Gender, Identity and the Reconstruction of National Mythic Narrative in the Crying Game

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1-1-2001

Riverine Crossings: Gender, Identity and the Reconstruction of National Mythic Narrative in the Crying Game

Margot Gayle Backus

James E. Doan Nova Southeastern University, [email protected]

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NSUWorks Citation Backus, M. G., & Doan, J. E. (2001). Riverine Crossings: Gender, Identity and the Reconstruction of National Mythic Narrative in the Crying Game. Cultural Studies, 15 (1), 173-191. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09502380010006790

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RIVERINE CROSSINGS: GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL MYTHIC NARRATIVE IN THE CRYING GAME

Margot Gayle Backus & James Doan

To cite this article: Margot Gayle Backus & James Doan (2001) RIVERINE CROSSINGS: GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL MYTHIC NARRATIVE IN THE CRYING GAME, Cultural Studies, 15:1, 173-191, DOI: 10.1080/09502380010006790 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380010006790

Published online: 21 Oct 2010.

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Margot Gayle Backus and James Doan

RIVERINE CROSSINGS: GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL MYTHIC NARRATIVE IN THE CRYING GAME1

Abstract

The Crying Game’s central, tragic theme of warrior/lovers caught between their love for one another and loyalty to their respective factions has signicant roots in early Celtic mythology. The elegaic theme of potential lovers forced into ill-fated combat that frames the lm’s events also, signicantly, bears the weight of the lm’s most unambiguous political commentary, when Fergus speaks directly to the picture of Jody in Dil’s apartment, telling him:‘You should have stayed at home.’ This sad remonstration, which clearly lays responsibility for the chain of causality that has led to so much suffering not with Jody, but with the British state, is similar in quality to Cu Chulainn’s lament as he contemplates his meeting with Ferdia. When we listen carefully for ways in which Celtic mythical themes underlie and nuance the lm’s events, different rhythms emerge, accenting different beats.

Keywords

Neil Jordan; The Crying Game; Irish lm; Celtic mythology; Cu Chulainn; Fergus; queer theory

A M E S D OA N A N D Margot Gayle Backus rst met in 1991, at Notre Dame’s JSesquicentennial Swift and Irish Studies Conference, during the question- and-answer session following Backus’s paper on homoeroticism in Frank

McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme. In a lively con- versation after the session, both expressed enthusiasm for the possibilities that methods and approaches associated with cultural studies offered for new work on sexuality in Irish literature and culture. Even as they articulated their shared commitment to a eld of study that had yet formally to exist, however, both were acutely aware of signicant obstacles to the opening up of such a dialogue within Irish studies in the United States. As a Celticist (Doan) and a postcolonialist (Backus), both were institutionally situated outside the mainstream of Irish literary studies, which, at the time, tended to focus on a xed canon of modern texts, often read in isolation from larger historical or cultural contexts.2 Despite their tangential relationship to a eld that seemed resistant to new approaches and their own very different, even opposed positions within Irish studies, however, each felt that the other had tools that could help to span a methodological and temporal breach within Irish studies. For Doan, current methodologies associated with cultural studies offered new ways of approaching Celtic mythology. For Backus, conversely, Doan’s knowledge of pre-colonial narratives offered an opportunity to situate contemporary narratives against a more richly textured and nuanced cultural backdrop. In the summer of 1994, wishing to contribute to the growing diversity in Irish studies, Backus and Doan decided to bring together their different methodologies in a reading of The Crying Game, a lm that both found to demand modes of analysis beyond than those already available ‘off the rack’ within Irish studies. The essay that resulted from this collaboration explores pre-colonial inuences in The Crying Game through the dialogical application of cultural studies and Celtic studies. In inducting elements of queer theory into Celtic studies, this essay seeks to excavate another signicant layer of meaning from the complex and contradictory semantic layers of a much-critiqued popular lm.

Crossings

In the wake of the emergence of postcolonial modes of analysis, many scholars of Irish studies, regardless of their political orientation, have become entrapped within a closed circuit of analysis that is constrained, at however sophisticated a level, ultimately to assess a text or an instance of analysis according to whether it supports or interrupts competing imagined narratives of Irish history. Some have ed to a high ground that envisions Irish history mythically, as unfolding in a landscape cleansed of all traces of coercive British occupation, and dominated by an irrational, culturally inscribed Irish penchant for violence. For instance, in ‘The Cult of Violence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Ireland’, Sean Kinsella writes:

The actions of the gunman are made sacred through an appeal to both Christian and Celtic traditions in Irish culture. Violence is imbued with a R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 17 5

sacerdotal quality when it is identied with the virtues of courage and self- sacrice, as exemplied by both the Celtic heroes and the Christian martyrs. . . . The Irish nationalist tradition cries out for freedom but the reality is that the murderous scourge of violence unleashed and repeatedly invoked in successive generations continuously binds and constricts the concerns of national sentiment to ancient wrongs and age-old legacies of hatred and fear. This enslaved view of continuous struggle is perpetuated by those who ignore the real blood of innocents and bathe in the sacricial blood of ritual martyrs to the cult of violence in the service of revolutionary nationalism. (1994: 26–7)

In this characteristic analysis, which relies for its success upon an appeal to highly charged gurative language and mythic topoi, the historical and ongoing impact of British imperialism on Ireland falls out of the equation, and Irish culture is left to answer for what Declan Kiberd has termed ‘a self-inicted wound’ (559). Postcolonialists, disdaining such recourse to a mythicized and transhistori- cal Irish culture, have sought to understand contemporary Irish culture and politics from a rigorously historicized standpoint. Because of the ways in which Celtic myth and legend – and the mythicized Celtic ‘deep past’ toward which they gesture – have been deployed to evade the issue of colonialism, however, those who situate Irish culture within a postcolonial framework often neglect precolonial cultural forms as they recur within contemporary Irish cultural production. Such elisions have left postcolonial cultural analysis incomplete, and similarly marked by the evasion of a crucial issue. Unspoken tensions in Irish studies regarding the impact and re-circulation of precolonial narrative forms have had the paradoxical effect of muting the perceived inuence of Irish cultural formations on Irish postcolonial culture. Simultaneously, they forestall rigorous inquiry concerning the impact of British colonial domination on the narrative structures through which remnants of precolonial culture have been transmitted. Current polemical debates between postcolonialists and their critics have frag- mented Irish studies practitioners into three relatively distinct groups that can be distinguished, in part, by their relationship to Irish mythology. Postcolonialists evade the Irish mythic tradition; revisionists, in moments of poetic excess, appropriate mythic narratives into reductive caricatures of the contemporary political landscape; and Celticists pursue the study of early Irish materials in isolation from contemporary Irish studies. We believe that this essay, the joint work of a postcolonialist and Celticist drawn together through a shared commitment to queer theory, might suggest an approach to mythic narratives within contemporary Irish literature that remains carefully historicized. Such a redeployment of myth criti- cism within Irish studies has the potential to provide a model for more diverse and heterogeneous dialogues among Irish studies practitioners who have previously 1 7 6 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

worked in isolation, and to help move beyond what has been a genuinely repeti- tive and sometimes draining cycle of mutual avoidance in Irish studies. Neil Jordan’s 1991 lm, The Crying Game – a text that has frequently been celebrated or dismissed specically on the basis of its mythicizing ahistoricity – affords an excellent opportunity to explore the new textual interpretations that might emerge when attentiveness to the re-circulation of mythic narrative is combined with a carefully historicized reading of the lm’s representations of contemporary Northern Ireland. Because the lm reproduces stereotypical con- structions of Irish republicanism as atavistically violent, its major signicance for postcolonialists has been as a trendier, more enticingly packaged version of ‘the same old story’.3 Through its representations of pathological, remorseless IRA ‘terrorists’ against whose attenuated subjectivities the character Fergus’ own more complex and, therefore, less intrinsically violent inner self is established, The Crying Game unquestionably reinscribes British and Unionist demonization of the IRA at the diegetic level.4 We could, however, productively question whether Jordan’s screenplay directs itself principally to an implied viewer incapable of spotting the broad stereotypes and ironized recapitulations of ‘the same old story’ in which the lm revels. When conventional postcolonial readings of the lm are set in dialogue with the mythic narrative tradition that the lm explicitly and repeatedly invokes, this question grows more pressing. In this article, we are locating in the interstices of the narrative structure of The Crying Game not ‘the same old story’, but a different story, dialogically told through two mutually informed readings of this lm. As Barbara Harlow has shown in her reading of the fable of the tortoise and the birds in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a text that, like The Crying Game, incorporates an array of precolonial and imperial forms and discourses, a cultural production that emerges in the course of an anticolonial struggle may ‘recod[e]’ traditional folkloric narrative ‘as an allegory of resistance’ (p. 74). Our readings of the lm set out to explore its incorporation of precolonial mythic material, and the meaning of the lm’s representations of gender, sexuality and subjectivity in light of that mythic inuence. We undertake this investigation while attending to the impact of British colonialism on this material as it was transformed over intervening centuries of British political, economic and cultural domination. Though the early Irish heroic tradition is silent about any overt homosexuality, the relation between Cú Chulainn and his foster-brother, Ferdia (whom Medb coerces into ghting against him during the Cattle Raid of Cuailnge) has been viewed as possessing homoerotic overtones. For example, when Cú Chulainn learns that Ferdia is on his way to ght him, he says: ‘I swear I don’t want a meeting. Not because I fear him, but because I love him so much’. Before their fatal encounter, he reminds Ferdia:

Fast friends, forest companions We made one bed and slept one sleep R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 17 7

In foreign lands after the fray. Scathach’s pupils, two together, We’d set forth to comb the forest. (cited in Henderson, 1981: 258)

Cú Chulainn’s grief over his dead comrade approximates that of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh over his deceased friend Enkidu, or the Greek Achilles over the fallen Patroclus, with his lament including the following verses:

Ferdia, dead by their deceit, Our last meeting I lament. You are dead and I must live To mourn my everlasting loss. . .

I loved the noble way you blushed, And loved your ne, perfect form. I loved your blue clear eye, Your way of speech, your skillfulness. . .

Never till this very day, Ferdia, did I ever nd Your match for great deeds in battle Since I slew Aife’s son {Connlae}. . .

Misery has befallen us, Scathach’s two foster-sons – You dead and I alive. Bravery is battle-madness! (from The Tain, 199–204) As these verses make evident, The Crying Game’s central, tragic theme of warrior/lovers caught between their love for one another and loyalty to their respective factions has signicant roots in early Celtic mythology. The elegaic theme of potential lovers forced into ill-fated combat that frames the lm’s events also, signicantly, bears the weight of the lm’s most unambiguous moment of political commentary. In a short eulogy, made at the lm’s denouement, following the death of Jude, for which he will do time, Fergus speaks directly to a picture of Jody in Dil’s apartment, telling him:‘You should have stayed at home’ (Jordan, 1993: 68). This sad remonstration, which clearly lays responsibility for the chain of causality that has led to so much suffering not with Jody, but with the British state, is remarkably similar in quality to Cú Chulainn’s lament as he contemplates his coming meeting with Ferdia. Clearly, when we listen carefully for ways in which Celtic mythical themes underlie and nuance the lm’s events, different rhythms emerge, accenting different beats. 1 7 8 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

As Maria Pramaggiore points out in her recent essay on The Crying Game, the lm ‘organizes itself around the metaphorized and literal crossings of water’ via ‘crossings that signify transformations of various kinds’ (1999: 90). The magical ‘riverine crossing’ constitutes the lm’s central trope, a gurative pattern that is, as we have suggested, conditioned by historical and mythic narratives that have deeply inected latter-day representations of Ulster in relation to England. In order to understand the mythic elements the lm replicates, we will need to rehearse some of the underlying narratives. The pre-eminent narrative group, privileged by both early and modern Irish readers and critics, the so-called ‘Ulster Cycle’, glories the attainment of personal status through heroic exploits, even when such acts are to the detriment of the society as a whole. The sacrice of family or clan members, a key trope within this tradition, emblematizes and editorializes on the theme of intertribal warfare in episodes such as Cú Chulainn’s killing of his son, Connlae, and of his foster- brother, Ferdia. In the Ulster Cycle this ethos is telescoped through the ancient paradigmatic conict between the two northern provinces, Ulster and Connacht (with the latter often metonymically representing all of Ireland excluding Ulster). As we are told in one Ulster tale,‘Trí chét bliadan ría ngein Chríst ro-boi in cocad etorro’ (‘For three hundred years before the birth of Christ there was war between them’: Thurneysen 6, cited in Rees and Rees, 1961: 54). A division between Ulster and the rest of the island may date to the prehistoric period, with the original settlers arriving on the island from different parts of the continent. Strong archaeological connections between northern England (Yorkshire) and Ulster date from as early as the Late La Tène period (third–rst century BC), suggesting that the Ulster settlers crossed over from Britain. Over ensuing mil- lenia, these early crossings back and forth between Northern Ireland and North Britain and Scotland have been imbued with deep mythical, political and ethnic signicance. A cultural distinction between Ulster and the other provinces was established as early as the seventh century (AD) in the prototype of Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions of Ireland’). One of the charter myths recorded in the Ulster Cycle relates to the foundation of the conict between the Ulstermen and the Connachtmen (or the men of Ireland as a whole). This is found in the story of Deirdre (Longes mac nUislenn,‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’), one of the fore- tales (remscéla) of Táin Bó Cuailnge, ‘The Cattle Raid of Cuailnge’, in one sense the early Irish national epic. In this founding myth, the Ulster king, Conchobar, breaks faith concerning the safe-conduct granted to the sons of Uisliu, Fergus mac Roich (the deposed king of Ulster) and Conchobar’s own son, Cormac, together with another 3000 Ulster warriors, defect to the side of the Connacht queen, Medb. Ultimately, they slay many of their own people and even burn the Ulster capital, Emain Macha. During the Cattle Raid, thousands more of their own people die. R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 17 9

Although the The Crying Game is by no means a simple re-telling of ‘The Cattle Raid of Cuailnge’, there are enough parallels between the two to suggest that Jordan had the early Irish tale in mind when constructing the lm’s screenplay. Pivotal events in the lm’s narrative mirror the Ulster cycle’s recurring obsessions: betrayal of one’s own side, destruction, revenge and further annihi- lation. In addition to the close parallels that can be found between events in the lm and in national mythos, the name of The Crying Game’s central character, Fergus Hennessy, ags the lm’s indebtedness to Celtic mythology for its unques- tionable mythic resonance. Although there are some ten Ferguses in early Irish tradition, Fergus mac Roich, the dispossessed king of Ulster who defects to Connaught, precipitating the disastrous cattle raid, is by far the most famous.5 Fergus mac Roich’s name (which may be etymologized as ‘Manly Vigor son of Great Horse’) indicates an individual of superior sexual ability. Although not directly related to the Irish god of love, Aonghus son of the Dagda, Fergus mac Roich bears notable afnities to Aonghus in his relation as a foster-father and surrogate father to Cú Chulainn and Naoise respectively, which is comparable with Aonghus’ relation as foster-father and protector of Diarmaid O Duibhne, Gráine’s lover in ‘The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne’. Interestingly, Fergus in The Crying Game is surnamed ‘Hennessy’, which is an anglicized form of Ó hAonghusa (‘descendant of Aonghus’), suggesting that Jordan is conscious of the early Irish mythic strands in his narrative.6 Regarding the use of other Irish etymons in The Crying Game, it is also worthwhile pointing out that ‘Dil’ is Irish for ‘dear or beloved’. As a gender-neutral word, it is surprisingly appropriate for Dil’s character in the lm. Fergus mac Roich is associated with strong sexual appetites; he was the husband of Flidais (goddess of deer and cattle) and the lover of Ness (Concho- bar’s mother), Medb and other women. In his wife’s absence, it took seven women to satisfy him. Fergus Hennessy’s primary sexual afliations in the lm are with Jude and Dil, both of whom resemble primal goddesses in their protean, androgynous transformativity. Jude’s much-reviled voracious and aggressive sexuality and violent retributiveness are politically destructive, if we read them as components of a realist depiction of an IRA volunteer, and misogynist if read as some kind of general commentary on women’s sexuality. These same charac- teristics, however, coupled with Jude’s mysterious appearances and disappear- ances and her seeming resurrection from the dead following the apocalyptic British military strang of the IRA safe house in which she and her comrades are hidden signify differently if we read them as signalling, through their very sur- reality, Jude’s supernatural afliations with the warrior goddess Medb. By extension, Jordan’s Fergus parallels the early Irish Fergus in his political displacement, in so far as the IRA’s very existence testies to the disenfranchise- ment of specic groups and perspectives in contemporary ‘Ulster’.7 Stephen Rea’s Fergus Hennessy clearly wishes to participate in the political processes of the social order he inhabits. Jordan is at pains to show us, through continual appeals 1 8 0 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

to liberal humanist values, that Fergus is a ‘good’ man who, owing to his integrity and sensitivity, is ethically entitled to a political voice in his society. Therefore, like the mythic Fergus, Jordan’s Fergus is politically displaced and, as the result of contradictions inherent in the system that has displaced him, he is also a man at odds with himself. Fergus Hennessy also shares a form of sexual hunger with his mythical fore- runner, although sexual ‘excessiveness’ takes new forms in the case of the modern Fergus. His sexual excesses are those that occur when Eros overruns the limits of corporeality and fearfully recognizes itself as latent within the interpsy- chic and affective homosocial bonds through which modern patriarchal nation states, and their subjects, cohere. They are the excesses of a latter-day ‘man of feeling’ in whom the double binds of masculine political agency, as it is both constituted and vitiated at the periphery of the imperial nation/state, are lived out externally, as destiny. The mythic Fergus defected to Connacht after Conchobar, who had displaced Fergus as the king of Ulster, killed a hostage, Naoise, for whom Fergus had stood as surety. Fergus found himself caught between two bonds of honour (geasa): his oath never to refuse a feast and his pledge to guard Naoise from harm. While Fergus was attending a feast, Conchobar had Naoise slain. The contemporary Fergus is similarly entrapped in a double bind inherent to post-Enlighten- ment subjectivity under conditions of imperial domination. As a purportedly autonomous individual, Fergus joins the struggle against imperialist forces that exclude him from participation within his own society. On the other hand, as a full, autonomous ethical subject, Fergus nds himself incapable, when con- fronted with the humanity of an Other, of objectifying and silencing that Other as he himself has been silenced. Fergus Hennessy is, in other words, entrapped within contradictory mandates central to the post-Enlightenment social con- tract, just as Fergus mac Roich was entrapped within contradictory mandates inherent within an earlier social order. The equivalency between the lives of the two Ferguses and the two hostages, Naoise and Jody, is striking. In the case of Fergus Hennessy, it is implied that he must either kill Jody or himself occupy the fatal position of a man who can no longer be trusted within the IRA. Fergus mac Roich, on the other hand, must choose between alliance with his own group and violation of his ethical relationship with Naoise, or betrayal of his group and alliance with the enemy, Connacht. In both cases the lives of the men to whom the central character’s own lives are linked are taken by the authority by whom the central character was politically displaced. Jordan therefore places the British government in the position of Con- chobar, who abuses his authority in order to gratify his own boundless drives (elicited, in this case, by the beautiful Deirdre). Just as Conchobar sacrices Naoise and, guratively, Fergus, thereby sowing strife, disorder and chaos within a society his authority purportedly exists to unify, the British state sacrices Jody’s life and simultaneously precipitates Fergus’ ight to London. Jody dies in R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 18 1 a shocking interruption of a moment of play in which he and Fergus run laugh- ing, the deadly zero sum relationship between their two lives momentarily for- gotten. The implications of Jody’s death are similar to the implications of Naoise’s death at the hands of Conchobar: in both cases, authority sacrices the lives of its followers (Fergus mac Roich, whose life is made forfeit with the death of Naoise, and Jody) to gratify ends that are, through the very form of their attainment, revealed to be both selsh and atavistic. Like Conchobar in his pursuit of the too beautiful Deirdre, British forces are shown to be morally blind and undif- ferentiating in their single-minded drive to destroy the IRA safe house and all those inside (including Jody, so far as they know). Jordan collapses the various mythic events that lead to the burning of Emain Macha in the Ulster Cycle into a swift, explosive sequence. The lm dramatizes Fergus Hennessy’s divided loyalties, culminating in a ludic episode (the chase) in which the characters seem to have escaped the roles assigned them, which parallels the feast Fergus mac Roich disastrously attends. This brief moment of seeming liberation leads to Jody’s destruction by the forces he has been sent to Ireland to uphold, and the apocalyptic strang and burning of the safe house. The dramatic, mythic events of the Ulster Cycle, in which the heedless pursuit of unquestioned ends by one in a position of authority led to disunity, divided loyalties, exile, death and nally an apocalypse that took thousands of lives, seem to have taken on an autonomous function within Jordan’s modern-day Ulster. We may, in fact, following Mary Condren, read the original, mythical cycles of per- secution, exile, and mass violence to which the lm’s events allude as themselves encoding a socio-historical moment when social hierarchies of power in Ireland crossed a threshold beyond which the exercise of blind power without account- ability to one’s followers became possible – as a mythologization of the central- ization and hierarchization of power that attends the passage from tribe to polis.8 Jordan’s substitution of the British state apparatus for an authoritarian monarch could be seen as re-enacting the gradual British exacerbation of pre-colonial hierarchies over the course of colonial penetration. After the death of Jody, a hostage from the ‘other side’, Fergus ees to that ‘other side’ to preserve his own life: he travels to England on a cattle boat, just as Fergus mac Roich ed to Connacht to serve his people’s enemy, Queen Medb, in her famous Cattle Raid. Once in London, the modern Fergus frequents the Metro bar, where he has promised Jody he will take Dil for a margarita. While it is unclear whether he is genuinely pursuing Dil, or whether he is pursuing Jody through Dil, Fergus’ journey from the periphery to the metropolis (or Metro) parallels Fergus’s ight out of warlike Ulster, where his political agency was usurped by a despotic authority, into an alternative and opposed social order that appears, at rst, to offer an escape from a barbarous world. The sensation of a ‘ight through the looking glass’ that accompanies such mythic boundary crossings is accentuated in Jordan’s lm. As John Hill has pointed out (1998: 92), a de-centering and unlooked-for shift in Dil’s subject position reconstitutes the 1 8 2 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

social order in which Fergus has placed himself and, ‘we would add’, retroac- tively alters our understanding of the relationship between Fergus and Jody. Retrospectively, Jody is cast in the role of a trickster who has exerted control over Fergus’s role through the use of strategic generic violations. The most notable of these occurs in the scene immediately prior to his death, when Jody subverts the solemn assassination scenario that he and Fergus have had imposed on them by their respective national histories and substitutes the incompatible activity of play. It also occurs in the scene in which Jody plays the role of a child, asking a parent to ‘tell him a story’. Jody’s most masterful stroke of generic subversion, however, occurs posthumously, when he sets Fergus up for an erotic encounter that will con- front him with an alarming alternative perspective on their relationship and its potential meaning. As Kristin Handler (1994) observes, the implications of the ‘story’ that Jody ultimately tells Fergus through the erotic relationship he estab- lishes between Fergus and Dil runs counter to the apparent implications of the fable that he tells Fergus concerning the scorpion and the frog. The fable of the scorpion and the frog purports to suggest that there are two essential kinds of people. These essentially different and opposed categories seem, at rst, to represent nationality, with the IRA (as metonymic representations of the Irish) as the scorpions, and the British (represented by Jody) as the frogs. Obviously, however, this equation is unstable from the rst, and Handler neglects to observe that the scorpion/frog binary is already de-stabilized in the lm’s ‘Irish segment’ (p. 33) as we watch Jordan’s mythologized rendition of the British in action, impassively rolling over Jody in their drive to eradicate ‘the enemy’. This reversal of our expec- tations, which happens while we are still in Northern Ireland, still viewing events through the lens of ‘nationalism and racial difference’ (p. 32), suggests that the lm’s complexities are not, as Handler argues, the result of its ‘only partial self- awareness about the meaning of its central parable’ (p. 40). Race, nationality and gender are all equally solicited by the story, and all, we would argue, are equally unstable. Ultimately, the story about gender and, by implication, about nationality and race that Jody ‘tells’ Fergus by setting him up to act out a ‘heterosexual’ consummation of their homosocial bond shockingly reveals the homoerotic impulse that is, as Eve Sedgwick has shown, fundamental to Western patriarchal bonds between men. It also suggests that binary denitions through which we attempt to set up and maintain ‘pure’ identities are themselves responsible for the death of both the frog and the scorpion. Fergus’s journey into the ‘other side’ of masculine heterosexuality reveals the ways in which homosexuality is always already implicit in heterosexuality, and, by extension, that imperial domination is always already implicit within metropolitan social relations.

The hostage scenario

As David Lloyd (1994) has pointed out, the founding premise for The Crying Game – that the IRA takes a British soldier hostage to deter the British Government R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 18 3 from interrogating a highly placed IRA prisoner – is historically unrepresentative. During the roughly two decades from the disintegration of the civil rights move- ment to the rst IRA cease re, hostage taking was not among the IRA’s tactics. While the identication of such discrepancies represents a necessary and import- ant critical function in its own right, Lloyd goes beyond merely identifying the lm’s factual and historical distortions and undertakes to read these deviations symbolically or, perhaps more precisely, symptomatically. Such distortions, as Lloyd’s analysis suggests, offer insight into the ways in which the lm so uncan- nily both resists and reinstates both conventional and historical ‘realities’ in ways that ‘produce an excess of possible signication that the lm can neither control nor elaborate’ (p. 36). If Lloyd’s reading of The Crying Game’s ahistoricity could be characterized as a reading of the symptomatic aspects of the lm’s historical distortions that also more perfunctorily recognizes the representational possibilities that the lm activates but cannot fulll, our own could be said to constitute a com- plimentary attempt to identify the lm’s constructive narrative elements. While Lloyd has brilliantly exposed the ways in which historico-political pressures have shaped and recontained Jordan’s attempts at generic subversion, our own reading seeks to identify subversive elements that remain legible in the lm’s efforts to make visible and signicant a historically inected mythic, as opposed to realist, landscape. By exploring and opening up specic anti- or a-realistic moments or elements within the lm, we hope to clarify some of the complex problems posed by the highly troubled relationship between the historical and the symbolic as they are asymmetrically and unevenly inscribed within the lm’s narrative structure. The analysis that follows will explore the connections between the two registers into which the lm’s events are unevenly inscribed – the allegorical and historical – particularly as these connect to questions of sacrice, gender and the mythic foundations of Irish national identity. While it may be true that for most non-Irish viewers the lm’s factual deviations don’t signify, it is also true that they do signify for Jordan. At moments, even Handler acknowledges the representational complexities the lm’s self- conscious encoding of Northern Irish realities through its unrepresentative choices. She notes, for instance, that Jordan observed ‘black British soldiers were the rst people of color most Irish had ever seen’ and correctly reads Jody’s Afro- Caribbean ethnicity as serving, among other things, to remind the viewer of the irony that ‘[the] current British colonial occupation of Northern Ireland is enforced by West Indian subjects of the former British Empire’ (pp. 38–9). In a similar fashion, the lm’s founding hostage-taking scenario, read within the Northern Irish context, takes on specialized symbolic meanings precisely in and through its ahistoricity. The IRA does not, in fact, take hostages. What, then, that is symbolically true about the crisis in Northern Ireland does such a factual distortion inscribe? In order to understand the symbolic meaning of Jordan’s founding hostage scenario, we must rst identify the ways in which the lm does accurately reect elements indigenous to the Northern Irish social order. The narrative opens on a world in which the IRA are ‘always already’ 1 8 4 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

guilty and targeted for violence by the British military. The lm’s events begin while, as we later learn, off-screen an IRA prisoner is being pressured to provide the names of his comrades. This information is, presumably, being extracted through torture, since the IRA leader who engineers Jody’s abduction takes it for granted that their comrade will eventually be coerced into supplying names. Historically, as Allen Feldman and others have documented, names extracted in such interrogation sessions have underwritten the summary executions, by British soldiers and by Loyalist paramilitary death squads, of IRA members. The generation of such names has also led to the murder of non-combatants, since journalistic and legal investigations into Loyalist death squad practices show that at least some of those whom British ofcials have identied to Loyalist paramil- itaries as IRA members (and who were subsequently executed) were not, indeed, IRA volunteers. This death toll has been supplemented through cases of mistaken identity, through ‘accidental’ deaths from stray bullets, ‘plastic’ bullets or baton rounds, and miscalculated or botched detonations of explosives, and through cases such as that in which an off-duty RUC ofcer shot dead four Sinn Fein volunteers in a youth centre on the Falls Road, believing them to be IRA members, before shooting himself. Throughout the 20 years prior to the current period of partial demilitarization, names obtained through random detention and coercion within the walls of Castlereagh Detention Centre constituted the fuel that drove what Feldman (1991) described as an ‘economy of violence’ brought into being through ‘the exchange systems of death’ in Northern Ireland (p. 110). The coerced production of names functioned as a ‘ceremony of verication’ (p. 110), providing a sense of certainty that specic individuals or organizations were legitimate targets. Furthermore, the production and circulation of the names of ‘veried’ targets for violence symbolically enacted what Loyalists experienced as their sacred, specialized bond with the British state. The generation and circulation of names perpetually renewed and re-afrmed the unofcial, loosely cohering penumbra of paramilitary violence surrounding the British presence in Northern Ireland. The lm obliquely inscribes and acknowledges these realities in minimalist shorthand. As with earlier lmic treatments of the Troubles, however, in The Crying Game, British ‘counter-insurgency’ in Northern Ireland is enacted coldly and cleanly by machines rather than people. The lm’s elision of actual minds that make policies and bodies that commit violence ultimately places those who make and administer British policy in Northern Ireland out of our line of vision and, by implication, above reproach. This elision of the subjectivity of British operatives other than Jody, who is bracketed off from the larger British state order as an anomaly, contrasts with the lm’s detailed exploration of the per- sonalities and psyches of the IRA volunteers, whose violent propensities seem to require greater exploration and elaboration. As a result, British policies, including detention without charges, torture and the circulation of names, posits an extra-legal paramilitary campaign carried on within the British camp as routine, R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 18 5 a priori, given, while IRA policies are subject to scrutiny through the eyes of Jody, an IRA ‘victim’, and, implicitly, through the eyes of Fergus. The hostage scenario, however, tacitly counters the lm’s narrative pos- itioning of and perspectival emphasis on the IRA as the instigators of violence. According to the logic that governs Jody’s abduction, it is the British that, in the routine maintenance of ‘pressure’ on the IRA and on the nationalist community at large, have abducted an IRA volunteer, thereby constituting him as an object within an ongoing circuit of death. The ctional trope of hostage-taking serves to make visible this pervasive but invisible production of an ongoing system of death aimed at a specic community. Through Jody’s abduction, the IRA is represented as attempting to displace a death intended for the nationalist community and thereby to interrupt a crucial stage in the production of death within the Northern Irish sociopolitical order. Read in this way, the hostage relationship functions as a symbolically meaningful factual distortion that distills the following simple abstractions from lived political and social conditions in contemporary Northern Ireland: charged, volatile power dynamics, an emphasis on human lives as exchange values within a larger political economy, and, as Jordan has noted in his introduction to the script of The Crying Game, the hostage scenario’s conventional symbolic status within the Irish literary canon. The conventional Irish literary hostage scenario, as Jordan explains it in his introduction to the screenplay of The Crying Game, embodies the erotically supercharged disequilibrium that has arised within ‘the broader history of Anglo- Irish relationships’8 between groups that are constituted as opposed, as colonizer and colonized, in times of relative quiescence, and equivalent exchange values (that is, as soldiers) in times of war and upheaval. The hostage scenario in The Crying Game affords Jordan the opportunity to explore the symbolic complexities of this colonial disequilibrium. Hostage taking positions a group within a paradoxical relationship to violence in that the group that takes a hostage hopes not to kill the hostage (since the death of the hostage signies the loss of political leverage and generally marks the failure of the group’s enterprise) and may (as in this case) hope to spare additional lives through the successful completion of the hostage exchange. The terms of the hostage scenario are negotiated through a threat of violence that brings into being a deferred death. This deferred death is constituted as originating with a group outside the inuence of the hostage-taking group. Symbolically, to take a hostage is to attempt to redirect a death initiated by an alien group with greater legal, moral, political or military leverage than one’s own. Symbolically, the literary hostage scenario invokes and embodies the dynamics of human sacrice. In so doing, hostage scenarios seek to make visible a diffuse and abstracted a priori violence that structures existing social processes. As a literary category, the hostage scenario could be seen as a ‘simple abstraction’ for the cluster of related social acts that seek to interrupt an ongoing circuit of death by concentrating and grounding diffuse sacricial dynamics in a specic, circumscribed locale. Seen in this way, 1 8 6 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, violent acts directed against property or persons identied with the state, and extreme acts of self-sacrice, such as hunger strikes, could be seen as species of the broad category of social interruptions that the literary hostage scenario encodes. Such literary enactments are represented as occurring in a liminal space between war and peace, between violence and non- violence, and frequently, as in The Crying Game, between the mythical and the historical. That the hostage scenario in The Crying Game does indeed pull together both sides of the traditional Anglo-Irish asymmetry, which Jordan is consciously drawing from and re-working, is evident in Fergus’s and Jody’s ongoing dialogue exploring both their differences and their similarities. Central to their absolute ‘difference’ are their opposing identities as British ‘soldier’ and Irish ‘terrorist’ – terms hegemonically installed within the British dominant ction owing to the absolute ascendence that Britain has for centuries claimed, Irish resistance notwithstanding, over the Irish people and their identity. A contravening, paradoxical racial alterity between the two men is emphasized in Jody’s (again inac- curate and even ludicrous, as David Lloyd points out) assertion that Northern Ireland is ‘the only place in the world they call you nigger to your face’ (Jordan, 1993: 12). Through this assertion Fergus is constituted (with symbolism that encodes a historical truth even as it breaks with the literal facts) as a member of a quintessentially racist, white-identied group.9 Conversely, Jody is coded as quintessentially black, or as being made, through Northern Ireland’s purportedly superlative racism, to experiencing himself as the abstracted quintes- sence of racial alterity. Resemblances between the two characters, however, are equally signicant. Their shared identity as purportedly heterosexual men is emphasized, for instance, in the erotic circuit of desire that Jody brings into being when he shows Fergus Dil’s picture: an image through which, as Handler points out, Jody solicits Fergus’s heterosexual desire. Fergus obtains access to the picture at the cost of an erotically and politically dangerous level of physi- cal intimacy with Jody, into whose pocket he must slide his hand in order to acquire the heterosexually authenticating image. In this scene Jody’s and Fergus’s intimacy is erotically conrmed but at the same time safely (heterosexually) mediated, unlike the more problematic scene in which Fergus reaches into Jody’s pants, pulls out his penis and helps him urinate. Their equivalency as (purportedly) heterosexual men from colonized backgrounds, moreover, is emphasized through their symmetrical expressions of passion for parallel national games – hurling and cricket – each of which is charged with an assertion of masculine, nationalist potency, as a form of symbolic resistance to British culture’s emasculating encroachment.10 As these equivalencies are established and reafrmed, the central ‘terrorist/soldier’ opposition breaks down, as Jody begins, perhaps manipulatively, but unquestionably affectingly, to assert their parallel positions as soldiers. The eroticization of this equivalency is particularly salient in the poignancy of Jody’s R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 18 7 discursive shift in register from within the British world view to one outside of it. This shift is registered indexically in Jody’s increasingly tender use of the term ‘soldier’, through which he stresses the equivalency between Fergus’s position and his own. Jody’s nal, elegiac invocation of the term, as Fergus marches him off to execute him, draws heavily on the poignant homoeroticism of the British military elegy, a form that inducts Eros into the service of Thanatos by suggesting that men may only love each other passionately and unreservedly when the threshold of death is absolutely, 100% denitely about to be crossed. As in the military elegy, the intensity of this scene’s erotic charge derives from the extraordinary reality that men’s desire for such unconstrained contact with each other is sufciently overwhelming to conventionally compensate for the impending sacri ce that constitutes its prerequisite. The ambivalence between the Manichean, victim/victimizer relationship that exists between a hostage and his captor when this relationship is viewed in isolation, and the equivalence between the life of the hostage and another or other specied lives and, implicitly, between the hostage and his captor, when this relationship is viewed within a broader social context, also suggests a pivot between two forms of political power distribution and their symbolic analogues within patriarchal family structure: father/son or brother/brother. Jordan’s rendition of the hostage scenario, with its ambivalence between bonds of brotherhood and father/son bonds, leads us back to the situation expressed in early Irish myth, in which the patriarchal order requires the hero to sacrice his relationship with a foster-son, foster-brother or actual son in the service of the king or the state. Likewise, the conicted nature of the captor/hostage relationship in this tradition frequently requires the captor to make a painful choice between loyalty to the king/state or to the hostage with whom he has established ties of friendship or affection. In both The Crying Game and ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’, Fergus ultimately opts for loyalty to the hostage and/or the hostage’s objects of affection. Still drawn to his former connections at the Ulster court, however, the mythic Fergus found that one cannot escape a system merely by resituating oneself within the sphere it opposes. Once again he found himself entrapped in a double bind when the Connacht army marched against his foster-son Cú Chulainn (whom he had promised never to ght in battle). When the situation arose, he retreated from battle along with most of the Connachtmen, which set the seal on Connacht’s defeat. Similarly, the modern Fergus nds that he cannot escape the war between Ireland and England simply by adopting a new name and nationality (he lets Dil believe that he is Scottish, a sort of middle term between Irish and English). Rather, English/Irish and white/black conicts permeate the metropolis at every level, as we see when Fergus’s new employer casually lobs ethnic insults at Fergus and racially tinged slurs at Dil, thus linking anti-Irish atti- tudes and racism in British society. Like his mythic antecedent, once he is contacted by his former lover and 1 8 8 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

comrade, Jude, Fergus is, once again, forced to choose sides. As is the case with Fergus mac Roich, Jordan’s Fergus is powerless to avert or control the cycles of intercultural hostility that shape his life and the events around him. Indeed, in Jordan’s re-telling, he cannot even preserve his own life, since he will be assas- sinated, presumably, along with Dil, should he fail to take the assignment and he will, it is established, be shot down by secret service personnel if he does take it. The last choice available to him is whether it is to be he and an anonymous English judge, or he and Dil, who will die. At rst he agrees to aid in the assassination, ceding greater value to Dil’s life than to that of the dissipated judge. Later, it is Dil who actively prevents him from going to the aid of his former comrades, as the mythic Fergus failed to aid the Connachtmen, thereby ensuring their defeat. The mythic Fergus was nally killed out of sexual jealousy by Ailill, Medb’s husband, when bathing in a pool with the Connacht queen. In Jordan’s version, the Ailill role is played by Jude, who tries to kill Fergus but is in turn killed by Dil. This fusion of Medb and Ailill elements in Jude’s persona may help explain the notably androgynous quality of her character. Finally, the circuit of death initiated by the British (when they rst apprehended an IRA volunteer in order to free whom Fergus’s cell kidnapped Jody) and aimed at the IRA is both completed and reconstituted as sexual revenge. After the debacle of the Táin, Fergus was said to have written down the saga of the Cattle Raid in ogham, the early Irish form of writing, but this version was lost when a bard took the ogham wands to Italy. Yet Fergus’s spirit later recited the tale to the poet Muirgen. Similarly, Fergus Hennessy’s participation in the oral tradition is foregrounded in his recounting of tales, particularly at the end of the lm as he begins to recount to Dil the story of the frog carrying the scorpion across the river. Additionally, Jordan’s role as lmmaker is akin to the role of ancient Irish bards, like Muirgen, who recorded and transmitted the tribal lore. Through his incorporation of Ulster’s founding myth, a myth that also, signicantly, came to function as Ireland’s pre-eminent early national epic, Jordan acts as a transmitter of tribal lore. In his construction of the lm’s narrative he is performing not as a historian, but as a spiritual teacher who uses historical matter as a pretext for the transmission of allegorical, as well as literal, truths. In taking up the role of a shaman or bard, roles that were largely lost in Irish society after colonization, Jordan is literally ferrying mythic information across generations in calling attention to the endurance of precolonial narratives within contemporary Irish culture. His distortions of the history of the Troubles in the North work to invoke the matter of Irish pre-colonial history. He also acts, like his character Jody, the lm’s dramatic catalyst, as a trickster, lying to tell the truth and carrying us on a riverine crossing to rediscover the words of the dead among the living. R I V E R I N E C R O S S I N G S 18 9

Notes 1 We are indebted to Susan Shaw Sailer, James MacKillop and Richard Bizot, all of whom encouraged the original production of this paper and supplied useful feedback. Thanks also to those who responded to the early version of this project we presented at the 1995 American Conference for Irish Studies/Canadian Association for Irish Studies Conference, at Queens University, Belfast. We are especially grateful to Ed Wiltse for an incisive last minute reading of this essay. 2 The diversity that both Doan and Backus wished to promote in Irish studies was, in fact, already in full swing at this time at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. Under the auspices of Declan Kiberd and, subsequently, Eliza- beth Cullingford, the Yeats Summer School was, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a common ground that brought together Celticists, poststruc- turalists, historical revisionists, old school humanists, poets and authors, unre- constructed formalists, hardcore anti-colonialists and rebreathing feminists. With each passing summer, the two week program exposed another crop of graduate students and scholars to a heterogeneous model of Irish studies that, at the time, existed nowhere else in the world – a genuine marketplace of ideas where scholars representing the real diversity of Irish studies met, debated on level ground and sang ribald songs together in the pub afterward. In the years since this period, many other such liberated spaces have sprung up at confer- ences and in some fortunate departments, but the originators of the recipe appear to have been Kiberd and Cullingford, both of whom fundamentally inspired an entire generation of work in Irish cultural studies. 3 See Liz Curtis (1984) Nothing But the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism, London: Information on Ireland. 4 For the denitive critique of The Crying Game’s reduction of characters other than Fergus to stereotypes in order to grant Fergus his full humanity, see Handler (1994). 5 Of course, as Maureen Hawkins has pointed out, another Fe(a)rgus who undoubtedly contributed to Hennessy’s persona is found in Behan’s The Hostage (pp. 209–10). 6 Richard Kearney has also suggested the inuence of Irish myth, including the Deirdre story and The Tain, in Neil Jordan’s earlier lm Angel, released as Danny Boy in the U.S. (1983), and Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981) ‘Modern Irish cinema: re-viewing traditions’, in Michael Kenneally (ed.) (1992) Irish Literature and Culture, Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, pp. 144–57. 7 Of course, modern Northern Ireland does not correspond geographically to ancient Ulster, though the latter term is used, primarily by Ulster Unionists, as if they were equivalent. 8 While Condren does not focus on the Tain Bo Cuailnge, she nds, throughout the Ulster Cycle, a progression of tales encoding the passing away of a world ‘where the preservation of life and human relationships took precedence over any abstract idea or personal honor’ (p. 182). 1 9 0 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

9 We take this constitution of the Irish as in a particular way symbolically opposed to descendants of the African diaspora to represent an allusion to the enormous impact that changing representations of Irish ethnicity occurring in the United States from the emergence of slavery through the present have had on global perceptions of Irish identity as determined by skin color rather than political opposition to a colonial oppressor that the Irish shared with India and much of Africa. See also Noel Ignatiev (1995) How the Irish Became White, NY: Routledge. 10 See Declan Kiberd’s discussion of hurling as one of a series of ‘Gaelic equiva- lents’ to ‘any valued cultural possessions of the English’ institutionalized by the Gaelic League in the late nineteenth century in an attempt to forge a new and distinct national identity (p. 151).

References

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