Nova Southeastern University NSUWorks CAHSS Faculty Articles Faculty Scholarship 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] Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/shss_facarticles Part of the English Language and Literature Commons 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 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in CAHSS Faculty Articles by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cultural Studies ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 159 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcus20 CU LT U RA L S T U D I E S 1 5 ( 1 ) 2 0 0 1 , 1 7 3 –1 9 1 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 sig- nicant roots in early Celtic mythology. The elegaic theme of potential lovers forced into ill-fated combat that frames the lm’s events also, sig- nicantly, bears the weight of the lm’s most unambiguous political com- mentary, when Fergus speaks directly to the picture of Jody in Dil’s apartment, telling him:‘You should have stayed at home.’ This sad remon- stration, 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 Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380010006790 1 7 4 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S 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 liter- ary 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 contem- porary 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 methodolo- gies 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 contra- dictory 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 land- scape 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 poli- tics 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 pro- duction. 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 cul- tural 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, appro- priate 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 post- colonialist 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.