Postnationalism, Hybridity, and Utopia in Paul Durcan's Poetry: Toward an Irish Minoritarian Literature

POSTNATIONALISM, HYBRIDITY, AND UTOPIA IN PAUL DURCAN’S POETRY: TOWARD AN IRISH MINORITARIAN LITERATURE A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Yeonmin Kim May, 2013 Dissertation written by Yeonmin Kim B.A., Chonbuk National University, 2005 M.A., Chonbuk National University, 2008 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2013 Approved by ____________________________________, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Claire Culleton, Professor of English ____________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Kevin Floyd, Associate Professor of English ____________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Babacar M’Baye, Associate Professor of English ____________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Richard Feinberg, Professor of Anthropology ____________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Patrick G. Coy, Professor of Political Science Accepted by ____________________________________, Chair, English Department Robert W. Trogdon ____________________________________, Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Raymond A. Craig ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………... iv Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1. “Durcan and a Minoritarian Tradition” …………………………………………….. 29 Chapter 2. “Durcan’s Anti-Oedipus” …………………………………………………………... 68 Chapter 3. “Postnationalism in Durcan” ……………………………………………………… 112 Chapter 4. “Durcanesque Hybridity” …………………………………………………………. 186 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………. 241 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………... 252 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………… 264 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS God always wants me to confess that there is almost nothing I can achieve by myself. I owe my gratitude all the people who have made this dissertation possible although I cannot mention all their names in this limited space. My deepest gratitude is to my advisor, Prof. Claire Culleton. I have been greatly fortunate to have such a generous advisor who directed my individual investigation, led a graduate seminar, and administered one of my qualifying exams, through which I was able to lay a strong background in the field of Irish literature. Her cordial feedback continuously encouraged me to investigate this topic and helped me overcome my language barriers as an international student. I am deeply grateful to Prof. Kevin Floyd and Prof. Babacar M’Baye, who have strongly stimulated me to found theoretical backgrounds in Marxism and Postcolonialism, which became my primary academic interests as well as Irish literature. In particular, Prof. M’Baye encouraged and expanded my horizon of expectation in the Transnational Studies Reading and Working Group at Kent State University, from which I got one of the main themes in this dissertation. In addition, I am also indebted to Chonbuk National University Foundation that granted me a scholarship to further my research at KSU. Moreover, the Rotary International Foundation has taken care of my family and me economically, culturally, and emotionally. I would like to express my gratitude to many Rotarians who have changed my prejudiced perspectives on American society and suggested a new model for transnational/postnational people. Besides, this dissertation would not have appeared without the help of my passionate proofreader Lynne Jeon, who exactly understood what I intended to express, based on her English teaching experiences in Korea for twenty years. iv This dissertation was a family project. I would like to express my special gratitude to Carol Crimi, my American mother, whom I met through the Rotary International. She has truly shown a motherly love to my family and me. There are no words to describe her but “mother.” More important, without the love and patience of my wife, Sangmi, who sacrificed her life for me, none of this would have been possible. I acknowledge that she fulfilled more than half of this project through her sincere dedication to my family. I also would like to give heart-felt thanks to my two children, Euijin and Seojin, who have continuously given me a sense of love, responsibility, and survival. I am also grateful to the people of Ireland whom I have probably generalized or judged with my limited knowledge. Although this dissertation is still an ongoing project to understand the nation of Ireland, I hope to stay with them and share their concerns in the near future. All things considered, I acknowledge the irresistible message of God again that I have done almost nothing by myself. Yeonmin Kim April 2, 2013, Kent, OH v Introduction I first became interested in Irish literature and culture when I began to understand that Ireland and Korea have many things in common regarding their culture, history, and politics. Divided into the North and the South at the end of colonialism, both countries have suffered and withstood political conflict and civil wars. It is often believed that their peoples like singing, dancing, drinking, and even fighting. They also regard themselves as the saddest nation in the world because of colonial experiences, regardless of whether those images have been constructed by colonial authority and their nationalists. Among other similarities, a concept of nation is a key to understanding of Ireland and Korea. Because the Koreans strongly believe that they have retained a purely homogeneous ethnic group of nation for over five thousand years, the concept of nation based on blood characterizes their national identity. Contrary to other European countries such as Britain and France, in which their nations are defined as a community of the civic, ethnicity for the Irish, in particular for Gaels, also serves as an important standard in defining national identity. Although Ireland and South Korea are considered a first world country based on capitalist economic system, they still retain past and/or ongoing colonial influences because most contemporary problems can be traced back to the era of the end of colonialism when they defined the concept of nation and established the nation-state. In focusing on debates on the concept of nation, as a citizen of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), I have conducted comparative researches on those two countries. Irish literature reminds me of political and ideological conflicts in Korea; Korean history becomes a useful tool to read Irish literature in which many characters have struggled with defining what the nation is. Gaining mutual inspirations from the comparative perspective, in this dissertation I will investigate the concept 1 2 of nation through the eyes of contemporary Irish poet Paul Durcan, whom I first became interested in back in 2010, when I read his poem “The Bloomsday Murders, 16 June 1997.” Durcan belongs to the so-called “blank generation” who grew up in Ireland between the 1960s and the 1980s. Richard Kearney in Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976-2006 (2006) defines them as a “new breed of urbanized and internationalized youth” (321). As they consciously differentiated themselves from their fathers’ generation, Durcan and his contemporaries represented new concepts of national identity different from the ideologically rigid ones accepted by previous generations primarily marked by Gaelic-Catholic nationalism. Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944 to John James Durcan and Sheila MacBride Durcan. His relationship with his father was problematic inasmuch as he remembers his father as becoming a violent and oppressive person after he was appointed a circuit judge. Although he studied law and economics at the University College Dublin (UCD) to please his father, he lost his interest in those studies when he met John Jordan, a lecturer in literature at UCD who later became a poet. Probably because of his neglect of his studies, he was hospitalized by his family, primarily by his father, at the age of nineteen in psychiatric institutions in which he was subjected to several electric shock and heavy sedative treatments. It is not a surprise that his disturbed relationship with his father has become one of his crucial poetic motifs. Along with his contemporaries of the blank generation who struggled with their fathers’ outmoded legacies, mainly inherited from the Irish nationalists who founded the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland and formed their obsession with Irishness as distinguishable from the identity of British colonizers, Durcan has continually searched for a way out of his father’s influence and the identity politics of the nation- state. 3 The identity politics of Ireland championed by most Irish nationalists like his father is one of the primary concerns for Durcan. The Irish neutrality during World War II and the IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland were outcomes of the obsession with identity through which Irish nationalists celebrated their difference from the rest. Identity politics, however, presupposes an exclusion of the other to confirm one’s own special existence. The obsession with a certain identity can bring about violence. That is the point at which Durcan began his lifelong journey as a poet. In reflecting on his contemporary, Irish poet Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, who writes “The end of art is peace” (l. 25) in “The Harvest Bow,” Durcan has persistently sought ways in which he can “abandon the obsession with identity” (“Passage to Utopia” 330) to bring an end to the violence

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