender performances facilitated by glam conventions.

118 Haney attachment forms, Billy protects and financially supports Kitten and allows her to perform with the band as a “squaw,” complementing their existing gender and cultural appropriations but visibly disgusting the rest of the band during on- and off-​stage romantic interludes between the two. At one point, a bandmate expresses shock at Billy’s interest in Kitten, and is answered with a pointed reminder of time Billy took away from the band during a tour in San Francisco. The Mohawks nevertheless tolerate the behavior until Kitten’s performance at a Republican Prisoners’ Welfare Association benefit, where a single sweeping shot pulls back from the stage to survey young women and couples happily dancing, before turning to the back of the room and a large group of young men, crowded beneath a republican banner, who begin heckling Kitten and throwing beer cans at the band onstage. Kitten’s behavior could apparently be countenanced as a smaller open secret, but can’t withstand the oppressive force of organized republicanism. Her tenuous hold on the ability to perform a more authentic gender identity, even after she leaves home and takes up with the most non-​conformist group of outsider figures she can find, is ultimately threatened by a demand for outward sexual conformity within the republican community. The impossibility of escape to a safe place for her gender performance is the primary plot complication facing Pussy. Leaving Tyreelin with Billy affords her no lasting freedom, and even when she removes herself to pagan England, the Troubles follow her there. It is therefore surprising when, despite the expectations of the post-​scandal priest genre, the plot points of McCabe’s novel, and Pussy’s earlier imagining of Father Liam’s rape of Pussy’s mother, returning to Tyreelin and the bosom of her f/​Father provides her greatest refuge. When asked about the change in the character from the unreconciled Father Bernard of the novel to the heroic Father Liam of the film, McCabe explains that his formal aims for the novel precluded substantial characterization of Father Bernard.10 Pussy’s breathless narration and the “hyperreality” of the scenes she described would have been hampered by the sustained presence of a priest who, in 1998, would demand a degree of “social realism” in an approach to the Church’s culpability. In preparing to adapt the novel, conscious of the requirements of commercial filmmaking, McCabe in his first pass at the screenplay needed to flesh out the character. He describes the decision to redeem Father Liam in the context of scandal and the public’s approach to scandal: That came out of, in Ireland, a lot of anti-​clerical feeling, but for me anti-​clericalism is old hat. I’d had all those battles with the clergy in the 10

McCabe, interview by author.

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seventies, so now that it’s popular, I’ve lost interest in it. It’s a bit late now anyway. These things were all staring everybody in the face forty years ago; it’s a bit easy …. So I thought, “Let’s make the priest a good man.”11 Father Liam’s stature (in more ways than one—​the casting of Liam Neeson, whose professional persona depends substantially upon an impression of decency, is a boon to this characterization) also supported audience willingness to see a positive priest. When asked if he and Jordan considered the possibility that they would be seen as apologists, McCabe answers, “of course we did,” but that “it didn’t come up. Nobody said that at all.”12,13 Perhaps most importantly, Father Liam’s characterization also encourages some consideration of non-​clerical sources of repression that might continue to have significance in post-​scandal Ireland. Nearly every sexually nonconforming priest in Irish literature of the scandal era to this point has, either with or without the self-​knowledge to realize it, offered a glimpse at the happier, open life he might have led. One of the innovations of Father Liam is that he is best able to meet his responsibilities as a (parental) father by doing his duties as a parochial Father. For a time—​until the violent intervention of his congregation—​he is able to enjoy fulfilment in both. His initial re-​connection with Kitten is a reversal of an earlier scene in which Kitten confronts him in a confessional to tell the story (as well as he knows it at the time) of his mother’s departure from the town and Father Liam’s role in it. In a mirror of that scene, Father Liam appears in the darkened booth of Kitten’s peep show stall and speaks of his regret and his love for both Kitten and his mother before giving Kitten the mother’s address and disappearing. Speaking in the third person, he explains that Though his father loved him very much […] he could never tell the boy how much he loved him. [….] Because he didn’t know how. He had the words for many things, you see, but he didn’t have the words for that. […] 11 12 13

Ibid. Ibid. For his part, Neil Jordan has long been interested in the institutional power of the Catholic Church and the human relations that are touched by it throughout modern history. That interest motivates his adaptation of The End of the Affair (1999), and we see a version of this in The Borgias (2011–​2013). A gentler example, perhaps his ideal, would be Stephen Rea’s portrayal of the Priest in Ondine (2009), a figure who offers even nonbelievers the comfort of confession (stripped of its sacramental apparatus if necessary) in a film taken up with a reimagining of folkloric material in the context of a contemporary broken family being healed by immigration.

120 Haney He never told him, and the boy left and came to England, and the father had lots of time to think about it …. All the things that might have been. Should have been. He had all the time in the world to think. As Jordan mentions in the dvd commentary, this scene is an homage to the climactic conversation in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) but Jordan reverses much of the intent of Wenders’ scene.14 Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson describes an unresolvable nightmare of jealousy and violent recrimination tearing his family apart—​a crisis intensified by alcohol but clearly having its root in an overactive imagination. Neeson as Father Liam describes his failure as a lack of imagination and language. Both fathers profess a desire to reunite their children with their mother, but, as becomes clear in a few minutes of screen time, Father Liam now has the imagination to integrate his earthly family with his spiritual responsibilities. The conspicuous sincerity of Father Liam’s fairytale language dovetails with the forms of romantic commitment Kitten looks for in asking all of her potential paramours to use the language of a Bobby Goldsboro song to assure her of their syrupy feelings. In the peep show booth, however, it is also a revision of the earlier, botched confession. Father Liam runs away before Kitten may speak with him further, but this narrative necessity (Kitten still needs to reunite with her mother) pays off when she soon returns to the presbytery in Tyreelin, uncoerced and on her own terms. When Father Liam opens the door to Kitten, her first question is, “what will I  call you?” to which he answers, “Father. You call me father.” The approach seems at first to be a blurring, to provide linguistic cover for him, to hide the unacceptable “father” behind the deferential “Father.” But as we immediately see, he continues to be focused on his priestly remit as well as his parenting. When Kitten hesitates for a moment, he tells her, “I prayed, you know. I prayed you’d come back.” Upon Kitten’s arrival, Father Liam is already caring for Charlie, who, after Irwin’s death and a drugs charge of her own is pregnant and without anywhere else to stay.15 Few acts of Christian charity are associated with priests in texts of the period, but in these scenes Kitten and Father Liam together nurse Charlie to health at the expense of his reputation among his parishioners, openly risking the hazards that eventually befall them at the hands of his congregation. As this is going on, Father Liam is also convincing 14 15

Paris, Texas. dvd. Directed by Wim Wenders 1984. New York: Criterion Collection, 2009. In an apparent concession to wiser viewers in the 2000s, Kitten asks, “Where do you sleep father?” to which he answers, “Ah, don’t worry about me,” and we do later see him in his own very small bed.

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Kitten of the depth of his relationship with her mother, filling in details of their courtship and the places that they would visit together. In short order, Father Liam becomes one of the most complete characters seen in clericals in a decade. Furthermore, despite his acknowledged mistake in abandoning Kitten as a baby, he is fully rehabilitated by the close of the film. The film’s most loving treatment of Father Liam’s heroism comes when parishioners disgruntled with his inappropriate living situation firebomb the presbytery, endangering the lives of its sleeping occupants. As beautifully-​shot slow-​motion sheets of flame lick up the staircase, he charges into the girls’ bedroom in his pajamas, scoops the heavily pregnant Charlie out of bed, and leads them away from the church and to safety as both the sanctuary and presbytery begin to collapse. The visual rhetoric of the trial by fire requires little unpacking (he prevails), but the uniting of domestic and sacred in the following shots highlights the both/​and proposition of Liam’s f/​Father status. Throughout the period, deviations from appropriate clerical attire are marked out as disturbances of priestly virtue, such as the image of anoraks pulled over the heads of priests wishing to maintain anonymity as they faced charges in Colm Tóibín’s short story “A Priest in the Family”(Tóibín 141). More broadly, the blackness and otherness of priestly attire, particularly the soutane (think of the association between “the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike” in chapter one of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) are longstanding markers of menace or dignity exclusive to priests. After the rescue (for which Kitten later thanks her “great big fireproof man”), we briefly see Father Liam fully deinstitutionalized, standing at the smoldering, wet, open-​air altar in pajamas rather than vestments. As he holds a bent and ruined ciborium and inspects the host inside, some of his parishioners file in to the back of the church, and he looks at them sadly. It would seem that as either a priest or a parent, he can provide kindness, compassion, and support for Kitten and Charlie—​each of whom subsequently credit him with saving their lives, clearly from more than just the fire—​but without the consent of his parishioners, he can’t reliably keep his congregants from even such fundamental sacrilege as desecrating the host. In that moment, Father Liam’s status as a genuinely good priest and his relationship to the institutional Church ceases to be the focus, as the film indicts the broader population of churchgoers for their intolerance and hypocrisy. The parishioners, who are in other texts treated as being outside of institutional power, or more progressive than the Church or its priests, are the problem. Rather than being culpable only for their inertia, or tacit approval, or for their acquiescence empowering corrupt institutions, they are in this case responsible for the limited possibilities available in priestly performance and thus the sad state of the (here literally) destroyed church.

122 Haney Jordan and McCabe consistently highlight the failings of the laity in addition to the clergy in the film, not just adapting the Peace Process politics of 1998 to the preoccupations of 2005, but pointing toward a future in which addressing broader cultural complicity will become a greater concern. When young Kitten is referred to the dean of his school for writing a story about Father Liam raping her mother, the dean responds compassionately and allows Kitten to withdraw from Physical Education in favor of Home Economics if she feels it will help her focus. Later, when the dean responds violently to a different incident and another priest menacingly pushes Kitten into a room where we expect her to be beaten, Jordan cuts on the door slam to Mrs. Braden, Kitten’s adoptive mother, hitting her and chasing her through their living quarters. Of all the violence perpetrated upon Kitten, only one forced march by his twisted ear comes at the hands of the clergy. The Hierarchy is similarly disinclined toward violence or action against Kitten’s interests, as we find when three women who observe Charlie, Kitten, and Father Liam walking together discuss going to the bishop to complain, even though “the bishop we have isn’t worth a damn.” In Tom Hickey’s few seconds of screen time as the bishop, he regards the group of women waiting outside his office (now swollen to five) and leans in to tell his secretary, “there are times when I wish I was a bus conductor.” The scene takes a risk in crediting the Church for doing the right thing by ignoring the complaints of parishioners, but the culpability of these women (who we must infer are responsible for the firebombing) is both vital and provocative. After the firebombing, Charlie remarks to Father Liam that, “with the welfare state and all,” England will be better for her and the baby in any event. Earlier in the film, Charlie had intended to have an abortion, but having made the choice that the Church would prefer, she is nevertheless ultimately left without a home in Ireland because of her parents’ ideas about children born out of wedlock, because of a group of parishioners’ belief that it was inappropriate for Father Liam to shelter her and Kitten, and partly because Archbishop John Charles McQuaid successfully opposed the Mother and Child Scheme of 1951. Of these factors in the film, the McQuaid-​sized threat of the imposition of clerical will seems least likely to renew itself, given the damage that has been done to priestly capacities to eliminate resistance. In 2005, presenting good or even neutral priests is a surprising choice, but allowing for the possibility of a priest with a coherent performance of masculinity, subject neither to ungovernable urges nor painful repression, allows for broader considerations of cultural complicity in the crimes of and related to the Church. As the issue of the scandalized church and the figure of the priest continue to be newsworthy in the years after 2005, many of the more

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interesting questions about abuse and complicity will be directed toward the population rather than the Hierarchy, with the Church continuing to lose relevance in directing public and private affairs at the same time. In the earlier portions of the crisis, performance of a priestly masculinity was an appealing area for critique, but by the turn of the century, there were diminishing returns for that line of analysis. To treat priests more like normative, reproductive men was by that point not merely a sacrilege, but an affront to those who would bristle at sharing a classification with the suspect and subordinate figures of a diminished priesthood. By modeling the incorporation of priestly masculinity into conventional hierarchies, and by insisting on understanding those hierarchies as authorized by popular consent, the film demands a more attentive approach to considering broader cultural complicity for the harm directly caused by the Church since independence.16 BoP encourages viewers to consider their complicity in now-​distasteful social actions and attitudes too easily made the sole responsibility of the Church. Works Cited Auslander, Philip. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. BoP. dvd. Directed by Neil Jordan, screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe. 2005; New York: Sony Pictures Classics, 2006. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2006. Edelman, Lee. No Future:  Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke, 2004. Haney, Lindsay J. “Performing Anxiety: Masculinities in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture.” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2014. Harding, Michael. Sour Grapes. In New Plays for the Abbey Theatre Volume Two, 1996–​ 1998. Eds. Judy Friel and Sanford Sternlicht. Syracuse:  Syracuse University Press, 2001: 3–​57. Harte, Liam and Michael Parker. “Reconfiguring Identities: Recent Northern Irish Fiction.” Contemporary Irish Fiction:  Themes, Tropes, Theories. Edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker. London: Macmillan Press, 2000: 232–​254. 16

In a different context, I explore a broader group of contemporary texts for their relationship to R.W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, a parallel means of considering these texts. Lindsay J. Haney, “Performing Anxiety: Masculinities in Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2014).

124 Haney Jeffers, Jennifer M. The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 2003. Kelly, Michael. “Irish Priestly Vocations in Worrying Decline.” The Catholic World Reporter, Oct. 30, 2012. Accessed June 27, 2014. http://​www.catholicworldreport.com/​ Item/​1706/​irish_​priestly_​vocations_​in_​worrying_​decline.aspx McCabe, Patrick. BoP. London: Picador, 1998. McCabe, Patrick. Interview by author, Dublin, Ireland, October 13, 2011. Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Nugent, Joseph. “The Sword and the Prayerbook: Ideals of Authentic Irish Manliness.” Victorian Studies 50.4 (Summer 2008): 587–​613. Accessed May 13, 2014. http://​www. jstor.org/​stable/​40060405 Paris, Texas. dvd. Directed by Wim Wenders. 1984; New York: Criterion Collection, 2009. Savage, Robert J. and James M. Smith. “Sexual Abuse and the Irish Church: Crisis and Responses.” The Church in the 21st Century: Occasional Papers. Number 8. 2003. Boston College eScholarship. Accessed June 14, 2014. https://​www2.bc.edu/​~smithbt/​ Sexual%20Abuse%20and%20the%20Irish%20Church_​%20Crisis%20and%20Responses.pdf Stembridge, Gerard. Love Child. Typescript, 1992, www.irishplayography.com Tóibín, Colm. “A Priest in the Family.” Mothers and Sons. New  York:  Scribner, 2007: 133–​151.

Chapter 8

Possible Worlds in Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood James F. Knapp The leading characters in Patrick McCabe’s fictions are burdened with the past. Irish history may be touched on only glancingly in his novels, through quotations of stirring ballads or brief references to long-​past atrocities, but as the narratives unfold, readers are brought shockingly close to the continuing violence of sectarian strife. Personal history is a burden as well, as children are sexually abused or born out of sexual exploitation, grow up unloved, abandoned, and carry the memory of early years into adulthood. In both BoP and W, two narratives, that of the Nation and that of the child, are told in parallel, structuring fictions that complicate memory and question the very nature of hope and change. Both novels are about emotional damage, and to read them in psychological terms is necessary and inevitable. But in this chapter I want to read with a different set of terms in mind. In philosophy, modal logic is the study of the truth conditions of statements such as “it is possible that …” or “it is necessary that …” To reflect on the nature of necessity and possibility, philosophical inquiry of this sort often relies on the notion of “possible worlds,” an idea that, for modern philosophy, may be traced as far back as G. W. Leibniz in the seventeenth century (Leibniz 370–​73).1 I do not intend to address the ongoing philosophical disputes about modality, which are many, but rather to reflect on the ways in which Patrick McCabe addresses the frightening entanglement of necessity (the sense that we are trapped by the personal and collective past that defines us), and, against this grim determinism, the utopian promise of possibility (that perhaps we can escape our past, or perhaps the world can change). In both of these novels, McCabe’s vehicle is that of powerfully imagined possible worlds. In BoP, Pussy Braden seeks both the harsh reality of his mother’s life, but also the mother who might have been, had the world been different. In the meantime, s(he) lives in an alternate world constructed of American film and Broadway musicals, fashion, old popular music, and gender transformation, all 1 In what has become a memorable founding image of possible worlds, Leibniz described a great pyramid of infinitely many rooms each containing a different life of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last king of Rome.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_009

126 Knapp as distant from the Ireland of his birth as a distant planet. The main character of W is equally concerned to understand (and even research) the terrifying reality of his past, but he too tries to live in the counterfactual space of old Irish song and story, a world made increasingly untenable by the nation’s own dream of transformation through capitalist modernization. McCabe’s two novels represent the strongest questioning in recent fiction of how possibility, deeply desired, must confront the inescapable necessity of history. It is possible to speak of two kinds of possible worlds. In the first, we assume our world to be actual, and therefore judge specific conditions of possibility or necessity by asking whether they are ways the world might be “as far as we know.” These are epistemic possible words, possible because we believe them to be consistent with what we know about the world, though always subject to the disproof of future knowledge (Whittle 265). Free-​Stater and Republican alike believe their own views of the world, however different, to be grounded in actuality, though some previously unknown archive could one day prove one or both to be mistaken. In a “Prelude” before the story of BoP formally begins, McCabe frames his novel with historical facts (or collective memories) which his hero(ine) “is born with, but only becomes aware of as he grows”: In 1745 a crofter was garroted. In 1848 a landlord dragged from his bed and put to the rope. Not long after that, twenty protestants burnt in a barn. Xmas 1881, a Catholic man disappeared and was found in a ditch, a crucifix hammered into his head. (BoP x) There is a grim necessity in this enumeration of a past which is static, finished, and yet present before birth, only gradually rising to consciousness, but experienced as timeless, and so inevitably seeming to determine the future as much as it defines the past. In this version of Irish history, violence is necessary. Similarly, the 1922 drawing of the border between north and south is described as “mapping out the universe into which Mr. Patrick Braden, now some years later found himself tumbled”(BoP x). Dropped without agency of any kind into a universe which has already been constructed, Patrick would seem to be destined from birth to suffer the London bombings and the death and madness of friends caught up in endless violence which follow as his story unfolds. Metaphysical possible worlds, on the other hand, are counterfactual “ways the world might have been.”2 In this sense, 1798 might have been the opening 2 David J.  Chalmers, “Epistemic Two-​ dimensional Semantics,” Philosophical Studies 118 (2004) 160, 177; Nicholas Rescher, “ The Ontology of the Possible,” in The Possible and the

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to a utopian future of peace and brotherhood, and we might go on to imagine a richly detailed nineteenth century entirely different from the one we know to be true. Such worlds may be counterfactual, but their power may also be (or be hoped to be) very real. The cultural narrative of Irish history’s beginning as a golden age of heroes and high civilization, far superior to anything else in northern Europe, was a possible word fundamental to the rise of cultural nationalism in the nineteenth-​century. In the 1840’s, The Nation newspaper relied on this version of the past to project a utopian vision of the future: Our sun-​burst on the Roman foe Flash’d vengeance once in foreign field—​ On Clontarf’s plain lay scathed low What power the Sea-​kings fierce could wield! Benburb might say whose cloven shield ‘Neath bloody hoofs was trampled o’er; And, by these memories high, we yield Our limbs to Saxon Chains no more! (Duffy 47) This imagined world, celebrated throughout the pages of The Nation, proved remarkably persistent. When Patrick/​Pussy Braden leaves Ireland on the Liverpool ferry in BoP, McCabe has him meet a sentimentally violent and maudlin drunk who “went down to the bar where ‘A Nation Once Again’ was in full swing,” presumably to be inspired yet again by this ballad composed in the 1840’s by Thomas Davis, the editor of The Nation. The persistence of history is established early. Still a child in 1966, when the anniversary of the 1916 rising takes place, Patrick and his friends Irwin and Charlie are caught up in the excitement and take up marching games. “Everyone was waving a tricoloured flag or singing an Irish ballad” then, but for Irwin games are only a first step as he later becomes drawn into ira operations (BoP 18). That scenario comes to its inevitable conclusion when Irwin is brutally executed by two of his friends when he becomes known to the police and is forced to inform to save Charlie. The grim necessity of all this is signaled by Irwin’s early sense that “he was fucked,” and later by the maudlin sentimentality of one of his killers as he prepares for the killing in a pub where The Boys of the Brigade and other stirring ballads were being sung: “ ‘It was sad,’ ran the thought through Horse’s mind, ‘having to kill someone.’ But particularly when you liked them” (BoP 84 &167).

Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, ed. Michael J. Loux (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), 1979, 166–​181.

128 Knapp Like the early make-​believe of Patrick and his friends, Davis’ song began by positing an imagined world: When boyhood’s fire was in my blood I read of ancient freemen, For Greece and Rome who bravely stood, THREE HUNDRED MEN AND THREE MEN. The words of the song then turned immediately to the future: And then I prayed I yet might see Our fetters rent in twain, And Ireland, long a province, be A NATION ONCE AGAIN. (Duffy 274–​275) For Horse Kinnane and for Irwin, however, political ballads that had once offered a utopian picture of the way Ireland might be now seem to teach only that violence is destiny. And yet, a counterfactual world might well be imagined in other, entirely different, ways. Forty years after Thomas Davis wrote “A Nation Once Again,” a fin-​de-​siècle appropriation of his program for cultural renewal was announced in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, dedicated to the old nationalist John O’Leary, but imagining a very different possible world, though one equally in tension with the realities of contemporary Ireland: Her eyes are bright and tearless But wide with yearning pain; She longs for nothing earthly, But oh! to hear again The sound that held her listening Upon her moonlit path! The rippling fairy music That filled the lonely rath. T. W. Rolleston



BoP

Celtic Fairyland, as Yeats and his circle imagined it, is what philosophers would call a “maximal” world. It is a world apart in which every detail fits

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without contradiction (Leibniz Letters 661). Unique rules of mortality and power prevail, fairy behavior and even what I might call the aesthetics of fairy culture—​its music, its poetry, and the beauty of its creatures—​are fully imagined and of a piece. Like the analogous Lake Isle of Innisfree, it is always set as other to the harsh and hopeless reality of the present, whether that reality is characterized as political impasse, dehumanizing modernity, or increasingly absurd violence. Fairyland is, above all, a desired place of sanctuary and escape. T. W Rolleston’s sensibility is far different than Patrick McCabe’s, but his verse could hardly be a closer expression of the feeling that overwhelms McCabe’s hero(ine) after failing to persuade a young girl to avoid the village thug who is certain to sexually abuse her and ruin her life, just as his own mother’s life was changed forever when she was raped by a priest. After the sexual assault on Martina does in fact occur, Pussy crawls around behind the shed where it happened, with a flashlight, looking for evidence. When he later recounts finding a drop of semen on a leaf, he reflects on his insurmountable distance from this reality, which “belonged in a world thousands of miles from the one I’d written of and dreamed” (BoP 108). Pussy Braden does not yearn to escape to a world of Yeatsian fairies, but the world he imagines is equally literary, if in a different cultural register, and it too beckons him with music: I ain’t gonna let it bother me, girls! Just give me Vic Damone, South Pacific, plus a yummy stack of magazines and I’ll be happy, as once more I go leafing through the pages of New Faces of the Fifties, Picturegoer, Screen Parade, gaily mingling with the stars of long ago. (BoP 1) The world Pussy desires to inhabit exists in the rich intertextuality of popular American music, Broadway musical, Hollywood film, fashion, and the journalistic gossip of celebrity culture, a fully imagined narrative of social interaction of which he imagines himself to be a part. Most importantly, that beckoning space is “long ago,” a world temporally sealed off from the present and so forever safe. Like the young woman in Rolleston’s poem, Pussy’s desiring is kindled by song, and everything (s)he does—​every fashionable accessory (s)he acquires or hair styling (s)he learns from the old magazines—​is part of a magical attempt to cross over into that desired world, so far from the one to which he was born. The point is not that Patrick tries to become someone other than he is. Pussy Braden is always who she is, but actuality does not present her with a world compossible with her essential identity, that is, a world allowing the possibility of her co-​existence with everything else in that

130 Knapp world.3 For Pussy, a place of such safety would have to exist in some distant part of the universe. Wishing one were elsewhere is hardly a novel idea, but the elsewhere of Pussy Braden is maximal—​everything in it must be of a piece—​raising urgent questions about how a possible world might exist, and whether, if at all, there can be any relation between it and the necessity of the “real world.” According to the notion of compossibility, if anything incompatible with Pussy’s essential being were to enter her “South Pacific” world, that new world would be destroyed. McCabe makes this point very clear in “Chez Nous,” a brief chapter in which Patrick sketches rural Irish life in blatantly stereotypical terms. The Patrick we have come to know in previous chapters has no place in this counterfactual world: “Is this Patrick—​Pat Puss of the girly doodle dandies, son-​of-​ priest and naughty nipple-​licker of a Mum called Louise Ward—​fame? No—​ this is simple, ordinary Patrick—​son of the man called Daddy, who with great big shovel hands this cabin proudly raised.” (BoP 109) And the same goes for his mother, Eily: “Sweet Eily who perhaps once made breakfast for a lascivious, hungry cleric? But no, my friends. Eily it may be, but not that one.” In the interlude entitled “Chez Nous,” the identity of individuals across worlds is simply denied, and the tone remains playful. A few pages later, however, the same principle underlies a catastrophic turn in Patrick’s life. His mother, giving birth after being raped by a priest, had abandoned her baby, leaving him in a Rinso box on the doorstep of an abusive foster mother who was only in it for the monthly payments from the Church. Patrick yearns all his life for the loving mother he never had, learning everything he can about her, and fantasizing the rest, even down to her clothes and her Mitzi Gaynor hairdo. After a series of male lovers, he winds up living with a man called Bertie. Their landlady, Louise Ward, had lost her own son when he was hit by a bus in 1961, and soon a bond develops between the mother who lost her son and the son who lost his mother. Patrick, usually adept at playing the roles his clients desire, is somewhat uncomfortable when he and Louise drift into a mother/​son game in which he plays her lost son Shaunie, even agreeing to dress up as the little Shaunie. When Bertie catches them together one

3 David Lewis suggested one way to think about identity across worlds: “The counterpart relation is our substitute for identity between things in different worlds. Where some would say that you are in several worlds, in which you have somewhat different properties and somewhat different things happen to you, I prefer to say that you are in the actual world and no other, but you have counterparts in several other worlds. They resemble you more closely than do the other things in their worlds. But they are not really you.” “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic,” in Loux, p. 111.

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day he is furious, shouting that Pussy is his girlfriend and how dare she steal him, before storming off never to be seen again. But Pussy stays, happy with the comfort and the hairstyling she provides him. He is uneasy, nevertheless, telling himself that while it’s fine to pretend to be her son for her, he knows “she’s not your mammy,” but rather “Mum,” already defined in Chez Nous as the contradiction of his real mother. Nevertheless, he tells her all about the mammy of his imagination. One day, perhaps thinking to take the game they have built to another level, Louise comes down the stairs dressed exactly as Pussy had described his mother: the yellow check blouse, white Capri pants, even the tight Mitzi Gaynor curls, and singing “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair!” as Pussy had always imagined his mother in their South Pacific idyll (BoP 114–​16). Reflecting later as he describes the scene and his consequent breakdown, Pussy agrees with his psychiatrist that “it all dated back to then” (BoP 115). The experience was shattering for him because it signaled the impossibility of the alternate world to which he had escaped for so many years, the world made out of old show tunes, movie gossip, and a beautiful mother who was his alone. When Louise attempts to enter that world she destroys it because she violates its wholeness, its compossibility. If Louise may be distinguished from his dream mother, then she belongs in another, incompatible world (BoP 3). The urgent question that follows from this scene, then, is whether every individual is in fact bound within his or her world. What are the consequences of travelling to another world, to having BoP? The final trigger for Patrick is when Louise speaks the word he hates: breakfast. Because Mum Louise is at this moment Patrick’s not-​mammy, she is necessarily of the world he has so desperately tried to efface, and yet with one word she brings the Irish mother who “perhaps once made breakfast for a lascivious, hungry cleric” (109) into Patrick’s South Pacific, hopelessly collapsing the integrity of both worlds. If it is possible to travel between worlds, can one be changed by the conditions of a new world, and yet still return? What is at stake for a figure like Patrick/​Pussy is whether it is possible to escape from violence and abuse to another place and then return as a kind of incompatible alien, disrupting the maximal economy of the home world and perhaps changing it. The story of Louise would seem to say no, that utopian dreams are, finally, only dreams. Pussy has tried to live her life as if she were on a distant planet we might describe as “the way the world might have been.” But she is brought back to earth by two traumatic events. In one, the painstaking construction of a place where her beautiful mother never abandoned her is shattered by the intrusion of Louise’s other, incompatible fiction. The second event is Pussy’s presence

132 Knapp and subsequent arrest at the site of a horrifying bomb attack on a disco-​pub full of British soldiers in London. The detective who interrogates her has no interest in ways the world might have been. He only wants to know how the world actually is. To do so, he too must investigate possibility, but only in the epistemic sense. That is, he knows that Pussy might be an ira bomber cleverly disguised as a woman, but he worries that they might have the wrong man, and wonders whether Pussy is “nothing more than a drifting transvestite prostitute from the backwoods of Ireland, in search of nothing more than a good time and a reasonable living on the streets of London?” (BoP 149). A third possibility for the officers watching her thrash violently about her cell is that she is simply insane, a likely scenario, and one that finally leads Pussy to the hospital where Terrence, her psychiatrist, asks her to write down the story that becomes the chapters of BoP. Pussy tells Terrence that after the incident with Louise, he felt adrift, floating “in a cosmos with no end.” It is at this point that Terrence returns him to the world of actuality: “You’re down here now—​rock solid!” (BoP 115–​16) Like the police, Terrence only cares about how the world is, as far as he can know it, but he too needs to explore multiple possible scenarios—​not to explain a crime, but to understand an illness. The real world is the one he lives in, and his task, and that of his patient, is to know more in order to establish which of many possibilities is actual, and then to help Patrick accept and live in reality. At its harshest, this is a regime of historical causality much like the inexorable logic of Irish history that sends Horse Kinane out to murder his old friend. Pussy parodies the social-​science version of necessity like this:  “ ‘Oh, it’s perfectly clear that your provincial small-​town Irish background has left you ill-​equipped to deal with the challenges of a major cosmopolitan city!’ ” (BoP 95) Terrence is not presented as substituting facile notions of causality for more complex diagnosis, and Pussy loves him. But just as in the case of Pussy’s alternate world, now floating off into space like a fragile cigarette paper in a fireplace, medical solutions based on supposed real-​world causality must lead us to ask the same question. Is there any space for change in the actual world of Pussy Braden, and of Ireland? When a child is stolen away to fairyland in the Celtic Twilight, she never returns. At the end of BoP, Patrick/​Pussy takes all of his/​her “delicious wardrobe” to a thrift shop, keeping only an old housecoat and a headscarf. S/​he lives a quiet life, alone, never again attempting to mingle with the stars of the other world. The “tufty-​nosed labourers” who are her neighbors are mostly friendly, and s/​he reads her magazines (BoP 198). The mood is subdued, but not without hope. Something like the Ireland of 1998, into which this novel was published.

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Winterwood

In his 2006 novel, W, Patrick McCabe constructs an even more complex array of possible worlds through which his main character is moved by the hope of change and the dread of necessity. When we first see Redmond Hatch, he is a journalist who returns to his childhood home in the western mountains to research a story about Ned Strange, a local fiddler and storyteller who represents an almost vanished Irish past. Redmond hopes to reenter a timeless world of traditional Irish art and village custom. This is an epistemic possible world, that is, a world he believes to have actually existed, as far as he knows. While it is increasingly distant from the current actuality of a rapidly modernizing Ireland, it in no way violates the laws of the world he knows, but rather presents a thoroughly coherent social reality of close-​knit community and shared values. He arrives on the day of a village festival: On a crude platform in the square a slap-​bass combo was banging away goodo, with a whiskery old-​timer sawing at his fiddle, stomping out hornpipes to beat the band. He must have been close on seventy years of age, with a curly copper thatch and this great unruly rusty beard touched throughout with streaks of silver. He slapped his thighs and whooped and catcalled, encouraging anyone who knew it to join in the “traditional come-​all-​you”! (W 3) The language of this introduction is a seamless fabric of cliché, perfectly representing the journalistic style of popular feature articles that rely equally on comfortable nostalgia and tourist board high spirits as they direct readers to Ireland-​as-​attraction. The visual image of the “old-​timer” with his “copper thatch” might easily decorate a souvenir coffee mug. The world these images represent is not merely the invention of modern business, of course, but the coherently imagined notion of an Ireland existing before, or perhaps along side, its colonial history. From early nineteenth-​century antiquarians and nationalists to contemporary internet searchers for the authenticity of the past, the world of traditional Irish culture is a powerfully inviting escape from the present. When Redmond meets a woman who had known his father, she unwittingly underlines the loneliness and uncertainty of his own life: “Auld Daddy Hatch—​sure we all knew each other, back in those days!” (W4). The status of the community represented in the village festival is complex, however. On the one hand, its presence to the imagination depends in a very real sense on its absence in a world of real estate development and global business. Or perhaps near absence—​for some, Ned the fiddler and storyteller was

134 Knapp an archaic remainder of the past, and his chief value was educational, to perpetuate memory in children who could “find out about an Ireland that was fast disappearing” (W 12). For these parents, the folk past is in no way a fantasy. It really exists, though in a residual way through a few old timers, but none of these people actually want to return to a time prior to the modern: “It was as if it had been decided that simply having Ned was sufficient”(W 16). Later, when Redmond makes a prize-​winning documentary about his ancestral home, he ends it with a sepia-​toned shot of the mountains slowly fading into the mist, a perfect indulgence in nostalgia for men and women who have spent the afternoon at the mall. Far more problematic, however, is the presence of a second and very different possible world based on the same knowable actuality of Ned’s traditional mountain community. Later in the novel, Ned is found guilty of raping and murdering a young boy he had befriended, commits suicide in prison, and then returns as a kind of demonic ghost to urge Redmond to identify with his actions. This counter narrative to the tale of nurturing communal oneness is established early in the novel, in parallel with Redmond’s initial journalistic observations of the local color. And it is by no means a scenario of one man’s aberrant crime. By the first few pages of the novel, Redmond learns that his mother had been regularly beaten by his father, and later Ned tells him that she did not die in a church as he had always believed, but that she “died of a brain hemorrhage brought on by your father’s beatings” (W 107). Little Red himself had been sexually abused for years by his uncle Florian, who would take him off to the woods and photograph him in an ironic extension of his abuse. Redmond carries one tattered photograph of himself as a young boy with him for years, its image of “damaged innocence and hope” the only trace of the abuse, but, ironically, a signifier of the innocent world he had come to the mountain to recover as well (W 37). According to his own account, Ned had also viciously beaten and then killed his wife Annemarie, as well as a woman named Carla Benson in Boston. When Ned comes to Redmond as a ghost/​hallucination, he offers a piece of chocolate, Florian’s initial gesture of seduction, triggering Red’s dream (or memory) that he too had been abused by Ned. References to the habitual occurrence of violence and sexual abuse involving the extended families, others in the community and ultimately those far from the mountain, like Carla Benson, are scattered throughout the novel. What is true and what not in Ned’s capricious storytelling is never clear, however. At one point Ned calls into question both of the possible worlds of which he is the central figure: “Of course the whole fucking lot could be a pack of lies, Redmond. Maybe I don’t give a fuck about these stupid country songs” (W 99). Elsewhere he denies drowning Annemarie, or even having had more than a trivial “dalliance” with her.

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The premise underlying the two scenarios I have called epistemic possible worlds is that either one describes a way the world might actually be, because neither contradicts what we already know of the world. While Ned’s conflicting statements are undecideable, possibility in the sense I have described implies that sufficient knowledge may establish the truth of one or the other, and within the novel’s larger narrative structure, the Ned who abuses and murders boys, not the Ned who teaches children about lost folkways, is deemed actual by the system of justice. But this is only the beginning of McCabe’s deployment of the notion of possible worlds. W begins in the eighties and concludes in 2006, a time of remarkable economic prosperity for Ireland. Aggressive real estate development and entrepreneurial zeal in Dublin, and even around Slievenageeha, where the folk festival is held, new housing tracts, motorways, a mall, and a giant casino define modernity in the new Ireland. It is against this economic and social transformation of everything familiar that the nostalgic yearning for the simpler past is leveraged. Most of the passages describing emergent modernity are strongly negative, suggesting the fear underlying nostalgia for a supposedly simpler past. And yet, while “Old-​timers haunt the fringes of the city, afraid to penetrate its boundaries lest they be set upon by the young,” the young who flock to the great glowing casino now visible from Ned’s old shack imagine a new kind of possibility, a world of previously unimaginable pleasure, wealth, and freedom (W 37). Their newly imagined world is one of seamless progress, taking them far away from the narrowed lives of their parents. Redmond Hatch is sometimes successful in this new world, but he also feels the vertigo of an economy which at some periods leaves him near destitution, living in a bare room in a gentlemen’s hostel. At a low point in his life, after his wife has left him, and without prospects, Raymond Hatch stages his own suicide and invents a new identity for himself, that of “Dominic Tiernan.” If Redmond’s desire had been to know which of two possible worlds he had once been a part of, he now acts out a more radical question: can he imagine a possible world in which he is not the man who fails to earn a decent living, whose wife takes a lover, and whose erratic behavior so frightens his wife that she wins an order forbidding him from seeing his daughter? Can he instead be Dominic Tiernan, who writes for television, marries again, and films a prize-​ winning documentary?4 Although Redmond feared and detested Ireland’s new modernity, Dominic must embrace it if he is truly to re-​write the actuality of his life. And modernity is in fact the enabling condition of his plan to adopt a 4 In Leibniz’s allegory of possible worlds as countless rooms in a vast pyramid, Sextus is the man who, in one room, rapes his friend’s wife, and is beaten and driven out of Rome; and the man who marries happily and lives an uneventful life, in another room. Theogony, 372.

136 Knapp new identity. Slievenageeha’s new casino, the Gold Club, is a new kind of social space, where you can get “anything you want”: It’s like the gold rush days have come back to life, and it’s in there you’ll find your heart’s desire with no restrictions at all, just so long as you’ve got money and the right attitude about spending it. Once through its doors, you’ll encounter flight attendants and kindergarten teachers, executives mingling with software engineers, all quaffing state-​of-​the-​art cocktails, not batting an eyelid at the non-​stop table dancing, or the inevitable q­ uota of discreet working girls. You won’t hear much country ­music either. (W 225–​6) The casino represents modernity so perfectly because it is like the boulevards of Paris for Walter Benjamin, or the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg for Marshall Berman: a space defined by the crowd, where country peasant and urban sophisticate mingle with the striving men and women of the rising new classes.5 In the anonymity of the crowd, the individual leaves behind the totalizing surveillance of village life and finds the freedom to reinvent himself. Dominic does in fact become the man who writes for television, marries again, and films a prize-​winning documentary. However, the question of how and whether identity can be preserved or changed across worlds is once again fraught with difficulty.6 To begin with, though Redmond is presumed to be dead, and Dominic is presumed to be a man defined by a very different series of life events, the old Redmond, with all of his demons, continues to exist in Dominic’s mind. Haunted by Ned’s stories of violence against women and his veiled references to the sexual abuse of boys, Redmond had early on taken solace in the children’s literature he read to his young daughter. Together, they had invented “W,” the fictional home for the snowman of a television cartoon. But W becomes more than a detail in a children’s story, and its importance only increases for the (ostensibly) childless Dominic, as it takes on the role of a possible world quite different from those I have so far described. For example, we may assume there is only one actual world, but many possible worlds. In

5 Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections:  Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York and London: Harcourt, 1978), p.  146–​162; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air:  The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1982), p. 173–​286. 6 Alvin Plantinga, “Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals?” in Loux, pp. 146–​65; David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Penelope Mackie, “Identity, Time, and Necessity,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 98, pp. 59–​78.

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this sense, a world of nurturing village community, with old Ned as its collective voice and inspiration, might possibly have existed, as far as we know. Of course the dark counter to this world, centered by a child-​murderer, was equally possible. These are epistemic possible worlds, and within the narrative of a novel, the second is finally shown to be the only actual world. For Dominic, however, W gradually takes on a very different kind of possibility. In philosophical terms, it would be called a metaphysical possible world. It is entirely counterfactual, existing alongside the actual world in which Dominic lives, and never subject to the kind of real-​world knowledge that could invalidate the Sunday supplement’s cheery version of the past by identifying the killer of a boy. In Dominic’s mind, “W was the most magical place anyone could imagine—​ a crystal palace carved out of ice, bounded by rows of stiff-​standing pines” (W 157). It was explicitly set against the “duplicitous” new culture of Irish modernity, which Dominic viewed as “dead and redundant” and “a world of ash”: “When compared with our crystal castle of the heart, our W home where we’d endure for ever and beyond” (W 216). What makes this crystal palace a utopia for Dominic is its timelessness, unlike the actual Ireland which seems to be characterized by nothing but ferocious, destabilizing change. To be out of time in W is to be dead, however. This is made particularly clear after Redmond has kidnapped his daughter, when she shatters his expectation that she will be exactly as she had been as a much younger child. She is no longer interested in My Little Pony, but rather in Sweet Valley High, a sign that she is growing up and therefore becoming incompatible with the timelessness of W. Her father’s response is to alter his plan, immediately giving her a drink that will drug her and lead to her captivity and death on the mountain. When Dominic later kidnaps his ex-​wife Catherine, his intention is to reunite his family in a dark parody of the supposed community of traditional Ireland: “It’s going to be OK, darling, I said. You and me and baby Owen and Immy. After this all our problems are over” (W 181). Imogen was their daughter, but Owen was the son they never had, when Catherine, unsettled by her husband’s increasingly disturbing behavior, had refused to bring another child into the world. But Owen was also the name of another unborn child, a name Ned and Annemarie had chosen for the baby they planned to have after they were married—​at least in the account Ned gives to Redmond later in the book. As if the details of one world were bleeding through into another, Red finds it increasingly difficult to untangle his own reality from that created by Ned’s mesmerizing narratives, regardless of how blatantly inconsistent they might be. And this instability strikes to the heart of all the possible worlds McCabe has deployed in the novel.

138 Knapp Here is G. W. Leibniz on the notion of possibility: “I call possible anything which is perfectly conceivable and which, as a result, has an essence or an idea, without raising the question of whether the rest of the world permits it to become existent” (662).7 The distinction Leibniz is making here depends on the notion that two incompatible entities may not exist in the same possible world. Thus everything in any given possible world must be “compossible,” that is, capable of existing together with everything else in that world. In this sense, Ned the abuser of boys, is the dark actuality within Ireland’s folktale past of gleeful hornpipes. He is not compossible with that world’s idea of warm human community, and so destroys it as anything that could ever “become existent.” In a similar way, Dominic, whose ability to reinvent himself as a new man is the very embodiment of modernity’s dream of endless happiness, is at the same time the dark actuality of the Casino’s glowing presence in the mountains. As kidnapper and murderer of his own family, he is not compossible with the Celtic Tiger dream of an Ireland free of famine, emigration, or Troubles. Finally, the counterfactual metaphysics of W, with its timeless Utopian play space, is not compossible with the actuality of a woman and child freezing to death in the ground beneath a mountain shack. W sends its characters through a series of worlds, some that might have been (or might be) possible, others entirely counterfactual, but when worlds touch, their possibility is lost. The Ireland of the folk can never be recovered by a man who brings to it what Red Hatch does. Nor can the cartoon idyl of W be any more real for him than the world of Fairy proved to be for the poets of the Celtic Twilight. McCabe’s novel could certainly be read as embracing the grim necessity so often expressed by Ned Strange, when he dwells on kinship as destiny, a kind of pre-​d na biological determinism. However much Redmond seeks to escape to some alternate world, he too believes that what is actual is necessary, that Ned is simply the product of the violent, abusive, patriarchal society into which he was born, and that the trauma of Red’s own abuse by his uncle defines him. The possible world that turns out to be real, that of Ned’s crime, might have included therapeutic healing or social amelioration, but McCabe only gives us justice, and that too late to save anyone. So is there nothing to be gained by imagining other, better worlds, whether W’s childhood, modernity’s built future, or BoP? However dark both of these novels may be, in both, imagined possibility is finally set aside. The dazzling dresses and wigs are sent to consignment shops, new identity proves ephemeral, and sepia-​toned nostalgia is revealed as the journalist’s trick it is. After 7 “Letter to Louis Bourguet,” for the notion of compossible vs. possible.

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high-​concept possibility vanishes, the actual is what remains, but actuality need not imply necessity. Perhaps the only possible world that matters is one that still might be made here, out of the real, for all we know. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz. New York and London: Harcourt, 1978. Chalmers, David J. “Epistemic Two-​dimensional Semantics,” Philosophical Studies 118, 2004. Duffy, James. “Irish War-​Song. A.D. 1843,” The Spirit of the “The Nation.” Dublin: 1844. Duffy, Chalres Gavan and others. The Spirit of the Nation, Edited by Charles Gavan Duffy and others. Dublin: James Duffy, 1845; rpt. Poole and Washington D.C., 1998. Leibniz, G.W. Theodicy:  Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the ­Origin of Evil, Edited by Austin Ferrer. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1985. Leibniz, “Letter to Louis Bourguet,” Philosophical Papers and Letters, edited and ­translated by Leroy Loemker. Dordrecht-​Holland and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1969. Lewis, David. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Mackie, Penelope. “Identity, Time, and Necessity,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 98., pp. 59–​78. McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998. McCabe, Patrick. Winterwood. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. McCabe. Breakfast on Pluto. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998. O’Leary and others. Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, Edited by John O’Leary and others Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1845. Plantinga, Alvin. “Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals?” collected in The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Nicholas Rescher, “ The Ontology of the Possible,” in The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality, Edited by Michael J. Loux. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979. Whittle, Bruno. “Epistemically Possible Worlds and Propositions,” NOÛS 43:2, 2009.

Chapter 9

‘It Ain’t Like the Old Place Anymore’: Contemporary Ireland and the Postmodern, Fragmented Individual in the Fiction of Patrick McCabe Kristina Varade The trope of “old versus new” is prevalent and commonly used in discourse on contemporary Irish literature. However, through his “postmodern mischief-​making,”1 Patrick McCabe subverts depictions of traditional Irish cultural mores, objects, and values in order to depict tensions in individuals who act as observers to a society in transition. These tensions are particularly notable in the presence and manifestation of music, in postmodern fragmentation of the individual, and in consumer culture. McCabe bridges genres and literary styles in ways that reflect the chaos associated with both an Irish and a global contemporary quotidian. Like his complex, often grotesque yet sympathetic characters, McCabe defies placement in any generic narrative frame. He questions and redefines concerns of past and present, traditional and contemporary through deliberate and carefully constructed textual moments of inclusion and exclusion, evasion and/​or omission. Through his references to musical, corporeal, and consumer fragmentation, McCabe ultimately ends up fashioning a bleak pastiche of contemporary Irish life. McCabe’s writing demonstrates an awareness of the chaos of pre-​and post-​ millennial life and how it subtly or overtly confronts Irish traditional culture. In the style of Laurence Sterne and James Joyce, it also demonstrates an awareness of re-​appropriation as a defining trait of the Postmodern. Culture changes according to time and space, and in order to address his narrators’ (mis) understanding of current Irish socio-​cultural concerns, McCabe demonstrates a clear openness to the flexibility of literary considerations which are often associated with the Postmodern.

1 Cowles, Gregory. “The Silver-​Tongued Devil.” The New York Times, 3/​4/​2007.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_010

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Postmodern Critical Voices and BB

I focus upon the wide variety of McCabe’s works which best represent a postmodern theoretical viewpoint, with particular attention to the ways that pastiche, fragmentation and consumer culture overlap. Moreover, I follow Ihab Hassan’s perspective, one that identifies a “new anti-​literature,” or what we might currently call postmodern literature, as being different from the modern due to evasion, silence, and absence: “Whatever is truly new in it evades the social, historical, and aesthetic criteria that gave an identity to the avant-​ garde in other periods. The force of evasion, or absence, in the new literature is radical indeed; it strikes at the roots and induces, metaphorically, a great silence. But the same force … bursts into a great babel of noises … the most audible of these is the cry of outrage, the voice of the apocalypse” (3).2 Hassan’s understanding of postmodern literature as “the literature of silence” nicely correlates with current literary traits of Postmodernism. He identifies these to be the general presence of violence lacking meaning or value; outrage and apocalypse, parody and literature as a game; the crisis of the unknowable Self; radical irony, and the refusal of order (4–​10). Hassan also categorically juxtaposes Modernism as that which embodies Urbanism, Technologism, “Dehumanization,” Eroticism, Antinomianism, Experimentalism through Elitism, Irony or Abstraction, while he delineates Postmodernism as “a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable that Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments” (34–​39). While he maintains the same categories as those of the Modern, creating continuity between the two literary epochs, he specifies clear changes in doctrine and discourse. According to Hassan, some of the juxtapositions most relevant to postmodern literature are the following: Conjunctive, closed Form (M) versus disjunctive, open Antiform (P); Design versus Chance; Hierarchy versus Anarchy; Master/​Logos versus Exhaustion/​Silence; Distance versus Participation; Totalization versus Deconstruction; Synthesis versus Antithesis; Presence versus Absence; Genre/​ Boundary versus Text/​Intertext; Hypotaxis versus Parataxis, Metaphor versus Metonymy; Signified versus Signifier; Metaphysics versus Irony; Narrative versus Anti-​Narrative, and Paranoia Versus Schizophrenia. As a postmodern example itself, Hassan’s list derives from the late 1970s and early 1980s. It lacks knowledge of further developments in postmodern literature, which have evolved over the course of the last thirty years. Yet it is still relevant to turn-​of and post-​millennium literature, and it arguably provides the clearest categorical comparison between Modernism and Postmodernism. 2 Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn (1987).

142 Varade Hassan’s work is fully relevant to and reflects the literature with which I  engage; however, for the sake of a postmodern illusory “continuity,” I  have chosen to primarily adhere to the two definitions of Postmodernism which Jean-​Francois Lyotard and later Fredric Jameson present in The Postmodern Condition (1984) and Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), respectively. In the former, Lyotard establishes that Postmodernism is defined as “incredulity toward meta-​narratives (in which-​k.v.) the narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (Lyotard xxiv).3 In the second half of my definition of Postmodernism as stated above, I ascribe to Fredric Jameson’s definition of the postmodern condition as “(t)he new mode of relationship through difference” (31). As is the case for Lyotard’s perspective of Postmodernism, here again in Jameson one can identify how difference creates new relationships within and between various parts of narration. Jameson micro-​manages Lyotard’s larger crisis of the narrative by outlining specific categories that affect the already denigrated self and ultimately come to represent a more specific, more delineated view of the postmodern condition. A key sub-​topic pertaining to Jameson’s understanding of the narrative above is his understanding of Postmodernism as “the consumption of sheer commodification as a process” (x). In BB, these characteristics enable the reader to understand and/​or sympathize with Francie Brady, who is both McCabe’s own postmodern mischief maker and the young protagonist/​narrator of the novel. Music is often associated with postmodern culture and offers connections to important textual moments; as such, the connection between music and the Postmodern are identified in the ways that musical pastiche provides narrative understanding, as well as in the ways that songs from American and Irish culture help to frame narrative on both local and global levels. While allusion to traditional Irish songs such as “Down By the Salley Gardens” and musical publications such as Emerald Gems of Ireland provide insight into Francie’s past, his references to globally identifiable singers such as Elvis and Frank Sinatra indicate the level of musical culture that has penetrated the boy’s local space. Contemporary consumer culture and fragmentation of the individual likewise provide insight into Francie’s psyche. Postmodern literary theory references irony, schizophrenia4 3 An interchange of terminology also supports the condition of Postmodernity elucidated by Douglas Kellner, which shows that contemporary postmodern society is not fully comprehended without the incorporation of social and economic elements pertaining to globalization. 4 In terms of Jameson (Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) and Hassan (The Postmodern Turn).

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and alienation, characteristics that will be examined with respect to Francie and the objects that surround him. Furthermore, a seemingly random pastiche of allusion to Rolos, John Wayne, and Looney Toons indicates how postmodern tropes of nostalgia, listing, and fragmentation function within McCabe’s fiction.

Music, Irishness, and Postmodern Pastiche/​Fragmentation in BB

In The Global Soul, Pico Iyer’s literary meditation on globalization and the contemporary quotidian, the author calls the music of Handel and Van Morrison to be two of his “great companions,” for “ … “in a world where the sense of “home” can prove so elusive, they root us firmly in the lasting” (303). Here the author equates the diversity of global music on a universal level with an idealistic sense of local ‘place.’ It is music, Iyer argues, that can act as a fixed and rooted point of identification while the global society in which we find ourselves is instead fragmented and transient. The decision to incorporate music as a fundamental grounding element is not particular to Iyer, as it is regularly present within a vast range of postmodern narrative. Music in the Postmodern is also manifested through the re-​appropriation and/​or manipulation of music by younger generations. Examples of this re-​appropriation can be identified in many musical forms. New manifestations of traditional Irish tunes such as reels, slips jigs, and hornpipes, for example, are found in commercial Irish dance shows such as Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. Likewise, students from Coláiste Lurgan in Connemara, County Galway are currently experiencing great popularity for their Irish language adaptations of rock songs such as Madness’ 1979 ska-​pop hit “One Step Beyond,” as well as more contemporary top pop songs such as Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” and Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” This similar rediscovery of music from the past consistently appears in Irish current fiction and often provides significant insight into moments of greater narrative clarity by evoking nostalgia, providing plot hints, imparting the reader with insight into the mind of the character, and by propelling the story forward by creating moments of linear narrative. Music has always been well adapted to literature; as a soundtrack of varying resonances, tones, and instruments, it provides color and clarity to a text. While the relationship between music and fiction has become more frequently acknowledged and manipulated within twentieth and twenty-​first century literature, its connectivity is both built upon yet differs from earlier modern and postmodern works. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is an excellent starting point for providing a historical context for music within the Irish novel, as well as for the ways that the novel

144 Varade stylistically bridges the Modern and the Postmodern. The novel, which was first published in 1759 and reflects the digressive, witty, and satirical nature of its protagonist and his fragmented stream of consciousness, is often considered as an early example of postmodern literary style. It is also considered to be the “first musical novel” due to its use of musical metaphor with respect to arrangements of space and time (Holtz 112). On one hand, a heavy emphasis upon nostalgia and parody with respect to Tristram Shandy’s persona reflects these same two defining characteristics of Postmodernism. Moreover, the novel, which is a novel within a novel, plays with narrative form centuries before its time: Perhaps the most startling of Sterne’s “innovations” in Tristram Shandy is the deliberate ten page gap (pages 241 through 250) in the text-​“the chapter which I have torn out,” according to the narrator. A careful reader will note that the page numbers themselves jump from 240 to 251! In addition, the novel contains pages that are entirely blank; pages with chapter heads but no text; a page with a large inked area; gaping holes in the text; and copious numbers of dashes and asterisks (many denoting obscenities). (iii) In this sense, Tristram Shandy reflects the Postmodern in its ability to play with ironic absence and stylistic subversion; the incorporation of fragmented signs and symbols often connected to music is only one way in which the reader is encouraged to both engage with the text and to ultimately formulate conclusions based upon these fragments.5 James Joyce, who was likewise often considered to be caught between a modern and a postmodern literary aesthetic, was forward-​thinking in his ability to use music as a reflection of the text and to facilitate accessibility to the reader. Some of the texts that incorporate music, for example, are Chamber Music, Dubliners, Ulysses,6 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegan’s Wake. But with changing time comes changing forms of dissemination, as well as a variation in the ways in which music and literature appear to relate within contemporary fiction. How does McCabe appropriate and reconfigure musical allusion presented in Ulysses in order to create new narratives and textual relationships? McCabe does, for instance, follow Joyce in appropriating Yeats’ 5 For more on the incorporation of music within Sterne’s work, see Hocutt, Daniel. “Music and Rhetoric in Tristram Shandy: Challenging Eighteenth-​Century Radical Intellectualism.” https://​facultystaff.richmond.edu/​~dhocutt/​pdf_​files/​shandy.pdf. 6 The importance of music in Ulysses will be outlined in a discussion of McCabe’s The Holy City.

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“Down By the Salley Gardens,” a “song Joyce sang to impress Nora” (Bloom 131). However, McCabe’s appropriation and textual incorporation will demonstrate a more postmodern sensibility through the song’s distinct connection to irony and pastiche. These questions are answered with a focus upon the functions of music within narratives such as BB and how these functions have developed new levels of meaning and importance in Postmodernity. The popular Italian author Melania Mazzucco, for example, has explained that contemporary life has a soundtrack:  “In any given day a soundtrack is present … And it is true that some songs know how to perfectly express our feelings, because in our language today, the sentiment remains unarticulated. But songs separate, rather than unify, because each person has his or her own soundtrack.”7 Similarly, Irish literary critic Joe Cleary has proven that Irish music has served both as a nationalist cultural and globally aware, counter-​cultural point of reference. In Outrageous Fortune, Cleary elaborates on the growth of this type of “subaltern” Irish music in “The Pogues and the Spirit of Capitalism.”8 Irish music is cultural in the sense that it supports and confirms distinctive national art forms. Cleary uses the example of the Gaelic League, a nationalist group that supported and encouraged a resurgence of traditional Irish cultural forms including céilí music and dance. Irish music can also be viewed as counter-​cultural, such as in the example of anti-​traditionalist punk groups like the Pogues and through mainstream, economically powerful “global” rock stars such as U2. For the former, Cleary focuses on the Pogues’ sense of “excess and debauchery” in which their albums “… track a peculiar mini-​history of modern subaltern carnival and consumerist excess that stretches from pre-​modern to postmodern times” (265–​266). In this sense, Cleary connects how the punk music of the Pogues both articulates otherness and foreshadows post-​millennial consumer culture within a very specific period of Irish socio-​political conservatism. Parallels exist between McCabe’s fiction and Cleary’s understanding of Irish musical otherness in the face of conservatism and consumer culture, especially when considering Francie Brady within the context of a Lemassian Ireland intent on fostering economic growth and industrial development.9 7 My loose translation. In the original: “In una giornata e’ sempre presente anche una colonna sonora... Ed e’ vero che alcune canzoni sanno esprimere perfettamente i nostri sentimenti, perché nel linguaggio di oggi spesso il pensiero rimane inarticolato. Ma le canzoni dividono, oltre a unire, perche’ ognuno ha le sue” (Marietti Donna 17/​12/​05). 8 Pp. 261–​294. 9 See O’Flaherty, Eamon. “A maker of modern Ireland.” The Irish Times, 8 Nov. 1997.

146 Varade Moreover, through the band’s mixing of traditional Irish music and British punk, diverse ethnic composition, and irreverent use of Irish traditional stereotypes, mainly that of the “Paddy look,”10 the Pogues were responsible for undermining traditional tropes of Irish authenticity and culture. “As a band schooled in the English punk scene, they brought to Irish music a noisily brutalist aesthetics of excess that suggested neither ‘continuity’ nor ‘revival …, but radical rupture and a pugnacious disrespect for tradition” (275). These alternative values, which directly countered the deeply held beliefs intrinsic to so-​ called “traditional” Ireland, forced the Irish to come to terms with their past and to ponder how it would be reflected within the context of a rapidly modernizing and globalizing world. One identifies this struggle between tradition and modernity in McCabe’s characters, where Francie’s understanding of Ireland on a local level is incompatible with an Ireland newly facing both national and international issues of modernity.11 One could further argue that the incorporation of music and soundtrack within contemporary fictional narrative is a cry for some sort of order or structure in a seemingly chaotic, unstructured Postmodernity. However, it is more appropriate to consider this soundtrack to be the soundtrack of contemporary life. Even though the presence of music is not a necessary aspect of current fiction, the perception of music as a key indicator of the contemporary quotidian within literature often reflects postmodern traits. Music, as understood in postmodern Irish fiction, conveys fragments of ideas and yet, at the same time, remains in some way distinct to each subject with which it comes into contact. On a general level, music in postmodern literature may engender a greater understanding of the pieces of narrative that comprise the novel. In BB, for example, songs such as “BB” and “Down By the Salley Gardens” are carefully chosen by McCabe to point to primary characters’ sentiments and to indicate irony. The songs can also support the action of events as they occur. Furthermore, the soundtrack of Postmodernity is not comprised of a delineated set of songs or albums, musical styles or genres, as it may also indicate nostalgia and

10 11

See Shane McGowan’s discussion of ‘Paddy chic’ and the band’s nostalgia for this look in A Drink With Shane McGowan (213) as cited in Cleary (275). The Cuban Missile Crisis prominently remains in the background of international events over the course of BB, where the threat of global destruction runs parallel with the threat of local destruction by and of Francie Brady. Other characters of McCabe who cannot reconcile traditional and modern Ireland and ‘Irishness’ can be noted through the following narrators: Patrick ‘Pussy’ Braden’s sexual and national ‘otherness’ in BoP; Redmond Hatch’s unreliable narrator and his inability to confront the new millennium in WW; Chris McCool’s reliance upon nostalgia and pastiche in The Holy City.

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pastiche.12 Finally, music reflects the Postmodern in its ability to connect the local to the global. By now, one of McCabe’s literary identifiers is his ability to incorporate music within his novels as a form of cultural and historical identification.13 However, BB is fundamental in codifying McCabe’s style and literary appeal. The first musical reference occurs when Francie describes a night of domestic fighting between his parents in his home: “Then I heard da cursing the town and everybody in it he said he could have been somebody hadn’t he met Eddie Calvert who else in the town had ever met Eddie Calvert who else in the town even knew who Eddie Calvert was?” (6). Here, McCabe fully assumes the voice of the narrator; in this case, a boy from a poor small Irish town in the 1960s. From this and subsequent dialogue, one can conclude that Francie’s father was a musician who had contact with other important musical figures14 but who drank away his chances of success. This traumatic exchange, based on the connection among his father, music and inferred verbal/​physical violence, has an effect on Francie which is ingrained in his psyche from childhood; as he states, “I was going back into the room when I heard something breaking I wasn’t sure what it was but it sounded like glass” (6). Each of these references is key; this initial allusion to music helps to provide narrative context for Francie’s numerous traumas. The connection in his childhood that links music, his father and domestic duress is exemplified in his subsequent exchange with a passerby on the street: Who are you he says. Brady I said … Brady? he says, would that be Brady of the Terrace? That’s right I says. O, he says, I see. You see what, I said. Your father was a great man one time, he says. He was one of the best musicians ever was in this town. He went to see Eddie Calvert, he says then. I said I wanted to hear no more about Eddie Calvert. You don’t like music, he says … (13) In the exchange above, the reference to both music and his father upsets Francie, causing him to abruptly close the topic at hand. Because Francie styles his persona in stoic likeness to his favorite television heroes such as John Wayne, he rarely 12 1 3 14

In McCabe’s case, the Holy City is the most indicative of music’s ability to connect nostalgia and pastiche in order to provide textual meaning and commentary on the tensions between past and present. Leclair, Tom. “Asylum Seeker.” The New York Times, 2/​12/​2009. Eddie Calvert (1922–​1978) was an English trombonist famous for the 1954 instrumental hit Oh, Mein Papa.

148 Varade shows emotion. However, the reference to both Eddie Calvert and his father reminds Francie of this troubling childhood exchange, one that Francie would prefer to forget. Moreover, his abrupt closing of the topic indicates his impending loss of control of his emotions. He insists on changing the subject instead of facing the possibility of becoming physically moved by the conversation on an emotional level. In addition, his silence is indicative of the desperation and sense of stagnancy of individuals caught in the chaos of a changing Irish society. At the end of the novel, the connection between his father as musician, as well as his effect on Francie, comes full circle. The doctor asks Francie if he would like anything: “Yes, I said, the Beano Annual and a trumpet … So now I have a trumpet and if you could see me I look just like da going round the place …” (214). On the surface, Francie clearly reflects his happiness as now being “like his da,” trumpet and all. What McCabe subtly points out is that behavior is passed down through the generations; however, in Francie’s case, it was magnified. While Francie’s father’s vices were drink and domestic abuse, Francie’s instead are stalking, harassment, pyromania, and murder. In a postmodern sense, we discover these connections of narrative through the fragments of reference to the trumpet, to Francie’s father, and to the musician. Moreover, these fragments connect to what is either spoken, unrevealed or silenced in the dialogue. Specific songs can indicate sentiment, nostalgia, and irony, as well as support the action of seemingly fragmented, incomprehensible events. If one considers the title of BB to be a postmodern narrative fragment, then one can attribute a variety of literary meaning to it. The song frequently appears throughout the novel. It first appears in a moment of domestic bliss when Francie’s mother introduces it to him and they subsequently dance together. It last appears when Francie sings it for the patients in (what one may assume to be) the insane asylum. The song is first written as follows: I wish my baby it was born And smiling on its daddy’s knee And me poor girl to be dead and gone With the long green grass growing over me. He went upstairs and the door he broke He found her hanging from a rope He took his knife and he cut her down And in her pocket these words he found Oh make my grave large wide and deep Put a marble stone at my head and feet

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And in the middle a turtle dove That the world may know that I died for love.  (19) Francie expresses that the song confuses him, stating “It was a good song but I didn’t know what was going on in it.” He is drawn to the lyrics that allude to crucial moments in his life, and the song is his ‘soundtrack.’ For instance, the reference to ‘He found her hanging from a rope,” alludes to his mother’s death. However, instead of suicide by hanging, Francie’s mother ultimately dies by drowning. Furthermore, the song’s connection to the baby, happy on the father’s knee, with the death of the mother is reversed; “You” the father says, “I didn’t know what he meant. But he told me. He meant you did it, what happened to ma. I says what are you talking about what happened to ma. O you didn’t hear? he says with a bitter smile. Then he told me they had dredged the lake near the garage and found her at the bottom of it” (43). Instead of the smiling baby on the father’s knee, Francie creates a literary picture of an angry father accusing his son for causing his mother’s emotional trauma and eventual death by suicide. This inference is supported by the final stanza of the song, where the turtle dove and death, due to the lover’s refusal, refer instead to Francie’s mother’s love for her son. Memory of the song haunts Francie as he tries to go on without his ma, and throughout the span of the novel he continually searches for the saying, “A mother’s love’s a blessing no matter where you roam” (41). Francie is never able to fully process the details of the song in its entirety, most importantly the idea of dying for love. While Francie suggests affection for his best friend Joe, one wonders if he ever truly understands the concept of love and a person’s capacity to love others. At the end of the novel, Francie repeats the song; however, the first verse is omitted, and two new verses are inserted before the one indicating suicide. One of those verses specifically references a butcher boy: “In that fair city where I did dwell /​A butcher boy I knew right well /​He courted me my life away /​But now with me he will not stay …” (208). The connection between Francie and the Butcher Boy are finally made explicit in this moment. The song “BB” offers further narrative richness with respect to Francie as an individual. Literally, Francie becomes the Butcher Boy as he assumes a job when no one else cares to do the bloody work. He is a natural, and even perplexes Leddy, the butcher: He hands me the pistol, here he says have a look at it but be careful, I says don’t worry Mr. Leddy. I looked at it for a while there wasn’t much to it the baby pig was still looking up at me with the ear flapping over one eye

150 Varade please Francie? … One squeal and a buck as the bolt went in and I just threw him down on the floor beside the other fellow. Leddy was rubbing his tattoo, biting his lip and staring at me. (124) Francie’s ability to kill without emotion or remorse is a commonly acknowledged trait of psychopathic behavior, which is also mirrored in his lack of empathy for others and in his high level of aggression.15 This behavior can also be schizophrenic in a Jamesonian perspective, where the breakdown of Francie’s signifying chain causes his conflation of past, present, and future.16 What obviously troubles the elder butcher is Francie’s complete lack of hesitation in killing the animal; in fact, at times, Francie even reasons that the animals seek to be killed.17 It is no accident that Francie is fully dedicated to his job, showing the extent to which the passion, emotion, and violence of the song becomes manifested in his daily life. This strong emotion is especially evident in the language of the song, in which the numerous references to love, death and dying, such as the “Long green grass growing over me”; the hanging rope, knife, grave, marble stone and turtle dove all represent tragic elements to which meaning can be ascribed within the context of Francie’s local Irish social sphere. Along with Pussy Braden of BoP, Francie is arguably one of the McCabe’s most effective muses in his transitioning of a traditional Irish narrative 15 16

17

See the conversation between Ira Flatow and Dr. James Fallon, neuroscientist in “Uncovering the Brain of a Psychopath.” Science Now, National Public Radio. October 25, 2013. Online at: http://​www.npr.org/​2013/​10/​25/​240751585/​uncovering-​the-​brain-​of-​a-​psychopath. “What we generally call the signified -​-​the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance -​-​is now rather to be seen as a meaning-​effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves. When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. The connection between this kind of linguistic malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic may then be grasped by way of a twofold proposition: first, that personal identity is itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present: before, and second, that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.” Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham; Duke University Press, 1991. Pp. 25–​26. “Ah no, I says, Mr. Leddy, not at all. It wouldn’t be fair on this little fellow to leave him all alone now that his poor old friend is gone. So give me over the gun now and we’ll see what he can do for him” (124).

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to one representing a bleak Irish pastiche, in the sense that love and death are intimately connected and cannot be separated. Finally, “BB” as a song alludes to Francie’s place as a murderer, an actual killer of humans and animals alike. We know this to be the case, as Francie is held responsible for the murder of his neighbor, Mrs Nugent.18 Francie himself recounts how it occurred: You did two bad things Mrs Nugent. You made me turn my back on my ma and you took Joe away from me. Why did you do that Mrs Nugent? She didn’t answer I didn’t want to hear any answer I smacked her against the wall a few times there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth and her hand was reaching out trying to touch me when I cocked the captive bolt. I lifted her off the floor with one hand and shot the bolt right into her head thlok was the sound it made, like a goldfish dropping into a bowl. If you ask anyone how they kill a pig they will tell you cut its throat across but you don’t you do it longways. Then she just lay there with her chin sticking up and I opened her then I stuck my hand in her stomach and wrote pigs all over the walls of the upstairs room. (195) In the above passage, there is a moment of lucidity. Francie knows that he has been wronged and he can provide the reasons why; specifically, Mrs. Nugent caused him to act badly to his mother and would forbid his best friend Joe from having anything to do with him. However, his job as a butcher ironically becomes useful in choosing the way to kill the source of his problems in Mrs. Nugent. The pastiche of action leading up to the murder, as well as the ironic use of the bolt killer of pigs on a human being at the time of the murder, provides the reader with hints regarding the truly troubled nature of Francie. On a critical level, Francie’s obsessive nostalgia for the song, as well as the ironic tripartite between the butchers of song, animal, and murderer, is a clear indicator of Postmodernity as analyzed by Linda Hutcheon. Irony and nostalgia take center stage: What irony and nostalgia share, therefore, is a perhaps unexpected twin evocation of both affect and agency—​or, emotion and politics. I suspect

18

The text omits the punctuation: For Francie, it is always “Mrs Nugent” instead of “Mrs. Nugent.”

152 Varade that one of the reasons they do so is that they share something else—​a secret hermeneutic affinity that might well account for some of the interpretive confusion with which I began, the confusion that saw postmodern artifacts, in particular, deemed simultaneously ironic and nostalgic. I want to argue that to call something ironic or nostalgic is, in fact, less a description of the ENTITY ITSELF than an attribution of a quality of ­RESPONSE. Irony is not something in an object that you either “get” or fail to “get”: irony “happens” for you (or, better, you make it “happen”) when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not something you “perceive” in an object; it is what you “feel” when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of response—​of active participation, both intellectual and affective—​that makes for the power. (Hutcheon 6) If we consider Francie Brady as embodying schizophrenic traits,19 then we subsequently see how nostalgia frames his ability to confound space and time as the novel progresses. In expressing nostalgia, as in his nostalgia for the Emerald Gems of Ireland or for his father’s trumpet at the end of the novel, the weight of Francie’s personal trauma parallels Hutcheon’s emotional weight as stated above. In the final lines, we see Francie heading towards the mountains, “with the tears streaming down my face” from what the reader can, on one level, imagine to be nostalgia (231). However, an alternative reading could also be applied to Hutcheon’s understanding of irony, which is even more powerfully evoked. Irony as a literary trope contributes heavily to the bleak outlook concerning progress and modernity within the novel on both individual and collective levels. With respect to irony, the “Butcher Boy” of animals is the butcher of humans; he is also obsessed with constantly evoking the song of the same name. In Hutcheon’s perspective, this tripartite of meaning demonstrates the ultimate triumph of irony in the novel. Moreover, in a reader’s ability to perceive, or make irony “happen,” he or she is driven to take an active role in the power of this irony. At the end, the reader is left with an overwhelming sense of stagnation and disappointment; while Francie tells a fellow patient in the mental hospital “don’t you worry nobody’s letting me down again!,” the sad irony of the situation, as well as

19

See Wallace, Clare. “Running amuck: manic logic in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy.” Irish Studies Review 25 April 2008. Online.

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the consequential tears which Francie expresses, clearly portrays the opposite (215). In this way, BB’s evocation of butcherer who butchers and who is also emotionally butchered lends an extremely powerful and negative response to the austere situation of an Irish, or even human, condition. I have chosen to focus primarily on the “BB” song to demonstrate how musical references indicate deeper levels of postmodern narrative meaning. Not only is the musical literary trope repeatedly identified in the work of McCabe, but the sum of these references also points to varying compositions of narrative pastiche. For example, the Emerald Gems of Ireland, a collection of Irish traditional tunes, is an additional musical reference found in BB; this reference clearly alludes to the nostalgia which Francie feels for the collection and causes him to recollect his childhood. McCabe references the Emerald Gems of Ireland in several of his novels, most notably in the playfully ironic title of his second novel, Emerald Germs of Ireland. Francie also mentions the collection A Treasury of Irish Memories which, he is told, is “A much better book. There was no ass and cart on the front of it just an old woman in a shawl standing at a half-​door staring at the sun going down behind the mountains” (183). Here, Francie expresses emotional awareness and instability: “I flicked through the pages over and over,” he says, “reading all the names and when I went to pay the music man I dropped the coins all over the place then I went into the whole story about Philip and Joe and everything it was like a cavalry charge of words coming out of my mouth I didn’t know where they were all coming from” (183). Other traditional songs, such as “Down By the Salley Gardens,” provide the reader with a moment of seeming emotional lucidity on the part of Francie. After arriving in Dublin, he enters a church and hears a girl singing: “(S)he was wearing a white dress,” Francie recounts, “and singing a song about gardens.” Alluding to a potential moment of innocence or affection, he remarks how the notes make him remember his friend Joe (40). As a well-​known traditional Irish tune whose text comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “Down By the Salley Gardens” tells the story of a love which comes to folly due to the foolishness of youth. Listening to this emotional Irish tune, Francie then states the following: I sat there for a long time I don’t know how long. Then the sacristan came and wheeled the piano away. When I looked again the girl in the white dress was gone. But if you listened carefully you could still hear the song. Down By the Salley Gardens that was what it was called. I wanted to sit there until all trace of it was gone. It was like I was floating inside the coloured shaft of evening sunlight that was streaming in through the

154 Varade window. I knew that I would look back some day and wonder had I ever been there in that church or did I imagine it all? (40–​41) In the above, Francie is comforted by a white apparition who we can only conclude to be his “ma.” Confounding reality and imagination, this memory foreshadows a subsequent novel sequence alluding to Francie’s guilt about his mother’s suicide. The scene is important, as it shows the comfort that the traditional and local Irish songs seem to provide him that the more global and contemporary songs do not. These collections are historical relics that represent a lost “innocent auld” Ireland. Through his obsession with these collections, Francie also reflects his inability to come to terms with the loss of these so-​called “authentic” cultural characteristics.20 In typical postmodern fashion, however, it is all a pastiche of past and present, fiction and reality; even Francie expresses this in his utterance, “I knew that I would look back some day and wonder had I ever been there in that church or did I imagine it all?” American and international songs such as Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes”; Frank Sinatra’s “Dear Hearts and Gentle People,” and others commonly heard on Radio Luxembourg, come at a time when historical and political points of global intersection occur. Francie notices and internalizes these non-​local cultural aspects.21 It is especially important to note here that, through his naming of these particular songs, the reader is given some hint as to how globalization begins to encroach on the Irish local. In a postmodern context, music can often help us to uncover and/​or come to terms with this tension between the regional/​local and the issues that pertain to a world that is rapidly becoming homogenized and international. We know that the Irish national songs and ballads act as points of pure nostalgia for Francie. While his discourse is oftentimes schizophrenic and fragmented, the pieces of information revealed in the songs he mentions provide us with a context of the old Irish local versus the new global. In the end, Francie can never fully embody that new world due to his fragmented psyche; we find him, as he says, narrating from a perspective of “Twenty or thirty or forty years ago, I don’t know,” but still singing to the other patients of the mental institution (214). In this way, Francie never comes to terms with a changing Irish landscape. He is confined to the institution as the world keeps on turning around him. The inability to unite the Irish local and the global is a theme that runs throughout the course of all of McCabe’s novels. 20 21

See Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortunes: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin; Field Day Publications, 2006. Francie alludes to political events such as Khrushchev and Communism, the atomic bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and John F. Kennedy.

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It is a defining feature in the author’s “psychopathic” yet endearing narrators. An inability to come to terms with the regional local in a changing global world is also a defining factor of the contemporary quotidian. Pastiche, Fragmentation and the Commodified Self Music is not the only manifestation of the connection between the fragmented narrator and fragments of textual meaning. Like music, references to ­consumer culture likewise demonstrate postmodern characteristics of irony, pastiche, narrative reference, nostalgia, and the tension between the local and the global. Social stratification and identity through consumer culture is not new in Postmodernity; rather, it is a timeless way in which people distinguish themselves and acquire what Kant called “taste” and what Bourdieu develops as “distinction.” Bourdieu states that distinction “… functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place’ guiding the occupants of a given place in social space toward the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position” (Bourdieu & Nice 486). Using Marxist terminology of “property” and “goods,” Bourdieu shows the natural inclination of social beings to orient, improve, and benefit themselves through these same markers of tangible distinction. One can further support the emphasis of social stratification in literature in a myriad of classic fiction, from the works of Jane Austen to those of Émile Zola. What does become distinctive in current literature, however, is how it moves beyond a pure critique of society through social stratification in order to create new, varied levels of narrative meaning. Current fiction frequently cites consumer products or labels familiar to a wide readership, and these tangible images of the contemporary quotidian function in many ways. Brands and branding within literature can indicate status or manipulate a sense of socio-​economic prosperity. More for our purposes, however, narrative fragments concerning consumer culture function as nostalgia in a postmodern sense or allude to a local society’s crisis of globalization; that is, the process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures become integrated through a global network of communication, transportation, and trade. Finally, these fragments of consumerism and globalization can help to either organize or disrupt the structure of a narrative through means such as titles, book segments, and the placement of specific plot references. Consumer references found spread throughout the span of the narrative help to orient the reader in a distinct socio-​economic time period, in which current events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and a rapidly globalizing world begin to threaten the socio-​economic and cultural values of a local, or so-​called “traditional,” Ireland.

156 Varade

Commodification, Fragmentation and Pastiche: BB

From the outset, consumer references help the reader to perceive a time/​cultural context. This is evident when Francie Brady directly mentions cultural entities such as Flash Bars, John Wayne, and “Loony Tunes.” However, each of these references offers a diverse narrative allusion that ultimately provides a deeper, while never conclusive, understanding of the many layers of the text and the fragmented narrator. Moreover, this pastiche of references can, and will, repeat at key moments to provide a momentary point of textual cohesion for the reader. Flash Bars, for instance, are introduced early when Francie’s ma tries to send him away: Then she got her purse down off the window and says here Francie, there’s sixpence-​why don’t you go on round to Mary’s sweetshop and buy yourself a quarter of dolly mixtures? No ma, I says, I won’t buy dolly mixtures but I will buy two Flash Bars and a macaroon bar if I can can I? Of course you can she says. Now go on go on and her face was red and patchy and hot like she’d been sitting bent over the fire only there was no fire. (7) Francie’s narration, which centers on procuring the Flash Bars and macaroon bar, reveals much about the deeper meaning of both the text and of the narrator’s psyche. On one hand, the pink marshmallow bar opposes the harsh realities of the events that are taking place. Subsequent narration reveals that this is the point at which Francie’s ma is attempting to kill herself by hanging: “What’s that doing up there ma I says it was fuse wire belonging to da just dangling but she didn’t say what it was doing there …” (7). Furthermore, the reference to the sweet, fluffy Flash Bar is embedded in Francie’s childlike narrative of run-​on sentences, innocent questions, and imperfect grammar. The pure desire for candy bars within a seemingly childlike discourse magnifies the grotesque nature of Francie’s descent into madness, as it is hard to reconcile the innocent questions of the Francie quoted above with that of a more mature Francie, the subsequent “Butcher Boy” of pigs and humans. As with most of his narrators, McCabe crafts a character who is unable to distinguish between real life and fantasy; as such, the divide between the “innocent” child narrator and the psychopathic serial murderer becomes heightened through references to the candy bar. Consequently, the weaving of a bleak Irish pastiche becomes heightened and especially tragic through McCabe’s focus on a child narrator. Further pastiches and fragments of recollection are explored when Francie enters Mickey Traynor’s shop. These memories evoke more of Francie’s

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childhood trauma, this time through the lens of consumer consumption. “I went into Mickey Traynor’s shop” Francie narrates. “There was a big picture of Our Lord hanging on the wall. It said: Buy a television or else you bastard! No it didn’t it said Our Saviour looks after us all” (100). Francie’s confusion of what the religious object says suggests an Ireland that struggles to come to terms with both the changing role of the Catholic Church and the increasing influence of commodity culture. Along the same lines of cultural consumption, Francie’s passion for John Wayne and “Loony Tunes” provides both cultural context and a deeper level of textual meaning. From 1930 to 1969, generations of children grew up watching the raw antics of characters such as Tweety Bird, Elmer Fudd, and Sylvester the Cat. Likewise, John Wayne was an idol for a generation of male children. Both the movies of John Wayne and the serials of “Loony Tunes” were indicative of important moments in American media; John Wayne represented the charismatic cowboy in the Great American West, while “Loony Tunes” stood for the golden age of American animation. However, in McCabe’s hands, “Loony Tunes” and John Wayne become much clearer examples of Francie’s troubled psyche. As time passes and Francie’s only true friend, Joe, begins to abandon him, the worlds of “Loony Tunes” and John Wayne begin to collide: I asked him to put on the cowboy voices like he used to. He said he couldn’t do that any more … Try it Joe I says. Then he said it-​OK fellas we’re ridin’ out! … It was just like John Wayne. You’d swear it was him. I was over the moon when he did that voice. He used to spin his silver colt and say it just like that-​OK fellas we’re ridin’ out! Say it again Joe I said, say it again! I couldn’t stop asking him to say it again. But I had to in the end for I could see him getting red under the eyes and I didn’t want to annoy him anyway he’d said it enough he was tired he said he had to get back. I left him in town and then I came back out myself. I’d try doing the voice but I could never get it as good as Joe. I’d lie there on the flattened yellow grass where he had been but no matter how I tried I always got it arseways. It didn’t sound like John Wayne at all. It sounded more like the bird what do you call him-​I taught I taw a puddytat. (108–​9) Here, Francie equates his friend Joe with the “hero” John Wayne. However, he can never approximate this greatness, no matter how he tries. Instead, he only ends up sounding like a verbally challenged Tweety Bird who is relentlessly pursued by Sylvester the Cat. Indeed, Francie is chased throughout the novel both by the police and by his own demons, and McCabe’s juxtaposition of an

158 Varade imperfect American cartoon character and a flawed young murderer is both clearly intentional and subversively ironic. Moreover, the comparison of Francie with the cartoon character instead of the cowboy star indicates a darker level of literary allusion. While John Wayne is the squeaky clean hero who saves the citizens of the American West from evildoers, the cartoon characters in Loony Tunes instead use irony and politically incorrect, sometimes racist humor in order to show the imperfections of humans and society. Because he identifies with Tweety Bird instead of John Wayne, Francie is therefore himself a “Loony Tune.” Similarly to BB, W follows postmodern considerations of music and consumer culture as they factor within fragmented “Selves.” In W, McCabe develops the ultimate unreliable narrator. The narrator’s unreliability has developed to a level at which one must choose between resigning to take what is said at face value or to engage in a Manichean struggle to identify “linear” narrative. Here, McCabe develops what he began in BB by more closely relating postmodern considerations regarding music, consumer culture, and self-​fragmentation through the context of a country that incessantly relies upon self-​identification through status symbol and global labeling. McCabe’s muse is Celtic Tiger Ireland, and the protagonist who questions this clash of cultures is Redmond Hatch. In W, the complexities associated with Hatch’s persona are supported by the text’s use of brands and branding. Gerard Genette’s Paratexts becomes particularly applicable, as the reader is asked to question if these products and consumer references are serving to provide narrative order or disorder. Often, McCabe’s novels and characters question what happens when a traditional culture, in the past based upon deprivation and neglect, is confronted with rapid economic prosperity, and W is no exception to this question. As is par for the course in McCabe’s novels, it is difficult to discover the realities behind the true personae of the main characters; as such, the reader is constantly forced to ponder the question, “Who really IS Redmond Hatch?” Is he somehow related to “Auld Pappie Strange,” the old storyteller /​keeper of Irish rural tradition who holds the keys to the secrets of the mountain? Or is he the middle class, cosmopolitan Celtic Tiger family man who bounces back and forth from Dublin to London in search of economic prosperity? In all, he is both an unreliable narrator and a “shape shifter” which, in Celtic mythology, represents those who change form for survival, rebirth, punishment, or protection (White 2000). For Redmond Hatch, these multiple realities emerge, always within the context of a sinister and foreboding narrative style. The novel, which begins innocently enough, quickly turns into a psychological thriller. In W, the complexities associated with Redmond Hatch’s persona are supported by the text’s use of brands of all types; from media and television,

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to toys, to books and verse. By including these narrative fragments referring to actual products and cultural references, McCabe provides a sense of historical accuracy within a narrative fraught with spatial and temporal questions. One of the textual fragments that enable the reader to make some sense of Hatch’s convoluted, questionable narration is through the specific brand names that he repeatedly mentions. One of these brands, specifically My Little Pony®, helps the reader to better comprehend the various time periods which are evoked as the narration is propelled forward. On one hand, the My Little Ponies mentioned within the text coincide with the time periods being mentioned. Each section of the novel is assigned a specific date or a general time period, beginning with “Eighties,” and finishing with “2006,” “Present” and “Eternity,” respectively.22 Because the sense of time within the novel is so disordered and seemingly disjointed, these section titles “propose” a sequential plot based upon a linear progression of time. Gerard Genette’s Paratexts is again useful here, for McCabe’s chapter titles “appear” to provide us with a context and an order. As Genette mentions, these titles are not necessary and are geared to the limited readership of those readers who browse or read the book (Genette 294). These titles are more complex than they seem, as they confound the reader’s understanding of the plot instead of clarifying it. On one hand, it is difficult to know exactly who is stating the titular information; is it Redmond Hatch? Or is it Patrick McCabe? These titles, after all, propose objective periods of time. The titles further confuse the reader through these same specific time periods. Since our narrator is unreliable, we must question that he is indeed correctly recollecting plot moments. This is particularly true of section titles referring to specific moments in time, such as “Eighties” or “Mid-​Nineties.” As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator regularly confuses memories, hallucinations, and chronological time, again contributing to the unstable narrative plane that the reader must confront. A reader’s assertion that the information is indeed muddled is confirmed by noting the My Little Ponies which Hatch’s daughter, Imogen, covets. These ponies serve to provide a context for the events that Hatch narrates regarding his past. In this way, one can conclude that even though Hatch is an alcoholic, prone to hallucinations, and mentally disturbed, he is still not inventing his whole discourse; rather, the tangible details relating to the specific toy brand

22

Sections are different than chapters. Sections refer to periods of time (Ex.: “2006; Eternity”), while chapters refer to people, places or things (Ex.: “Heaven’s Golden Halls”; “My Little Pony”).

160 Varade help to prove that at least in part, these events really did occur. To what extent the narrator can be believed, however, is never concretely established. Using narrative fragments pertaining to the Hasbro pony “Pinky Pie,” it is possible to reconstruct historical time. This plastic pony is mentioned repeatedly throughout the decades by Hatch and is always connected to a discourse referring to Imogen. The first time Pinkie Pie is mentioned in the “Eighties,” the reader notices the strong bond between Hatch and his daughter. He states that in these times, “(w)e always had great fun walking through Queen’s Park, with her sucking her lollipop and me singing the theme song from My Little Pony, shouting “Kimono!” and “Pinkie Pie!”, the name of all the characters she loved” (26). From this memory, along with his mentioning of other ‘eighties children’s brands such as Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman and petite plastic figurines called Polly Pockets™, one notices that Hatch depicts himself as a caring, loving and involved parent. However, this is a false sense of both time and persona, as he later proves to be incapable of escaping the demons of his past through his nightmarish recollections and hallucinations. In “The Nineties,” My Little Pony again can provide a historical context that alerts the reader to crucial events in the text and appears to provide a reference point to progressing time. When Imogen and Hatch pretend to be the ponies Pinkie Pie and Kimono, for example, he remarks that his daughter “… used to make me feel young” (52). By this point, however, some of Hatch’s narration begins to take on a sense of the peculiar. He states, for example, that when pretending to turn all of Queen’s Park “… into Ponyville from My Little Pony,” the old woman watching winces and takes offense at the great chaos which the father and daughter engender (52). In this scene, Hatch goes beyond the norms of fatherhood with his daughter; he acts the part of the pony by whinnying and acting out the movement of imaginary reins. He also weirdly mentions the “afraid things” which scare Imogen. Tying these frightening images to the pony he states, “Pinkie Pie was a sweet lamb of a pony who loved to try all these new fun things but sometimes could get just that little bit nervous. Sometimes Immy liked playing at being her because she liked me comforting her when the ‘afraid’ things were over” (52). This statement, along with the previous action between father and daughter, forces the reader to question both Hatch’s sanity and his relationship with his daughter more carefully, specifically by keeping other narrative fragments in mind. While alcohol, spousal and child abuse, restraining orders and robbery come to plague Hatch as the novel develops, he still longs for the pure connection that he once shared with Imogen. He later states, “I told the judge that I regretted a lot of my behaviour-​especially the sudden irrational rages. I had just wanted us all to be the happiest family ever, but, unfortunately, things hadn’t

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developed that way” (67). The ponies, therefore, provide two differing points of reference. For Hatch, the ponies represent his attempt to be an ideal father and to have a perfect family. For the reader, the ponies serve as ironic symbols of the perverted and destructive behaviors plaguing Hatch throughout the years. In addition to the way that My Little Ponies help to complicate a sense of time in W, these brand objects come to represent deeper textual moments through their reference to masks and masking. In one of Hatch’s memories of time spent with his daughter, he recounts the following nostalgic moment resulting from a happenstance discovery of one of Imogen’s preferred videos: … after the taxi had pulled away and after dazedly wandering into a shop, the first thing I came upon happened to be a video of My Little Pony. And not just any old copy of it either, but the very one I remembered watching with Immy-​ The Enchanted Mask, in fact. Where Rainbow Dash, Minty, and Wisteria are going to the magic castle with Sunny Daze. I remembered it especially because Pinky Pie wasn’t in it and Immy had been very disappointed by that. (75) It is interesting that Hatch remembers this specific episode of My Little Pony. The name of the video referring to masking and starring the little plastic ponies which Imogen adores clearly corresponds to the events in the novel itself. In an allegorical sense, Hatch is wearing the mask; he is the shape-​shifter, where the boundaries between himself and Ned Strange become more blurred as the novel develops. In this sense, Hatch’s “mask,” when uncovered, reveals characteristics pertaining to Ned Strange. This comes to fruition at the end of the novel, where the difference between Strange and Hatch ceases, at least for a moment, to exist. Moreover, Hatch’s reference to The Enchanted Mask may also refer directly to his paternal nature. Even though he does exhibit ideal characteristics of a father, at the same time Hatch proves to be a less than an ideal father figure to Imogen. There are veiled references to child abuse and the clear implementation of the restraining order that prevents Hatch from seeing Imogen. Hatch behaves in strange ways when with his daughter. In one moment he chastises her for wanting to watch the video a third time, and in the next he calls her Pinky Pie and lets her watch it for as long as she pleases (75). Furthermore, there are often references to Hatch’s “scaring” of Imogen. He recounts the following: “Do the ‘afraid’ things, she’d say and I’d scare her. Pinky Pie was the ‘scarediest’ pony … But she always loved it when the time came to comfort her” (75). Hatch puts on a convincing mask for his daughter, either as one of the ponies in the television series or as an “afraid” thing from which she needs salvation.

162 Varade In these ways, the brand of My Little Pony, both through the representation of the toy and the media, helps to create a textual connection between the innocent mask of the children’s video and the sinister multitude of masks that Hatch comes to represent. While McCabe first appears to create a parallel between brand names and historical time, it is all for naught; in the reality of Hatch’s case, however, these markers of the past instead act as further indicators of a very real, disturbing present. What McCabe ultimately brings to light, therefore, is the way that Postmodernity cannot be separated from fragments of the past. Even though one can attempt to place certain images within a historical time frame, it is a fruitless labor; as such, McCabe textually proves that the parodic nature of Postmodernity can never escape the nightmarish quagmire of the historical past. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. James Joyce. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Bourdieu, Pierre and Richard Nice, tr. “Classes and Classifications.” Distinctions. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1984. Pg. 486. Cleary, Joe. “Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context.” Éire-​Ireland, Vol. 42:1 and 2. Spring /​Summer 2007. Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2007. Cowles, Gregory. “The Silver-​Tongued Devil.” The New York Times, 3/​4/​2007. Flatow, Ira and Dr. James Fallon. “Uncovering the Brain of a Psychopath.” Science Now, National Public Radio. October 25, 2013. http://​www.npr.org/​2013/​10/​25/​240751585/​ uncovering-​the-​brain-​of-​a-​psychopath Flint, James. “Shades of Meaning.” The Daily Telegraph, 12 Nov. 2006. http://​www.telegraph.co.uk/​culture/​books/​3656509/​Shades-​of-​meaning.html Genette, Gérard and Jane E, Lewin, tr. Paratexts:  Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Ohio; Ohio State University Press, 1987. Hassan, Ihab. “The Dismemberment of Orpheus.” From Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology by Paula Geyh, Fred G, Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. New York; W.W. Norton and Company, 1997. Hocutt, Daniel. “Music and Rhetoric in Tristram Shandy:  Challenging Eighteenth-​ Century Radical Intellectualism.” https://​facultystaff.richmond.edu/​~dhocutt/​pdf_​ files/​shandy.pdf

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Holtz, William. “Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel” (Review). Found in Eighteenth-​Century Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, Autumn. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Pp. 112–​115. Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” Online Source. https://​www. scribd.com/​document/​56702952/​Irony-​Nostalgia-​and-​the-​Postmodern-​Linda-​ Hutcheon. Pp. 1–​16. Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul:  Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Random House, 2000. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Kellner, Douglas. “Globalization and the Postmodern Turn.” http://​www.gseis.ucla.edu/​ courses/​ed253a/​dk/​GLOBPM.htm Kellner, Douglas. “Theorizing Globalization.” Sociological Theory, Vol. 20, No. 3. November 2002. Kellner, Douglas and Richard Khan. “Resisting Globalization.” http://​www.gseis.ucla. edu/​faculty/​kellner/​essays/​resistingglobalization.pdf Leclair, Tom. “Asylum Seeker.” The New York Times, 2/​12/​2009. Lyotard, Jean-​Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Marietti, Benedetta. “Melania Mazzucco: Sandro Veronesi. Confronto d’autore tra due romanzi italiani che ci raccontano come siamo.” Donna, 17/​12/​2005. McCabe, Patrick. Emerald Germs of Ireland. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. McCabe, Patrick. The Butcher Boy. New York: Dell Publishing, 1992. McCabe, Patrick. The Holy City. New York: Bloomsbury usa, 2008. McCabe, Patrick. Winterwood: A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. O’Flaherty, Eamon. “A Maker of Modern Ireland.” The Irish Times, 8 Nov. 1997. Sterne, Laurence and Janet Kopito, ed. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Mineola; Dover Publications, 2007. Wallace, Clare. “Running Amuck: Manic Logic in Patrick McCabe’s BB.” Irish Studies Review, 25 April 2008. Pp. 157–​163. Online. Welsh, Irvine. “The Man from the Mountains.” The Guardian, Saturday 4 November, 2006. White, Kenneth. “Shapeshifting in Celtic Myth.” http://​www.realmagick.com/​7082/​ shapeshifting-​in-​celtic-​myth/​

Chapter 10

‘Sinking the Pail into the Self-​Conscious,’ Bubble Gum Ballads and Other Conversational Circles: Patrick McCabe, London 2015 Jennifer Keating Patrick McCabe agreed to a conversation on July 17th, 2015 in a London hotel lobby. We discussed his work, family and the world (over coffee and scones). Edits are made for clarification and continuity in the interview delineated below. But few substantial changes or cuts were made.

Preamble: “Home and Language”

P: How old are your boys now? J: Liam is seven and Finn is three. P: Has it been that long (since we last saw one another)? And you live in Pennsylvania? J: Pittsburgh. P: It’s a nice town, I liked it a lot. J: It’s funny. I didn’t know if I’d be able to move back. It was one of the few places I guess I felt at home. It’s been lovely raising the boys there. The landscape, even some of the plants are identical to those that I remember in Cobh as a child. There’s just something very comfortable in that. P: Different people, different things, but whatever works. J: It’s been lovely, actually, to raise the boys there. P: It’s interesting that the world has become internationalized. The whole notion of homeland keeps rearing its head. You see the whole Greek debacle now. These things, you know. So that’s what it meant? We don’t matter now? It’s pretty deep. J: It’s very fluid and I think sometimes that fluidity is liberating but it’s also really unsettling. You have nowhere to put your feet. P: Exactly. I have a friend who would have been a child of the seventies, you know, countercultural kind of internationalist. “There is no such thing as home, there is no Ireland, there is no nothing you know, everybody is a citizen of the world as that’s fine as it goes.” The other day she was around and said that she

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389007_011

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just bought an old cottage in the mountains of Kerry and I said, “That surprises me, what did you do that for?” And she said, “I don’t know either but when my mother died I woke up one morning realizing I don’t have a stake in anything.” And you know, that isn’t about intellect, actually. You can rationalize all these things. And I said, “That’s what you felt?” And she said, “yeah … I didn’t expect to feel it.” And she followed it through and that’s where she ended up. It wasn’t sentiment, it was something as deep as your nature, you know. So you don’t matter anywhere but someday you find a little place where you can grow rhododendrons or whatever. I wouldn’t have needed any convincing at all of that because I always felt that homeland was important. But she did. J: I think it’s really interesting to think about that. I’ve been thinking about that a lot in terms of what people are willing to fight for or keep as their own. P: Well when you have children it really becomes important. Because the questions start very early as to who I am. The most interesting one that I had on that was when my eldest daughter was about seven years old; just saying the Catholic religion is the age of reason but I never gave it much thought. But I used to pick her up from school and walk her home. Out of the blue she said, “How come I’m not allowed to make my own Holy Communion?” I said, “Nobody said anything, how do you even know about Holy Communion?” We weren’t practicing Catholics –​not that we were anything, just too lazy to go to mass. That’s about the height of it. And she reamed off all her classmates –​Muslim, Jewish –​that all came through the rite of passage. And I said, “How do you know about communion?” She said, “Aunty Ruth’s photograph album.” I had never realized she knew about that but she had gone through it and all these things had gone into it. So we flew her over the next week and she made her Holy Communion. But it was very interesting that she figured it out all herself. J: It’s funny actually, so two things pertaining to language and customs. We took the boys to Canada on holiday about two weeks ago and my three year old kept saying, “I like the hotel mommy but I miss our green house.” And every day at some point he would say, “When are we going back to our green house?” And we’d ask, “Are you not enjoying yourself?” and he’d say, “Oh I love it. But where’s my green house?” P: It’s not the real… … … … . J: And then we were going on another trip shortly thereafter and we were going to stay at a hotel and he said, “Now mommy, do you use French words when we go to this hotel?” And I said, “No, you know, we’re staying in the U.S. and we don’t use French.” And then he said, “Where did you get all those French words?” As though you just pick them up and put them in a bag … P: Like coins. That’s the way he sees it then. Like coins. J: They are words that he didn’t know and couldn’t say …

166 Keating P: I often wonder –​I used to work in special education and you know some of the autistic kids were always saying, is that the way they seem them? You know, real things, like floating around? J: Like tiles. They are very interchangeable but might morph … P: That’s right. Because I mean that’s the other thing, language is obviously living. Well not obviously, but I think of it as living and moving in these different directions but it has to have some type of solid element or else it loses all its meaning, right? P: Guess so, yeah. Moorings. You know it’s only one now.

On Three: Butcher Boy, Breakfast and Winterwood

J: What I was really interested in hearing in regard to your work, and the way that I’ve seen a lot of your work within the context of contemporary Ireland, is that it’s unapologetic and hard-​hitting. And the other thing is that I studied history, so I have a difficulty reading literature outside of the historical framework. But the release points (years of publication) for these books in particular were, I think, really important moments for Ireland coming on to the international stage. And so much of your work, I think, is exploring the external influences on Irish culture but also how Ireland attempted to define itself and the ways in which individual people or characters or voices kind of push against any of those notions by the different ways in which they, you know, are exploring their own issues or whatever the theme might be that you’re exploring in each of the novels. I have been wondering about the aesthetics of your work but also its cultural meaning. Especially because, I think, from 2008 onward, we are in a very different chapter in regards to this Irish culture, the Irish economy than where we were in maybe 1985, in 1990. But I also just wanted to hear from you today a little about your own practice as a writer, and how with these three specific works might have been working through different techniques or practices that you were really interested in aesthetically. You know, continuing to move in slightly different directions with the voices of the protagonists. They are so distinct from one another but they also seem to be coming right to the heart of the Irish landscape and place. P: The three of them are like ballads, you know. If you think about BB it is a ballad. It’s a traditional English ballad, like you know, the child ballads, the Scottish ballads. It’s kind of like them. And W is certainly a child’s ballad –​it’s a mountain song. And BoP is kinda like a sort of bubblegum ballad, a making up modern ballad, which is from an original song. So they’re kind of daily requests and you kind of use what’s available to you and what you’re born with. I suppose a

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soft feminine Irish Catholicism, which is what I’ve always seen it as rather than, should we say, hard Protestantism. They tend to be very broad about it and you might think, well what does that mean? Well, you know objectively, maybe the untrained eye would say, “What is the difference?” I mean we’re all Irish; well in fact, we’re not. There is a very subtle difference and a very important difference between let’s say Protestantism, which is the language of business and perhaps arguably individuality, and maybe the impression from the Catholic point of view so if you wanted to get to the core of anything that I do, you have to look at the Irish Catholic mindset seeing that it’s rogue, it’s contrary, it’s generous, it’s unpredictable and just when you think you have the measure of it, it changes again and that’s the shape shifter aspect of it so that’s the kind of thing that leads all those things. Where do you get the common thing that’s in the ballad? It can change in front of your eyes and it changes every night but it’s always sung with great gusto, great commitment. So that’s how I see those three books being made and it’s a very historical form, the ballad, because it’s like the mini Shakespearean epic in the beginning, middle and end. It all happens in three minutes so they’re kind of short books; whatever the broad sweep of history. But I suppose what they’re really doing is that it’s a country that has only been free of occupation, I suppose relatively speaking, a part of less than a hundred years. Identity is always going to be protean, and you know, malleable and being worked out as we speak. You know you say, that change has been another quantum leap in the last ten years and it has and it hasn’t; because human nature can change, and you know, the big thing is that nothing has changed since Joyce wrote “The Dead” or Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth.” So you’re always faced, no matter how sophisticated technology becomes or economies become dramatically altered that Steve Jobs said, “What do we know now that I’ve delivered that the Stone Age man didn’t know?” I mean, we don’t know. So at the heart of every ballad is a mystery, which is the preoccupation with mortality. You know, will you ever see your loved ones again? When will I ever get home? All those things. I’m not conscious of them when I’m writing. But only when I’m finished and I look back can I say, “Probably, that’s what they were about. ” J: And I guess that’s part of what I’m getting at as well, is that some of the questions are asking you to kind of explore that unconscious underlying part of the practice. P: But I’m always trawling in the subconscious. So when it’s over, they are welcome questions because it might improve your performance to some extent for your next book, if you don’t get self-​conscious –​if you get self-​conscious then the book will be no good. But definitely that sort of “sinking of the pail into the subconscious,” which is the Joycean method. Sometimes it’s a disaster, certainly in the first draft it’s a disaster. You don’t know what’s going on.

168 Keating J: So, when you are working with protagonists like a child, working with a transgender character, or in the case of W, a seemingly typical Irish man in a particular moment, how do you start with the characters? P: It never starts with a character. It always starts with a sound or a smell or a snatch of music. The character gets built up like a mosaic, like the tiles that we were talking about earlier on; bit-​by-​bit the dynamic mosaic begins to form. Sometimes it doesn’t. It just falls away. But usually what happens then is that it turns up in another book later on. You never waste anything. You know, just leave it aside. They form kind of more like a sonata or maybe like a symphony or a ballad symphony. There’s always music, there’s always color –​like different colors of the book, almost like synesthesia. The color of W would be like ash gray or wintery skies. Breakfast was clearly like bubblegum, you know, like candy music. And BB is crimson like a Roger Corman movie. That’s the way I think of them. But I don’t know any of this. I can only tell you that looking back. Because if you had asked me, I’d get uncertain if I thought I knew what it was. I wouldn’t go there. I would have to be lead there to keep the sincerity of it or the authenticity of it. J: I mean, if we were to think about these three books in relation to one another, and if you’re reflecting back on your writing over the last 20–​25 years, what comes to mind with those three books, I suppose, in conversation with one another? P: I think every book is in conversation, you know, with the one before, the one after, the one sideways to it in that I’ve always thought it would be quite crude about it in that way that the whole thing is one long book. And that you eventually chop it up into different books, you know, that it is a continuum. It’s a bit like you couldn’t see the world apprehended in any other way and that some people are like that. You know, like when you’re talking about Amy Winehouse, you can see that that girl was an old soul in a young body. She shouldn’t be able to sing like that so you know, how is that? Some of these things are not quite explicable. You know, she’s singing like someone born in the 30’s or 20’s and it’s not just that she’s copying it. It’s coming from somewhere else. So sometimes, when I think of writing you’re writing in your father’s voice, in your mother’s voice and the parents and the grandparents that you’ve never met. I think that culturally speaking in the Irish context the oral culture is so strong or was so strong. It’s certainly become attenuated now and that’s not just getting older. Things have changed. I  wouldn’t cut across that. There’s no doubt about that. I notice that the small villages are not as interesting, in many ways, the language has flattened out. So that’s happened in America, it’s happened I’m sure in Africa and various other places but something else will take its place. But it’s not my world. Although when I started writing the only one that I felt

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really comfortable with and still have a friend in is Brendan Behan, strangely enough. Because Brendan Behan’s ballads seemed very kind of authentic to me. In a way that sometimes I found that the middle class people use these things but they didn’t understand them or they were looking at them through a parsonage window, as it were. Whereas even in these his tape-​recorded books, they had a rollicking kind of abandonment that was absolutely seductive for me. The best Irish pubs had that. They don’t have it now and will never have it again because there’s an anarchy that went with that which children and wives often suffered for. But nobody ever gets anything right so the best of it was interesting. People just go to places that were quite extraordinary as far as storytelling. I’m sure Glasgow had it too. They come from a solid working class culture where people, whatever deficits with their worlds, they had a rhythm to their lives and they belonged to places that made it perhaps is unthinkable now and inconceivable now. So I’m very much from the old world as well as that. I mean, at the same time the modern thing, that BoP, you’re talking about transgender but transgender is like old hat to me now, you know what I mean? It’s just part of life now, it’s just not an issue. J: But if it’s old hat now what was it back then? P: Well, it wasn’t what people would have said to me, you know, “this is hard hitting, this is radical.” Is it? What’s radical about it? It just seemed to me that it seemed extraordinary to me that we didn’t have a character like that before. You know, that we suddenly didn’t only discover these aspects of human nature in the mid-​90’s. There was a sheer deficit or an absence there I thought, although that wasn’t the reason I wrote the book. But I certainly wouldn’t have had any problem going there. But it wasn’t meant to be transgressive in the way it was perceived. That wouldn’t be the place I’d start. J: But it seems to me, if we’re looking at it not necessarily as a transgressive trope, so-​to-​speak, what I think is interesting about it is its shape shifting. In that regard it’s invoking elements of the mythical and the oral history. P: It’s an epic fairy tale kind of thing, “what are we going to find?” But that’s very old fashioned. That’s not 90’s. It’s as old as the Greeks. But I would always use those, you know, because so much of Irish folklore is based around those fairy tales, the child in the woods, the going beyond the borders. That’s very much like Ireland is insular, so going out into the world. I  remember when I was growing up in the world, being Irish is kind of not necessarily the best favor done on a people but people would be very suspicious of the Irish. J: It became very glamorous in the 90’s. P: It may well have been, but believe you me, it wasn’t in 1973 when you had to make all sorts of kind of, well, you had to be alert to survive and you know probably the Dublin theme in BB is malignant shame, you know, even your

170 Keating accent was a problem. Sometimes imagined, sometimes you imagined things that were being implied that you shouldn’t be inferring at all. Even the very fact that that happens is a colonial legacy. When it became trendy and all the rest of it blah blah blah –​that’s ephemeral –​because as soon as the international crash happened we saw how fucking trendy it was again when Lehman Brothers blew the gasket and straight away the Germans reverted to the type with the imperialist notion. And so it was the same old story again so when you think everything is changing, as the Greeks are finding out now and being punished now the same way in the ways that Ireland was when it was neutral during the wars. It was all very subtle but the financiers are in charge, with the “we’re terribly sorry, bye-​bye now.” And it’s dreadful but we could argue there that everything has changed but it hasn’t really, you know. In the Anglophone world the same old powers and levers are being pushed and over Europe, same way as the Irish used to be seen. But what was interesting about that is when Ireland got the chance to kind of stand at the side it colluded with the older dog, which was very depressing, I thought. And I understand that there were financial reasons for that but you don’t have to stand with the other people so that you can ingratiate yourself. It is simply because they will drop you too. History teaches us that if you’ve got any sense, even if you are an elected representative. But they all fell for it. J: So, when you were thinking about your books in terms of those moments in Ireland –​in ‘92 for BB, in ‘98 for BoP, 2006 for W –​with this purview, looking back on the crash of 2008, and Ireland being bailed out by the imf, the extreme austerity measures and the ways in which the old pecking orders became quite apparent yet again. And then with the economic structure; I can’t help reading your work and seeing, I guess, the tensions in notions of communities in Ireland. And one of the things I always think about and interpret your work doing, is coming at understandings of Irish culture from the margins. Because these are not the dominant protagonist voices. But at the same time, it immediately makes me wonder well, what the hell is the dominant voice? It tells us that there are people in power who are making decisions but the dominant voice is kind of a myth unto its own. Instead, what we are seeing is kind of like a dialogic, the interaction between your characters is the complexity of the community, of a particularly Irish community. And at once, thinking about coming at these questions from the margins. And as soon as I say that I find myself falling on my face because the whole idea is that it isn’t about a single voice, it’s almost like a symphony of voices, right? P: It’s a curious thing but I’ve always kind of felt that everybody is on the margin. I mean you’re talking about the voice, and in the sense that the real core of all these books is, well I am like a Schubert kind of romantic as in ‘why does

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everything pass and everything like, there are your children and all the things where you’re like, how can that be given to you and then be taken away? How does that make any sense to anybody? You think of the world as a random burlesque. Nick Cave’s son, I saw yesterday, died in a cliff fall. I used to know Nick. I said here we go again … how can this awful thing be? This child is taken away at fifteen and probably was going to be a great musician. And now that’s never gonna happen. So like, you could think “oh his family’s position is as vulnerable as anyone” and now it’s going to be followed by this ghost all his life. You know, sometimes, you know, work of mine would be appreciated in this sense of giving a voice to the voiceless but the rich are as important to me as the poor. If you’re gonna be democratic, be democratic. It’s nobody’s fault that they’re rich. You can’t suddenly do this Steinbeck thing of the poor disenfranchised, you know, drunk or you know. I don’t see it that way. And that’s why my sympathies now in Ireland are with the devout Catholics, actually. J: In what ways? P: Because I think that the real radical act now in the modern world is to say something like, “Yeah I have this principle view of the world like I go to mass every day, I  think it’s a good thing for my children to do and I  believe you should stay married.” I think that is really a radical thing to say and you know the minute you say it –​I’m not saying this is my view –​but if one said it, with the current climate you would be riled or at least lampooned on social media and that’s fine if people on social media want to do that but I don’t think it’s fair. So my sympathies are with the people who are not getting a fair shake, really. And this is what always happens. But it just so happens in 1940 it was the Catholic Church that was in the ascended and now it’s the white liberal middle classes who are now getting the revenge on their masters, I suppose. Maybe, maybe not, but what I’m saying is that someone who has some kind of handle on if 30 odd people are mowed down on a beach and there’s a guy with a “selfie” the next day taking a photograph of himself. And nobody sees anything wrong with that? The Church sees something wrong with that so I understand why the Church sees something wrong with that. There is such a notion as the sacred and that’s profane what he’s doing. So my sympathy, then, is with someone who understands that that’s profane. You know, because I do think art has a moral imperative as well. You can’t just ride on your back morally or spiritually. So in a way, the books are, well literature is a kind of handmaiden of religion or vice versa, or they’re on the same train, anyway. J: Do you think it’s an ethical framework or a moral? Because on some level I would argue that with some of your work it is the ethical transgression of the Church, as well as individuals and the implications of that within a community, right, both small and large. And maybe, and I guess in that regard, I am kind

172 Keating of questioning whether or not there is a divide between moral, which might be religiously sanctioned as sacred or otherwise and then the ethical, that might be a way to kind of ever so slight divorce between what is still a discomfort with profane acts or a disregard for the potentially sacred whether it’s married to a religious system or not. Because, if we’re thinking about, if we are using violence as an example, so violence is something that is pretty pervasive to all three of the novels, in terms of not just acts of violence but that slippage into maybe not justification of violence but taking action in those ways. I  mean in, that regard the violence, it doesn’t seem to be a moral vendetta against the violence but actually exploring kind of the tensions and the rationalization of violent acts for the characters. Because Francie, it’s hard not to empathize with this child. Even in the moment –​ P: That still baffles me to this day how I got away with that. Because I wrote that at a time when feminism was very much in the kind of ascended in Ireland. There were a lot of people I knew who were feminist ideologists and the more radical of them said to me, “That’s a beautiful book.” I said, “How can you possibly say that –​what do you mean that’s a beautiful book?” What do you mean that’s a beautiful book? They said, “No I really loved it.” And I said, “He slaughters an innocent woman and he disembowels a woman. That is a deeply misogynous act.” “Ah, no –​I hated that bitch!” People are even worse than you thought they were! Here you’ve just tossed up everything like. There we go. I swear to God, and that wasn’t said in print now. J: Well that’s just it. So, in BoP you have the play on gender roles, it’s kind of like a “who done it?” element. But it’s also, I think, circling in on that conundrum of state and non-​state sanctioned violence. As well as violence on person, right? The question of rape or even of just the power structure between a priest and a female villager? There’s a lot of negotiations of power in play there but also the questions in terms of the ways that violence can be perceived, used or justification for action. P: Surely the artist and the writer will always have to investigate these spaces in that. Even in the most appalling kind of situation in that because in the mediated age, all these uncertainties –​all these things have grown up in that world filled with complexity. Especially with the certainties of the social media age, (which) present a whole other problem but that’s not really my world and it belongs to some other because I’m not that savvy or that interested because I think it has to be in your blood enough to really write about it, you know. It would be like somebody in the 70’s trying to write about my hippy –​they wouldn’t get it and you know they wouldn’t get it. So what’s the point in trying? That would be the interesting work to deal with now because even in the Catholic Church, it’s a dead horse. And they keep on kicking it and I believe it is a

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bit undignified, in a way, now. You know this phrase that is coined now called performance piety, are you familiar with that one? You know that we’re all cool and everyone is agreeing with sin –​you know, all on the same page? Well, you just can’t afford as a writer to be in that place because again we are saying about how do you write about it, the minute you get complacent or smug, you know it, the book won’t be any good. It has to be really troubling –​I don’t mean, you know, troubling morally, but just linguistically and emotionally it has to be complicated and you have to be prepared to live with this for two or three years and the minute you think, “oh I’ve got it” that’s when it slips out of your grasp. But it does out of mine anyway. That may not be the case –​some writers just map it all out, it’s great, and that works for them but not for me. Because it’s an emotional kind of underground. I am negotiating an underground river and its trajectory or whatever. It could be decently unpleasant and upsetting but sometimes it’s nice. But I don’t know how many more times I want to do it, probably one or two more times. Because you can’t go on forever. You’ve only so much to say and then you repeat yourself. Politics J: So, in regard to something like Breakfast, I would presume that the preamble you wrote in regard to the Peace Agreement was last minute? P: Can I be perfectly honest about that? I wasn’t comfortable doing that. J: You weren’t? P: No. J: Why not? P: I was asked to do it for the American edition. J: Really? P: Well that’s the truth of it. If I  had to do it again, I  would take it out. It’s prescriptive. It’s not rigorous. It’s not saying anything new. I was kind of embarrassed by it –​ J: Partly I’m asking about it trying to figure out, you were talking about going to that dark place and presumably you were in that dark place, I would imagine –​ when did you start writing Breakfast? P: I suppose about 96–​97. But I mean, I would have started writing that maybe 30 years before. There were bits of things that I had written about a young girl who had a little pet dog, and that became the character. You know, there was an innocence about it that fed into it, maybe it was only two or three paragraphs. But without it there wouldn’t have been –​it was a very big book, you see, initially. It only became 200 pages but there was 600–​700 pages there so.

174 Keating J: I was just thinking about entering that darkness in a moment that was still fairly precarious and then, the 1994 ceasefire. P: You see I wasn’t conscious about it at all. I didn’t think I was writing a political book for a start. I thought I was writing a book about this young girl who hit adolescence but it was going wrong so I thought hmmm. It was the world of androgyny and that was the world of David Bowie, so I moved in and it seemed really natural. If it’s a glam rock feel to this, it’s a burlesque, yeah, maybe go to London, maybe go to a Bowie concert, all that kind of stuff started to be a part of it. So that really was what decided –​not anything that was happening outside the windows. But I think, you know, being at the age you are bound to mirror, having come of age when The Troubles started –​you’re reaching. You know, somebody said that ira volunteers or even uvf are like rock bands –​ they have the same lifespan –​they start off at seventeen and they’re glamorous, get a wee bit tired and then they end up either mad or as compromising or on a comeback tour. So, I’m at that age now. So would it be exactly the same kind of trajectory of The Troubles or whatever you want to call them. J: What about the concept of the border? P: You see, the borders are very strange idiotic things in a way. I mean it was only there thirty years when I was born and all it meant was there was a little kind of, when you think about passing or a real border, like the Berlin Wall or something, it was just a kind of hurdle or an old tin shed. And an old guy would appear out it and you’d say, “Is this an international front here?” So there was something kind of comical. You know they used to make these kind of movies in the 30’s and 40’s, you know, and there would always be an English reporter coming out to visit. And he’d say, ‘Hallo, is this the bordor? And there’d be some kind of little funny fellow like Jimmy O’Dee or somebody. He’d say, ‘Ah, top of the mornin’ to ya, Mista.’ “I’m terribly sorry for interrupting your tea old chap.” And off he’d go. That’s what kind of a way living on the border was like. There was a comical element to it. But if you’re asking me about my work, you see there will always be a comical element but underneath, then, I think is this river –​this dark fucking place because it’s a bit like, you know, oh yes it’s a bit like picture postcard or the Katzenjammer Kids. But this thing could blow up like a grenade in the front of your face at any moment and you’re always aware of that. And when is it going to happen? So you (have) kind of fits of anxiety. You know there’s a great phrase in the Irish language, “ar eagla na heagla.” I don’t know if you’ve ever come across it. I don’t think there’s a direct translation –​it means for fear of fear. Now, not only are you afraid –​you’re afraid you going to get afraid and you’re afraid that if you get afraid will you be afraid, so you are constantly in a state of agitation. So that’s kind of the time that you’ll find a kind of a fraught edginess about anything I write because it’s mirroring the

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world that I grew up in. So the border is happy until, as we well know, bang, off it went. And even that had the glamorous thing that a lot of those guys died like Darky Hughes in a mental hospital or hating each other, as it always happens. Like the British establishment stands back and says yes this is going to happen in 96, this is going to happen in 98 and then we build a barracks and we direct our attention to Iran and, “oh, they’re so predictable.” It really is. You know, the border would have been interesting to me in that way but I mean I always regard it as ludicrously illegitimate, if you’re asking me what I thought about it. And the circumstances of it being established are beyond parody. You know, there are some photographs of these three people, there were only three people involved-​a South African, an Irishman and a Canadian –​sitting under a Minden tree drinking tea and drawing little bits. And meanwhile the Irish people, as they always go about, wonder who we’re going to be fucked over by next. But you see, there was also an element to it outside of the political trouble. England was very a very hip place at that time –​you had TV stations and the Avengers –​so we had access to all those TV stations because of living on the border, which meant that the whole urban world of London and the English people was accessible, which was very important because Ireland was in deep torpor of not repression so much as a sort of deprivation. I don’t think it was the Catholic Church as much as poor, deprived and backward. But for whatever reason, you know that with other countries. It’s bad shit happens to people in those places –​damp and depressed. So when the lid comes off like the marriage referendum all of that’s got to be good, you know what I mean? I just don’t have to side with the kind of lack of rigor about some of these things, but it’s still a good thing.

America, the Tiger and Crisis

J: I guess part of the motivation behind the question around the border is that idea of the futility and the notion a liminal space. The characters are comic but … P: Yeah, sure oh yeah. I am conscious of the liminality of it, oh definitely. For sure, the low cloud cover. J: But the ways in which the external, almost like the smattering of American culture influence, as a smattering … or letters from families who had moved. P: It started off as a smattering but by the 70’s it came full blown. It was just a small thing but you see America was … I mean a lot of my relatives went to America and I used to associate it with an Aunt of mine who used to arrive over, you’d want to see it, just like she appeared on stage in a lime green pant

176 Keating suit [American accent], like a pant suit, you remember those things from the 60’s … .like maybe Dyan Cannon would wear? She would burst in like this and she says, “You play the piano?” And I would say “yeah.” And she said, “Get up here and play the piano.” I’d say, “What are we goin’ to play?” And she starts singing “The Secondhand Trousers I  Bought in Belcoo” around the fucking room. And that was not just a smattering,that was a beginning. Although I suppose now, the window’s been thrown open altogether. Americanized culture is now almost unstoppable. J: The American influence and the English influence that seem to be popping in explosive and very colorful ways in each of the pieces. But what I think is interesting, is when we turn to W … P: But that was conscious. I drained it all out. That was a very conscious thing I did and whatever period I was accessing, it was like these kind of French movies that Colin [MacCabe] would know about like where you have sort of I don’t know kind of a truthful, colorless, wintery landscape, they’re kind of ash, beautiful, like breathless cigarette smoke and that’s the color of the mountains that I wanted up there. The color of the child ballads where dreadful murders happen and I think it worked actually. I was very kind of keen on it when it was finished. I thought it was nice to do that, to let that color seep out –​it’s genuinely gothic. But I kind of think the problem with Americanization of the colonial kind, in the colonial thing, it is very interesting the way these old things kind of keep popping up. That’s why nothing really changes. Because if you look at the accident that happened in Berkley, was it? Where the eight kids were killed; did you see what the New York Times wrote about that? Almost blaming them for their own deaths? Now that’s like something you would have seen in the 50’s. “Well, you know the Irish drank an awful lot too, you know. There’s more to this than meets the eye.” And I thought here we fucking go again. Now, isn’t that awful? I mean that is pretty awful I think, you know? “There is no smoke without fire. You can’t trust the Irish who drink a lot.” That’s what it was no matter how they dress it up. I used to see it all the time … the amazing Irish. J: So I guess in W’s kind of draining out all the color, that’s in direct opposition to Dublin in 2006? P: Yeah. Anybody with any sense could see that was vile. You didn’t have to be a fuckin’ smart kid to see. You know what, when you talk about it you recover the old and new and how nothing changed. I  remember reading in Irish Literary magazine in the 40’s –​we used to have all these magazines in my father’s house. There was an article on the Irish Catholic mind by a Presbyterian scholar. They said an Irish Catholic can always be relied upon to squander his substance at fairs and in patterns –​you know what pattern is –​house kind of thing. And it’s true because that’s what I’ve always done. But you know to

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suddenly turn around and accept this and to laud this; it’s irresponsible. And prudence is something the Protestants are good at and there is something to be learned from that fuckin’ shit. But suddenly the whole place has turned in an orgy-​esque and everyone is getting cocky along with it. This guy rides up beside me starts this [finger snapping] American stuff … a young guy about 23. I said, “ What are you clicking about?” He said, “Wait, are you who I think you are? I’m honored to buy you a pint.” “By all means get me I pint” –​I didn’t even tell him who I was or anything. So I could be fucking Billy Connolly for all I know. So he comes down and when he sets the pints down okay I want to talk to you. –​He’s all mixed up –​body language all changes. He does this Americano shit –​you know Tarentino. “I want to be a writer.” Every word of this is true. “You got any advice for me?” He’s got the suit and the whole thing and he’s on the phone every two fucking minutes. And I said “Ok.” He says, “What advice have you got for me?” And I said, “Look … whatever you do, writing is very precarious –​try to get yourself a flat or a house –​buy it.” He said, “Are you for real?” I said, “What do you mean?” I was being genuine. I come from a 70’s kind of world where you know every writer ended up destitute or lost all of their books and that –​ having no place to live. I said, “Yeah I am for real. Just get a place where if you travel you have a place for all your books.” “I’ve got fucking four houses –​what would I want with a house?” And I said, “What age are you?” And he said, “I’m 23.” And I said, “You have four houses?” He said, “Yeah.” And you know what he said to me then? What he said was, “You’re no used to me, I’ve got no use for you.” And walked away. I thought, “How vulgar is that?” It just couldn’t be any more vulgar. A 23-​year-​old saying that to a 50-​year-​old man. You’re no use to me –​ you’re toast buddy. And off he went with his arse fucking wagging. It was hilarious but you couldn’t take it seriously. J: So in W there are still kind of echoes of the old country, right? P: All the time. J: I mean it’s the landscape speaking in its spookiness. P: But there was a conscious political thing in that the old guy is the peasant mind. And he’ll come back and bite your arse, which he did. So in that sense it wasn’t that wrong politically because whenever the crisis really came and the puffy-​ass way that the Irish politicians swell up and then they fuckin’ wriggled away. That’s exactly what you’d expect. It was Churchill used to say, the Irish have now moral courage. That’s where you’ll always get them. And they still let the Europeans whoop their fuckin’ asses. So whatever you think about Greece certainly they stood to them. Whether that was right or wrong, it doesn’t really matter. But it was nice for just once in your life to see someone say this isn’t fucking right –​this isn’t fair. And that’s what we were supposed to be good at but we turned out to be the most docile race in Europe. It’s true, isn’t it? It’s sad

178 Keating and irrefutable and I grew up with all this stuff rebel Irish but if you actually examine it, it’s always a small number. And the rest of them are scuttle away to see what way it’s gonna blow. I’m sure it’s the same everywhere but it’s particularly true of Ireland.

On Reading and Writing; Joyce to Close

J: So, do you read critics? P: Less and less. I think criticism isn’t as good as it used to be. I honestly do believe that. And I don’t think critics are as committed politically and, I don’t think there’s a kind of progressive academia anymore. I think that’s, you know, obvious. And that’s really missed. And I think the whole fabric of society misses that whether you know the hegemonic kind of movement of capitalism has destroyed all that. I don’t think it’s reversible I think it’s all going, in this country certainly. It’s just about ascended now, they’re rolling back everything. I think that’s fine –​it doesn’t bother me –​I’m 60. Bit definitely, when publish a book maybe thirty or forty years ago you felt, this kind of matters to somebody. I think now, unless it wins a prize, it doesn’t matter to anybody. Except for a few people, if you’re lucky enough, kind of like how an album might be in the 70’s. People get it and it means something to them but unless you’re shortlisted for some prize or you know, you get a whole social media thing going behind it … a lot of books just disappear. J: And what about the academic? P: Well, I think it’s the last quarter. I think it’s very important to me that books are taken seriously and the fact that you’re talking to me about it, that means something to me and I’m sure it means something to those who will read it. I don’t do these things for money or even …. J: For a scone?! And two cups of coffee?! P: This is what makes it all worthwhile! We’ve been dining! [posh English accent] I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you now I’m having dinner, with an academic from some reputable Pittsburgh university … [laughter]. I don’t know maybe that’s a negative kind of way of looking at things. But I don’t –​you know my wife is a painter, right. We have a lot of visual artist friends and they are actually even worse. A lot of them have no galleries, there are very few exhibitions and if there are, there would be nobody at them and I think that whole kind of thing is changing and it’s not just that we’re getting older it’s just that the world has changed dramatically. The digital world has elbowed a lot of this stuff out. You know so that is bound to have effect and a loss of standing in literature. The London Review of books used to have some cache. But there’s nobody

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would know about that … That is bound to have an affect on the standing of literature. But then having said that then you get television with Breaking Bad, which is based on Greek mythology …. So it’s just that the printed word is different it’s not dying or anything. But when you’ve published a book that you’ve spent four or five years on it, there’s a chance you might get some attention for it for rather a week and then it would die? So, increasingly, you know at the foothills of a mountain you think, writing another novel? Is this worth it? I do feel that, you know. It’s a long journey. J: Do you work in other forms? P: Yeah, I write plays. I work with a lot with actors now. And for that very reason. Because that is still vital. I am doing a site-​specific thing for Easter 1916, which is coming up next year. And when you are surrounded by 12 or 13 actors, all the top of their range they come at you with ideas. So, that is very exciting, you know. J: Where’s the site? P: An Elizabethan Fort at Cork City, right beside St. Finnbar’s Cathedral. It’s Cromwelian. So I was up rucking around up there and I think one of the ideas I  have about the 1916 Rising like a football match. You know the big match (bugle sound) … and the ball is in [commentator impression] and they mix up Irish football and English football. And nobody knows what the fff …. ‘cause I used to hang around with these Provisional ira men and they were always mad keen to get to see the match. I said what goin’ blowin’ up fuckin’ English for when you’re here come on Arsenal [gritting voice], and all that sort of mixy-​ up stuff. But it will be good fun. J: Just because I can’t resist, do you still visit Joyce? And if so, in what capacities? P: All the time. I don’t know, I mean some of the political writings that I came across recently I found very interesting. You know, whether it’s economic imperialism or just little snippets of things that he had to say. One of the things I remember now –​I don’t know was it one of the renaissance people was arguing with him and he said, “You know, the conqueror can never afford to be amateurs. You’ve always got to remember that.” And it was only like when I was in the Elizabethan fort I remembered that the minute you show and fucking … these guys will pull this place down so you’ve got to really go at it with the same kind of commitment that Joyce gave to his work. You know, so once you think it of in those objective terms … And then, of course, there was his reaction to it, which was to throw that guy Henry Carr down the stairs. Do you remember that? And Henry Carr was an English guy that he said short changed him over 2 francs for a pair of trousers and he said, with all that kind of thing in his mind about the conqueror. He said, “Well my father was employed by you and you

180 Keating owe me.” And it was some kind of perfect logic where he is not ashamed or embarrassed in front of the conqueror. It’s practical logic. Now you have to be thrown down the stairs. Which, I kinda felt well there’s nothing emotional, it’s logic. And the minute you go “ooooooh” that’s when you’re in trouble. It’s almost like you’re on top of the situation because: “No, you’re subservient to me because my father …” [invoking Joyce]. But whatever way it works he ends up the better because he wasn’t going home with a hump on his back. And Carr, “Oh, well this is outrage” [stuffy English accent]. He’s all upset. But not Joyce.

Index Amendment 34 6 Archbishop John Charles McQuaid 122 Ballads 11 Beckett, Samuel ix, 22 Benjamin, Walter 136 “Bog Gothic” 94 Border Campaign (ira) 69 Bourdieu, Pierre 29, 30, 155 Bowie, David 174 Brexit 2, 4 Brown, Wendy 2, 3, 9(f) Bundoran 14 Butler, Judith 111 Celtic Twilight ix Celtic Tiger 100, 158 Cleary, Joe 145 Cold War 21 Comics 11 Cuban Missile Crisis 12, 20, 36, 72, 155 Cumman na mBan 42 Curtis, Lewis Perry Jr. 83 Davis, Thomas 127–​128 Davitt, Michael 49 De Beumont, Gustave 78 DeValera, Eamonn x, xi, 4, 19, 76, 94 Dickinson, Emily 46 Easter Uprising 1916 2 Edelman, Lee 115 Eldred, Laura 58 Eliot, T.S. 46, 47 Elvis 142, 154 Engels, Friedrich 77 European Union x, 6, 7, 100 See Article 50 Lisbon Treaty 1, 4 See European Economic Community (eec) 117 Famine 22 Fanon, Frantz 83 Freud, Sigmund 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21 Friel, Brian ix

Gauthier, Tim 79–​80 Gaynor, Mitzi 130–​131 Genette, Gerard 158–​159 Glam Rock 117–​118 Good Friday Peace Agreement 2, 3, 66, 67, 110, 113, 173 Goodall, Mark 94 Hassan, Ihab 141–​142 Hutcheon, Linda 151–​152 Innisfree 13 Irish National Television (Radio Telefis Eireann [rte]) 101 Irish Republican Army 67 Irish Times 72–​73 Iyer, Pico 143 Jameson, Frederic 142 Jewish 1 Johnson, David 87–​88 Jordan, Neil ix, xi, xii, 5, 10, 29(f), 35, 40, 42, 110, 113, 115, 119(f), 122 Joyce, James x, 1, 5, 7, 46, 47, 144, 167, 179–​180 Portrait of an Artist 45, 47–​53, 55–​63 Kant, Immanuel 155 Lacan, Jacques 43 Leibnitz, G.W. 125, 129, 135(f), 138 Lemass, Séan 76, 94, 145 Limerick Rural Survey 16, 17 Lyotard, Jean-​Francois 142 Macardle, Dorothy 18, 19, 20, 22, 23 Magdalen Laundries 106 Marx, Karl 155 May, Teresa 1 McCluskey, Dara  Blood Relations 71–​72 Nazi 19 Neeson, Liam 23

182 Index O’Casey, Sean ix O’Connor, Sinead xi, 13, 14 O’Neill, Terrence 76–​77 Parnell, Stewart x, 49–​50 Partition 1922 x, 39, 66 Partridge, Dan  Breakfast on Pluto 23, 41 Pearse, Padraic x, xi Pogues 145 Provisional Irish Republican Army (pira) x, xi, 32, 39, 41, 42, 99, 117, 132 Punch 84 Punishment of Incest Act 32 Radio Luxembourg 154 Rea, Stephen xi Robinson, Mary x Royal Ulster Constabulary 42, 66 Ulster Special Constabulary 67

Sidney, Philip 46 Sinatra, Frank 142, 154 Stembridge, Gerard 115 Suttie, Ian 15 Synge, John Millington x The Nation 127 The Quiet Man 11, 13, 24 Tóibín, Colm 121 U2 145 Ulster Defense Association 39 United Nations (UN) 101, 103 Winnicott, D.W. 12, 13, 15, 17 Williams, Raymond xii, xiii(f), 27, 28, 29 Whitman, Walt 63 Yeats, William Butler ix, 128–​129, 153