Bridgewater Review

Volume 31 | Issue 1 Article 5

Jun-2012 Reanimating the Nation: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and the Bog Gothic Ellen Scheible Bridgewater State University, [email protected]

Recommended Citation Scheible, Ellen (2012). Reanimating the Nation: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and the Bog Gothic. Bridgewater Review, 31(1), 4-6. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol31/iss1/5

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. deviancy. Instead, he read a scene from a Reanimating the Nation: recent novel where a female character slyly visits a barbershop and suggestively Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and converses with the barber. It was a dis - creetly provocative passage with foggy the Bog Gothic sexual undertones that were reinforced by the mundane, everyday personalities Ellen Scheible of the characters. I was seated to the side of the podium and what unfolded was n a rare moment of academic vacationing, I strangely surprising, not only because traveled to Princeton University in February 2011 the prose that was almost entirely for the opening of the “Cracked Looking Glass” dialogue toggled carefully between I two characters who embodied strong exhibit, an extensive collection of Irish prose ranging stereotypes of their opposing genders, from the nineteenth century to today. As part of the but also because McCabe physically acted out the parts behind the podium symposium for the exhibit, a number of contemporary as he read! Most of the audience did not Irish writers and Irish Studies critics were invited see this, but from the angle of my seat, I to attend a series of lectures and dinners celebrating watched as he raised his leg at the knee and he shifted his weight to extend one the massive private donation that sponsored this rich hip out sideways, placing a hand on that collection. Those of us who contributed to the same hip, each time his voice rose to emphasize a female octave. I then catalogue that accompanied the exhibit were asked watched as he relaxed his posture, placed to provide brief essays on either specific that’s the case?” Feeling surprised and both feet on the floor, and stood back, authors or specialized topics that could slightly worried, I spat out, far too one hand in his pocket, when he inform and loosely contextualize the quickly and embarrassingly articulately dropped his voice to read the male char - history and significance of the collec - for casual conversation: “Your novels acter’s parts. Although this was subtle, it tion. I provided the entry entitled “The personify the bifurcation of Irish cul - was a tremendously informative. It Bog Gothic” and focused on a few con - tural identity in a way that allows the helped me articulate what it is about temporary Irish writers and filmmakers, students to identify with your characters McCabe’s work that eliminates some of particularly Patrick McCabe and Neil on a personal level while maintaining the distance between reader and audi - Jordan, who aestheticize the Irish cul - in their minds a larger national and ence while simultaneously presenting tural experience through a political critique.You have somehow absurd, over-the-top, sometimes even contemporary gothic lens. captured the multi-tasking generation’s supernatural scenarios. His writing, even attention by legitimizing their constant text that consists only of dialogue, uses Over the course of the weekend I oscillation between various forms of language to express and often privilege had the opportunity to meet Patrick information and representation, both physical experience, not by describing McCabe, and the encounter led me to public and private.” physical acts, but by emphasizing the reflect on the overlap of my scholarship body even when the prose is abstract or and my pedagogy. McCabe yoked The last evening of the colloquium vague or about everyday small talk like together the educator and the writer culminated in the final series of readings the weather. One of his many talents is in me, making manifest one of the from writers who were featured in the his ability to equally represent the body many reasons I remain invigorated by Irish prose exhibit. McCabe was one and the mind in his work, but not by contemporary Irish Studies: a split or of these writers and he was waiting collapsing them. Instead, he preserves bifurcated identity can be a cultural until the last possible minute to select their separation while unifying the and political survival tool rather than his reading for the evening because he dualism through narrative. Somehow, an alienating force. needed time to decide what excerpt McCabe’s novels personify competing would have the strongest effect based When I first introduced myself to oppositional forces and use the body on his perception of the audience. Patrick McCabe, I was unable to stop to unify them, while defending, some - Unsure of what effect he was going for, myself from telling him how much my times to the point of hostility, their I assumed we would be barraged by students love his novels. He looked me necessary separation. either comedic violence or overt sexual in the eye and said, “Why do you think

4 Bridgewater Review Gothic fiction is a visceral genre. From the late eighteenth-century work of Ann Radcliffe to Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece, Dracula , McCabe’s novels participate in an historical chain of nar - rative that is saturated with the dangers and pleasures of physical experience. Since I began teaching gothic fiction, I have found that the human body trumps all other symbols as the most consistent doppelganger for the prominent struc - tures within the common gothic narra - tive: the aristocratic but decaying house that parallels the interiority of a charac - ter’s mental decline, the refined but dis - eased familial bloodline that surfaces in a sickly or incestuous body, or even the dividing religious interpretations of transubstantiation that become personi - fied in the vampire’s physical existence. In McCabe’s case, the mind/body dual - ism is a metaphor for the inherent para - dox underlying national identity: a unified nation depends on the erasure of personal identity, while individualism resists conformity, thereby evading the forward motion of cultural and national modernity.When McCabe performed his narrative in an instinctual and spon - taneous way, I realized that this paradox translates as a physical experience. My students might connect to his texts because they understand what it means Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame to physically experience many things at of hectic experiment or extravagance, south of the border between Northern once, be they technological, visual, or to resuscitate it into some new life Ireland and the republic. verbal forms of stimulation. Some of or half-life.” Cleary’s gothic painting Breakfast on Pluto is not McCabe’s most these things represent modern progres - of experimental ‘resuscitation’ for a popular novel, but it is the text that most sion and others emphasize individual modern culture is one of many critical explicitly engages partition as a central thinking or perception, but they are approaches to contemporary Irish writ - force in its otherwise overly personal, coexisting forces that characterize both ing that has birthed, in the fashion of first-person adaptation of a transgen - McCabe’s fiction and my students’ Dr. Frankenstein, the critical attention dered bildungsroman . McCabe has writ - contemporary disintegrated mode paid to the gothic fiction of late twenti - ten numerous texts that confront the of perception. eth-century Ireland.Technical innova - dualistic components of Irish identity, tion brings with it the ‘high voltage’ of Although he does not employ the term but in Breakfast on Pluto McCabe joins, experimentation and sews together the “bog gothic” directly in his introduction on the landscape of the transgendered monstrous invention of a reanimated to the Cambridge Companion to Modern body, the interiority of the self with the gothic identity. Just as Dr. Frankenstein Irish Culture , Joe Cleary identifies physical otherness that disallows that self gives birth to an undead being in a authors such as Patrick McCabe and from locating its point of origin. Pussy skewed creation narrative that imagines filmmakers such as Neil Jordan as pro - imagines the sexual interaction that the disastrous effects of scientific power, ducing fiction where “the old naturalism led to her conception but cannot ever Patrick McCabe, in Breakfast on Pluto , has … acquired the high voltage of new uncover the reality of her birth. Just as invents Patrick “Pussy” Braden, a trans - technical innovations, some newViagra Pussy will never be traditionally male or gendered character who is born just

June 2012 5 female, partitioned Ireland must accept the womb; partition in Ireland might frog’ fable that comprises this scene the coexistence of two nations on one be an unavoidable natural creation, emphasizes the dual but separate con - geographical location. In Pussy’s imag - but it is birthed from the ideologically nection between natural instinct and ined memoir, the parish priest, Father hybridized relationship between sexual social desire; Jody tries to convince Bernard, Pussy’s unidentified biological repression and religious power. Fergus that both good and evil are natu - father, rapes his young, extremely naïve, ral behaviors and some are just better Neil Jordan has adapted into film female housekeeper who consequently at controlling their impulses.This theme Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy and gives birth to Pussy and thus creates the is then physically enacted in a separate Breakfast on Pluto , but Jordan is best unconfirmed story that comprises the scene where Fergus must hold Jody’s known for The Crying Game, a 1992 majority of the novel: penis, so that the shackled and hooded film. Similar to McCabe’s Breakfast on Jody can urinate. Like McCabe, Jordan A first, she really was one hundred Pluto, Jordan’s film also tells the story of unifies the film’s separated identities per cent certain that it was a joke a transgendered character, “Dil,” whose through a basic physical need.The […]Which made her go: ‘oh now, life is threatened after her boyfriend, second scene takes place much later in Father!’ and ‘Eek!’ and ‘Oops! That Jody, is killed by the IRA in Northern the film and, though short in length, hurt!’ until all of a sudden she cried: Ireland and one of the IRA members expresses Jordan’s concern with identity ‘Ow! I’m being split in two!’ and responsible for his death guiltily seeks that cannot exist as a partitioned whole, there was so much squirty stuff all her out in an act of penance. Fergus, or but rather must move from one extreme down her she thought that maybe ‘Jimmy’ as he renames himself when to the other.The main female character Father Ben was playing more he gets to England, tries to protect Dil in The Crying Game , Jude, who passes for games—squidgies with the Fairy but ends up falling in love with her a traditional Irish woman who supports Liquid washing-up bottle that she’d and consequently trapping himself in an the IRA in the first half of the film, often seen the kiddies doing. It was almost fatal confrontation with his for - has been transformed to a gun-carrying, only when he fell back across the mer IRA compatriots. Dil and Fergus violent terrorist by the second half. room with a Hallowe’en mask on both survive, but their relationship However, her split identity is a forced him that she really became con - remains sexually ambiguous. Similar to illusion, not an organic separation, and fused, thinking to herself: ‘But it’s McCabe’s novels, Jordan’s films combine Jordan emphasizes its unrealistic exis - not Hallowe’en!’ How long it was violence, disorientation, and humor to tence by reflecting multiple images of before she realized that it was in underscore both the anxiety and trauma Jude in a prism-like mirror; nationalist- fact her Employer’s actual face she that produce what literary critic Enda terrorist Jude is herself inescapably split. was looking at—and not a whey- Duffy has called the “viral discourse” And, of course, she does not survive the coloured Egyptian mummy-type of the Bog Gothic. Duffy identifies end of the film. In both McCabe’s novel papier mache affair—is impossible mimeticism as one of the defining and Jordan’s film, the characters who to say but she eventually did, realiz - features of Bog Gothic fiction, where do survive are transgendered men who ing too that the Fairy Liquid—it the strangeness of the texts develops a live as women. Seeing Patrick McCabe wasn’t Fairy Liquid at all! And that rhythm mirroring material reality. perform the bifurcated self in his reading thing—that glaring red thing with Although contemporary Irish criticism at Princeton helped me understand its malevolent eye—what was that? may never resolve either the discordant more clearly the resonance that the Bog analyses of modernity in Ireland or the The housekeeper’s pronouncement that Gothic and the notion of split identities Irish literary interpretation of the Bog she is ‘being split in two’ becomes the (national and sexual) has for my students Gothic genre, Irish prose continues to metaphor for Pussy’s struggle through - at Bridgewater State. transform and reanimate an undead, out the narrative. Pussy is not conceived gothic tradition capable of articulating from a unifying sexual act and, thus, the simultaneity of the Irish condition. enters the world with a literal ‘split’ identity; her transgender status is pre- There are two specific scenes in The supposed and thus inevitable.The Crying Game that emphasize the dualis - housekeeper’s difficulty in distinguishing tic tension illustrated compellingly in the reality of her experience from the McCabe’s novels and further empha - superficial illusions of game-playing and sized in Jordan’s films.The first scene ‘Halloween’ further underscore the occurs in the first half of the film, when body’s detachment from the mind’s con - we see Fergus conversing with his pris - Ellen Scheible is Associate Editor of ceptions. Pussy’s origins are multi- oner, Jody, before Jody is killed while Bridgewater Review and Assistant faceted before she even emerges from trying to escape.The ‘scorpion and the Professor in the English Department.

6 Bridgewater Review