Love in the Time of the Troubles: the Cultural Politics of Tragic Form in Northern Irish Cinema*1)

문학과 영상 2018 봄 Love in the Time of the Troubles: The Cultural Politics of Tragic Form in Northern Irish Cinema*1) Lee, Hyungseob / Hanyang University In her introduction to the Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet, Jill L. Levenson offers three “angles” from which to view the perennially popular play. At one level, it is a play that “dramatize[s] a love-story that transcends time and place”; at another, modern psychology has enabled us to see “Shakespeare trac[ing] paradigm of adolescent behavior”; yet at another level, it is “a tragedy [that] enacts a love-story shaped by the social and literary conventions of late sixteenth-century * This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [NRF-2008-361-A00005]. Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 125 England” (1). Philosophy, history and psychology vie one another for the interpretive prerogative. Shakespeare’s play is a universal paean of love in tragic form, a thwarted Bildungsdrama or an ingenious representation of, and response to, political situations of its own time thinly disguised as a youthful romance. Romeo and Juliet can endure all these interpretations and more, we are led to believe. What goes often unnoticed or submerged in the overflow of the two young lovers’ concurrent romantic self-aggrandizement and self-effacement is the fact that violence pervades the whole play. Swordsmen, militia, gangsters, medieval versions of rednecks and bitniks—whatever you call them, they are the ones who people the city of Verona, and intimations of violence are everywhere. Thanks to cinematic adaptations such as West Side Story (1961) and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), we become keenly aware of the violent atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play in which two warring families or tribes have been at loggerheads for a long time. With the “ancient grudge” turning into a “new mutiny,” as Chorus tells us, we see a “pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.” How long has this enmity been going on? What is the origin and nature of the ancient grudge?—Shakespeare does not tell us. But we know that the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that Shakespeare dramatizes is historically rooted: the Montecchi were supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Cappelletti were followers of the Pope in Rome. Dante refers to these two ancient families as prime examples of civil strife any prince should be mindful of (Weis 43-44). The political conflict between the secular regime and the religious power at a critical historical juncture is an unsung backdrop against which the two innocent teenagers dream their rosy 126 future together. This hidden, bigger picture may help us better understand Shakespeare’s artistic agenda (which is not our immediate concern here). On the narrative terrain of the play, certain ramifications of the deaths of the lovers need to be considered: Romeo and Juliet being the only child of each family, what does the belated reconciliation mean really for the future of the two families? Perhaps with the grudge being ancient and no commemoration of the origin of the inter-familial feud practiced and ritualized, the rampant violence we witness in the play has become habituated and internalized: the violence may have become less political than atavistic. Is European politics implicated in the perpetuation of the tribal feud and atavistic violence of Verona? Will Prince Escalus, the governor of Verona, be able to enforce a fair distribution of justice when he has been incapable of policing the situation and when he has lost his own kinsman, Paris, by the sword of Romeo, a fair Montague? This paper discusses the tragic narratives adopted by the films that depict the Northern Ireland conflict known as the Troubles. It focuses, in particular, on those films that take the form of romantic tragedy with the love-across-the divide structure. A major question concerns tragedy’s ahistorical and depoliticizing tendency and its adequacy for cultural representations of the Troubles. By organizing itself tightly in terms of individual actions and their fateful consequences without the full knowledge of those forces (whether divine, natural or political) working outside and beyond their control, does tragedy place moral weight and responsibility ultimately on its heroes? The paper begins with a brief discussion of the formal and narrative constraints that tragedy innately possesses that may debilitate the social and political contextualization of the tragic hero’s action. It moves on to identify Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 127 certain tropes and schemes in the Troubles-related films, with special consideration of the “love-across-the divide” films. By shifting the emphasis away from its eponymous lovers and focusing on the political and historical contours under which this “little” tragedy unfolds, the tragic narrative of Romeo and Juliet can serve as a useful conduit to help understand the complex cultural politics of the Troubles-related films in both their shortcomings and possibilities. I. The Individual and Society in Tragic Form Classical tragedy develops and envelops a curious narrative of the individual’s downfall in which the attainment of self-knowledge is so crucial and yet so inessential as to question its rightful status in the overall dramatic structure. George Steiner points to this paradox when he writes: Tragedy would have us know that there is in the very fact of human existence a provocation or paradox; it tells us that the purposes of men sometimes run against the grain of inexplicable and destructive forces that lie “outside” yet very close. To ask of the gods why Oedipus should have been chosen for his agony . is to ask for reason and justification from the voiceless night. There is no answer. (128-29) The audiences as well as the tragic hero come to realize the moral weight and consequences of his action, but they are not gifted with any knowledge of those forces that implicate the hero in the tragic situation in the first place. Despite the propulsive force of the hero’s recognition of his or her “tragic flaws,” tragedy leaves us with the ultimate 128 inexplicability of the tragic milieu and causes. The terror that Aristotle posits at the center of his discussion of tragedy consists precisely in the horrifying fact that the downfall is always already predetermined by the forces beyond the confine of human agency. Tragic form dramatizes the individual hero’s acceptance of their downfall with the painful recognition of their flaws. It is also characterized by its narrative closure which aims at recovering the socio-political order which the tragic drama unfolds in and threatens to disrupt. Tragedy also imparts the sense of inevitability and finality to the audience. In Aristotle’s tri-partite conception of tragedy, dramatic resolution or narrative closure is absolutely necessary in order to produce the ultimate effect of catharsis. It is difficult to tell whether the cathartic state the Greek philosopher had in mind is psychological, emotive or intellectual. Moreover, nowhere in Aristotle’s Poetics do we find the intrinsic connection established and assured between the telos of action and the dramatic effect of catharsis. When action is exhausted in catastrophe, the audience may well be left with a sense of resignation instead of moral boost, with forlorn deprivation instead of spiritual transfiguration. In our mind’s picture, the bigger social world is zoomed out and the individual fills up the frame. The world experienced through tragedy may become all the poorer. Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy is specifically calibrated to the Attic tragedy of Sophocles. This has led some critics to argue that tragedy is ill-equipped to capture the vertiginous complexity of the modern world or, more to the point, the modern life is unfit for the lofty grandeur that tragedy offers. To give a couple of examples, George Steiner’s well-known theorization highlights the incongruity between tragic form and modern sensibilities (thus the “death of tragedy”) and John von Szelski attributes the “failure of modern tragic drama” to the Love in the Time of the Troubles / Lee, Hyungseob 129 ill-founded confusion of tragedy with sheer pessimism.1) Like all art forms, tragedy has gone through various transmogrifications and permutations to accommodate to changes in socio-cultural conditions. When the generic base changes from tragic drama to the cinema, further accommodations have been necessary. The cinema is more inclusive and flexible in its narrative layers and other constitutive elements than tragic drama, with its economy of action that eschews elaborate characterization and visual mapping of surrounding landscapes, allows for. With that in mind, four kinds of tragic narrative have been identified as particularly adaptable to the Northern Irish situation: “revenge, romantic, and domestic tragedy, as well as versions of classical Greek tragedy” (Cleary, “Domestic Troubles” 503). Romantic tragedy is more expansive than the original form in the sense that it introduces a pair of individuals instead of a singular hero and therefore two social forces at loggerheads. It also advances on classical tragedy in that the tragic narrative is built on the conscious inclusion of the social forces that lurk behind the lovers and stand in their way. The families (or tribes) are constructed as adversarial forces, and the lovers experience the domestic sphere as a confined and oppressive space. Thus it opens up possibilities for investigating the nature of larger forces. In other words, romantic tragedy can lead us to an awareness, if not a critical understanding, of its social and political contexts. 1) Szeliski attributes “the most crucial failure of modern tragic art” to “its unprecedented insistence on a terrified, wailing, pessimistic view of existence” (3).

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