Études irlandaises

42-1 | 2017 Incarner / Désincarner l’Irlande Embodying / Disembodying

Fiona McCann et Alexandra Poulain (dir.)

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5077 DOI : 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.5077 ISSN : 2259-8863

Éditeur Presses universitaires de Caen

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 29 juin 2017 ISBN : 978-2-7535-5495-5 ISSN : 0183-973X

Référence électronique Fiona McCann et Alexandra Poulain (dir.), Études irlandaises, 42-1 | 2017, « Incarner / Désincarner l’Irlande » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 29 juin 2019, consulté le 24 septembre 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/5077 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises. 5077

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 24 septembre 2020.

Études irlandaises est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International. 1

SOMMAIRE

Erratum Comité de rédaction

Introduction Fiona McCann et Alexandra Poulain

Corps de femmes, corps dociles : le cas Magdalen Laundries Nathalie Sebbane

De-composing the Gothic Body in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent Nancy Marck Cantwell

“Away, come away”: Moving Dead Women and Irish Emigration in W. B. Yeats’s Early Poetry Hannah Simpson

An Uncanny Myth of Ireland: The Spectralisation of Cuchulain’s Body in W. B. Yeats’s Plays Zsuzsanna Balázs

Embodying the Trauma of the Somme as an Ulster Protestant Veteran in Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? Andréa Caloiaro

Intimations of Mortality: Stewart Parker’s Hopdance Marilynn Richtarik

Performing trauma in post-conflict : ethics, representation and the witnessing body Alexander Coupe

Ciaran Carson and the Theory of Relativity Julia C. Obert

“We’re Only Monsters”: Punk Bodies and the Grotesque in 1970s Northern Ireland Timothy A. Heron

“Bubbles of joy”: Moments of Pleasure in recent Northern Irish Culture Caroline Magennis

Making a Scene: The Diceman’s Performance Activism and Irish Public Culture Tina O’Toole

Comptes rendus de lectures

Beata Piatek, History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction Krakow, Jagiellonian University Press, 2014 Bertrand Cardin

Claude Fierobe, Les Ombres du fantastique. Fictions d’Irlande Dinan, Terre de Brume, 2016 Sylvie Mikowski

Donald E. Morse (ed.), Irish Theatre in Transition. from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 Alexandra Poulain

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Keith Hopper and Neil Murphy (eds.), Dermot Healy, The Collected Plays , Dalkey Archive Press, 2016 Shaun Richards

G. K. Chesterton, Impressions irlandaises Versailles, Via Romana, 2016 Christophe Gillissen

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Erratum

Comité de rédaction

1 Le comité de rédaction, par la voix d’Alexandra Slaby, qui le coordonne, présente ses excuses aux rédactrices invitées du numéro de décembre 2016, Karin Fischer et Clíona Ní Ríordáin, pour un ordre des articles différent de celui qu’elles avaient prévu, et pour l’absence de mention du nom de la poétesse Aifric Mac Aodha dans la table des matières et sur la page où apparaît le poème inédit qu’elle a composé pour ce numéro commémoratif. Que cette dernière nous excuse également.

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Introduction

Fiona McCann and Alexandra Poulain

On a night like this I remember the child who came with fifteen summers to her name, and she lay down alone at my feet without midwife or doctor or friend to hold her hand and she pushed her secret out into the night, far from the town tucked up in little scandals, bargains struck, words broken, prayers, promises, and though she cried out to me in extremis I did not move1 It is a confusing feeling – somewhere between diarrhoea and sex – this grief that is almost genital.2

1 This issue of Études irlandaises, entitled “Embodying/Disembodying Ireland”, develops and extends reflection and discussion which began during the 2014 annual IASIL conference, held at the Université de Lille SHS. 2014 marked the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, and as such, necessitated discussion of Irish bodies in that particular context of war. The centenary commemorations held last year, in 2016, rekindled public and scholarly interest in two landmark events in Irish history: the 1916 Easter Rising and the infamous Battle of the Somme, in both of which the materiality of Irish bodies and the body of the nation are literally and figuratively embodied and disembodied. Taking these two central moments as points of departure, this issue then seeks to address the ways in which bodies “matter” in Irish history and culture and to reappraise, in particular during this decade of centenaries, the discursive, historical and cultural aspects of the materiality of Irish bodies.

2 As both Luke Gibbons and David Lloyd have convincingly shown, Irish bodies have historically been the target of British practices of discipline, organisation, coercion, and control. Lloyd’s study of what he calls the “transformation of the oral space”, which focuses in particular on the orifice of the mouth, reveals the ways in which “[t]he space of orality not only embodied a set of material relations, but also contained a set of social and cultural possibilities3”, and he emphasises “how charged this organ is for the ambivalent representation of Irishness4”. Luke Gibbons for his part exposes the association of Irishness, and in particular, with uncleanliness, and a more general fear of contagion located in Irish otherness, in particular during the

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Victorian era: “Whether through the association of Irish republicanism with dirt and the pigsty in Victorian caricature, or the stigmatisation of ‘Fenian Fever’, one of the most notable shifts in racial depictions of the Irish was the transference of moral panics raised by fears of contamination and infection from actual disease, typhus, and cholera, to its political counterpart, radical protest and the contagion of political violence5”. He goes on to analyse Gaelic Gothic as resolutely bound up in questions of race and colonialism, a genre which seems “uniquely appropriate to capture the anomalies presented by Irishness to the racial Gothic of colonialism6”.

3 Beyond these colonial stereotypes, Irish bodies were of course also subjected to mass starvation during the Great Famine, the iconography of which features so many “haggard and gaunt expression[s]7” on the faces of Irish men, women, and children who were starving to death. As Emily Mark-Fitzgerald shows, “depictions of starvation and impoverished/emaciated human figures, representations of funeral rites and graveyards, depictions of relief efforts, scenes of eviction and emigration8” were numerous, and figured Irish bodies in distress and wasting away. The gradual disembodiment of the island which began with the Famine, then continued with mass emigration, resulting in a persistent hemorrhage of the population.

4 A considerable body of scholarship has, of course, already been devoted to these questions, and it is hoped that the present volume will expand and develop this vast field. One way of doing so would be to acknowledge dissident Irish bodies as so many “willful subjects” to take up Sara Ahmed’s terminology. In her most recent essay, she argues for an understanding of willfulness as “a diagnosis of the failure to comply with those whose authority is given”, acknowledging simultaneously that it can also “compromise […] the capacity of a subject to survive, let alone flourish9”. In this sense, her work resonates strongly with Lloyd’s discussion of “the impropriety of Irish conduct10” and is especially relevant to understanding how forms of oppression, and resistance to them, emerged during the course of the twentieth century and the increasing policing of bodies in Ireland. For Ahmed, “[t]he figure of the willful child becomes crucial to the national project, allowing that project to be framed as a matter of life and death: the project of straightening the children becomes about saving the nation11”.

5 Lloyd also devotes considerable attention in Colonial Modernity to the ways and means by which colonised Irish male bodies were frequently feminised by the British, but one of the most sinister dimensions of twentieth-century Irish history is that of the repression and control of women’s bodies by the newly formed Irish state. This reached a devastating climax in 1984 with the death of Ann Lovett, which Paula Meehan’s poem, quoted in the first epigraph, evokes with such haunting precision. Meehan exposes with cold scorn the corrupt society which forced Ann Lovett to give birth, utterly alone, to “her secret”, in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary, and the failure of either church or state to show compassion or question in what way they might have been responsible for the death of both Lovett and her baby. Notwithstanding the collective hysteria in 1985 around eye-witness accounts of moving statues of the Virgin Mary, this Virgin, the speaker of Meehan’s poem, remains unmoved, literally and emotionally. The 1980s was the decade which also saw, among other landmark events, the Kerry babies scandal, the introduction after referendum of the notorious Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, and protests by women prisoners in Armagh Gaol. In each of these divisive cases, Irish women’s bodies were central, either exposing institutional mistreatment and the

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inadequacy of sex education, access to contraception, and general lack of care (respectively for the Armagh prisoners and Ann Lovett) or enshrining in law the subordination of women’s bodies to that of a foetus they may not wish to carry. When Nell McCafferty began her now famous Irish Times article with the words “There is menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh prison in Northern Ireland. The 32 women on dirt strike there have […] for over 200 days now […] lived amid their own excreta, urine and blood12”, she provoked readers into engaging with the plight of those republican women prisoners, rendered all too visible these bodies which had become too abject to even acknowledge, and took to task mainstream Irish feminists’ refusal to take a stance on this issue and intervene in the public sphere on the prisoners’ behalf. More generally, in the conflict in the North of Ireland, which spanned at least the last thirty years of the twentieth century, dead and injured bodies were an almost quotidian occurrence, and one of the challenges of the ostensibly “post-conflict” era has been how to deal with such a violent legacy, and the painful issue of the whereabouts of the bodies of those known as the “disappeared” will perhaps never be fully resolved.

6 For all that the above issues are highly relevant however, how bodies “matter” in Ireland should not just be limited to questions of control, coercion and violation. Literature has long been a space in which the possibilities of pleasure can be explored, even when the censorship board attempted to ban works, like Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy, which exploited that space and told stories of illicit sexual pleasures. , to name just one contemporary writer, has repeatedly placed the body and all sorts of permutations of sexual pleasure at the heart of her fiction, from the detailed description of each penetrative thrust by Eliza’s lover, culminating in orgasm, in the opening chapter of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, to the more prosaic description of visceral grief in the second epigraph, taken from Enright’s The Gathering. Beyond literature, the punk movement of the 1970s and the development of queer (performance) activism in the 1980s and 1990s also enabled the emergence of different ways of thinking about, responding to, and contesting the pressures of (hetero)normative discourses and practices. Irish theatre has also been a site of both enforcement and contestation of bodily norms. Lionel Pilkington13 and Mark Phelan14 have convincingly argued that the embrace of naturalism as the Abbey Theatre’s dominant aesthetic has been a means of promoting the Abbey’s modernising agenda, forcing the bodies of the actors on the stage into standardised, recognisably modern attitudes, and containing those of the audience, confined to immobility, inaudibility and invisibility by the convention of the fourth wall and its attendant set of learned attitudes. At the same time, however, a whole counter-tradition of non-naturalistic Irish theatre has developed, from Synge and Yeats to Beckett to contemporary playwrights and performers, which foregrounds dissident bodies, bodies incapable or unwilling to subject themselves to the normalising demands of naturalism. The extraordinary set of grotesque disabled, or differently- abled bodies that have peopled the Irish stage since the inception of the Irish theatrical movement makes visible the harrowing history of deprivation and violence to which Irish people have been submitted in colonial and postcolonial times, and the inherited trauma which continues to affect them, often invisibly. Yet they also express a form of derisive, sardonic resistance to modernising norms and embrace alternative modalities of physicality, often at the cost of abjection – as the brutal expulsion of the beggars who choose to remain blind rather than comply with the working ethos of modern sociality at the end of Synge’s The Well of the Saints makes clear. This issue of Études irlandaises aims to pursue reflection on all of these issues.

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7 Nathalie Sebbane’s article, which opens the issue, provides a historical overview of the emergence of Magdalen Laundries, which she places in in the context of a broader logic of containment of transgressive bodies. Starting out from the premise that the Laundries were totalitarian institutions whose aim was to imprison, punish, control, and render docile women’s bodies which were deemed dissident by the state, she demonstrates, from a Foucaldian perspective, how internment was legitimised by scientific discourses linking mental illness with women’s reproductive systems. She also charts the shift from charitable to punitive ideology during the nineteenth century more generally, and the resultant brutal practices in Irish Magdalen Laundries. From these very real abused bodies, Nancy Marck Cantwell turns to a fictional world full of Gothic bodies created by Maria Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent. Departing from a close reading of the opening chapter of the novel, and the seizure of Sir Patrick’s corpse, she develops an analysis of decomposing Gothic bodies, both literal and textual. In so doing, she foregrounds Edgeworth’s political critique, likening it to a Joycean collapse of meaning in part because of a series of monstrous fallen signifiers. Investigating the Gothic body as a site of indeterminacy through the prism of Julia Kristeva’s abject, she highlights the collapse of meaning which threatens personal and national identity. In the final analysis, she reveals how a foundering national identity is mirrored in the de- composition of the text.

8 The two following articles, written respectively by Hannah Simpson and Zsuzsanna Balázs, focus on Yeats’s early poetry and on his drama. Simpson focuses on the physically moving, dead body in Yeats’s poetry, which she reads through the lens of mass Irish emigration, and establishes a link between the high emigration rate of Irish women and the recurrence of moving dead or supernatural women in Yeats’s pre-1900 poetry. Balázs addresses Yeats’s five Cuchulain plays and analyses how the playwright expresses his increasing ambiguities over the cultural and political capacities of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy through the changes of the Irish warrior-hero Cuchulain’s body and the growing predominance and influence of the spectral world on his bodily integrity.

9 Remaining in the realm of theatre, Andréa Caloiaro’s article discusses Christina Reid’s 1987 My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? and examines the many ways in which this radio play interrogates the Somme as an integral part of Unionist Identity in the North of Ireland, while exposing the ironies at stake in such a political teleology. In this analysis, Caloiaro emphasises the ways in which Reid uncovers the masculinist and imperialist imperatives at stake in the Somme, the streamlining of Unionist history, and the ironies of upholding British imperial aggression, through the main female character Andrea who works hard to disembody the masculinist ethno-nationality of her World War 1 veteran grandfather. Marylinn Richtarik’s article comments on and analyses her forthcoming edition of Stewart Parker’s as yet unpublished autobiographical novel, Hopdance. Parker, who is doubtless better known as a playwright, also wrote poetry and experimental prose. Hopdance deals with the amputation of his left leg at the age of nineteen and as such, transforms body into text, structuring Parker’s experience of amputation in a way that gave it meaning for him. Challenging novel conventions and eschewing a linear approach, Parker, Richtarik argues, highlights the restorative power of human connection and of story-telling.

10 The following article, by Alexander Coupe, brings us up to the more contemporary era, and investigates the performance of trauma in a “post-conflict” North of Ireland. In his

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analysis of three recent productions by Darragh Carville, Dave Duggan, and the Theatre of Witness, he demonstrates both the limits and the possibilities offered by the strategic use of the body as a “site of witness”, and reflects on the ways in which the body bears witness to the singular aspect of a trauma which is recalcitrant to transformation into discourse. Julia Obert turns to a very different type of trauma in her article on Ciaran Carson’s poetry collection, Until Before After – that of serious illness. She reads this collection through the prism of the theory of relativity, and analyses its aesthetic engagement with the poet-speaker’s wife’s illness, the spectre of death, and interrogations of the space-time continuum. She also relates Carson’s interest in perspectivalism to his knowledge of and prowess in traditional music, in particular the ways in which the latter eschews conventional measures of time and is open to infinite variation. This leads her to demonstrate how this collection offers, in both content and form, an alternative means of apprehending space and time.

11 Tim Heron focuses on another, very different, alternative means of thinking about bodies in his article on punk in the 1970s in the North of Ireland. In particular, he analyses the potential of the conscious exploitation of the grotesque as a means of destabilising traditional sectarian, gender, and sexual boundaries. Investigating both punk codes and music in the North at the height of , Heron argues that punk provided a (temporary) liminal space which allowed power relations to be negotiated in new ways. Remaining in the context of contemporary writing from the North, Caroline Magennis argues for something of a critical turn in discussions of Northern Ireland as a “post-conflict” space. Calling for a move away from the dominance of trauma theory, she analyses moments of pleasure in three recent texts by , Billy Cowan, and , and evokes the “affective topography” in which these pleasures, not all of which are sexual, are expressed. In her reading, pleasure and trauma can co-exist and thus provide multivalent ways of dealing with the emotional landscape of this part of Ireland.

12 It is fitting that the final article in this issue should be devoted to queer bodies in performance and activism, as it also opens up new perspectives for further research, arguing for a move away from the rigid methodologies which all too often govern reflection on what constitutes art and how it might relate to activism. Tina O’Toole focuses on queer bodies and public spaces in the late twentieth century, and analyses in particular the performance activism of Thom McGinty, better known as “The Diceman”, as well as key interventions by queer Irish migrants in . Her article charts the growing importance of street demonstrations and public performance in rendering Irish LGBTQ+ people visible and audible against a backdrop of increased pathologising and policing of bodies and sexualities. The case made by O’Toole for paying sustained attention to performance activism continues to be equally relevant in the current context of the Repeal the Eighth movement in which art and politics are absolutely intertwined15, and where Irish women’s bodies, and the freedom they should be able to exert over them, are once again central concerns.

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NOTES

1. Paula Meehan, “The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks”, in The Man Who Was Marked by Winter, Oldcastle, Co Meath, Gallery Press, 1991, p. 41. 2. Anne Enright, The Gathering, , Jonathan , 2007, p. 7 3. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800-2000: The Transformation of the Oral Space, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 9 4. Ibid., p. 57. 5. Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2004, p. 51. 6. Ibid., p. 87. 7. Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013, p. 45. 8. Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument, op. cit., p. 14. 9. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, Durham/London, Duke University Press, 2014, p. 1. 10. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800-2000: The Transformation of the Oral Space, p. 57. 11. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects, p. 130. 12. Nell McCafferty, “It is my belief that Armagh is a feminist issue”, , August 22 1980. 13. Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 14. Mark Phelan, “The Advent of Modern Irish Drama and the Abjection of Peasant Popular Culture: Folklore, Fairs and Faction Fighting”, Kritika Kultura 15 (2010), p. 149-169. 15. See for example the organisation of concerts, the development of a book project, as well as many other, extremely varied, forms of action. [http://www.repeal.ie/]

AUTHORS

FIONA MCCANN Université de Lille SHS & Institut Universitaire de FranceUniversité Sorbonne Nouvelle- 3

ALEXANDRA POULAIN Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3

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Corps de femmes, corps dociles : le cas Magdalen Laundries

Nathalie Sebbane

1 Si l’année 2016 a marqué le début d’une décennie de commémorations en Irlande avec le centenaire du soulèvement de Pâques 1916, elle a également marqué le 20e anniversaire de la fermeture de la dernière Magdalen Laundry, institution conventuelle de prise en charge des femmes dites « perdues », à savoir mères célibataires, filles à la morale considérée comme trop légère ou victimes de viol ou d’inceste et, de fait, salies et jugées inaptes à rester dans la société.

2 En effet, c’est le 25 septembre 1996 que la dernière institution de ce type ferme ses portes en Irlande. Trois ans auparavant, les Sœurs de Notre-Dame de la Charité du Refuge1, contraintes pour des raisons économiques de vendre à un promoteur immobilier le terrain sur lequel avait été construite l'une des plus grandes institutions du pays, St Mary’s Asylum2, demandèrent au Ministère de l’Environnement un certificat d’exhumation pour les corps de 133 pensionnaires enterrées dans des tombes ne portant aucune inscription3.

3 Lors des exhumations, on découvrit les corps de 22 autres pensionnaires et les religieuses durent demander un certificat d’exhumation supplémentaire. Il apparut plus tard que les Sœurs n’avaient pas pu fournir de certificat de décès pour les 22 femmes concernées et que des identités fictives leur avaient été attribuées. Les corps de 155 femmes furent finalement découverts et ré-enterrés au cimetière de Glasnevin. Des recherches sont actuellement en cours au cimetière de Glasnevin car il semblerait que les noms qui figurent sur les pierres tombales ne correspondent pas toujours au lieu où sont enterrés les corps4.

4 L’existence, puis la disparition des corps au sein des institutions de type Magdalen Laundries est centrale à toute réflexion sur les modalités de mise en place du régime que James Smith a appelées « Ireland’s architecture of containment5 ». Cette prise et emprise sur les femmes témoigne du pouvoir exercé par et sur les corps pendant toute la durée de ce que l’on peut appeler le « plein régime » de l’institutionnalisation des femmes en Irlande6. Car c’est bien du corps des femmes dont il s’agit, ce corps sexué, ce

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corps visible, ce corps tentateur, coupable et responsable qu’il s’agit de cacher, de désexualiser et de dompter jusqu’à le rendre docile.

5 Dans un contexte où les sociétés occidentales, et notamment européennes, se voient confrontées à différentes problématiques autour de la liberté et de la visibilité du corps de la femme, et où politiques, média et société civile se saisissent de l’enjeu à des fins diverses, il semble tout à fait pertinent de s’interroger sur la manière dont l’Irlande, au cours de son histoire a reproduit, importé et conçu des espaces et discours destinés à enfermer, châtier et contrôler les corps des femmes. C’est précisément l’objet de cet article, qui tentera de démontrer comment les Magdalen Laundries, institutions totalitaires, héritières du modèle du « grand renfermement, » ont été de véritables fabriques de « corps dociles ».

6 Ervin Goffman définit ce qu’il appelle une institution totalitaire comme « un lieu de résidence ou de travail où un grand nombre d’individus, placés dans la même situation, coupés du monde extérieur pour une période relativement longue, mènent ensemble une vie recluse dont les modalités sont explicitement et minutieusement réglées7 ». Il explique que la prison est un parfait exemple de ce type d’institutions. Les institutions dites totalitaires, selon Goffman, sont caractérisées par « les barrières qu’elles dressent aux échanges sociaux avec l’extérieur, ainsi qu’aux entrées et aux sorties, et qui sont souvent concrétisées par des obstacles matériels : portes verrouillées, murs hauts, barbelés, falaises, étendues d’eau, forêt ou landes8 ».

7 Les institutions totalitaires brisent les frontières qui séparent ordinairement les lieux où les individus dorment, se distraient et travaillent. Tous les aspects de l’existence s’inscrivent dans le même cadre. Chaque phase de l’activité quotidienne se déroule en relation de promiscuité totale avec un grand nombre d’autres personnes, soumises aux mêmes traitements et obligations. Toutes ces périodes d’activité sont réglées selon un programme strict, de sorte que toute tâche s’enchaîne avec la suivante à un moment déterminé à l’avance, conformément à un plan imposé d’en haut par un système explicite de règlements dont l’application est assurée par une équipe administrative. Surveillants et surveillés forment un couple indissociable9.

8 Les Magdalen Laundries sont des institutions qui ont évolué au cours du temps, à la fois dans leur structure, leurs objectifs, mais également leur gestion. Les résidentes10 des Magdalen Laundries ne furent jamais réellement considérées comme inoffensives, puisque leur existence même était une offense à la société, à ses codes moraux, mais aussi à Dieu. Elles n’étaient pas non plus considérées comme véritablement dangereuses pour la communauté à strictement parler, même si elles l’étaient sur le plan moral. Associés dès le milieu du XIXe siècle à des couvents, et administrés par des ordres religieux, les Magdalen Laundries n’étaient pas destinés à assurer une retraite hors du monde, mais davantage à imposer, à forcer un isolement et une invisibilité. Les caractéristiques communes à ces institutions, telles qu’elles sont définies par Goffman, s’appliquent, en tous points, aux Magdalen Laundries. Il s’agit, en effet, de structures au sein desquelles le quotidien était réglementé de manière stricte, dans le cadre d’un régime autoritaire, et d’un enfermement auquel participaient à la fois « surveillés et surveillants ». La promiscuité qui existait entre les religieuses et les pénitentes conféra à ces institutions un caractère totalitaire dès les années 1930 en Irlande.

9 Pour mieux saisir les enjeux propres à ces institutions, il convient de les replacer dans un contexte historique et philosophique, en s’appuyant sur les théories développées par Michel Foucault.

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De Foucault à Bentham

« Le grand renfermement » : misère, assistance et enfermement

10 Pour Foucault, c’est l’édit royal du 27 avril 1656 autorisant la fondation d’un Hôpital Général qui signa le premier acte de ce qu’il appelle « le grand renfermement ». Cette structure, parisienne au début, et qui s’étendit par la suite à toutes les villes du royaume, avait pour objectif d’empêcher « la mendicité et l’oisiveté comme les sources de tous les désordres11 ». Elle prévoyait que les hommes seraient accueillis à Bicêtre, les femmes à la Salpêtrière, et les enfants à la Pitié. Pour Foucault, les workhouses ou Houses of Correction anglaises s’inscrivaient dans ce schéma, au même titre que les Zuchthäusen allemandes.

11 Si l’Hôpital Général, selon Foucault, était « une instance de l’ordre, de l’ordre monarchique et bourgeois qui s’organis[ait] en à cette même époque », l’Église ne tarda pas, elle aussi, à repenser ses structures d’accueil et à prévoir des institutions susceptibles de concurrencer les entreprises monarchiques. Un vaste réseau caritatif religieux se développa en France au dix-septième siècle. Des hôpitaux ou Charités virent le jour dans de très nombreuses villes, dans lesquels assistance et répression se côtoyaient de près.

12 Le cas de la Salpêtrière12 est tout à fait pertinent pour notre réflexion sur le corps des femmes. Comme nous l’avons mentionné plus haut, cet hôpital faisait partie du projet de l’Hôpital Général, conçu par Louis XIV, visant à incarcérer les miséreux et les mendiants. De quelqu’âge qu’il soient, de l’un et l’autre sexe, qui se trouveront dans la ville et faubourgs de Paris lors de l’établissement de l’Hôpital Général qui ne pourront gagner leur vie seront enfermés dans ledit hôpital et lieux qui en dépendent pour y être employés aux œuvres publiques, manufactures et service dudit Hôpital, selon l’ordre des directeurs13.

13 Au cœur de ce schéma, le cas de la Salpêtrière est tout à fait pertinent. On y trouvait toutes sortes de femmes, quelques hommes, souvent âgés, et un très grand nombre d’enfants, assez jeunes, qui avaient suivi leur mère ou avaient été abandonnés. Il y avait un grand nombre de « filles enceintes », dont on peut supposer qu’il s’agissait de filles qui avaient été séduites puis abandonnées. Le 20 avril 1684, une nouvelle catégorie de femmes, les « femmes débauchées » firent leur entrée dans l’établissement. Dès 1660, on y comptait 1460 femmes et enfants. En 1701, l’hôpital accueillait 4646 personnes, tous âges confondus, dont 1894 enfants. Les femmes étaient réparties en différentes catégories : les jeunes estropiées et teigneuses, les vieilles paralytiques, les « correctionnaires », libertines et prostituées et les femmes violentes ou innocentes. À une époque où la moralité était considérée comme primordiale, on enfermait sans aucune limite les prostituées et les femmes dites « gâtées », qui étaient toutes enceintes. Il s’agissait de femmes dont les grossesses, produits de leur débauche, étaient comparables à une maladie infectieuse14.

14 Tout, dans cette taxinomie, renvoie au corps de la femme, qu’il s’agisse d’infirmités physiques ou de déviance morale. Les corps sont catégorisés et répertoriés pour être mieux soumis et contrôlés. Le terme « femmes débauchées » confère une dimension de jugement moral qui sera au cœur du régime « madeleiniste15 » irlandais.

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15 La vie au sein de l’institution était fort semblable au quotidien d’un couvent, les journées étant ponctuées de prières et autres services religieux. Les pensionnaires devaient clairement exprimer une volonté de pénitence et de changement moral. De plus, l’établissement avait une vocation de conversion affichée. Il était indispensable de convertir au catholicisme toutes les femmes impies. Afin de parvenir à ce résultat, et sur le modèle de ce qui se faisait déjà en Hollande, Allemagne et Angleterre, les pensionnaires devaient associer la religion au travail. Le travail forcé devait inculquer une forme de discipline à des individus qui n’en avaient jamais connue. Il est évident que ce que les femmes choisies purent considérer comme une chance n’était ni plus ni moins qu’un moyen, pour les autorités, de se décharger des cas les plus difficiles. C’est précisément la démarche qui sera adoptée par les Magdalen Asylums irlandais.

16 L’enfermement en France, aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles, apparaît donc comme une réponse urgente et, somme tout, peu regardante, à la question de la misère grandissante et du nombre croissant d’indigents. Pourtant, il semble que les femmes aient été particulièrement affectées par ces mesures pénitentiaires. Foucault explique qu’il existe toute une liste d’expériences que le dix-huitième a choisi de bannir. Elles touchent toutes, soit à la sexualité dans ses rapports avec l’organisation de la famille bourgeoise, soit à la profanation dans ses rapports avec la nouvelle conception du sacré et des rites religieux, soit au « libertinage » […]. Ces trois domaines forment, avec la folie, dans l’espace de l’internement, un monde homogène qui est celui où l’aliénation mentale prendra le sens que nous lui connaissons16.

17 La convergence du contrôle de la sexualité et de la moralisation religieuse ne pouvait que conduire à une répression inéluctable dirigée sur les femmes et leurs corps. À défaut de contrôler le corps avant qu’il ne commette l’irréparable, on s’appliquait à re- former des « corps dociles17 ». Partant de l’endiguement de la misère, et de la répression de la débauche, facteur de désordre social et économique, le pas qu’il restait à franchir vers l’aliénation mentale était assez aisé. Pour Foucault, la sexualité marque la ligne de partage entre Raison et Déraison, ce qui explique pourquoi tant de femmes furent considérées comme « folles » ou « insensées », en vertu de leur sexualité perçue comme illégale ou d’un rapport différent à leur corps.

18 En Irlande, la naissance de l’internement des malades mentaux date du dix-huitième siècle18. En effet, Jonathan Swift avait légué une partie de sa fortune pour qu’un hôpital spécialisé dans la prise en charge des malades mentaux fût construit.

19 Il existe peu d’informations, à notre connaissance, sur la condition des femmes dans les institutions pour malades mentaux. Áine McCarthy a publié un article sur l’internement des femmes au sein de l’institution d’Enniscorthy de 1916 à 1925, qui fournit néanmoins quelques indications sur la politique de qui prévalait19. L’article souligne qu’avec le développement des institutions pour malades mentaux, les médecins tentèrent de légitimer les internements par les nouvelles découvertes sur le système reproducteur de la femme. Cette dernière se vit, dès lors, attribuer une série de troubles liés à sa physiologie, notamment la « folie puerpérale », dont on pensait qu’elle était causée par un empoisonnement dû à l’accouchement, la « folie ovarienne », résultat d’une inflammation des ovaires, la « folie liée à l’allaitement » et la « mélancolie climactérique », liée à la ménopause. Ces pathologies rendaient les femmes plus prédisposées à une maladie mentale. Le médecin William Hallaran, qui fut directeur de l’hôpital psychiatrique de Cork, fut le premier médecin irlandais à écrire un traité sur la folie. En 1818, il expliqua pourquoi les femmes étaient

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mentalement plus fragiles. « Il ne faut pas s’en étonner lorsque l’on tient compte de tous les facteurs excitants auxquels les femmes sont particulièrement exposées20 ». McCarthy cite également un extrait d’un manuel de psychologie, datant de 1874, qui confirmait cette prise de parti, affirmant que les femmes dont les organes reproducteurs étaient développés étaient les plus susceptibles d’être atteintes d’hystérie. Cela permit l’internement de nombreuses femmes sous des prétextes relativement fallacieux et ce, jusqu’au milieu du vingtième siècle.

20 L’utilisation de critères pseudo-physiologiques pour justifier une aliénation mentale et par conséquent un internement, allait frapper davantage la femme dont le mode de vie la rendait plus vulnérable, notamment la mère-célibataire, qui représentait un fardeau pour la société et pour sa famille. Elle portait en effet les stigmates les plus évidents d’une sexualité extravertie.

21 Les pathologies liées à une grossesse et un accouchement difficiles étaient fréquemment associées à l’une des causes de désordre mental mentionnées plus haut, et légitimaient un internement en institutions. La visibilité de la grossesse inscrite sur le corps de la femme pouvait, à elle seule, suffire à prescrire un enfermement.

22 Ce que nous venons de montrer correspond en tout point aux différents critères cités par Foucault dans sa théorie du « grand renfermement » et nous invite à ne pas envisager le cas de l’Irlande comme particulier. Le corps et la physiologie de la femme offraient une opportunité inespérée de se débarrasser de citoyennes encombrantes et trop voyantes.

23 En 1975, avec la publication de son ouvrage Surveiller et Punir, Michel Foucault fait découvrir au monde universitaire et académique français l’œuvre considérable de Jeremy Bentham. C’est notamment en analysant le projet panoptique de Bentham qu’il ouvre la voie à une analyse poussée du projet de ce juriste et philosophe utilitariste, qui avait conçu tout un arsenal de méthodes censées résoudre le problème de l’assistance aux pauvres, alors que se dessinaient les contours d’une réforme de cette assistance en Angleterre.

« Corps dociles » et corps de femmes

24 Selon Foucault, à la fin du dix-huitième siècle et au début du dix-neuvième, l’on assiste à une transformation de la punition. Il distingue deux grands mouvements : d’une part, « l’effacement du spectacle punitif21 », avec une tendance à cacher l’expression de l’acte punitif. Ce dernier consiste à « corriger, redresser, guérir22 ». Et d’autre part, un recul devant l’utilisation du corps comme lieu de la punition et de la répression. Le corps s’y trouve en position d’instrument ou d’intermédiaire : si on intervient sur lui en l’enfermant, ou en le faisant travailler, c’est pour priver l’individu d’une liberté considérée à la fois comme un droit et un bien. Le corps, selon cette pénalité, est pris dans un système de contraintes et de privation, d’obligation et d’interdits23.

25 Cette notion est d’autant plus pertinente et importante lorsque c’est le corps lui-même et notamment celui de la femme, qui est à la source du châtiment et de la punition. Pour autant, nous dit Foucault, la prise sur le corps n’est pas complètement révolue, puisque l’enfermement contient, en soi, un « supplément punitif qui concerne bien le corps lui-même : rationnement alimentaire, privation sexuelle, coups, cachot24 ». Ainsi, ce serait à l’âme, et non plus au corps que s’adresserait la pénalité. Foucault ne le croit fondamentalement pas. Il s’en explique en arguant que « c’est bien toujours du corps

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qu’il s’agit - du corps et de ses forces, de leur utilité et de leur docilité, de leur répartition et de leur soumission25. Le corps s’inscrit dans le système complexe des rapports de production, de pouvoir et de domination, et il n’est « force utile que s’il est à la fois corps productif et corps assujetti26 ». La discipline, le contrôle, le pouvoir et la surveillance ont pour objet de forger des « corps dociles » : « La discipline fabrique ainsi des corps soumis et exercés, des corps “dociles”27. »

26 Sa théorie s’est appliquée, de tout temps, aux femmes en tant que catégorie spécifique, a fortiori parce que leur corps était objet et source de pouvoir. L’illégitimité, notamment, était perçue comme la trace « corporelle » d’une utilisation frauduleuse du corps. Ce corps de femme avait produit, dans l’illégalité, un ou plusieurs autres corps, et c’était ces corps mêmes qu’il fallait contrôler et punir. C’était bien sur eux que devaient s’exercer les « technologies du pouvoir » dont parle Foucault.

27 Dans Surveiller et Punir, il affirme que toutes les instances de contrôle individuel, qu’il s’agisse des hôpitaux, des asiles et des prisons, ont opéré un partage entre le normal et l’anormal, un « marquage binaire ».

28 Le Panopticon28 de Bentham, dit-il, « est la figure architecturale de cette composition29 ». Ce que Foucault voit dans le panoptisme c’est la possibilité, pour les instances du pouvoir de contrôler en permanence, d’« induire chez le détenu un état conscient et permanent de visibilité qui assure le fonctionnement automatique du pouvoir30 ».

29 Ce qui est intéressant dans l’analyse qu’en fait Foucault, c’est la double dimension du projet disciplinaire. Il s’agissait de contrôler, de surveiller, de réformer, et de réajuster un mode de fonctionnement en accord avec une certaine idéologie du pouvoir.

30 C’est cet aspect qui nous semble tout à fait pertinent dans l’analyse de l’évolution des différents modes de prise en charge de la « femme perdue » en Irlande du milieu du dix-neuvième au milieu du vingtième siècle. Il interroge, en effet, la nature et la forme de discipline envisagées, le type de pouvoir auquel elle correspondait et le degré d’emprise, ou de prise, sur le corps qu’elle prévoyait.

31 Plus intéressant encore, Bentham se prononça sur les institutions de prise en charge des prostituées qui existaient à l’époque en Angleterre. « Les hôpitaux établis à Londres pour les filles repentantes sont de bonnes institutions, mais ceux qui condamnent fermement la prostitution ne sont pas en accord avec eux-mêmes s’ils encouragent ces œuvres caritatives. Si elles remettent certaines filles dans le droit chemin, elles en encouragent d’autres31. »

32 Il faisait référence, indubitablement, aux ancêtres des Magdalen Asylums, établis en Angleterre au cours du dix-huitième siècle par des philanthropes protestants32.

33 Sherill Cohen qui a publié un ouvrage sur l’histoire des institutions pour femmes de 1500 à 199233 affirme, parlant de Foucault et de son analyse du projet panoptique de Bentham, que pour les femmes, la société patriarcale occidentale a toujours été « un régime panoptique34 ». Les institutions pour femmes européennes des seizième et dix-septième siècles furent d’importants archétypes pour certaines institutions spécialisées contemporaines visant à prendre en charge un seul sexe, à savoir les femmes. Plus généralement, l’histoire des institutions pour femmes est également liée au développement d’établissements correctionnels, éducatifs et caritatifs réservés à la plèbe au cours des siècles suivants. Pour cette raison, l’histoire des refuges pour femmes peut offrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la nature des institutions sociales modernes 35.

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34 Ce sont précisément les philanthropes anglais qui ont importé le modèle européen et qui l’ont exporté vers l’Irlande. Les modalités et objectifs ont évolué avec le temps mais également avec le discours et les représentations identitaires et religieuses.

Corps en prison, prison des corps

Investir le corps

35 Jonas Hanway, membre d’un groupe de philanthropes qui fondèrent le Magdalen Hospital de Londres36, était un marchand qui avait parcouru le monde et avait observé avec attention le fonctionnement des entreprises caritatives dans le reste de l’Europe. Il rédigea plusieurs pamphlets vantant les mérites d’un Magdalen Hospital à Londres. Dans l’un deux, il revient sur les expériences des nations étrangères pour justifier sa nouvelle entreprise : « J’ai lu de nombreux ouvrages sur la question et fait plusieurs enquêtes, et je constate que la même formule a été adoptée dans la plupart des pays chrétiens dans le monde37. » Il décrit les institutions hollandaises et les ordres monastiques appelés Magdalanes, spécifiquement consacrés à la prise en charge des prostituées repentantes. Ces ordres avaient été établis entre le treizième et le seizième siècle à Marseille, Metz, Naples, Paris, Rouen et Bordeaux, ainsi qu’en Espagne38.

36 Voici ce qu’il écrit à propos de l’institution qu’il compte fonder : « [Cet établissement] sera un moyen d’employer les oisives, de leur enseigner et de les habituer à travailler ; de réformer leur morale ; de sauver de nombreux corps de la maladie et de la mort, et de nombreuses âmes d’une misère éternelle39. »

37 On peut constater que le corps apparaît déjà comme l’espace dans lequel vont se mettre en œuvre les technologies du pouvoir. L’objectif est, certes, moral mais c’est par le corps que passera la rédemption. Le corps de la prostituée représentant son outil de travail, il fallait lui retirer, ne fut-ce symboliquement, cet outil, en désexualisant son corps. Il faut aussi garder à lʼesprit que les « femmes déchues40 » représentaient également un danger physique, puisque l’on craignait la transmission de maladies vénériennes.

38 Si, au dix-huitième siècle, ces institutions avaient pour vocation de mettre à l’abri des femmes qui avaient succombé au péché de chair et se trouvaient dans une situation délicate, elles ont évolué, au cours du dix-neuvième siècle vers des établissements punitifs, des institutions quasi-totalitaires. Les durées de séjours sont devenues de plus en plus longues et les formations à un métier en vue d’une réinsertion dans la société ont progressivement été remplacées par un dur labeur systématique censé financer l’institution. Le travail de blanchisserie et sa pénibilité sont devenus le symbole de la purification morale et physique dont on estimait que les femmes devaient s’acquitter pour faire acte de pénitence.

39 Bien que les prémices du « madeleinisme » en Irlande aient été de nature philanthropique et laïque, petit à petit, faute de financement, et l’enthousiasme des bienfaiteurs ayant diminué, la plupart des institutions ont été confiées à des ordres religieux, leur conférant une nouvelle dimension. Quoi qu’il en soit, ce sont les femmes, qu’elles soient philanthropes ou religieuses, qui ont dominé ce mouvement. Il s’agissait au début de protestantes issues de la bourgeoisie, puis de religieuses catholiques. Ce glissement a opéré un changement considérable dans la manière dont les femmes

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déchues étaient perçues et traitées. L’humanisme indulgent du dix-huitième a progressivement cédé la place à une culpabilisation impitoyable, reléguant les aspirations réhabilitatrices des origines au second rang pour les remplacer par un régime punitif et répressif. La femme déchue n’était, dès lors, plus envisagée comme une victime mais comme une coupable, et la compassion qui s’exprimait notamment à l’égard des mères célibataires dans les premières institutions a disparu avec l’entrée sur la scène madeleiniste des religieuses.

Corps disciplinés

40 L’un des aspects qui préoccupait beaucoup le gouvernement et l’Église Catholique en Irlande pendant les années 1920 et 1930 fut le cas de la mère-célibataire. Selon l’idéologie du jeune État, fortement influencé par la doctrine sociale de l’Église, la place de la femme était au foyer, et la femme idéale était la Mère. La femme devint emblématique du discours de construction identitaire de l’État Libre. Alors que la maternité était idéalisée dans la rhétorique politique41 de l’Irlande, le corps de la mère qui n’appartenait pas à ce schéma idéal fit l’objet d’une attention particulière et d’un grand nombre de discours politiques et religieux.

41 La sexualité était au cœur des préoccupations de l’Irlande libre mais c’était pour mieux la cacher. On parlait sans cesse de sexe mais pour dire qu’il ne fallait ni en parler, ni y penser, et n’y avoir recours que pour procréer. Elle opérait le partage entre pur et impur, moral et immoral, normal et transgressif.

42 Le travail, notamment de blanchisserie, mais également de couture, était à la fois une source de revenus pour les religieuses mais également symbolique d’une technique de purification. La pénibilité du travail imposait au corps le châtiment qui revenait à l’âme. Une discipline de fer régnait, sous la surveillance permanente des religieuses. Les femmes étaient peu nourries, dormaient peu, travaillaient sans relâche, dans des conditions qui sont désormais condamnées par les instances internationales comme du travail forcé et de la quasi-, comme nous le verrons plus loin. Des témoignages42 relatent des accidents, des brûlures non soignées, des heures passées sans boire ni manger, dans les vapeurs de produits toxiques. Si une pensionnaire était malade, elle restait au lit quelques jours sans que l’on fasse venir un médecin.

43 On surveillait et on ne tardait pas à punir celles qui ne respectaient pas les règles. Des corps « purs », ceux des religieuses, côtoyaient des corps « impurs », ceux des femmes dites perdues. La symbolique de Marie et celle de Marie-Madeleine étaient enfermées dans le même espace, soumises à un même régime d’exclusion du monde. Le corps était non seulement malmené et maltraité mais il était également négligé, oblitéré.

44 Dès leur entrée dans l’institution, les femmes se voyaient retirer leur nom et attribuer un nom de sainte. On leur coupait les cheveux, signe ostentatoire de féminité et de vanité. On leur donnait une sorte de vêtement informe, d’une couleur indéfinie. Rien ne devait donner à voir ce corps, responsable de leur état de disgrâce, qui était pourtant l’objet de toutes les attentions.

45 La plupart des pensionnaires étaient des femmes qui avaient mis au monde un enfant dans le péché. Elles étaient passées par une autre institution, le Mother and Baby Home, où elles avaient accouché, puis, bien souvent, leur enfant leur avait été retiré pour être adopté ou placé dans un orphelinat ou une Industrial School. La violence de

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l’arrachement du bébé, à peine sevré, était une autre atteinte à l’intégrité du corps, le corps maternel43.

46 Ces dispositifs et technologies de pouvoir – la pénibilité du travail, la dissimulation de la féminité, la violence faite au corps maternel et le silence imposé aux pensionnaires, furent suffisants pour insuffler un climat de peur tel qu’il ne fut pas nécessairement utile pour les religieuses d’avoir recours à la violence physique, ce qui ne fut malheureusement pas le cas dans les institutions qui accueillirent des enfants. L’obéissance et la docilité étaient le produit de la crainte et d’une discipline quotidienne et répétitive, dans un schéma panoptique où les pensionnaires se savaient en permanence sous contrôle.

47 Dans les Magdalen Laundries, le corps est l’instrument par lequel passe la purification de l’âme. C’est en soumettant le corps que l’âme pourra être sauvée. Il s’agit d’une technique très pernicieuse puisque le corps devient également l’instrument qui produit, qui travaille. Il est l’outil qu’il convient de ménager afin qu’il puisse rester efficace mais également celui du châtiment et, par conséquent, il fait l’objet de maltraitance.

48 Dans le même temps, la femme voit son corps disparaître derrière des discours d’immoralité et devenir l’instrument par lequel passe sa prétendue rédemption.

Corps dociles ?

49 Lorsque les médias ont révélé l’ampleur du régime d’institutionnalisation des femmes vulnérables en Irlande, la parole s’est libérée, des témoignages ont dénoncé les violences subies et les traumatismes. Les anciennes pensionnaires ont eu la plus grande difficulté à se réinsérer dans la société. Leur parcours témoigne de souffrances psychologiques et physiques. Leur corps porte la mémoire d’années de privations, de confinement, d’isolement, de manque de soins et parfois dʼabus sexuels.

50 Il n’en demeure pas moins que grâce au travail et au soutien d’associations de victimes, un processus de justice et réparation est actuellement en cours44. Comme signalé plus haut, des recherches sont actuellement menées par JFMR afin de tenter de localiser précisément les lieux ou sont enterrées les femmes. Cela permettra de rendre une certaine forme d’intégrité aux corps des défuntes.

51 De plus, le groupe de soutien JFMR45 a mené sans relâche une campagne pour obtenir des autorités politiques la reconnaissance des souffrances endurées46, ce qui a conduit à la mise en place de la Commission McAleese47. Le groupe a également déposé une requête auprès du Comité des Nations Unies Contre la Torture (UNCAT)48 pour incarcération forcée, travail forcé, mauvais traitements, en vertu des articles 1 et 16 de la Convention contre la Torture49.

52 En figurant au cœur de la campagne pour obtenir justice et réparation, le corps est extrait de son état passif et docile. Le silence qui lui a été imposé est désormais remplacé par des mots, actes performatifs, qui lui restituent une visibilité qu’il ne saurait être question d’ignorer plus longtemps.

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Conclusion

53 Si le processus d’institutionnalisation de milliers de femmes en Irlande dans les Magdalen Laundries a participé d’un mouvement général historique d’enfermement des individus jugés transgressifs, il n’en demeure pas moins que le pays a développé des techniques de pouvoir et de contrôle qui lui ont été propres, adossées à un discours de construction identitaire très influencé par la doctrine sociale de l’Église catholique.

54 L’Irlande s’est incarnée dans un ordre moral, régi par un appareil législatif strict et rigide, une idéologie sociale dans laquelle la femme était à la fois symbolique de la pureté de la nation et emblématique de toutes les transgressions possibles. À ce titre, les Magdalen Laundries incarnent ce régime dans lequel les corps ont été investis et travestis.

55 La récente légalisation du Mariage Pour Tous et la campagne menée pour l’abolition du 8e amendement de la Constitution, portant sur l’illégalité de l’avortement, témoignent d’une volonté de réincarner le pays, à l’aune d’une vision sociétale qui restitue au corps sa dimension légitime.

NOTES

1. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge. 2. Aussi connu sous le nom de Mary’s Penitentiary or Magdalen Home. Institution située à High Park, Drumcondra, qui fonctionna de la fin des années 1850 à 1991. 3. Mary Raftery, “Taking Mary Home”, Irish Times, 15 avril 2004. 4. [https://www.magdalenelaundries.com/name.htm], page consultée le 11 septembre 2016. 5. James M. Smith, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Indiana Press, 2007, p. XIII. 6. On peut considérer que c’est après l’indépendance que ce « plein régime » a été mis en place et qu’il a perduré jusque dans les années 1990. 7. Erving Goffman, Asiles. Études sur la condition sociale des malades mentaux, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1968, p. 41. 8. Ibid., p. 46. 9. Ibid. 10. Notons que les groupes de soutien aux anciennes résidentes utilisent les termes « victims » ou « survivors ». Par souci d’objectivité scientifique et historique, nous choisirons d’utiliser « pensionnaires » ou « résidentes ». 11. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 91. 12. Ce nom vient de l’emplacement sur lequel l’établissement fut construit. Il s’agissait, à l’origine, d’une fabrique de poudre à base de salpêtre, destinée aux munitions.

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13. Code de l’Hôpital Général, archives de l’Assistance publique - Hôpitaux de Paris, p. 274. 14. Pour un développement sur le traitement des femmes à la Salpêtrière, voir notamment Carrez, Jean-Pierre, Femmes opprimées à la Salpêtrière de Paris, 1656-1791, Paris, Connaissances et Savoir, 2005 ; Yannick Ripa, La Ronde des Folles. Femmes, folie et enfermement au XIXe siècle (1838-1870), Paris, Aubier, 1986. Pour une approche artistique de la question, voir Xenakis, Mâkhi, Les Folles d’enfer de la Salpêtrière, Paris, Actes Sud, 2004, ouvrage publié à partir d’une exposition qui eut lieu dans les locaux de l’hôpital. 15. Néologisme. 16. Ibid., p. 115-116. 17. Cette expression est tirée de Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, op. cit., p. 13. 18. St Patrick’s Hospital ouvrit ses portes en 1746. Voir Malcolm, Elizabeth, Swift’s Hospital: a history of St Patrick's Hospital, Dublin 1746-1989, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1989. 19. Áine McCarthy, “Hearts, Bodies and Minds: Gender ideology and Women’s committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum, 1916-1924”, in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds.), Female Experiences: Essays in Irish Women History, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2000, p. 102-109. 20. « This cannot be wondered at when we take into account the many exciting causes to which are more particularly exposed », W. H Hallaran, Practical observations on the Causes and Cure of Insanity, Cork, Edwards and Savage, 1818, p. 50. 21. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 15. 22. Ibid., p. 17. 23. Ibid., p. 18. 24. Ibid., p. 23. 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Ibid., p. 34. 27. Ibid., p. 62. 28. Néologisme fabriqué par Bentham pour rendre compte de la structure de totale visibilité qu’il envisageait. Le terme français panoptique fut utilisé dans le document présenté à l’Assemblée Nationale en 1791 : J. Bentham, Panoptique. Mémoire sur un nouveau principe pour construire des maisons d’inspection, et nommément des maisons de force, E. Dumont (éd.), Paris, Imprimerie nationale, Secours publics no 1, 1791. 29. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, op. cit., p. 233. 30. Ibid., p. 234. 31. « The hospitals established in London for repentant girls are good institutions: but those who regard prostitution with absolute rigour are not consistent with themselves, when they approve of these charitable foundations. If they reform some, they encourage others », Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843). 11 vols. Vol. 1, [http:// oll.libertyfund.org/title/2009/140060/2643427], page consultée le 21 septembre 2007. 32. On peut, à ce titre, citer le Lock Hospital (1746) pour les vénériennes et le Magdalen Hospital (1758), pour prostituées, tous deux situés à Londres. 33. Sherill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500: from Refuges for ex- prostitutes to Shelters for battered women, New York, OUP, 1992.

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34. Ibid., p. 5-6 35. Ibid. 36. Cf. note 28, p. 11. 37. « I have turned over some volumes on the subject, and made several enquiries, and I find the same thing has been adopted by almost every Christian country in the world », Jonas Hanway, Reflections, Essays and Meditation on Life and Religion, London : printed for John Rivington. R. and J. Dodsley, and C. Henderson, 1762, p. 8-9. 38. L’Hôpital du Refuge fut fondé à Marseille en 1640, le Refuge de Clermont en 1668. Le couvent de Notre-Dame de la Charité du Refuge, l’une des institutions les plus importantes, vit le jour à Caen en 1641, et prit ensuite le nom de Bon-Pasteur. L’ordre avait été fondé par Jean Eudes. Dans l’ensemble, les institutions françaises étaient plus dures et plus répressives que leurs homologues italiennes. 39. « It will be a means of employing the idle, of instructing them in, as well as habituating them to work; of reforming their Morals; of rescuing many bodies from Disease, and Death; and many Souls from eternal Misery », Jonas Hanway, op. cit., p. 31-33. 40. Traduction du terme « fallen women » employé en anglais. 41. Pour une analyse de cette question, voir Maryann Valiulis, « Neither feminist Nor Flapper : the Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman », in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds.), Chattel, Servant or Citizen ? Women’s Status in Church, State and Society, , 1995, p. 168-178. 42. Pour les témoignages des ancienne pensionnaires, voir : [ http:// www.magdaleneoralhistory.com/]; Sex in A Cold Climate, documentaire de Steve Humphries, réalisé en 1997 ; Nancy Costello, Kathleen Legg, Diane Croghan, Marie Slattery and Marina Gambold with Steven O’Riordan, Whispering Hope:The True Story of the Magdalene WomenOrion, UK, 2015 ; le rapport de la Commission dite McAleese : Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (2013). 43. Ces institutions font à leur tour l’objet d’une Commission d’Enquête : http:// www.mbhcoi.ie/MBH.nsf/page/index-en. 44. Voir le site de JFMR à ce sujet. 45. [http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/what.htm]. Page consultée le 12 septembre 2016. 46. [https://www.magdalenelaundries.com/JFMR%20Followup%20UNCEDAW% 20300915.pdf]. Page consultée le 12 septembre 2016. 47. [ http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/MagdalenRpt2013]. Page consultée le 12 septembre 2016. 48. [ http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/jfm_comm_on_torture_210411.pdf]. Page consultée le 12 septembre 2016 49. [http://www.ohchr.org/FR/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CAT.aspx]. Page consultée le 13 septembre 2016.

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RÉSUMÉS

Alors que l’année 2016 marque le 20e anniversaire de la fermeture de la dernière Magdalen Laundry en Irlande, cet article offre une perspective historique sur la manière dont ces institutions, s’inscrivant dans le schéma la logique foucaldien du grand renfermement, ont caché, discipliné et contrôlé les corps des femmes qui contrevenaient à l’ordre moral d’abord au dix- neuvième siècle puis surtout après la naissance de l’État Libre.

The year 2016, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, also marked the 20th anniversary of the closing of the last Irish Magdalen Laundry. This paper offers a historical analysis of the way these institutions were part of a broader logic of internment of transgressive individuals, whose aim was to conceal and control women’s bodies. It shows that in Ireland, specific techniques were used in order to perfom this taming of the body, in a context of identity construction after 1922.

INDEX

Keywords : Magdalen Laundries, institutions, women, body, institutional abuse Mots-clés : Magdalen Laundries, femmes, corps, institutions, maltraitance institutionnelle

AUTEUR

NATHALIE SEBBANE Nathalie Sebbane is MCF HC Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 (USPC) where she lectures in British and Irish History. Her research speciality is on the history of women in Ireland, the relationship between Church and state, and religious institutions (Magdalen Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes). She has published several articles on these questions, co-edited a special issue of Études irlandaises with Fiona McCann (37.2, 2012) on Women’s and Feminist Issues in Contemporary Ireland. She is currently working on a history of Magdalen Laundries to be published by Peter Lang.

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De-composing the Gothic Body in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent

Nancy Marck Cantwell

Introduction

1 Published just prior to the Act of Union, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) forecasts the dissolution of Irish identity in terms of a disorienting horror. The novel shares a preoccupation with loss and death with popular gothic productions of its day, like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), but while its prevailing atmosphere of deterioration envisages a grimly uncertain future for Ireland and its people, Edgeworth elevates this loss of identity to a transgressive fragmentariness, imagining colonization as a traumatic familial and national event capable of destabilizing meaning itself. And, to emphasize the profound personal impact of this appropriation, Edgeworth narrates this pervasive decay through the gothic body, a site of multiplying and unfathomable alternities.

2 To introduce this troubling unpredictability, Castle Rackrent begins with an ending; the first of four family biographies told by self-appointed memoirist Thady Quirk concludes abruptly with the death of patriarch Sir Patrick Rackrent. Edgeworth employs the gothic trope of the stolen corpse in the opening chapter, where creditors interrupt Sir Patrick’s funeral procession and confiscate his remains: Just as all was going on right, through his own town they were passing, when the body was seized for debt – a rescue was apprehended from the mob – but the heir who attended the funeral was against that, for fear of the consequences, seeing that those villains acted under disguise of the law – So to be sure, the law must take its course – and little gain had the creditors for their pains1.

3 The dashes capture Thady’s breathless shock as he relates the disruption of the funeral ritual, but they also call attention to the presence of an Editor, another key feature of the novel. The text of Castle Rackrent is itself a disjoined hybrid and colonized body of fragmented memories assembled by its English Editor, who solicits and then formally composes the family tales recounted orally by Irish narrator Thady Quirk, lifelong

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retainer of the House of Rackrent. However, the Editor further explains that Thady’s impenetrable Irish dialect requires the further annotation of his recollections in a Glossary, where the Editor exerts further authority over the text by selecting, interpreting, and translating events from this oral family “history” for the benefit of an implied English reader unfamiliar with Ireland and her people. To convey Thady’s complex description of the corpse seizure scene, the Editor uses dashes to separate the perspectives of creditors and mourners, as well as to dramatize Thady’s horror at the suspended fate of the corpse, at exactly the critical moment when the patriarch’s identity should be most firmly established, as the procession passes through “his own town”. The dashes, therefore, help to recreate the confusion of the scene, drawing attention to several things at once: a decomposing corpse, interrupted funeral rites, the patriarch’s identity with his land and town, the narrator’s distress at the violation of taboos respecting the dead, and the Editor’s authority to transcribe the trauma of dislocation. The event dissolves into fragmentary associations as its meaning degenerates, particularly since the unknown fate of the corpse suspends any linear plot trajectory towards an ending.

4 The horror surrounding the seized corpse, inspiring such complex and entwined responses – biological, religious, personal, political, and editorial – identifies the narrative effect as distinctly gothic and aligns the abject with Ireland’s loss of identity. Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, describes abjection as a psychological state in which human efforts to construct meaning fail utterly; this collapse of explanation fosters horror, as even time and identity appear irreparably fractured and impossible to confirm2. Kristeva observes that we commonly bear witness to the abject when we are confronted by the inevitability of our physical dissolution. Evidences of bodily decomposition – notably corpses and illness – provide shocking reminders of our eventual corporeal decay, an irretrievable loss of identity we hold apart from ourselves as a fearful unreality, and which we inscribe in literature upon the gothic body, often spectral or lifeless. The pervasive fragmentation of the corpse seizure scene at the opening of Castle Rackrent therefore invites further examination of abjection as it renders Edgeworth’s novel a gothic production, focused on the decay of a body and a family as signs of the impending dissolution of Irish national character at the crucial historical moment “when Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain3”. The seizure of Sir Patrick’s body in this liminal period as it travels between the family castle and the grave bears political import even as it also causes temporal, spatial, and narrative disruptions: the funeral ritual remains unfinished, the space of the intended grave lies open, and both narrator and Editor abruptly abandon Sir Patrick’s history, leaving it disturbingly incomplete.

5 This reading of abjection and the gothic body builds on several important lines of critical commentary on Castle Rackrent, including discussions of Thady Quirk’s unreliability, the Editor’s role in composing the “memoir”, and Edgeworth’s ambivalence about Anglo-Irish politics on the eve of Union. In response to Marilyn Butler’s assertion that the gothic, “remotest of all from daily reality”, stands apart from the novel of social commentary, Kellie A. Donovan argues that Castle Rackrent employs destabilizing gothic conventions to call attention to the marginalized position of women; although she finds that Castle Rackrent “is not a gothic novel”, she does acknowledge the confluence of social and gothic interests4. Joseph Kestner also recognizes the importance of this combination of impulses, interpreting Edgeworth’s

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disjunctive technique as a means of fostering the social awareness common to Romantic-era regional novels5. Similarly, Daniel Hack’s helpful discussion of Union in the novel identifies a method in its unreliable narration, reading in its “endless approach to and deferral of complete Union” a ratification of the hybrid Anglo-Irish ruling class6. Building on these readings of the novel as a commentary on union, I propose instead that Edgeworth’s complex affiliations point to a more ominous view of Ireland’s future. Reading the novel’s fragmentariness through the lens of abjection, I point to the gothic body as a signifier of the potential horrors – personal, political, and cultural – consequent to Union. In this discussion, I follow Fred Botting’s important distinction between terror and horror: “If terror leads to an imaginative expansion of one’s sense of self, horror describes the movement of contraction and recoil. […] [T]error marks the uplifting thrill, where horror distinguishes a contraction at the imminence and unavoidability of the threat. Terror expels after horror glimpses invasion, reconstituting the boundaries that horror has seen dissolve7.” Terror, a temporary state of apprehension that allows us to return to safety after experiencing the sublime, is therefore ultimately generative, while horror forces our confrontation of destructive forces we dread and cannot avoid, the impending abject that disturbs and disrupts narrative because it represents the breakdown of signification, here a breakdown consequent to union.

6 Corpses prompt abjection in the narrative, provoking the horror of lost meaning and unstable identity. Producing textual gaps in the linear history of the family/nation’s decline, Edgeworth articulates abjection through verbal dislocutions, accidental or deliberate “mistellings” that disrupt both spatial and temporal logic, creating the novel’s gothic effect. Her use of this technique to “de-compose” the text and destabilize the forward movement of narrative anticipates a similar effect in Joyce; in this vein, Fritz Senn’s 1984 study, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, describes the indeterminacy of Joycean language, where “an emerging pattern tends to be discredited as soon as it becomes discernible8”. These terms can help us to appreciate the similarly experimental quality of Edgeworth’s narrative technique in Castle Rackrent, particularly the confusing opaqueness of her language, its capability of multiple simultaneous (and even contradictory) meanings that often require an act of translation to make sense out of the obscure and the referential. And, of course, her use of the Editor further points to translation as a sign of Irish cultural dislocation, a collapse of national identity that no doubt appeared imminent on the eve of political Union. The initial funeral episode in Castle Rackrent furnishes an instance of how Thady’s dislocutions effectively “de-compose” the gothic bodies – corporeal and textual – that evoke abjection and advance Edgeworth’s political critique.

Dead metaphors: de-composing the gothic corpse

7 Sir Patrick’s decomposing corpse occupies a transitional space between the estate and the grave, both locations signifying land and nation, but his personal identity deteriorates as creditors and mourners debate its fate. The stolen remains become a metaphor for the appropriation, devaluation, and inevitable extinction of Irish identity. Thady first characterizes Sir Patrick by describing his debts, incurred by a traditional Irish hospitality that illuminates both his status and generosity, but once creditors and his heir successfully assign a monetary value to his corpse, Sir Patrick’s human identity

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collapses into an exclusively economic register. The body’s public deterioration from Irish patriarch Sir Patrick (he) to unclaimed corpse (it), a signifier of a certain sum of money, provokes the abject, as narrator Thady can only convey the spectacle of commodified decay in terms of hopeless unintelligibility. If even the corpse of an important person, a land-owning patriarch like Sir Patrick, can be seized and bargained over, his human status translated to a specific exchange value at the very moment when his personal qualities should be most remembered and firmly fixed “in his own town”, then stable meaning can only be an illusion; the linear narrative begins to unravel. In textually disjointed moments like the corpse seizure, all forms of identity – personal, familial, historical, economic, and political – fall away from meaning, a deterioration that haunts the text and resonates throughout the remaining three family histories.

8 Decomposing physically, already decayed epistemologically by his son’s unsentimental devaluation, Sir Patrick’s remains become inadequate collateral for debt, “little gain” for the trouble of disrupting a funeral. The creditors mistakenly assume that the corpse represents Sir Patrick the rightful Irish landlord and father, that his status requires his heir to pay any debts in order to complete the funeral rites to which the corpse is entitled by religion and local custom. To them, the body signifies a stable personal and political identity. However, Sir Patrick’s son and heir, the litigious Sir Murtagh, surrenders the body instead of paying his father’s debts, and the narrator invites us to consider that Sir Murtagh’s alleged “fear of the consequences” of the law could be a miserly reluctance to pay what is owed, since the surrender of the body frees him from further financial obligation. However, even as Thady obligingly reports this side of the question, he invalidates it as malicious gossip: “It was whispered (but none but the enemies of the family believe it) that this was all a sham seizure to get quit of the debts, which he had bound himself to pay in honor9.” Thady dislocutes by simultaneously proposing and retracting an interpretation, decomposing the tale even as he composes it. By claiming that the seizure insults the deceased by interrupting the funeral rites, the “great lawyer” Sir Murtagh can legally avoid paying his father’s debts while occupying the moral high ground, yet we learn that the “sham seizure” could possibly have been pre-arranged10. Thady’s equivocations, and the impossibility of discerning the truth from the evidence he provides, illustrate a Joycean collapse of meaning. Meaning decays into a state of abjection, like Sir Patrick’s cadaver, a monstrous fallen signifier, no longer patriarch or father, valued by his son at the sum of his debts, but nonetheless a valueless burden to his creditors, who cannot recover their money.

9 Although the narrative quickly passes to consider the next Rackrent baronet, this brief episode in the novel’s opening pages introduces the gothic body as a site of indeterminacy, summoning gothic horror as the collapse of meaning threatens personal and national identity. As Kristeva describes it in Powers of Horror, The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules11.

10 As the corpse is arrested unceremoniously on its journey from house to grave, Thady Quirk’s account of its journey derails from the linear expectations of the historical narrative, which Edgeworth’s Editor promises will picture an authentic Irish identity for

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the English reader, employing the system of describing each heir in chronological order. Instead, the seizure of the body defies the historical, interposing instead a gap in meaning, a chasm of abjection that echoes with gothic resonance, revealing the family history itself as a de-composed textual body. The abject spectacle, in Kristeva’s formulation, triggers the narrator’s dislocution, his inability to enact meaning, which in turn inspires the Editor to perform an act of translation to decode the textual instabilities that point to decay, dissolution, and degeneration.

11 By obstructing the corpse’s final journey to the grave, the creditors open the gothic possibility of its further influence on the living, as Anne Ridge observes that in Ireland “this liminal period, between death and burial, was always looked upon as a danger zone12”. Specific rituals governing the deceased’s procession from the “corpse house” (here the castle where the body lay before interment) to the grave ensured that the dead would rest peacefully and marked a clear boundary between the dead and the living, a type of narrative contract to assure a satisfactory ending. Bound to honor the dead by religion and tradition, the living observe specific funerary rites of passage, including recitation of the proper words (the burial service) and performance of the proper actions (procession and interment), because they expect the dead to “observe” the border between life and death by not returning to vex the living. Its rituals completed, death may be regarded as the end of a living subject’s capacity for narration. Although the dead exert influence on Thady’s narrative as the subjects of his memories, they can no longer relate their own stories. In this context, Thady’s “history”, an oral recitation of the lives and deaths of the Rackrents, both reanimates the Irish landowners through retold memories and exerts a control over them and their life stories that he could not have asserted while they lived. For instance, within the narrative, Thady can choose to abbreviate or extend a life story. Sir Condy’s life, related separately in the “Continuation of the Memoirs of the Rackrent Family”, comprises half of the entire novel, while Sir Patrick’s part is brief and stark.

12 Thady’s horror at the seizure of the corpse causes him to retell the episode; it is the first significant historical event he recalls, yet he further dislocutes by scrambling temporal sequence. Although his first pains are to establish his authority as memoirist, Thady reveals that he only has second-hand knowledge of the corpse seizure; after he waxes admiringly on Sir Patrick’s generous hospitality, describing the patriarch’s guest accommodations with the inside authority and detail of a first-hand observer, Thady discloses that he never actually saw Sir Patrick. His grandfather, he recalls, was Sir Patrick’s driver, perhaps the patriarch’s contemporary or even his junior. Thady further disrupts linear sequence by adding that it was his great-grandfather who witnessed Sir Patrick’s demise when, “a few days before his death” Sir Patrick drank the “bumper toast” that proved fatal, as “Sir Patrick died that night13”. A few sentences later, Thady misplaces his own temporal position in the narrative, offering his great- grandfather’s description of Sir Patrick’s death and funeral, which occurred “before I was born long”, and then abruptly referring to himself as “old Thady”, an established adult member of the household at the time of Sir Patrick’s funeral14. Time collapses with the confusion of generations and sequential events, as Thady inserts himself into what might be his great-grandfather’s memory, but indeterminacy betrays the power Sir Patrick’s death holds for him and underlines his narrative aggression, his need to make sense of his relation to the phobic event. Thady’s claim to an authority that he admits he cannot possess stands as a sign of the destabilized meanings that create abjection in

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Castle Rackrent. What is remarkable about the tale is that Thady knows it at all – that the details of Sir Patrick’s life, death, and the seizure of his corpse have been preserved through four generations of Quirks serving the Rackrents testifies not only to the purchase of memory but more importantly to the symbolization of the phobic object, the corpse, which comes to represent the loss of family/national identity. Sir Patrick’s gothic body, unburied and unacknowledged, continues to rot metaphorically just as Thady continues to de-compose the family narrative from his own contradictory recollections: “Whether it be projected memory or hallucination, the phobic object has led us, on the one hand, to the borders of psychosis, and on the other, to the strongly structuring power of symbolicity15.” Kristeva attributes this repeated effort to impose a system, even a contradictory one, on the abject to a phobic panic in the face of pervasive fragmentation.

13 Thady’s obsessive confrontation of decay through narration defines him as a deject, as “the one by whom the abject exists16”. Narrative is his only means of bringing himself into being, as it were, since his life has been entirely absorbed by and inscribed on those of his employers. As he tells what is, presumably, their history, he inevitably tells his own, as well as the history of Ireland’s colonial experience. Through this memoir, we learn that Thady belongs to no one but the Rackrents. He is in Kristeva’s term a stray, one who “never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines […] constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh17”. This is the predicament of the colonized, Edgeworth suggests, straining to recover and reinstate a past state. Similarly, through narration, the ghostlike Thady can address the abject corpse of each Rackrent lord and attempt to exert control over the phobic object by “reanimating” it, bringing his memories to life for the Editor and the reader, as he continues to do by relating the death stories of Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy.

14 If, as Kristeva suggests, the abject lies “in the way one speaks”, the Editor’s dislocutions qualify him as another deject, perhaps a more severe deject since he better comprehends the larger, transnational political significance of decay/Union18. Of course, the Editor has a different stake in the relating of memories, which serve ostensibly as instruction to the English reader. Acknowledging that Thady is “scarcely intelligible” and in the Glossary undertaking to translate and explain Irish culture and religion, the Editor imposes a surface linearity on the de-composed, dislocuted oral text, deciphering and recomposing Thady’s memories to form a more coherent, progressive history19. As many critics have noted, the Editor’s Glossary constitutes a competing narrative, containing and reshaping Thady’s memories, and exerting control over Thady’s efforts to exert control over the Rackrent history, yet another assertion of colonial dominance.

15 While Thady attempts to control the phobic specter of the dissolute and disappearing family, the object of his desire necessary to constitute his identity as subject, the Editor’s oscillation between Irish and English perspectives dislocates him politically and historically, echoing the Edgeworth family’s troublesome position as Anglo-Irish landowners with shifting sympathies20. By representing two alternative positions, the Editor also refuses to acknowledge the potential collapse of Irish identity, focusing instead on cataloguing and imposing a linear sequence on the lives (and particularly the deaths) of the Rackrent heirs. The gothic body emerges as the metaphor through which both Editor and narrator dislocute their respective senses of lack, as each history

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ends with a death, but the corpse itself is a shifting signifier that evades their continuing effort to revive meaning.

Time and the fallen: dislocating the gothic body politic

16 As a family “memoir”, the narrative ostensibly reconstructs a historical sequence of events, yet time is the first border to be violated by the abject. In Castle Rackrent, lost temporality marks a foundering national identity mirrored in the de-composition of the text, as we see in the example of the seized corpse, which slips from the narrative entirely, its linear path cut off in the face of a traumatic loss of individual, familial, and finally national signification. In “Women’s Time”, Kristeva describes the political ramifications of this identity crisis, noting that nations formulating or reformulating a distinctive native character typically experience “a double problematic: that of their identity constituted by historical sedimentation, and that of their loss of identity which is produced by this connection of memories which escape from history. […] In other words, we confront two temporal dimensions: the time of “linear history”, […] and the time of another history, […] monumental time21”. For unstable nations, monumental time does not progress chronologically, residing in the memory of enclosed (often traumatic) events that acquire metaphorical significance as they define national crisis, but linear history requires sequence and causality as structuring principles. In Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth employs linear time to trace each inheritor’s personal history as it contributes to the simultaneous decline of the tale, the family and the nation – as Jarlath Killeen observes in Gothic Ireland, “a disintegrating house stands at the centre of a disintegrating text about a disintegrating island22”. While readers witness the deterioration of a homeland as Edgeworth charts the parallel decline of house and family, she also disrupts the linear narrative with abject monumental events, like the corpse seizure, that politicize the novel’s gothic atmosphere by pointing to the dissolution of meaning and identity, thus projecting the horror not only of personal but also of national extinction.

17 Edgeworth’s social position as landed Anglo-Irish gentry problematizes her response to the debate over Union, which was resolved only a few months after the publication of Castle Rackrent; while the Edgeworths had originally believed that “such a merger would increase investment of English resources in Ireland and improve Irish trade”, in fact at the last minute Richard Edgeworth voted against Union, realizing that “the government in Westminster had bribed Irish Parliament members23”. Edgeworth appears to gloss over the impact of marginalization in her preface to the novel, where she excuses her unsympathetic portrayal of the Irish landowner by remarking that “nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity […]. When Ireland loses her identity by a union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency24”. This has often been read as a unionist nod, reflecting Edgeworth’s belief that union would eventually improve Ireland’s economy, as Frazer Easton has observed in pointing to her Smithian view that “commercial transactions between nations could ameliorate the social and material inequities of a colonial system25”. However, the passing reference to lost national identity opens the traumatic question of lost memory, of a time past and a historical identity that the Irish will gradually “lose attachment” to, and we can better gauge Edgeworth’s response to this threatened abyss through both Thady’s anxiety to record (and thus preserve) the

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Rackrent history and the Editor’s urgent efforts to provide the English reader with an intelligible record of Irish life and manners before the Union.

18 The Rackrent body signifies on both personal and political registers, as a sign of specifically Irish moral failings that leave their mark on the estate/nation and precipitate the decline and eventual extinction of the family line/national character. For Vera Kreilkamp, this theme of parallel decay indicates that “The Irish house must be put in order, purged of its native shiftlessness; the state of the house and the state of the nation are related26”. Sir Patrick dies of drink, leaving the estate burdened by debt, confirming Sinéad Sturgeon’s reading of alcohol’s “repeated association with death, functioning as an index of destructive dissipation27”. Despite the importance of lineage to a family history, the reader never learns the fate of Sir Patrick’s body, ironically surrendered to the law by his son and heir, the Law of the Father seemingly upended and emptied of meaning. If the creditors bury the body, the reader never learns where or under what circumstances. Moreover, as cadaver, Sir Patrick fails to sustain identity and falls – cadere – falls away as a signifier, calling into question the horrifyingly fragile, temporary meanings of human life, identity, property, and political status28. Only Thady’s memory, confronted by that abject spectacle of disintegration, struggles against the collapse of meaning by emphasizing the linear, historical time of the Rackrent heirs.

19 Although the narrative “seems to naturalize patriarchal and aristocratic values” endorsing linear time, “its mode of representation undercuts these links29”. For instance, Thady’s account of Sir Patrick’s inheritance and forced conversion ostensibly points to sequence, but in actuality serves as a marker of unstable temporality and fallen identity. The hybrid Rackrent family combines original Irish Catholic and grafted Anglo-Protestant branches, the Irish O’Shaughlins having been dispossessed by the English Rackrents, who, eventually failing of an English heir, leave the estate to Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who must change his surname and conform to the Anglican Church to claim his inheritance; as Catherine Gallagher observes, this “dispossession […] of their mythicized geneaology, is the very condition on which their property is held30”. According to Thady, this renunciation Sir Patrick “took sadly to heart […] but thought better of it afterwards, seeing how large a stake depended on it31”. As Killeen explains, many Irish families employed this outer conformity “to reverse a colonial usurpation”, as the 1704 Act for Preventing the Further Growth of Popery actually “effectively allowed crafty Gaelic families to repossess the lands taken from them […] by outwardly conforming to the Established Church after the death of their Norman relatives32”. Through intermarriage with the Rackrents, the O’Shaughlins eventually reassert their claim to the property that had been theirs to begin with, complicating linear sequence by doubling back to reconstitute a prior Gaelic Catholic identity under the pretense of moving forward as Anglo-Irish Protestants. However, Sir Patrick’s renunciation of Catholicism and of the family name fails to erase the past, where the trauma of dispossession still resides in local memory.

20 Although Sir Patrick’s acceptance of the Rackrent name preserves its Anglo-Irish identity (by its emphasis on the English surname, an ever-present reminder of exploitation), local residents remember the O’Shaughlin family name, and so Thady’s first history, the tale of Sir Patrick, celebrates the estate’s return to a Catholic heir and thus revives monumental time, the traumatic memory of Irish identity prior to the English dispossession. Since convert landowners retained their Gaelic aristocratic

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identities in the community, the family’s Catholic identity also remained intact in the minds of the locals, who like Thady may have acknowledged the strategic advantages of conformity33. Although a fallen or lapsed (from the Latin lapsus: slipped, fallen) Catholic by virtue of his Anglican conformity, Sir Patrick nonetheless receives the honor of the Gaelic funeral whillaluh, but Thady cannot recover the Catholic past without also marking its association with the time of English occupation, noting the striking appearance of the mourners by remarking, “to see all the women even in their red , you would have taken them for the army drawn out34”. Thady’s account dislocates time by referring to the military’s role in dispossession; here Thady also dislocutes and de-composes the narrative by employing a metaphor that complicates the meaning of the scene, comparing Irish Catholic female mourners to English Protestant male soldiers, enforcers of the laws that oppress Catholics, an “instantaneous mental dislocation” similar to the ones Giorgio Melchiori observes in A Portrait of the Artist, and a sign of monumental time, a past traumatic memory reimagined and superimposed on the present35. From the position of the colonized, Thady Quirk must narrate because he cannot act—his narrative aggression struggles against the hopeless disorganization and observable deterioration of Irish culture represented by the series of Rackrent corpses he forms into the gothic textual body, their family history.

Conclusion: the corpse and gothic indeterminacy

21 As with the corpse seizure, the pattern of indeterminacy in the novel has to do with Thady’s obsessive forecasting of death. Lady Kit, Lady Isabella, and Sir Condy are all falsely reported to be dead, and plot events proceed on those mistaken assumptions, even when the report remains unverified, as though a verifiable truth is no more authoritative than any other utterance. Reported “kilt and smashed” in a carriage accident – a phrase that evokes a gothic depiction of graphic carnage – Lady Isabella is the subject of a false counter-narrative circulated by her former rival, Judy M’Quirk, Thady’s great-niece36. The Editor intervenes to translate this dislocution by informing us that “kilt” does not mean “killed” in local parlance, but rather indicates intensity of experience, as in the expression “I’m kilt all over with the rheumatism37”. Dislocution, however, calls attention to the destabilizing of all meaning and narrative authority, as it turns out that “dead” does not mean dead, either – for example, Sir Condy falsifies his own death in order to hear what people say about him at his wake. The false report of Isabella’s death serves as a counterpart to the corpse seizure scene. Thady appropriates and (for a time) suppresses her textual body, even as her physical body is unexpectedly arrested, allegedly “smashed” on its journey from the castle to her childhood home. Like Sir Patrick, whose profligacy returns in a new form with each subsequent heir, Isabella returns to hover over the final pages of the unresolved Rackrent history, a ghostly presence that reiterates the abjection attending familial decay and national extinction. The erroneous report of Isabella’s death gathers more significance by the novel’s close; although Thady’s son Jason believes that he has acquired title to Castle Rackrent legally, Isabella’s tenacious hold on life means that she and Jason must litigate over the jointure memorandum, and Aileen Douglas’s remark that these “fears for property are regularly expressed through the vulnerability of crucial documents” points to the forthcoming legal action as it predicts future indeterminacy and waste38. Accordingly, Thady abandons the narrative at this point. Whether Jason or Isabella wins the , both the estate and the family are irretrievably

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lost, and Ireland has become a corpse, shed of meaning, its spectacle of decay and the traumatic memory of dispossession inspiring horror.

22 In chronicling the Rackrent drive to extinction, Thady cannot help but de-compose his fragmented tales of their dead, maimed, and imprisoned bodies, horrified by the spectre of dissolution that echoes Ireland’s experience of dispossession. While the Editor, conscious of his English audience, recomposes Thady’s oral narrative of crumbling memories, imposing legibility along with a Glossary of historical and cultural notes, the novel’s internal contradictions, evoking the trauma of colonization through references to monumental events, often interfere with its stated purpose as a linear history. Smashed or seized, silenced or sequestered, the gothic body in Castle Rackrent registers the abject by describing the dissolution of Irish identity, a traumatic loss on both personal and national scales.

NOTES

1. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 11. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 2. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 3. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 5. 4. Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 42. Kellie A. Donovan, “Imprisonment in Castle Rackrent: Maria Edgeworth’s Use of Gothic Conventions”, in Joachim Fischer and Brian Coates (eds.), Back to the Present, Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History Since 1798, Vol. 1, Amsterdam, NY, Rodopi, 2006, p. 146. 5. Joseph Kestner, “Defamiliarization in the Romantic Regional Novel: Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, John Gibson Lockhart, Susan Ferrier, and John Galt”, Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 10, 1979, p. 326-330. 6. Daniel Hack, “Inter-Nationalism: Castle Rackrent and Anglo-Irish Union”, Novel, Vol. 29 No. 2, Winter 1996. 7. Fred Botting, Gothic: The New Critical Idiom, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 10. 8. Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, p. 114. 9. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 10. 10. Ibid., p. 11-12. 11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, op. cit., p. 4, my emphasis. 12. Anne Ridge, Death Customs in Rural Ireland: Traditional Funerary Rites in the Irish Midlands, Galway, Ireland, Arlen, 2009, p. 60. 13. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 10-11.

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14. Ibid, p. 17, 7. 15. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, op. cit., p. 46. 16. Ibid., p. 8. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 4. 20. Marilyn Butler carefully delineates how these sympathies played out in both Edgeworths’ writings, particularly in the jointly authored Essay on Irish Bulls (1802), which she claims “came into being as a gesture of intellectual solidarity with the United Irish cause, probably in response to the Dublin government’s shutting down of the main United Irish newspaper, Samuel Neilson’s Northern Star, in May 1797”. See “Edgeworth, the United Irishmen, and ‘More Intelligent Treason’”, in Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske (eds.), An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, Newark, DE, University of Delaware Press, 2004, p. 34. 21. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time”, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 189. 22. Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century, Portland, OR, Four Courts Books, 2005, p. 191. 23. Kathleen Kirkpatrick, “Introduction”, The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. IV-V. 24. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 5. 25. Frazer Easton, “Cosmopolitical Economy: Exchangeable Value and National Development in Adam Smith and Maria Edgeworth”, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 42 No. 1, Spring 2003, p. 99-125. 26. Vera Krielkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1998, p. 35. 27. Sinéad Sturgeon, “The Politics of Poitín: Maria Edgeworth, Williams Carleton, and the Battle for the Spirit of Ireland”, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 14 No. 4, 2006, pp. 431-445. 28. Kristeva points to the similarity in words meaning “fallen” (Powers of Horror, p. 3). 29. Fred Botting, Gothic: The New Critical Idiom, op. cit., p. 51. 30. Catherine Gallagher, “Fictional Women and Real Estate in Castle Rackrent”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol. 12 No. 1, Spring 1988, pp. 11-18. 31. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 5. 32. Jarlath Killeen, op. cit., p. 198. 33. Ibid., p. 198. 34. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 11. 35. Giorgio Melchiori, “The Languages of Joyce”,in Rosa Maria Bolletieri, Carla Marengo, and Christine van Bohemen (eds.), Selected Papers from the 11th Annual James Joyce Symposium, Venice 1988, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Press, 1992), p. 5. 36. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, op. cit., p. 85. 37. Ibid., p. 85. 38. Aileen Douglas, “Maria Edgeworth’s Writing Classes”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 14 Nos. 3-4, April-July 2002), p. 371-390.

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ABSTRACTS

This article argues that the corpse seizure in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent epitomizes the fragmentation of Irish cultural identity, employing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to reveal the gothic body as a site of indeterminacy. Narrative inconsistencies, or dislocutions, “de- compose” the text, registering both a distinctively gothic horror of loss and an obsessive need to record the abject state of the colonized. The dislocution of traumatic events signals a dissolving cultural distinctiveness that destabilizes time and meaning itself.

Cet article montre que la saisie du cadavre dans Castle Rackrent de Maria Edgeworth emblématise la fragmentation de l’identité culturelle irlandaise. En s’appuyant sur la théorie de l’abject de Kristeva, il révèle le corps gothique comme un site d’indétermination. Des incohérences narratives décomposent le texte, et font apparaître à la fois un sentiment spécifiquement gothique lié à la perte et le besoin obsessionnel de formuler l’état abject des colonisés. Le brouillage narratif des événements traumatiques signale la dissolution d’une spécificité culturelle qui déstabilise la temporalité et le sens.

INDEX

Mots-clés: identité nationale, impérialisme/colonialisme, Edgeworth Maria, corps, littérature gothique, littérature – roman Keywords: gothic literature, Edgeworth Maria, literature – novels, national identity, body, imperialism/colonialism

AUTHOR

NANCY MARCK CANTWELL Nancy Marck Cantwell is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Daemen College in Amherst, New York, where she teaches British and . Her scholarly work investigates texts produced by nineteenth-century novelists from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Recent publications include an article on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in Nineteenth-Century , as well as book chapters in Jane Austen and Philosophy, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel, and Biographical Misrepresentations of Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors, and entries in The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth Century Novel, 1660-1820. Her current projects include an article on the subversive aspects of tourism in works by Sydney Owenson and Susan Ferrier and a book-length study of nationalism in 19th century novels by Four Nations women.

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“Away, come away”: Moving Dead Women and Irish Emigration in W. B. Yeats’s Early Poetry

Hannah Simpson

1 Emigration and Ireland are closely entwined in historical and contemporary public consciousness. Fintan O’Toole declares that Irish culture “is not just marked, but actually defined, by the perpetual motion of the people who bear it. Emigration and exile, the journies [sic] to and from home, are the very heartbeat of Irish culture1”. Jim MacLaughlin laments precisely this romanticising style of discourse as sanitising the suffering that frequently lay behind historical emigration; he bemoans the tendency to treat emigration “as a cultural tradition and a ‘peculiarity’ of the Irish […] simply as an expression of an institutionalised ideology” rather than a phenomenon frequently driven by historical hardship2. Despite the critical engagement with this cultural intertwining of the Irish and emigration, however, and despite the historically unsurpassed level of Irish emigration that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century3, little scholarly work has been produced regarding W. B. Yeats and Irish emigration. This is perhaps because emigration is rarely approached directly in Yeats’s poetry, or indeed elsewhere in his writing.

2 However, Irish emigration can be located in Yeats’s early poetry by reading through the lens of another under-discussed phenomenon in Yeats’s writing: the physically moving dead female body. The high emigration rate of Irish women following 1853 parallels the recurrence of moving dead or supernatural women in Yeats’s pre-1900 poetry. Fifty- three per cent of Irish emigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century were female, and an increasing number of them were young unmarried women. The consequent public anxiety in Ireland concerning the rate of female emigration was routinely expressed in terms that bear resemblance to Yeats’s coding of posthumous or supernatural female movement in his early poetry. Public reaction frequently condemned the emigration of young Irish women as an unnatural decision based on aberrant sexual desire, which disrupted the social balance and robbed the country of its maternal figures. Emigration, then, was a young woman’s betrayal of her nation, and of

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Ireland’s next generation of citizens that she should have borne her country; her emigration coded the death of the nation itself. Patrick Ward notes that the emigration of both genders was discussed in nineteenth-century Ireland as “a form of living death” because it was “a journey from which they and their neighbours knew they would not return4” – but female emigration also suspended Ireland itself in a “living death”, the death throes of a now-infertile nation left without progeniture. Female migration was thus coded in contemporary discourse as a disruptive display of unnatural and ultimately fatal female sexuality.

3 The Irish Gothic tradition comprises an important informing background to Yeats’s moving dead or supernatural women, following Eoin Flannery’s identification of Gothic literature as “a space into which the manifold fears and vulnerabilities of civility were poured5”. The moving dead or supernatural female figure is a recognisable Gothic trope, epitomised by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) and Lucy Westenra and the “Weird Sisters” of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Significantly, these incarnations of the moving dead or supernatural woman are linked to Ireland, and indeed to British- colonised Ireland. Le Fanu grew up in difficult financial circumstances in Limerick during the disorders of the Tithe War and the Irish Famine, and Jarlath Killeen among others has identified the influence of “his family’s isolation during the Tithe War” and of his opposition to Daniel O’Connell’s politics on his literary work6. Stoker’s Irish upbringing has led to Dracula and his female followers being interpreted variously as the Land Leaguers of the Irish Land War or the “gombeen men” of the Great Famine7, Charles Stewart Parnell and his followers8, “blood-gorged” Fenians9 or the declining Protestant ascendancy10.

4 Within the Gothic context, however, Yeats’s moving dead or supernatural women bear a significant resemblance not only to other female figures within other Irish Gothic texts, but also to the British fin de siècle “monstrous metamorphic female figures11”, the women who seduce men to their doom. Glennis Byron observes that the fin de siècle English Gothic frequently evokes “the notion of the sexually aggressive female who usurps male strength as something alien and monstrous” and, still more frighteningly, the “pure woman” who inevitably “metamorphoses into the evil12”. The English monstrous female has thus commonly been interpreted in the context of anxieties over the increasing independence of the “New Woman” of turn-of-the-century Britain. Yeats’s Irish version can also be read in the context of Irish female emigration, the emigrating women who either lure men across the ocean with them to a living death, or who leave them stranded in a “living dead” Ireland.

5 Yeats’s early poetry, then, repeatedly returns to the sexually alluring yet menacing movements of the living-dead female figure who is associated with unsettling movement away from the domestic space, and the luring of the male figure away from its safety. While Yeats’s poems rarely approach a direct discussion of emigration, the movement of his enticing yet threatening living-dead or supernatural women evoke this constellation of anxieties – national, sexual, generational – that arose around the issue of female emigration from Ireland. Focusing on “The Ballad of Moll Magee”, “To an Isle in the Water”, “The Heart of the Woman”, “He Wishes his Beloved were Dead” and “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, I read the recurrent trope of the moving living-dead or supernatural woman in Yeats’s early poetry through the lens of social and political response to the wave of Irish women emigrating in the late nineteenth century.

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Emigration and the Irish Woman in Contemporary Discourse

6 Emigration and supernatural death were recurrently connected in Irish discourse. Emigration was frequently coded as being “a form of living death13”, a journey from which one would not return. Yeats’s “The Dedication to a Book of Stories” in The Rose connects the unhappy “Exiles wandering over lands and seas” to a wish for full death rather than continued existence in the living-death of the emigrant state, “that some morrow / May set a stone upon ancestral Sorrow14”. In a letter of 1890 to Katharine Tynan, Yeats speaks of his own self-imposed exile in London is similar life-in-death terms: “When one gets tired & so into bad spirits it seems an especial misfortune to live here – it is like having so many years blotted out of your life15”. Later, Yeats records a peasant man’s conviction that his son who emigrated to America is in fact caught in the living-death, supernatural state of the Other: “It’s about a week ago, one night someone came into my room, and I knew it was my son that I lost, he that went away to America – Mike. He didn’t die, he was whipped away. I knew he wasn’t dead16.” The staging of the “American Wake” on the eve of an emigrant’s departure, a farewell gathering that mimicked the traditional Catholic funeral rites, offers another example of the connection in the contemporary public consciousness between emigration and death, and again specifically an unnatural death or a living-death.

7 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, women were emigrating from Ireland in historically unprecedented numbers. While before the Great Famine (1845-1850) women had emigrated as part of family units, in the aftermath of the famine “young single women came to dominate the flow17”. What caused this wave of female emigration? Besides the general economic hardship that drove Irish citizens of all demographics to seek new lives outside Ireland, certain social conditions pertaining to female sexuality and their domestic role combined to make Ireland “a place that young unmarried women wanted to leave”, as Marjorie Howes notes18.

8 Mid-to-late nineteenth-century Irish women were expected to either be sexually chaste or contain their sexuality within the domestic sphere. As the provided aid and advice to families during and following the Great Famine, their influence over the Irish population increased, and with it their consequent capacity for imposing a conservative brand of sexual morality. Nationalist discourse also took up this cause, marking out “sexual purity as one of the essential markers of Irishness19”. Mary Douglas argues that the fetishisation of purity is characteristic of threatened minorities, whose concern with political boundaries is displaced into an obsession with bodily orifices20. British rule and occupation of the country, and the stirrings of rebellion and the coming civil war, rendered Irish concern with nationality particularly acute during the second half of the nineteenth century, and young Irish women felt the effect. The figure of the sexually pure woman was increasingly being used as a symbol of the Irish nation, to inspire patriotic pride: Cathleen ní Houlihan, the Sean-Bhean Bhocht, Badb and Mórrigan. As Howes observes, in late nineteenth-century Ireland, “Moral and sexual issues were more explicitly and more intimately bound up with actual or potential crises of national integrity and identity than elsewhere21”.

9 Aside from unmarried chastity, the other extreme available to the Irish woman was to fill the role of the fertile and self-sacrificing guardian of the domestic sphere. This ideal of woman was engaged in conceiving, bearing and raising the next generation of Irish

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citizens, ensuring “a natural and stable economy of wholeness, continuity and reproduction22”. While outside the state-sanctified domestic sphere of marriage, sexual purity was demanded of Irish women, inside marriage “sexual reproduction was a sacred duty to the Irish nation23”. However, Howes notes that the lack of marriage opportunity “rendered this ideal unavailable to roughly one quarter of the female population24”. Land and a dowry were considered necessary to marry and raise a family, but Irish land ownership – and the consequent income to supply a dowry – was limited in nineteenth-century Ireland. Several factors had combined to restrict available land for the new generation in a nation whose domestic income was derived primarily from agriculture. Most landlords were Anglo-Irish descendants of those who had been given Irish property following earlier English land confiscation; most Irish citizens came to exist as landless labourers or tenant farmers who rented land from often absentee landlords. For those who did still own land, the Penal Laws did much to weaken their hold on it: the Popery Act of 1703, for example, re-established the Gavelkind system of partible inheritance, enforcing equal subdivision of land between sons of Catholic families unless the eldest son converted to Protestantism, thus decreasing the size and influence of Catholic landed estates in Ireland. Consequently, there was limited land available to Irish citizens, and many lived on the edge of destitution on small patches on subdivided land.

10 The situation worsened as the nineteenth century progressed, as the Great Famine and subsequent periods of agricultural recession resulted in mass evictions of tenant farmers unable to afford their rent payments. Hilary Larkin notes that many landlords took advantage of periods of famine to present unwanted tenants “with the stark ‘choice’ of emigration or eviction25”. 70,000 families were evicted between 1846 and 1853, during the Great Famine and its aftermath26. Severe agricultural depression in the 1870s extended the hardship, and between 1880 and 1887 almost 30,000 families were evicted in total27. As a result of this land privation, marriage became a less and less feasible option for young women, and emigration frequently took its place. Larkin notes how “marriage patterns were affected – there were fewer than before” as land availability remained restricted: “Fathers held onto the land as long as possible and there was plenty of encouragement to extra children to leave the country and find a role for themselves elsewhere28.” The Land War and agitation by groups such as the Irish Tenant League and the Irish National Land League following the Great Famine resulted in constitutional changes that began the process of reclaiming Irish land, but parliamentary response was so slow and often so ineffective that significant increases in Irish land ownership were only being realised by the very end of the century29. Given the Church’s and State’s restrictions on roles appropriate or available to their female citizens, this lack of marital prospect rendered Irish women’s opportunities particularly narrow. With few opportunities for marriage, family or independent work, and Church and State discouragement of their sexual, personal and political expression, many young Irish women sought opportunity beyond Ireland’s shores.

11 However, women who emigrated from Ireland were frequently condemned as a threat to the Irish nation by those who feared “race suicide” because of the dropping birth rate and high emigration numbers. Consequently, they were “pathologised for leaving, for being attracted or lured away from the country where they rightfully belonged”, and to which they owed the next generation30. In nationalist discourse, the young female emigrant is marked as the menacing Other, threatening national death through her dangerous movement and desires. The discourse of race suicide, the “barren

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boughs of Éire” that Yeats identifies in “The Dedication to a Book of Stories31”, contrasted to the life-giving nature of nineteenth-century Ireland’s cult of maternity, recurrently connected the emigrant woman to ideas of national death, as well as the less specifically gendered discourse of emigration and living-death already observed.

12 This recognition of the contemporary anxiety surrounding female emigration illuminates the recurrent appearance of the moving, dead female body in Yeats’s pre-1900 poetry. Kincaid notes that following Irish emigration, “a trace remained in Ireland. These absences had their own presences, and they had to be dealt with32”; the dead body is one such way to “deal with” or at least express such an absence. Yeats’s moving dead women thus invoke the Gothic’s “confusion of the literal and the figuration: metaphors comes to life as literal fact”: here, the posthumously moving female body evokes and explores this popular evocation of emigrant-death and national death. The female Irish emigrant body undergoes what Sara Ahmed identifies as a “process of estrangement”, the process “whereby some others are designated as stranger than others” in the context of emigration specifically33. To code the female emigrant figure as a moving female corpse is to “other” the agential Irish woman in a particularly extreme manner; Yeats puts his women through a very literal version of Ahmed’s emigrant “process of transition”. In social discourse and Yeats’s poetry, the “real” Irish woman is replaced by an ideal or her horrific Other; death, movement and sexuality combine in the menacing-but-alluring, living-dead woman of Yeats’s early poetry.

Yeats’s Domestic Woman and “The Ballad of Moll Magee”

13 Yeats’s pre-1900 poetry features several examples of the domestic Irish “woman of the hearth”: the passive, reproductive, rooted figure that nationalist and Catholic discourse coded as crucial to the continuance and rectitude of the Irish nation. Yeats at several points in both his early poetry and his life seems to reflect this public construction of the conservative Irish woman “rooted in one dear perpetual place” as the later “A Prayer for my Daughter” puts it34. He discouraged Maud Gonne’s involvement in politics and attempted to win her to domestic married life instead – a married life that he coded as one of peaceful stillness and passivity on the woman’s part, rather than active struggle: “Oh Maud, why don’t you marry me and give up this tragic struggle and live a peaceful life? I could make such a beautiful life for you35.” He also exercised a corporeal restraint on Maud’s movements; Jonathan Allison records him “physically restraining her, against her will, from joining a riotous Dublin mob during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 189736”. Yeats seems at times to propagate the nationalist and Catholic ideal of the woman whose movements and sexuality are contained within the domestic space.

14 In “The Ballad of Moll Magee” in Crossways (1889), Yeats offers a cautionary warning against the disruption of the domestic female role, similar to that envisioned by contemporary nationalist and religious discourse. Here, the female disappearance from the domestic space is figured as physical movement, and this “emigration” is coded as exilic rather than chosen. Moll’s husband has forced her from the domestic space because of her manslaughter of her child:

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I lay upon my baby. […] He drove me out and shut the door, And gave his curse to me; I went away in silence, No neighbour could I see37.

15 The authoritarian patriarchal figure condemns the Irish woman who fails to provide the desired “future generations” of Ireland, “depriving the nation of its rightful national stock38”. Moll’s exile from the domestic space is not figured as a literal emigration in the poem, but it is coded as ceaseless, mournful movement, associated with death – “always, as I’m movin’ round […] I’m think’ of my baby/And keenin’ to myself39” – and the loss of the domestic home space. Moll’s husband will not come to “fetch [her] home again,” and when she tries to return to her former home in Kinsale, she finds that “[t]he windows and the doors were shut40”. The only release lies in a natural death, when God “opens wide His door41”. “The Ballad of Moll Magee” combines a woman’s ceaseless movement, death (both literal and that of the future nation) and the maternal in a conservative caution against the Irish woman who leaves the domestic space that contemporary nationalist and religious discourse has designated her.

Domestic Space in “To an Isle in the Water”

16 However, Yeats elsewhere exhibits a suspicion of the contemporary domestic ideal – or rather, of the female figure who threatens its disruption from within through her intertwined deathly movement and sexual allure. The sustaining and containing family unit is “dependent on and threatened by female sexual choice42” – and on and by her sexual desire and allure more generally. The socially-sanctified family unit is vulnerable to the potentially disruptive sexuality of the ostensibly rooted and domesticated woman within it. “To An Isle in the Water” in Crossways (1889), for example, runs: Shy one, shy one, Shy one of my heart, She moves in the firelight, Pensively apart. She carries in the dishes, […] And lights the curtained room, Shy in the doorway And shy in the gloom; […] To an isle in the water With her I would fly43.

17 Superficially, Yeats seems here to evoke the idealised domestic Irish woman of contemporary discourse. The female figure is “shy”, quiet and timid, not accorded any voice of her own within the poem. She remains unindividualised, a “one” among a consequently suggested “many” female Irish figures. We see her engaged solely in domestic duties: tending to the hearth, laying the dishes and lighting the candles. Even while engaged in these domestic chores of her own hearth, she is coded as “helpful” and “of [the speaker’s] heart”; the husband-figure’s agency and ownership over the household, including the woman within, is suggested. The domestic space in which the woman moves is contained and orderly. Objects are laid carefully “in a row”, curtains

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shut off the discrete unit from the outside space, and the various domestic sources of light provided by the woman safeguard it from the “gloom” outside that threatens through the “doorway”: the menacing reminder of the unbounded outside space against which the discrete domestic arena is constructed.

18 However, the outside space intrudes upon the apparently safely contained domestic unit, because of the female figure’s association with movement into the dark. The woman moves in the half-light of the domestic room, the “gloom” of the “doorway”; she is on the threshold between the dark exterior and the lighted domestic space. Her presence lures the speaker towards this exterior dark; he declares his willingness to fly “[t]o an isle in the water” with his bride. Ashok Bhargava notes that Yeats associated water with sexual desire44; here, this impulse towards an aquatically-coded sexuality is linked to movement away from and destruction of the idealised domestic space. The “isle in the water” is still a contained unit, but one that is less clearly contained than the interior domestic room. The water that presumably laps the edge of the isle blurs any clear dividing line between discrete spatial unit and elsewhere, and the isle itself, while a recognisable single unit, is not protected from the dark exterior in which it exists. The darkness and the water with which the woman is associated threatens to extinguish the domestic lights of the hearth and candles; she retains the potential to destroy the domestic space that she herself creates.

19 Read thus, the speaker’s obsessive repetition of “shy” comes to seem like a self- reassuring construction on the male speaker’s part, belying a sublimated anxiety as to the female figure’s potentially “not shy”, more agential nature. This neurotic verbal repetition and the incantatory quality of the poem’s form suggests a performative conjuring-up in the poetic space of the same idealised domestic female figure that contemporary nationalist and religious discourse was attempting to compel into being. By contrast, the recurrent /aɪ/ phoneme of the poem – “shy”, “my”, “fire”, “light”, “isle”, “I”, “fly” – phonetically reasserts the female “I” itself that lurks beneath the speaker’s voice, the individual woman with individual desires who threatens to contradict the male construction of her. Although not featuring an explicitly dead woman, “To an Isle in the Water” presents female movement towards an exterior darkness that is both sexually alluring and threatens the domestic space, and so lays important groundwork for the more explicit coalescing of female emigration and deathly female movement.

Leaving the Domestic Space in “The Heart of the Woman”

20 “The Heart of the Woman” in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) offers a comparable exit from the domestic space to the threatening outside world in “To an Isle in the Water”. The gender pattern of “To an Isle in the Water” is reversed in “The Heart of the Woman”, but the poem charts a similarly sexually motivated retreat from a warm and well-lit domestic space into a threatening gloomy exterior, and makes more explicit the association between the emigrant woman and a form of living death. O what to me the little room That was brimmed up with prayer and rest, He bade me out into the gloom, And my breast lies upon his breast.

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[…] I am no more with life and death, My heart upon his warm heart lies, My breath is mixed into his breath45.

21 Like “To an Isle in the Water”, the allure to emigrant movement away from the traditional domestic arena is strongly present and coded in terms of sexual desire; however, it also leads to a threatening dark exterior space. The speaker offers her “hiding hair” as an unconvincing replacement for the walls of her abandoned home; the domestic woman who guards the boundaries of the domestic space is replaced by a more sexualised, alluring but fallible figure. Female sexual agency here destabilises the idealised domestic order very explicitly, and does so seemingly to her own risk; the Irish woman’s sexual desire sees her move from the domestic space into the dangerous, unbounded “gloom” of the outside world.

22 Furthermore, the female speaker of “The Heart of the Woman” is aligned with a form of life-in-death when she exits the domestic space. “I am no more with life and death”, she observes; this is not even the natural death of the domestic space, but an unnatural state beyond either, a death-in-life or a living death, in which movement and poetic expression are still possible. The female speaker’s description of her sexually agentive body renders it similarly dead-yet-moving: “My heart upon his warm heart lies” suggests that the speaker’s own heart is not warm, that it lies cold and without beating upon his live heart; “my breast lies upon his breast” suggests simultaneously the woman’s sexually suggestive position on of her lover and her lying slumped in death. Amid all this, she still has “breath” to mingle with her lover’s breath; the poem’s focus on the female figures shifts between continually alternating lenses of death and life, resulting in an unsettling liminal state somewhere between the two. Yeats’s poem again draws together female sexuality, female movement, rejection of the domestic and death, in a manner that replicates the contemporary discourse concerning female emigration.

Restricting Female Movement in “He wishes his Beloved were Dead”

23 This pathologising of the emigrating Irish woman as a living-dead figure is rendered still more literal elsewhere in The Wind Among the Reeds. In “He wishes His Beloved were Dead”, the sexually alluring, physically moving young woman is explicitly described as dead within the poet’s construction of her. Alongside the now-expected model of the sexually alluring woman moving in a dark exterior outside the domestic space, this explicit coding of death at first renders the woman’s physical movement deeply disturbing in the poem. The dead female body here moves unexpectedly, even incomprehensibly. The poem opens with her first “lying cold and dead” and, presumably, interred in the ground46. Suddenly, she is no longer buried; she “come[s] hither” to the poet speaker47, in very literally posthumous physical movement48. Then, despite the reader being assured that the woman will not “rise” and leave the speaker, we next see her entwined by her hair “[a]bout the stars and moon and sun” in a conventional trope of death49. Finally, and again without any explanatory intermediate travel, she lies once again buried “[u]nder the dock-leaves in the ground50”. For the dead woman to move is itself unexpected; for her to follow this unpredictable and

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blatantly contradictory path renders her movements far more discomfiting. The reader who tries to track the reanimated body across the poem is thwarted at every turn.

24 However, alongside this disturbing rendering of the physical movement of an explicitly dead female body, there is simultaneously a sanitising and a controlling of the dead woman’s movements that renders her less threatening than she might otherwise be. Firstly, she is not the avenging spirit of much other Gothic literature. The Beloved in Yeats’s poem arises after death in order to forgive, rather than to haunt those whom she does not forgive. Still more significantly, however, she does not rise from death – and indeed, does not move at all – of her own accord. The male speaker who first wishes her dead next wishes her moving, and her movement remains grounded explicitly in his poetic imagination. He then wishes her still; the lover does not refuse to rise, does not decide to stay with her lover, through her own choice, but rather, she remains in her place because she knows her hair to be binding her there. When we next see the Beloved entwined in the heavens, we do not see her rise there triumphantly of her own volition, and the Beloved’s hair being “bound and wound / About the stars and moon and sun” couches even her temporary ascension to the heavens in terms of physical restraint51.

25 We might recall here Yeats physically restraining Maud Gonne from political action in 1897; the male speaker poetically scripts and restricts his Beloved’s movement in order to construct a docile woman who moves only with his blessing, who exists only to act as his lover, whose only identity is “his Beloved”. This scripting of the female figure, and particularly of the female figure’s movements, has social implications beyond a merely personal misogyny. Breda Gray records that nineteenth-century Irish emigration “was linked to a lack of territorial sovereignty and was held to be symbolic of the Irish people’s lack of political control over their own nation52”. Given the frequency with which the Irish nation was coded as female in the period, for the poem’s speaker to retain such precise imaginative control over the movements of his sexually alluring lover – to the point of rendering her both dead and moving – offers a powerful poetic performance of Irish man regaining control of the sexual, political and migratory agency of the Irish woman.

26 As in “To an Isle in the Water” and “The Heart of a Woman”, “He wishes his Beloved were Dead” employs the trope of deathly movement to code the sexually alluring, non- domestic Irish woman, but here it is qualified and controlled by the male voice. She moves in death, beyond the interior domestic space, and radically not only between nations but between heaven and earth. However, the emigratory potential of the Irish woman is conservatively limited by the male speaker’s agency. The phenomenon of female migration is recognised, acknowledged, but rescripted into less threatening terms which reinscribes male dominance within a heterosexual relationship.

Menacing Allure in “The Hosting of the Sidhe”

27 For Yeats to link emigration with death in his poetry, then, is to follow an already established contemporary discourse of emigration as a form of living death. However, at moments in his pre-1900 poetry, Yeats redeploys this model to more sympathetic effect. In “He Wishes his Beloved were Dead”, Yeats curtails this agency of aligned sexuality and deathly movement; in “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, by contrast, he exaggerates and vaunts it.

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28 In “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, the moving women are a supernatural menace, whose sexual allure threatens the male figure with both a decreased agency – “We come between him and the deed of his hand” – and a call “Away, come away” from Ireland into a supernatural, living-death existence53. Here, the ceaselessly moving, supernatural Sidhe are notably coded as feminine. Although Caoilte is briefly mentioned, the female Niamh’s voice dominates the poem, and describes the Sidhe as having a distinctly feminine sexual allure – “our hair is unbound/Our breasts are heaving” – and their victims as male: “We come between him and the deed of his hand,/ We come between him and the hope of his heart54”. In Irish mythology, Niamh “led Oisin to the Country of the Young”, Yeats’s notes record55, and thus her appearance here brings in a mythological context of the sexually enticing woman luring the man away from his nation into a supernatural existence beyond it.

29 Moreover, the Sidhe here are not merely supernatural, but notably deathly, pale of cheek and set in precise opposition to the “mortal dream” of man. The living death existence of the Sidhe and their positioning “‘twixt night and day” codes them in a liminal space, one of the “third spaces” that Piaras Mac Éinrí and Tina O’Toole identify as the nature of the emigrant who finds herself “balanced between country of origin and country of reception, unfixed, ascriptive56”. In “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, the fear of the agentially moving and sexual Irish woman who would destabilise the nation coalesces into the othering of both migrant and woman as supernatural force, what Ronit Lentin calls “the insidious positioning of sexually active” – and, I would add, emigrating – “Irish women as a danger to themselves, to men, and to the nation57”. Where “He Wishes his Beloved Were Dead” contains the living-death female movement within male control, “The Hosting of the Sidhe” releases it in an image of uncontrollable force.

30 However, there is crucially space to read “The Hosting of the Sidhe” as celebrating this radically untrammelled female movement, as well as reflecting contemporary anxieties concerning the emigratory and sexual potential of the Irish woman. The predominance of full rhymes and firm stresses within the poem quickens the beat of the poem into an exhilarating rush, and the first person plural structure of Niamh’s words – which, significantly, quantitatively dominate the poem – invite the reader into the host in a manner that somewhat negates the threatening “otherness” of the Sidhe. The image of the “rushing band” that infuses the poem with a sense of adrenaline-fuelled freedom accords a new inflection to the idea of Ireland’s “race suicide”. Here, the “racing” exemplars of the Irish “race” evoke self and national suicide both through their own dead-in-life existence and their childless, sexualised nature; this is race suicide inflected with an exhilarating sense of untrammelled liberty, that is depicted as literally trampling “over the grave” rather than succumbing passively to it.

31 The moving supernatural living-dead women of poems like “The Hosting of the Sidhe” thus resist the idea of the dead woman as passive or easily manipulated by the poet- figure. Instead, they present the image of a radically free and agential deathly female being, figuring the power of the Irish woman capable of surviving (as living dead) and thriving in emigration. Emigration’s living-dead women are here associated not with pathos and passivity but with a triumphant adrenaline. “The Hosting of the Sidhe” thus constructs a poetic version of the space that Ahmed describes as integral to the emigrant experience, “the process of estrangement [that] is the condition for the emergence of a contested community, a community which ‘makes a place’ in the act of

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reaching out to the ‘out-of-placeness’ of other migrant bodies58”. The Sidhe make up a supernatural community, unfamiliar to the speaker but familiar to each other. As Cullingford observes, “Yeats’s celebration of female sexual transgression [...] opens an imaginative space for women’s desire and pleasure in a culture that occludes them59”, a new freedom against the traditional poetic passivity and the contemporary social condemnation. “The Hosting of the Sidhe” can be read as a significantly different presentation of female movement in living-death: one that infuses the women’s movement with an exultant energy, a vaunting of the sexual and geographical freedom of these beyond-mortal female figures. Following the connections between living death and emigration and the sexually agential, non-maternal female figure and the emigrating Irish woman, “The Hosting of the Sidhe” offers a remarkably more sympathetic evocation of female emigration than much other contemporary discourse.

Conclusion

32 Yeats’s pre-1900 poetry thus offers a range of varied depictions of the Irish femalehood in the context of emigration. We have examined here a misogynistic warning to the woman who seeks to leave Ireland as to the living death that awaits them, a similar warning to men who may succumb to the menacing sexual allure of such women, the poetic reinscription of this living-death movement under the male speaker’s imaginative control, and a celebration of female sexual and geographical freedom. I do not claim to reveal here any definitive statement concerning Yeats’s own sexual politics; I do not believe that any single definitive interpretation would do justice to the shifting grounds of Yeats’s own probing of contemporary questions of gender and its literary, political and cultural representation. I read these pre-1900 poems as part of Yeats’s vacillating exploration of political and sexual gender dynamics, an expression of the tension between what Cullingford identities as his inheritance of “the male- dominated literary tradition of poetic love at a moment of crisis and change in gender relations60” in Ireland that included the Irish Gothic mode, and what Howes observes as Yeats’s own frequently progressive political stances, his “long history of attacking the sexual and political timidity of the Catholic middle class, and […] Ireland’s sexual conservatism61”. The poet who wrote “He Wishes his Beloved were Dead” was also the poet who wrote “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, and both were also the politician who defended divorce and women’s right to work outside the home, and opposed censorship on material relating to contraception.

NOTES

1. Fintan O’Toole, “The Ex-Isle of Erin: Emigration and Irish Culture”, in Jim MacLaughlin (ed.), Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish Society: Emigration and Irish Identities, Notre-Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, p. 158.

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2. Jim MacLaughlin, “Emigration and the Construction of Nationalist Hegemony in Ireland: The Historical Background to ‘New Wave’ Irish Emigration”, in Jim MacLaughlin (ed.), op. cit., p. 6. 3. Andrew Kincaid observes, “Ireland is the only country in Europe to chart a decline in population every single year from 1840 to 1960, dropping from eight million to three million over that period”. Andrew Kincaid, “What They Left Behind – The Irish Landscape After Emigration”, in Marcus Bullocks, Peter Y. Paik (eds.), Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2009, p. 33. 4. Patrick Ward, Exile, Emigration and Irish Writing, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2002, p. 112-13. 5. Eoin Flannery, “A Land Poisoned: Eugene McCabe and Irish Postcolonial Gothic”, Literature & History, Vol. 22 No. 2, 2013, p. 92. 6. Jarlath Killeen, The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origin, Theories, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 204. 7. Bruce Stewart, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Possessed by the Spirit of the Nation?”, Irish University Review, Vol. 29, 1999, p. 238-55. 8. Michael Valdez Moses, “Dracula, Parnell and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood”, Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism, Vol. 2, 1997, p. 66-112. 9. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2002, p. 58. 10. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 89-90; Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Verso, 1995, p. 215-6. 11. Glennis Byron, “Gothic in the 1890s”, A New Companion to the Gothic, David Punter (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2012, p. 193. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, The Poems, 2nd edition, ed. Richard Finneran, New York, Scribner, 1997, p. 45. 15. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume One, 1865-1895, ed. John Kelly, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 231. 16. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume X, Later Articles and Reviews, ed. Colton Johnson, New York, Scribner, 2000, p. 45. 17. Bronwen Walter, “Irish Women in the Diaspora: Exclusion and Inclusions”, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 27, 2004, p. 370. 18. Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 137. 19. Elizabeth Cullingford, “Yeats and Gender” in Marjorie Howes and John Kelly (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 179. 20. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 124. 21. Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness, op. cit., p. 136.

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22. Ibid., p. 104. 23. Seán Kennedy, “Abortion and Infanticide in Beckett and Yeats”, Today / Aujourd’hui, Vol. 22 No. 1, 2010, p. 80. 24. Marjorie Howes, op. cit., p 137. 25. Hilary Larkin, A History of Ireland, 1800-1922: Theatres of Disorder?, London, Anthem Press, 2014, p. 101. 26. Fergus Campbell, The Irish Establishment 1879-1914, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 41-2. 27. Ibid., p. 39. 28. Hilary Larkin, A History of Ireland, 1800-1922: Theatres of Disorder?, op. cit., p. 112. 29. William Gladstone’s Land Act of 1870, which enforced the Custom of Ulster and instigated the John Bright clauses, was too vaguely constituted to enable any significant change in Irish land ownership, and in fact in many cases allowed further rent increases and consequently raised levels of non-compensated tenant eviction. The Second Irish Land Act of 1881 provided more tangible improvements by establishing dual ownership by landlord and tenant but, although it occasioned despite a short-term average national rent reduction, the Act still only produced 731 new Irish proprietors across the entire nation and, in fact, emigration numbers rose from 7.7% in 1878 to 17.6% in 1880, and then hit a record high of 21.6% in 1883. The Purchase of Land Act of 1885 put in motion some further but limited government-subsidised land purchase, and the Irish Land Act of 1887 provided further government funding for Irish tenant land purchase but was once again so complex a piece of legal work that few Irish tenant farmers obtained any practical benefit, until several of the more unattractive clauses were modified throughout the 1890s. It was only with the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903 that tenant purchase was made widely possible and absentee landlordism was significantly curtailed, and the Penal Laws were only fully repealed with the Act in 1920. 30. Breda Gray, “Unmasking Irishness: Irish Women, the Irish Nation and the Irish Diaspora” in Jim MacLaughlin, op. cit., p. 210. 31. W.B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 45. 32. Andrew Kincaid, “What They Left Behind – The Irish Landscape After Emigration”, op. cit., p. 33. 33. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London/New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 94. 34. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 191. 35. Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences, London, Gollancz, 1938, p. 326. 36. Jonathan Allison, “Yeats and Politics”, in Marjorie Howes and john Kelly (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, op. cit., p. 189. 37. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 21. 38. Breda Gray, “Unmasking Irishness: Irish Women, the Irish Nation and the Irish Diaspora”, op. cit., p. 210. 39. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 22. 40. Ibid.

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41. Ibid. 42. Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness, op. cit., p. 115. 43. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 18. 44. Ashok Bhargava, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, New , Humanities Press, 1980, p. 105. 45. Ibid. 46. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 69. 47. Ibid., p. 70. 48. The word “posthumous” derives from the Latin “post” or “after,” and “humus” or “ground”; this female figure very literally moves posthumously, after having been buried in the ground. 49. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 70. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Breda Gray, “Unmasking Irishness: Irish Women, the Irish Nation and the Irish Diaspora”, op. cit., p. 210. 53. W. B. Yeats, Poetry, op. cit., p. 51. 54. Ibid., italics mine. 55. Ibid., p. 634. 56. Piaras Mac Éinrí and Tina O’Toole, “New Approaches to Irish Migration”, Éire- Ireland, Vol. 47 No. 1 & 2, 2012, p. 7. 57. Ronit Lentin, “(M)other Ireland: Migrant Women Subverting the Racial State?”, in Julieann Veronia Ulin, Heather Edwards and Sean O’Brien (eds.), Race and Immigration in the New Ireland, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, p. 61. 58. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, op. cit., p. 94. 59. Elizabeth Cullingford, “The Historical Poetics of Excrement: Yeats’s Crazy Jane and the Irish Bishops”, in Karen Hohn and Helen Wussow (eds.), A Dialogue of Voices, 1994, p. 31. 60. Elizabeth Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 6. 61. Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness, op. cit., p. 138.

ABSTRACTS

Emigration and Ireland are closely entwined in cultural consciousness, yet little scholarly work addresses Irish emigration in W. B. Yeats’s poetry. I use the lens of Irish emigration to tackle another under-discussed phenomenon in Yeats’s early poetry: the physically moving, dead, female body. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, young unmarried women were emigrating from Ireland in historically unprecedented numbers, and this high emigration rate of

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Irish women parallels the recurrence of moving dead or supernatural women in Yeats’s pre-1900 poetry.

Bien que l’Irlande et l’émigration soient intimement liées dans l’imaginaire culturel, peu d’études se sont intéressées à l’émigration dans la poésie de W. B. Yeats. J’utilise le prisme de l’émigration pour aborder un autre phénomène peu étudié dans la première poésie de Yeats : le corps féminin mort mais mouvant. Dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, un nombre inédit de jeunes femmes célibataires quittèrent l’Irlande, et ce taux d’émigration élevé de femmes irlandaises peut se lire en parallèle de la récurrence de femmes mortes ou surnaturelles en mouvement qui peuplent la poésie de Yeats avant 1900.

INDEX

Mots-clés: émigration, femmes, corps, mortalité, Yeats W. B., poésie Keywords: emigration, women, body, mortality, Yeats W. B., poetry

AUTHOR

HANNAH SIMPSON Hannah Simpson is a PhD student in English Literature at St. Cross College, University of Oxford. Her thesis explores the representation of physical pain in post-WWII theatre and choreography, focusing on the work of Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett and Tatsumi Hijikata. An interest in disability and gender theory undergirds her work, and W. B. Yeats is proving a recurrent procrastination from her thesis. She has articles published in Comparative Drama and Warwick Exchanges, and forthcoming in Variations and the Journal of Modern Literature.

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An Uncanny Myth of Ireland: The Spectralisation of Cuchulain’s Body in W. B. Yeats’s Plays

Zsuzsanna Balázs

1 The well-known Irish warrior-hero, Cuchulain, is most commonly mentioned in relation to Irish history and national identity, as an icon for the leaders of the Easter Rising. He is also referred to as Yeats’s literary alter ego, anti-self or mask, as the Cuchulain plays reflect in many different ways Yeats’s obsession with the most important women of his life, his life-long commitment to occult studies, his increasing disappointment in politics, and wish for cultural, individual, and national unity1. However, this paper wishes to elucidate that the figure of Cuchulain in Yeats’s plays signifies much more than the mere embodiment of Ireland. Cuchulain is undoubtedly the embodiment of Yeats’s heroic ideal, but Yeats’s concept of heroism bears striking resemblance to his aristocratic ideal2. I will examine Yeats’s Cuchulain primarily as the embodiment of Yeats’s ideals of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the role this image assumed in his attempts to create a unified, independent Ireland at least in the mind’s eye. More importantly, I also wish to point out those parts where this idealised narrative seems to be challenged.

2 Despite his glorification of the aristocracy, Yeats was also aware of the problems with this class and the limitations regarding their capacities to become the great ruling class of Ireland. As Marjorie Howes explains, “[h]e imagined the Anglo-Irish as a noble and worthwhile tradition, one capable of providing Ireland with the cultural continuity, political leadership and artistic integrity that he thought middle-class Catholic Ireland lacked. However, he also imagined Anglo-Irishness as a nationality founded on crime, perpetually in crisis and inherently subject to degeneration and decay3”. This major ambiguity of Yeats’s life and work manifests itself in many aspects of his depiction of Cuchulain’s body and the effects of the omnipresent spectral figures on the changes of his body. I will apply the term “spectral” to those uncanny presences which threaten and shake the protagonist’s bodily integrity by means of their tragic laugh, sinister , or otherworldly cry. These spectral figures will generate fear and awe, repulsion

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and attraction in Cuchulain whom they are chasing. also refers to this phenomenon in Yeats observing that “[t]he prospect of devastation excited as well as distressed him4”. These spectral figures appear in human form yet they are capable of changing shape, and mediate between the terrestrial and supernatural worlds, representing a kind of Freudian uncanny. Through the five plays, Cuchulain is sometimes portrayed as a strong, vigorous, undefeatable figure full of bright prospects and hopes, while in other instants, he is presented as a weakened, vulnerable character gradually losing his physical strength and turning into a spectral image. Thus his superior qualities and greatness include a necessary decay and inevitable fall. I propose that this shifting between embodiment and disembodiment serves to express Yeats’s ambiguity over the capacities of his otherwise idealised aristocracy and thus includes a considerable extent of irony as well. I also argue that the uncanny spectral figures of the plays represent a threat to Cuchulain’s bodily strength and bring about the gradual disintegration of his physical existence, yet through the loss of his body they bring him closer to spiritual freedom. It is also important to note here that Yeats saw a very powerful relation between spirituality and the achievement of a nation’s cultural . As R. F. Foster explains, Yeats thought that “unity of culture could be achieved by a nation that eschewed materialism in favour of spirituality5”. Through the sinister spectral figures and the spectralisation of Cuchulain’s body, Yeats, to some extent, challenges his own narrative of an ideal aristocracy, shifting constantly between idealisation and ironisation of Cuchulain as the embodiment of Ireland – an ambiguity which is of crucial significance to the understanding of Yeats’s works. The plays discussed include On Baile’s Strand (1904), The Green (1910), At the Hawk’s Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) 6. In order to highlight the changes of Cuchulain’s body, I will examine the plays not in the chronology of their composition but that of the original Cuchulain-legend starting with AHW (Yeats’s own addition to the Cuchulain-saga), and followed by GH, OBS, OJE, and DC.

3 Judith Butler writes in relation to the role of the body that it “is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities7”. In these five plays, Cuchulain is supposed to represent the possibilities of the aristocracy in Ireland’s cultural development and its decolonising movement. As Birgit Bjersby articulates it, “Cuchulain is the hero in whom Yeats incarnates his own fight for the intellectual freedom of his country and his own heroic-aristocratic view of life8”. Yeats created a myth of the aristocracy and of himself too as being a representative of the Anglo-Irish intellectual nobility. The reason why Yeats could build up an aristocratic myth of himself was his father John Butler Yeats’s family background (the Butlers’ links to the Norman dynasty of the Dukes of Ormonde). The Butlers were related to the old Ascendancy, but it was a nobility already in decline, and with the marriage of Mary Butler and the Dublin merchant Benjamin William Yeats, the purity of the aristocratic past started to diminish9. This also means that Yeats was, to some extent, preoccupied with the idea of the inherent decline of the Protestant Ascendancy in his earlier works as well in which he seemed to propose an idealistic view of Ireland frequently using heroic figures from Celtic mythology. Parallel to Yeats’s controversial ideas of the Ascendancy, he increasingly despised the bourgeoisie, which is relevant with regard to Yeats’s representation of the spectral world in the plays. These Cuchulain plays will dramatise Yeats’s fear of the disappearance of ancient aristocratic values from modern Ireland as a result of the self-indulgence and powerlessness of the modern Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the increasing power of the middle-class. These preoccupations are

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nicely summarised by Yeats’s friend Lady Dorothy Wellesley: “By aristocracy he [Yeats] meant the proud, the heroic mind. This included a furious attitude towards the cheap, the trashy, the ill-made. And he certainly deplored the passing of the stately homes, and the gradual effacement of the well or highly born10”. During his lifetime, Yeats witnessed the decline and decease of those prominent figures who had symbolised for him the nobility of the mind and the Ascendancy spirit: Charles Stuart Parnell passed away in 1891, John Millington Synge in 1909, Major Robert Gregory in 1918 and Robert Gregory’s mother Lady Augusta Gregory in 1932. The disappearance of aristocratic spirit and intellectual nobility symbolised by the death of these people can be seen dramatised in the Cuchulain cycle where the ubiquity of insubstantial, disturbing figures arising from an unknown realm aims to erase certainty, familiarity, and thus questions or rethinks the feasibility of existing myths of Ireland and its Ascendancy.

4 What the spectral presences do to Cuchulain in these plays is destroy of his body and immortalise his soul. This is a process initiated by the otherworldly hawk-cry and penetrating gaze of the Guardian of the Well in AHW (1917). As Erika Fischer-Lichte states, “[t]he close relationship between body and voice is especially evident in screams, sighs, moans, sobs, and laughter. These utterances are unmistakably created through a process that affects the whole body: the body doubles over, contorts, and enlarges […]. The screaming, sobbing, or laughing voice penetrates the bodies of the listeners, echoes in and is absorbed by their bodies11”. This is what the hawk-woman’s cry does to Cuchulain and the Old Man’s body in the play. As Pierre Longuenesse points out, this woman is a disguised figure suggesting a hawk. She has a human body, but what makes her spectral is that a spirit cries from within her body, and that shade has the cry of a hawk12. As the Old Man puts it, “[i]t was her mouth, and yet not she, that cried./ It was that shadow cried behind her mouth13”. She is, therefore a channel through which the invisible world, the realm of the Sidhe, can speak to and threaten the living. It is significant that her possessed body is shivering too, as it is under the influence and control of an invisible spirit: “Look at her shivering now, the terrible life/ Is slipping through her veins. She is possessed14.”

5 Her role as a mediator between two realms is also nicely indicated in the text by the separation of her voice from her body15. This disruption evokes the Freudian concept of the uncanny, which appears in each of the Cuchulain plays in various forms and in each case the aim of the uncanny spectral figures is to precipitate Cuchulain’s loss of body, failure and journey towards an invisible realm ironically presented as the only place where unity is available for the hero’s soul. As Colette Conroy puts it, “Freud suggests that uncanniness is a physical response to a disturbance of expectations about the human body and human capacity16”. She continues that “[t]he notion that suddenly our habitual ways of reading the body don’t work, or a body that changes our expectations about its capacity or appearance produces in the spectator a distinctive thrill of horror17”. When Cuchulain faces this figure, he cannot define what he sees exactly: a bird, a woman, or a witch. He hears the hawk-cry but cannot see the bird. This lack of knowledge horrifies him, yet at the same time attracts him: “Do what you will, I shall not leave this place/Till I have grown immortal like yourself18”. The word “horror” is also crucial because one of the basic characteristics of Yeatsian heroes is the tragic joy that surrounds their actions and eventual failure or triumph. As Otto Bohlmann explains, “[b]oth he and Nietzsche regard tragedy as providing ‘the metaphysical comfort that beneath the whirl of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly’19”. Hence “Yeatsian tragedy promotes exultation in the midst of terror20”. Yeats’s

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obsession with this idea can equally originate in the disturbing ambiguity of the Anglo- Irish aristocracy as both great, intellectually superior and at the same time tragic, degenerating, and marked with acts of crime.

6 The play expresses this ambiguity also through the representation of Cuchulain and the Old Man as antithetical counterparts. The Old Man has already gone through a kind of bodily decay and seems pessimistic about his dream of reaching immortality, although he has not given up yet. In contrast, the young Cuchulain is very self-assertive, strong, and is ready to face any kind of obstacle. In Yeats’s works, in fact, this constant element of hope and heroic ambition is what makes a hero even if he/she is defeated. As Kennelly has it, “[f]or the hero, immortality is found, not in a lifetime of secure mediocrity, but in one of brief and self-assertive brilliance21”. Through the stark contrast between the Old Man and Cuchulain, Yeats both creates and questions the feasibility of his heroic and aristocratic ideal. One of the underlying reasons for this can be Yeats’s reaction to the 1916 Rising: after Easter 1916, he often questioned the worth of the heroic sacrifice of those who died for Ireland, but at the same time he increasingly regarded the leaders as martyrs and heroes who became national symbols, just like Cuchulain.

7 In AHW, the hawk-woman’s eyes also play a central role in the changes of Cuchulain’s body. Even though her eyes are described as heavy and worn-out, they still have power, they can mesmerise. Her body and her eyes are deathless yet they can bring about the death of the body of their spectacle; her gaze initiates the disembodiment of Cuchulain. The Old Man explains, “[t]here falls a curse/On all who have gazed in her unmoistened eyes; / So get you gone while you have that proud step/And confident voice, for not a man alive/Has so much luck that he can play with it22”. The Old Man continues that her gaze threatens mainly “[t]hose that have long to live23” and he suggests that any kind of encounter with her will curse the young warrior: “Or it may be that she will kill your children,/ [...] / Or you will be so maddened that you kill them/With your own hand24”. With this, the Old Man foreshadows the role of the hawk-woman’s gaze on Cuchulain’s fate: “Ah, you have looked at her; / She has felt your gaze and turned her eyes on us; / I cannot bear her eyes, they are not of this world,/ Nor moist, nor faltering; they are no girl’s eyes25”. Her eyes appear to be as a kind of medium between the visible and invisible worlds, which try to pull Cuchulain into their own spectral realm by destroying his bodily integrity.

8 GH (1910) offers a very bitter and pessimistic portrayal of Ireland, presenting it as a land characterised by confusion, inner conflicts, shame and disgrace. This bitterness can be traced back partly to Yeats’s reaction to the death of Synge in 1909, who had represented for Yeats one type of his ideal Irishmen (the solitary, imaginative countryman possessing intellectual nobility). As Kennelly explains, “Synge had enriched Ireland by expressing it; [but] Ireland had rejected Synge26”. This is why despite the scathing criticism of Ireland expressed in the play, it eventually concludes with the celebration of Cuchulain’s intellectual nobility and wisdom that save the house and, symbolically speaking, Ireland. However, as articulated in Yeats’s “The Fisherman” (1919), such men are but a dream, yet Yeats still goes on creating a myth of an ideal Irishman and an ideal Ireland.

9 The noblemen’s (Laegaire and Conall’s) fallen house is threatened by two spectral figures in this play, the Red Man and the Black Man, but it is the Red Man whose role is the most crucial. Even though the Red Man seems to appear as a physical presence in

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front of the court, the dramatis personae indicate that he is a spirit. Thus, once again, we have a mediator between the visible and invisible realms. Here Cuchulain is a palpable, virile figure full of bodily and spiritual strength, his body is compared to the sun, and he has grown in wisdom as well. Conall makes it clear that he is more than a human being, and there is something mysterious about him as if he were a half-immortal figure, an ideal mediator between the two realms: “I thought no living man could have pushed me from the door27”. More importantly, Laegaire and Conall still believe that such a great figure as Cuchulain could stop the degeneration of their house: “He was born to luck in the cradle, his good luck may amend/The bad luck we were born to28”. The central conflict of the play is brought about by the Red Man, who challenges the noblemen of the house, asking one of them to whip off his head and afterwards, allowing him (the Red Man) to cut off his opponent’s head as well, thus offering a “head for head” game. If it were not for Cuchulain, the Red Man could precipitate and intensify the fall and disgrace of the house, but Cuchulain’s bravery saves them. The game proposed by the Red Man is in itself a game about the disintegration and re- integration of the body, which suggests the whole structural pattern of the Cuchulain cycle and the fate of Cuchulain’s body. Laegaire and Conall describe the Red Man as an intruder, a stranger and a “wide, high man [who] came in with a red foxy ,/ With half-shut foxy eyes and a great laughing mouth29”. The noblemen of the house are ambushed by the disturbing strangeness of this figure and they do not understand why he “laughs like the sea30”, why he mocks them and looks at them so threateningly. Just as the hawk-woman’s cry and mesmerising eyes in AHW, the Red Man’s foxy eyes and sinister laughter penetrate the bodies of the living and thus shake Cuchulain’s bodily integrity as well.

10 The Red Man’s demonic laughter similarly permeates and disturbs Cuchulain’s and the others’ bodies, because such a joyful, triumphant laughter is not compatible with the tragic circumstances of the game proposed by the Red Man – they do not understand what is going on, what it means, and this lack of comprehension, the fear of the unknown, contribute to the uncanny nature of this scene. Conroy mentions with regard to the uncanny that it is always “the feeling that something is disturbingly not quite right, that it is not understood fully, that is may or may not have subjectivity31”. Among her examples, she lists the presence of severed heads, unmotivated laughter, and demonic possessions, all of which occur at various parts of the Cuchulain cycle and always affect Cuchulain’s physical strength. At the end of the play, for instance, Cuchulain voluntarily offers the disintegration of his body (the cutting of his head) to the Red Man – a self-sacrifice and bravery which in this play help him to save and maintain his bodily integrity and celebrate him as the most ideal man to represent Ireland. As Kennelly observes, “it is precisely this calm willingness to honour the debt through self-immolation that establishes Cuchulain in heroic superiority32”. What is more, “[t]he Red Man [...] had consciously created chaos so as to discover somebody who could impose order on it [...] Only Cuchulain completely fulfils this image, and only he deserves the appropriate immortality33”.

11 OBS (1904), however, puts an end to these idealisations and illustrates a radical change both in the cycle and in the idea of Cuchulain as the perfect embodiment of Ireland. It has to be noted that in the years of the composition of this play (1903 and 1904), Yeats was still under the influence of the nationalist Fenian tradition of John O’Leary, because for Yeats Fenianism carried the aura of the heroic past and ancient nobility of which Cuchulain was a perfect example. However, these were also the years when he began to

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turn his back on radical nationalist politics and express his support for Home Rule34. In OBS, we can map the traces of this process of change in Yeats’s political views as well as his growing hesitations, for one of the main themes of this play is the effect of compromise on Cuchulain. Cuchulain’s heroic-warrior spirit is tamed in this play, but, as Kennelly points out, “the play’s conclusion shows that, for a hero, compromise is disaster35”.

12 The play also dramatises Cuchulain’s disappearance from the terrestrial, visible world: after the tragic realisation that he has killed his own son, he starts fighting the waves (believing that the sea is the High King Conchubar whom he blames for the tragedy), and his body is absorbed by the deathless sea. Yet he does not die, he simply transcends into the invisible realm – an event presented by the other characters as something tragic and fatal. Cuchulain’s body begins trembling in the moment when he realises he has fallen prey to a kind of witchcraft. The trembling of his body shakes the bench on which he is sitting with the Fool and the Blind Man. The process of Cuchulain’s leaving the closed and limited space of the house and his approaching the waves is emphasised by the Blind Man who tells the raging and trembling Cuchulain that he will find Conchubar “[b]etween the door and the sea36”, as if pointing out the path between two worlds. But it is only from OJE (1919) that we know that the waves of the sea are indeed an entrance to the spectral world. As Emer tells the story to Eithne Inguba, she refers to the sea with the adjective “deathless”, in the same way as the hawk-woman and the Red Man are alluded to. Also, she makes it clear that the waves did not kill her husband, but made an image out of his body37.

13 The sinister spectral presences occur in this play as well. Here the maker of discord is Cuchulain’s own son sent over from Scotland by Aoife, Cuchulain’s former lover, a woman of the mountains as already mentioned in AHW. He very much resembles his mother and therefore to some extent Aoife is mirrored in the boy: “His head is like a woman’s head (I had fancy for)38”. He has clear eyes “burning nearer up in the high air39 ”. Even though Aoife is referred to as a flesh-and-blood woman who gave birth to Cuchulain’s son, she too can be labelled as a spectral presence here. She is both present and absent throughout the five plays: her name and extraordinary qualities are mentioned in each play; her aim is to kill Cuchulain; she has an invisible, disturbing, threatening presence everywhere, yet she is physically absent, and appears only in the last play. Thus it seems that here it is her eyes that look at Cuchulain through the son. It appears that the penetrating eyes of the hawk-woman have followed Cuchulain through the foxy eyes of the Red Man until the clear but cold eyes of his own son which reflect Aoife’s eyes and which will stare at Cuchulain in the last play as well fully possessing his body by then. In fact, it is Aoife who threatens Cuchulain through the spectral, unsettling figures in each play, and this is foreshadowed by the Old Man of AHW: “She [the hawk-woman] has roused up the fierce women of the hills,/ Aoife, and all her troop, to take your life,/ And never till you are lying in the earth/Can you know rest40”. Aoife’s invisible body is present in OBS as well, but it is only at the end of the play that Conchubar mentions the possible presence of an insubstantial figure above them: “Some witch of the air has troubled Cuchulain’s mind41”. And he soon repeats: “Some witch is floating in the air above us42”. This is Aoife’s unsettling ubiquity in the play, as simultaneously with Conchubar’s warnings, Cuchulain recognises the familiarity in the disturbing appearance of the young stranger.

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14 OJE (1919) dramatises the shift from Cuchulain’s disembodied presence to a weakened embodiment, very different from the one depicted in AHW and GH. The gradual disappearance of Cuchulain as a heroic figure in this play can be seen as a reflection of the violence that surrounded the Anglo-Irish from 1919 on during the Anglo-Irish War, when nationalist IRA forces attacked the Ascendancy and destroyed many significant Big Houses. What is more, Major Robert Gregory passed away in 1918: Yeats thought that Lady Gregory’s son Robert Gregory epitomised the values of the ideal hero as well as those of the spiritual aristocracy. Yeats lamented his death as a foreboding sign for Ireland’s fight for cultural and political unity, but he glorified Robert Gregory in his poems as a hero who found joy in his tragedy, thus making him a model for his ideal hero similar to the figure of Cuchulain.

15 OJE presents Cuchulain’s bodily weakening through the tripling of his spectral body: we have the Ghost of Cuchulain, the Figure of Cuchulain (both wearing heroic masks), and Bricriu, Cuchulain’s mask, who convinces Emer to renounce her husband’s love. And there is another spectral figure: Fand, the Woman of the Sidhe. This woman is equal to the hawk-woman of the first play: “You were not so dumbfounded when/I was that bird of prey, and yet/I am all woman now43”. She tempts Cuchulain promising him completion (knowledge and unity) as soon as he chooses her. It is implied that the invisible realm is the only sphere where the Unity of Being is available. This unity could have been reached by Cuchulain if he had kissed Fand – an act that would have purified him of memory and would have given him a superior knowledge – yet ironically it is Emer (his other self) and through her Bricriu, his own mask, that prevent him from fully achieving that superhuman sphere.

16 The gaze, again, plays a central role in this re-embodiment process. But here, the most important gaze is that of the living (Emer), and its aim is to restore Cuchulain’s body weakened and reduced to an image by the gaze of the spectral figures. Bricriu’s major role in the play is to give sight to Emer and thus knowledge. When Emer attempts to kill the Woman of the Sidhe, he states: “No knife/Can wound that body of air. Be silent; listen; / I have not given you eyes and ears for nothing44”. As Alexandra Poulain observes “Cuchulain only comes alive when Emer constitutes herself as a spectator to him45”. Initially, Emer cannot see Cuchulain—it is Bricriu who “makes the invisible visible, thus asserting the coexistence of several strata of reality46”. Thus while the gaze of the uncanny spectral figures of the previous plays aims to deconstruct Cuchulain’s physicality, Emer’s gaze reconstructs the body. To put it more accurately, the spectral figures’ gaze dematerialises the body, while the living figures’ eyes are capable of rematerialising it. This also invokes Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas of the distinction between the look and the gaze referred to as the regard. Sartre in his Being and Nothingness provides the example of a voyeur peering through the keyhole of a door, totally full of himself, absorbed in his spectacle, almost entirely devoid of self- consciousness (like Cuchulain at the end of OBS when he sees nothing but the waves). However, when he suddenly notices that someone (the so-called ‘Other’) is approaching watching him, he has to reconstitute himself from nothingness into a new kind of subjectivity. It is a process of decentralisation: by acknowledging that he is no longer the bearer of the look but the spectacle of another voyeur, he turns from master to slave47. Also, as Kaja Silverman epitomises, in Sartre’s view “[t]o function as a spectacle, and so to exist for the Other, is to lapse into a ‘fallen’ state48”. Even though Cuchulain recovers his physical existence thanks to Emer, this is a new kind of subjectivity; he has

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gone through a decentralising process. It is true that even before the fight with the waves Cuchulain constantly felt the gaze of spectral presences on his body, but this shift from watching to being watched appears most visibly when Cuchulain becomes absorbed in the spectacle of the waves, disappears into nothingness, and comes alive again when he feels Emer’s eyes watching him. This journey from spectator to spectacle indicates a decentralised, fallen state of Cuchulain.

17 Through the five plays, therefore, Cuchulain’s shifting between embodiment and disembodiment is also indicated by his constant vacillation between spectator and spectacle, which is an important element in Yeats’s idiosyncratic dramaturgy in general. Longuenesse elucidates that the dynamics of Yeats’s dramaturgy are based on a permanent tension between the real world of the living and the realm of the spectral figures that constantly haunt and threaten the living49. He explains that this tension is achieved by the presence of spectator-characters listening to the sounds coming from unknown sources (they are onstage, trying to decode the meaning of the noises coming from offstage) and the disturbing reality of those (mainly spectral) figures who are listened to; and finally the audience-as-spectator who can often see the appearance of those figures whom the living characters cannot50. For instance, in AHW, Cuchulain and the Old Man are trying to decipher the meaning of the hawk-woman’s penetrating gaze and her hawk-cry: “What are those cries? / What is that sound that runs along the hill? 51” In GH Cuchulain and the other noblemen endeavour to interpret the meaning and the sense behind the Red Man’s disturbing game and laughter. In OBS, the same waiting for and listening to the unexpected arrival of a stranger from the outside happen when Cuchulain and Conchubar try to find out who the Young Man is and where he comes from and why. In OJE it is Emer and Eithne Inguba who listen carefully to the possible signs from Cuchulain’s half-dead body and then to the disturbing words of Cuchulain’s mask (or spectral double) Bricriu and they try to decode the Woman of the Sidhe’s intention with Cuchulain’s body. Finally, in DC the increasingly weakening hero is waiting for his death which arrives in the form of Aoife first, then in the grotesque figure of the Blind Man of OBS. While Cuchulain is dying, he and Eithne Inguba try to make sense of the foreboding presence of the crow-headed goddess of war, the Morrigu.

18 However, it is striking that in each of these plays, there are moments when Cuchulain is not a spectator or a listener, but a spectacle and the one who is observed. The first three plays of the cycle begin with other characters’ conversation suddenly disturbed by the arrival of Cuchulain seen initially as a stranger. He too arrives from an unknown place and perturbs the peace of the others just like the spectral figures unsettle Cuchulain’s peace of mind and bodily integrity. In OJE, he is clearly reduced to a motionless spectacle, a mere image that cannot see nor hear, but can be an object of contemplation. Everyone is waiting for him to say something or move, which finally happens, but his spectator status is not restored. In the last play, he is totally subject to the others’ scrutinising observations. His bodily weakening is constantly reflected on by Eithne Inguba, Aoife, the Morrigu, and the Blind Man. Cuchulain has gone through a process of decentralisation, he has lost all control over his body and his world. This is why he warns Eithne Inguba, “[s]peak low if you would speak about my death,/ Or not in that strange voice exulting in it./ Who knows what ears listen behind the door?52”. This decentralisation also emphasises his weakening physical presence and the expansion of the spectral world, increasingly absorbing the world of the living. Longuenesse points out that the predominance of spectral bodies in Yeats’s theatre

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precipitates the erasure of the character through the protagonist’s attempts to decipher the sounds and voices coming from the unsettling spectral realm.53 This is how the spectral world gradually consumes and begins to possess Cuchulain. Poulain calls attention to another important aspect of Yeats’s dramaturgy in her article on The King’s Threshold, Calvary and The Death of Cuchulain, which is crucial if applied to the Cuchulain cycle: “Ultimately what the plays attempt to dramatise is what befalls the subject when the subject ceases to be54”. Bearing in mind Cuchulain’s status as an alternative symbol of Ireland and the Ascendancy (as well as Yeats’s own origins), Cuchulain’s physical disappearance raises the more concrete question of what happens to modern Ireland when the intellectual, aristocratic individual and its values disappear forever.

19 In DC (1939), the hero accepts his bodily weakening and imminent death, which seems to echo Yeats’s elitist preoccupations expressed in his 1939 On the Boiler: “[t]he danger is that there will be no war, that the skilled will attempt nothing, that the European civilisation [...] will accept decay55”. By this time, Yeats became disappointed in most of his formerly promoted political ideals. As Anthony Bradley explains it, “Yeats knew, then, that the Ireland he had long ago imagined and idealized as noble and heroic had plunged into the kind of political violence and instability that was widespread in Europe, [...] and that he lived in a period in which the continuum of history had paused, and was about to be reset56”. Yet when he met Maud Gonne for the last time, he evoked their nationalist past and the image of the Castle of Heroes that used to symbolise independent Ireland for the members of the Celtic Mystical Order (the ex-Golden Dawners like Yeats and Gonne): “Maud, we should have gone on with our Castle of the Heroes, we might still do it57”. We can see that Yeats, even at his most desperate and pessimistic, maintained a little hope for the realisation of his dreams about modern Ireland, and it is this shifting between bitterness and optimism that occurs in each Cuchulain play.

20 DC also nicely illustrates this shifting attitude to Ireland’s future. The uncanny spectral world (Aoife and the Morrigu) starts to gradually dominate the play and Cuchulain: Eithne Inguba tells Cuchulain that “I know that somebody or something is there,/ Yet nobody that I can see58”. The importance of the eyes of the spectral figure returns: “She [the Morrigu] seemed as pretty as a bird, she has changed,/ She has an eye in the middle of her forehead59”. Now this bird-like woman with the penetrating eyes catches Cuchulain once more after the death of his physical body. Right before the moment of his death, he still has a strong physical presence (though his body is already weak), as the beggar “begins feeling Cuchulain’s body, his hands mounting upward60” and finally cuts off his head. This image is followed by a transformation: even though Cuchulain loses his body, he manages to transform into “[his] soul’s first shape, a soft feathery shape61”. This description suggests the hawk (constantly associated with Cuchulain in the cycle) and through this proud and noble bird (the symbol of the aristocracy) it refers to the superhuman, highest sphere of existence as well. It means that Cuchulain’s soul seems to have eventually achieved immortality through the sinister influence of the uncanny spectral figures. Cuchulain dies but he is able to show intellectual ecstasy even in the face of death, and this evokes Yeats’s remark to Ethel Mannin towards the end of his life: “It is a curious experience to have an infirm body & an intellect more alive than it has ever been62”. Yet we need to keep in mind that Yeats’s Cuchulain has always been a symbol, which means that this figure has little to do with the reality of

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modern Ireland. It is only in the mind’s eye that this heroic and aristocratic myth of Ireland can be fully realised.

21 After this transformation, we see Emer dancing before Cuchulain’s severed head: “She so moves that she seems to rage against the heads of those that had wounded Cuchulain [...]. She moves as if in adoration or triumph round the head of Cuchulain63”. This is a joy in terror which is an indispensable characteristic of Yeats’s concept of heroism. He has to lose his physicality, his body and everything that ties him to the terrestrial world in order to reach immortality and the Unity of Being. However, it remains ambiguous whether this transformation is to be regarded as tragic or joyful. It is undoubtedly ironical that all this implies that such a condition is not available in the visible world, yet heroes such as Cuchulain and the martyrs of the Easter Rising (compared to Cuchulain in the play) must always attempt to reach the highest sphere even though it means the death of their bodies. This is what makes Yeats’s heroes outstanding and ideal64. This effort to aim high despite the evident failure and death is exactly what finally elevates them to the highest sphere of being, even though they cease to exist in their physical reality. As the Musicians sing in AHW as if uttering Cuchulain’s thoughts: “Folly alone I cherish,/ I choose it for my share; / Being but a mouthful of air,/ I am content to perish; / I am but a mouthful of sweet air65”.

22 Yeats’s Cuchulain-cycle, therefore, appears as yet another example of Yeats’s life-long obsession with the role of the aristocracy in the formation of a unified Ireland and the constant ambiguities that surrounded this myth. Yeats both constructs and deconstructs his heroic and aristocratic ideal in the cycle, expressing his wish to restore in modern Ireland those more ancient values which are already lost. As Suzan- Lori Parks has it, “the very act of playwriting is akin to digging for bones in a burial site, an act of loving excavation of the lost and forgotten66”. The whole cycle presents a constant shifting between Cuchulain as the saviour of Ireland and Cuchulain as the inherently degenerate figure who can do nothing but induce further decay in the country. This ambiguity occurs mainly through the role of the spectral figures that both threaten Cuchulain and help him to finally achieve spiritual immortality. As Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin have explained, “[t]he phantom’s uncertain ontological status interrogates both what it is to see and what it is to know, and thereby provides a device for challenging theories of epistemology as well as the boundaries between life and death, the political elite and the oppressed, the rational and the irrational, the material and immaterial67”.

NOTES

1. For an insightful analysis of how the Cuchulain plays correspond to the crucial events in Yeats’s life see Birgit Bjersby’s monograph The Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B. Yeats, Uppsala, Lundequist, 1950 and Brendan Kennelly’s article “The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain plays”, Hermathena, No. 101, Yeats Number (Autumn 1965).

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2. B. Kennelly, “The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain plays”, op. cit.., p. 13. 3. Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 103. 4. Seamus Heaney qtd in Anthony Bradley, Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats: Nation, Class, and State, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 105. 5. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 178. 6. In this paper, I am going to use the following abbreviations for Yeats’s plays: OBS, GH, AHW, OJE, and DC. 7. Quoted in Colette Conroy, Theatre & the Body, Theatre & Series, Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato (eds), London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 57. 8. Birgit Bjersby, The Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 106. 9. Cf. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 1-5. 10. Dorothy Wellesley qtd in B. Bjersby, op. cit.., p. 100-101. 11. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, Minjou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse (eds), London and New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 35. 12. Pierre Longuenesse, “‘Singing Amid Uncertainty’: Dramaturgie et pratique de la voix dans le théâtre de William Butler Yeats”, Doctoral Dissertation, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008, p. 177. My translation. 13. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, London, Papermac, 1982, p. 215. 14. Ibid., p. 215. 15. For a detailed analysis of this theme see Pierre Longuenesse’s doctoral dissertation quoted above. 16. Colette Conroy, Theatre & the Body, op. cit.., p. 26. 17. Ibid., p. 27. 18. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 215. 19. Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche: An Exploration of Major Nietzschean Echoes in the Writings of William Butler Yeats, London, Macmillan, 1982, p. 53. 20. Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche: An Exploration of Major Nietzschean Echoes in the Writings of William Butler Yeats, London, op. cit.., p. 54. 21. B. Kennelly, “The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain plays”, op. cit.., p. 18. 22. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 215. 23. Ibid., p. 215. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 216. 26. B. Kennelly, “The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain plays”, op. cit.., p. 15. 27. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 226. 28. Ibid., p. 228. 29. Ibid.

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30. Ibid., p. 231. 31. Colette Conroy, Theatre & the Body, op. cit.., p. 26. 32. B. Kennelly, “The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain plays”, op. cit.., p. 16. 33. Ibid. 34. Cf. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life I, p. 340-341. 35. B. Kennelly, “The Heroic Ideal in Yeats’s Cuchulain plays”, op. cit.., p. 15. 36. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 277. 37. Ibid., p. 284. 38. Ibid., p. 268. 39. Ibid., p. 265. 40. Ibid., p. 218. 41. Ibid., p. 268. 42. Ibid., p. 270. 43. Ibid., p. 292. 44. Ibid., p. 291. 45. Alexandra Poulain, “‘Westward ho!’: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy”, The South Carolina Review, Vol. 43. No. 1, Catherine E. Paul (ed.), Fall 2010, p. 94. 46. Alexandre Poulain, “‘Westward ho!’: The Only Jealousy of Emer, From Noh to Tragedy”, op. cit.., p. 95. 47. Cf. Kaja Silverman, « The Look », The Threshold of the Visible World, New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 64-66. 48. Kaja Silverman, « The Look », op. cit.., p. 165. 49. Pierre Longuenesse, “‘Singing Amid Uncertainty’: Dramaturgie et pratique de la voix dans le théâtre de William Butler Yeats”, op. cit.., p. 167. 50. Ibid., p. 166-167. 51. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 218. 52. Ibid., p. 697. 53. Pierre Longuenesse, “‘Singing Amid Uncertainty’: Dramaturgie et pratique de la voix dans le théâtre de William Butler Yeats”, op. cit.., p. 169. 54. Alexandra Poulain, « The King’s Threshold, Calvary, and The Death of Cuchulain: Yeats’s Passion Plays », Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual No. 19, Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould (eds), Cambridge, UK, Open Book Publishers, 2013, p. 60. [http://dx.doi.org/ 10.11647/OBP.0038] 55. W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler, Dublin, Cuala Press, 1939, p. 19. Web. 28 December 2016 [http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-50578018]. 56. Anthony Bradley, Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats: Nation, Class, and State, op. cit.., p. 105. 57. W. B. Yeats qtd in Michael Manning, W. B. Yeats Seanad Eireann Speeches 1922-28. Lulu Press, 2015, p. 48. 58. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 696. 59. Ibid., p. 696.

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60. Ibid., p. 702. 61. Ibid. 62. W. B. Yeats qtd in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II, p. 550. 63. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 703. 64. Carmel Jordan argues in her article that Yeats expresses the both tragic and extraordinary qualities of Ireland through the stone symbol in his Cuchulain plays, which is always associated with Cuchulain and the threatening spectral figures (“The Stone Symbol in ‘Easter 1916’ and the Cuchulain Plays”, College Literature, 13. 1, 1986, p. 36-43). 65. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, op. cit.., p. 219. 66. Quoted in Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, “Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality”, Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 15. 67. Mary Luckhurst, “Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality”, op. cit.., p. 2.

ABSTRACTS

This paper addresses William Butler Yeats’s dramatisation of his life-long interest in the invisible realm and an ideal Irish aristocracy in his five Cuchulain plays. I wish to illustrate how Yeats expresses his increasing ambiguities over the cultural and political capacities of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy through the changes of the Irish warrior-hero Cuchulain’s body and the growing predominance and influence of the spectral world on his bodily integrity. Even though Cuchulain is generally referred to as the embodiment of Irish national identity and the ideal aristocrat in Yeats’s works, I would like to point out those aspects of his Cuchulain-story, where this idealised narrative of Ireland and the Ascendancy seems to be challenged.

Le présent article aborde la façon dont W.B. Yeats met en scène son obsession d’un univers invisible et d’une aristocratie idéale dans ses cinq pièces consacrées au héros-guerrier Cuchulain. Je souhaite démontrer comment Yeats exprime sa perception de plus en plus ambiguë des capacités culturelles et politiques de l’aristocratie anglo-irlandaise à travers les changements du corps de Cuchulain et la récurrence croissante des présences spectrales. Bien que Cuchulain soit généralement considéré comme l’incarnation de l’identité nationale irlandaise et celle de l’aristocrate idéal dans les œuvres de Yeats, dans cet article j’envisage de mettre en lumière les endroits où ce mythe idéalisé de l’Irlande et de l’aristocratie est contesté par Yeats.

INDEX

Keywords: body, Cuchulain, mythology, national identity, drama, Yeats W. B. Mots-clés: corps, mythologie, Cuchulain, identité nationale, théâtre, Yeats W. B.

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Embodying the Trauma of the Somme as an Ulster Protestant Veteran in Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?

Andréa Caloiaro

Dramatizing the First World War’s remembrance in Northern Ireland

1 Christina Reid’s First World War memory play My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? (1987) concludes with protagonist Andrew Smith reflecting on his solitude as a First World War veteran. At the play’s close, following the Orange Order’s seventieth annual Somme Day parade in , he admits: “I’m the only one left from the Great War, and they want to honour me1”. Andrew is Derry’s last living survivor of the 36th (Ulster) Division, Carson’s men, who went over the top at the Battle of the Somme on 1-2 July 1916 at the cost of 5,500 casualties, 2,000 of whom died. But as he waits year after year for the British Legion’s arrival for the commencement march, Andrew is utterly alone. Recently, he has disowned his last living relative, Andrea, a beloved granddaughter. Their parting was bitter; his granddaughter’s choice to leave Northern Ireland to attend a London university, and more, to accept the marriage proposal of an Anglo- Pakistani, is in Andrew’s eyes, a betrayal, both personal and national. To Andrew, Andrea has turned her back on a Northern Ireland for which he and his company have been mythologized as defenders, having sacrificed their lives at the Somme in 1916.

2 Written in Reid’s words, “for radio, […] for voice2”, My Name was first broadcast by the BBC in 1987. The moment was significant. By the 1980s, the few Great War veterans who were still living came closer to passing away. Irish historians, authors, and the general public thus renewed an interest in collecting and reimagining Irish veterans’ testimonies. The trend of recording and depicting those who bore witness to combat also coincided with an uptick in attending public commemorations of the Great War.

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Yet, given the sectarian violence of the Northern Irish Troubles between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists, war remembrances inevitably became political battlegrounds. For some, the Troubles seemed a repetition or permutation of the domestic, militarized political turmoil of 1914-1918 surrounding Home Rule, Partition, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty3; that the Troubles’ violence was, in part, conceivable as a re-manifestation of 1914-1922 is exemplified by the Enniskillen bombing of 1987, the year My Name first aired. On 8 November, the PIRA bombed Enniskillen’s Remembrance Day ceremony. Though allegedly targeting the leading the ceremony, the PIRA consequently killed ten civilians, one police officer, and wounded sixty-three others. The bomb also severely damaged Enniskillen’s cenotaph honoring Irish Great War veterans. The PIRA’s targeting a First World War commemoration resonated symbolically; in destroying the war’s iconography and killing innocent commemorators, the act starkly reinforced to Irishmen and women how influential the First World War remained – and still remains – to Northern Ireland’s and the Republic’s claims to oppositional political, ethno-national, and religious identity and legitimacy4.

3 Irish domestic politics were not only deeply enmeshed with the First World War, but as Reid’s My Name testifies, that war’s consequent paramilitary violence, trauma, and memory would haunt Northern Ireland for decades. It was Frank McGuinness who first depicted that haunting in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), a ghostly drama which established the “memory play5” as a useful genre for Irish playwrights writing on the Great War. Similar to Sons of Ulster, Reid’s play delves into the troubled memory of a solitary, traumatized 36th (Ulster) Division veteran in order to reach across the border’s ideological divide and “examine the complexity, diversity, disturbance and integrity of the other side, the Protestant people6”. But what distinguishes My Name is how its medium of the radio carries the conventional content of the memory play. Throughout the drama, Andrew Smith’s voiceovers emerge from the past and intertwine with the present, conveying his oscillation between two times which he experiences contiguously, 1916 and the 1980s. This vocal splicing has a particular dramaturgical effect: insofar as Andrew’s beliefs have remained unchanged over the decades, his voice has a ghostly resonance, as if he ventriloquizes an ideological position no longer tenable7; Andrew’s body may inhabit Northern Ireland, but his mind occupies an Ulster of the Great War era. As such, he is the embodiment of a decades – long, state-propagated ideal – the Protestant unionist veteran of the 36th (Ulster) Division8.

4 The men of the 36th (Ulster) Division were justifiably mythologized into Ulster’s Protestant Unionist and Orange psyche at a moment when in the minds of those who were either wounded or lost loved ones, symbolized a legitimate sacrifice for the right to continued union. Like Sons of Ulster, Reid’s play thus considers the effects that having to embody this ideal had on the Ulster unionist combatant by interrogating a crucial issue regarding wounded veterans like Andrew. If after the 1916 Rising, unionists anticipated the Somme as Ulster’s trauma, its raison d’être (or Northern Ireland’s “1916”)9, to what extent did this act predetermine how veterans themselves could process the Somme, and furthermore, how that trauma was inscribed into shared memory? The few critics who have written on My Name have noted that Reid’s project is to deconstruct Northern Ireland’s canonical processing of the First World War – in Claire Tylee’s words, “the fixed masculine identity of the backward gaze, to the Somme10”. But no scholarship focuses on this “backward gaze” as it is conveyed in My Name through the radio genre, nor how performing that gaze affects Andrew by

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motivating him to occlude broader parameters of Northern Irish identity, including women and non-ethnically Irish citizens in the .

5 Thus, through the lens of traumatology, this article will first argue that Andrew Smith’s continuous, backward gaze to the Somme is effectuated by the state’s tendency to appropriate the trauma of that event. Andrew becomes the consequence of what Jenny Edkins identifies as the traumatized subject being claimed or appropriated by political factions or institutions intent on legitimazing their own prerogatives11; insofar as he is propagated as the ideal embodiment of the state’s right to the union, My Name suggests that Andrew undergoes a secondary form of trauma: he suffers from the weight of an ideological narrativization of his own traumatic event, whereby he cannot escape that event’s (re)occurrence. These reoccurrences, this tendency for Andrew to relive the past as the present, can be read through Cathy Caruth’s notion that trauma defies the possibility of symbolic inscription and thus cannot be fully possessed – neither by the state, nor by the individual. Thus, insofar as Andrew has been inscribed as the Great War’s sacrificial iconography, he is one of those traumatized who “carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely posses12”: Andrew cannot escape the extent to which he has been made to (self) propagate the hyper-masculine, martial, Protestant Orange veteran as the ideal embodiment of Northern Irish ethno-national and political citizenship.

6 In this context, it will also be suggested that My Name confronts an evaded issue in Northern Ireland and its theatre: that is, Northern Irishwomen’s responses to the First World War, especially to the Somme. For Reid’s play also focuses on Andrew’s granddaughter, Andrea, and her effort to counter the predominantly masculinist purview which has narrativized the Somme into an exclusionary telos13. Andrea not only speaks from the margin, but for the marginalized – and traumatized. Cast out by Andrew, imprisoned, and repeatedly strip-searched as a women’s peace protestor, it is through her own traumatic experience that Andrea ultimately advocates for the inclusion of hitherto marginalized “histories”, not only of the Somme, but of Irish and British national belonging. Through Andrea, My Name thus represents a paradigm for (traumatic) reconciliation that, in Caruth’s terms, is predicated on “the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound14”. As a Northern Irishwoman, Andrea represents a particular mode of listening: one that both honors the Somme’s trauma but indicts how her grandfather is inscribed as the Great War’s iconography: like a ghost, his body carries a narrative made to endure past its time – in 1986, it is for Andrea, a hauntingly oppressive and anachronistic one.

The Ulster Protestant veteran’s trauma: the past as the present

7 When the play opens, we hear the distant, echoed voiceovers of Andrew and Andrea, now both confined, Andrew to an “Old People’s home in Derry” (252) and his granddaughter in Holloway Prison, London. Their past folds onto their present as they recollect the same memory, of “1964 when Andrea was aged two and Andy was aged seventy- one” (253). The memory is Andrea’s earliest, a poem entitled “My Name”, one Andrew had taught her to express his unconditional love, and to walk and talk. From her prison

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cell, as therapeutic remembrance, Andrea draws portraiture (as her grandfather once did), illustrating him teaching her “My Name”. The opening scene foregrounds the play’s figuration of how human memory – regardless of referential accuracy – comprises for individuals a coherent version of the past. As Andrea states: “this should in truth be two drawings, not one. I didn’t learn to walk and talk all on the same day. But that’s how I remember it. Perhaps because the two events were joined in his memory” (254). But Andrea’s awareness of memory’s selectivity contrasts with Andrew’s attitude toward the past.

8 The play’s voiceover technique accentuates that contrast, for Andrew’s words in 1986 sound like the recordings we hear from his past, in 1916; as if rehearsed, his present iterations rarely go beyond a well-rehearsed litany of unionist Orangeisms which were common in Ulster during the First World War. Like Sons of Ulster’s Pyper, Andrew repeats in programmatic that “Ulster” has “grown cold, […] lies in rubble15”. Reading the past as the present, he curses the passing of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement in anachronistic, seemingly vetriloquized language; he longs for “Carson’s army” (272), the men who were hailed at the Battle of the Somme for defending Ulster against Home Rule, and afterward, during the Irish War for Independence (272). Andrew’s language reflects that in his mind, 1986 is reminiscent of the early Troubles, as the current sectarian conflict reminds him of when after Partition, “that scum rose up out of the Bogside” (268). But it is not just the threat of the Republic he resists, but of England. Evoking the paradoxical, Ulster Protestant unionist dictum of the war era, “loyalty to themselves alone16”, Andrew still envisions combatting republicanism via Parliament: We beat the English Government then, we’ll beat them this time round too. Anglo- Irish Agreement be damned! Lloyd George couldn’t defeat us in 1920, and Maggie Thatcher won’t defeat us in 1986 (272).

9 For Andrew, the First World War’s domestic politics are still being fought in Northern Ireland, particularly, by veterans like himself who “had signed the Ulster Covenant with his own blood” (272).

10 Such anachronistic ventriloquizations are in fact indicative of Andrew becoming a “symptom of history17”. Indeed, the wounding, loss, and political crux of 1 July, 1916 return to Andrew like “flashbacks18”, a common trope to Irish Great War literature, especially memory plays19. But the poignancy of My Name’s depiction is in the very desolation and symbolic confinement that these flashbacks effectuate. As Andrea is aware, her grandfather’s attempt to legitimize his existence by re-enacting conflict and speaking its idioms manifests as a symptom of being politicized beyond his own control: he internalizes the identity he has been made to embody, and consequently, litanize20. He begins: “them were the days in France. Real men. Heroes. Ulster Protestant Orangemen. We’ll never see their like again … Joseph Sloan, Billy Matchett, Isaac Carson, Samuel Thompson, Hugh Montgomery” (255).

11 However, from her own isolation in prison, Andrea is motivated to bridge the divide with her grandfather by acknowledging that he cannot escape his legacy. In the 1986 present, Andrea’s voice fades into her grandfather’s as they recite in unison the names of Andrew’s fallen companions from the 36th (Ulster) Division: The shared memory of these names has also come to Andrea as she draws and remembers her childhood. She has been mouthing the names that Andy taught her as he speaks. Andrea: … “Hugh Montomgery, Frederick Wilson, Jame Elliott, John Cunningham, Edward Marshall … A Litany of the Glorious Dead. […] Just a handful

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of the five and half thousand Ulstermen who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. My grandfather went to hell and back when he was just twenty-three years old”. […] Andrew: “A Glorious Victory. Their Finest Hour. An inspiration for painters and poets” (255-6).

12 As Claire Tylee avers, the associations with their incantation would not be lost on an audience of either the Republic or Northern Ireland21. The litany is reminiscent of Yeats’s homage in “Easter, 1916” to those patriots who were shot without proper trial: “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse22”. And in Sons of Ulster, Pyper commemorates his friends and lover who had fallen on the Somme in a similar manner: “Moore, Millen, Anderson, McIlwaine23”. Like Yeats and McGuinness, Reid is apprehensive about the potential occlusions associated with such a litany, while still iterating it to honor sacrifice. For Andrea’s motivation to recite the litany is to comprehend a belief system which Andrew cannot so easily separate from the trauma he still feels. From the solitary confines of the prison, she acknowledges her grandfather’s physical and ideological confinement, asking, “who does he talk to now, I wonder? Maybe he just talks. To the wall … to the memories locked away in his old tin box” (254); and later, as we hear Andrea’s “prison door slamming in the distance”, she withholds the emotion of suffering by confiding in her grandfather’s resiliency: “I won’t cry. I mustn’t cry. Give me some of your fierce, proud strength, granda. Did you ever cry, I wonder, when there was nobody there to see? Perhaps you didn’t dare, in case you could never stop” (262).

13 Andrea’s remark is profound, and empathetic. While My Name eschews narrativizing the 36th (Ulster) Division as heroic defenders against, in Andrew’s words, both “Fenians” (268) and now “Maggie Thatcher” and the “Anglo-Irish Agreement” of her “English Government” (272), the play is justly empathetic to Andrew’s suffering: like Sons of Ulster, Reid’s drama shows that the Somme’s loss affects the individual insofar as Ulster’s soldiers and casualties became the singular, sacrificial mythography of soon-to- be Northern Ireland. Reid suggests that this subjection is the deep-seated psychological trauma which paradoxically enforces the compulsion for men like Andrew to reiterate that mythography as a kind of self-legitimization, or that of the State. Indeed, the very absence of resisting this mythos in Northern Ireland – in literature, especially by women – attests to its durability. For the unionist appropriation of the Somme as “victory”, both tactically at the front and politically back home for Partition, left little room for outright dissent, or as Fran Brearton points out, for the Northern Irish to conceive of 1 July 1916 as anything but that “imaginatively powerful image of the sacrificial victim that permeates much Easter Rising literature24”.

14 My Name evinces the fixity of that mythos when Andrew’s voiceover reverberates as a ghostly return from 1968, when he brings Andrea to City Hall Belfast to teach her about Prinsep Beadle’s commemorative painting, Battle of the Somme: Attack of the Ulster Division. The iconic painting depicts the Somme as a victory, reinforced by its inscription, which Andrew quotes: “one of the greatest feats of arms in the annals of the ” (256). As Andrea hears Andrew’s “ghost” in the present, she draws the painting, consciously ventriloquizing its fictionalized rendition of “victory”: The officer is young, golden, angelic faced. […] ‘Fritz’ is being taken prisoner … top of the painting … more to the left … and another German soldier lies dying. Not there … bottom left … An Ulsterman walks away from the dying man … he carries a bayonet. Blood-covered. He looks … nothing. Blank. His eyes are wide open, but he looks blind. The officer is bathed in a golden light … (257).

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15 Andrea’s attention toward “proper” rendering – as simulacrum – correlates to the soldiers’ choreographically depicted action, focalizing on Ulster’s predisposition to victory. In this moment, as “the past merges with the present”, the play’s temporal splicing enables the present, “adult Andrea” to recall her grandfather’s retelling his actual experience at the Somme (257). He “got injured minutes after clearing the trenches”, and his friend Billy Matchett died a “terrible death” from a wound turned gangrenous after three days in no man’s land (257)25. Through Andrea’s literal redrawing and commentating, My Name limns the tension, or contradiction, between 1 July’s individualized experience and its state narratization: however costly, the Somme was, and had to be, remembered as a victory. As Jim Haughey even ventures to conclude, “Beadle’s painting effectively celebrates a defeat”, and “like the Easter Rising, a defeat in Irish memory often becomes a synonym for victory26”. Moreover, Andrea realizes that Beadle’s Battle of the Somme underscores the masculinist impulse rendered in this defeatist “victory” – Haughey notes how “Andrea, looking back now as an adult, realizes that the painting has also helped mythologize the Somme as Beadle celebrates the testosterone virtues of the Ulster Division27”.

16 Reenacting those “virtues” by performing them sustains the Somme’s mythos. Thus, Andrew’s voiceover willfully imagines Billy Matchett as one of the soldier figures in the painting, as if the act keeps Matchett “alive” (258): See that soldier there with the bayonet? Spittin’ image of Billy Matchett. […] Billy was the best Lambeg drummer the road had ever seen. The Orange Lodge paid for his headstone. […] Done him proud. Billy’s son, wee Billy, took over the beatin’ of the Lambeg drum when he grew up. Carryin’ on the name. Carryin’ on the tradition. Which is how it should be. […] And now, young Billy’s dead too. Cut off in his prime like his father before him. Second World War. Dunkirk. Still, his son, wee Billy has stepped into his father’s . […] Sound of the Lambeg drum. Andy caught in the memory. Go on, ye boy ye! Yer granda’ll never be dead as long as you’re alive! (257-8).

17 While Andrea even-handedly refrains from dismissing Andrew’s account of Billy’s allusively Williamite legacy28, as a woman, she looks apprehensively at Orangemen plotting Ulster’s narrative as a men’s history solely “about war” (259). She remembers Billy in the “Twelfth of July Parade” (258); before he finally died while marching, he would beat the drum until “the blood trickled over the tattoos on his arms … ‘Ulster is British’; ‘No Surrender’; ‘Remember the Somme, Dunkirk, the Relief of Derry’” (258)29. Billy’s physical body testifies to a loyalist narrative spanning generations. With a body similarly decorated by war, Andrew tells Andrea, “medals is for men. The men go off to war, and the weemin’ and children stay behind” (259).

Voices from the margin

18 Such parameters not only relegate women outside politics, but also men. The politico- religious positions of some Ulstermen – who have themselves suffered the Somme’s trauma – are elided if they do not align with Andrew’s Protestant unionism. Looking at a photograph, Andrea revises the litany of names to include one such man: “Edward Reilly, the only other survivor with my grandfather. His greatest friend … before the war. After the war, Edward sent his medal back. They were together in the middle of the photograph, and he cut Edward out” (261). Andrew’s elision is symbolic, an attempt to “cut out” or “reject” an undesired reality. He scorns:

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Turned down his medal. Turned traitor. Canvassed for the Labour Party after the war. Made speeches against the government and the monarchy. Betrayed all the brave men who fought and died so that we could be British and free. […] Catholic throwbacks. […] What sort of name’s Reilly for a Protestant family? Intermarried [….]. But it never leaves them. Popery. Bad Blood. Nationalism (261).

19 Acknowledging her grandfather’s partial success at eliding history, Andrea admits, “I never knew that Edward Reilly existed until I was sixteen” (261). It is Edward’s grandson, Eddie, who supplies her with “another version of the Battle of the Somme” (261), one apprehensive about “Ulster Protestant Pride”, “Orange ”, and its men being sent in first “over the top singing songs about the Battle of the Boyne and the Siege of Derry, as if the Catholic King James had been resurrected and was leading the German Army” (261). Yet as Andrea recalls, Edward also “mourned them” – Billy, Andrew, his entire company; Edward “survived and wept every time he told that story to his grandson” (262). But why this trauma deserves mourning is more complicated in the eyes of Edward and Andrea than it is for Andrew; the Somme signifies a post facto betrayal that Andrew might not, or cannot, admit to – that in part, his mythos is predicated on ascribing a utilitarian ideal to the 36th (Ulster) Division.

20 In such circumstances, the play asks us: what can be done for those who cannot support such stringent parameters wherein men like Reilly and women like Andrea are given no place? Indicative of Reid’s oeuvre, one way My Name suggests attenuating this dislocation – especially for marginalized women – is by removing oneself from Northern Ireland30. And this is what Andrea does. Andrea leaves Belfast for college in London to pursue her talent in art (inherited from her grandfather), and to live independently as her own mother never had the chance to do while caring for Andrew, her father. Andrea’s choice, however, devastates Andrew. He imagines it as a betrayal to his legacy. From prison, Andrea recalls how her choice wounded her grandfather, though she is aware of the supreme irony of his mindset: Andrew: They’re not like us over there. Andrea: He was hurt at me even considering that anything in England could be better than anything in Northern Ireland. It’s one of those paradoxes of the Ulster Protestant Mentality – being more British than the British, but at the same time, believing that anybody leaving the Province for the Mainland […] is letting the side down. […] Betraying the cause (265).

21 It is the company that Andrea keeps in London, and the more circumspective view she develops toward war, Britain, and Northern Ireland whereby as a woman, she represents Reid’s endeavor at “implementing cultural change31”. Andrea becomes engaged to her well-off landlord, Hanif, an educated British-Pakistani. At the university, they study war poetry together, performing an “improvised play about war” (267). Andrea soon comes to realize that aspects of her grandfather’s Somme mythography are appropriated; she re-quotes Andrew’s “Somme poem” – actually, Theodore O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead” – which honors American soldiers who fell in the Mexican-American War, concluding, “I expect it’s much the same, no matter what war you die in” (267). Andrea’s realization speaks against Andrew’s uncritical reliance on the Somme’s scripted idiom; My Name suggests that its idiom is not only akin to an ostensibly oppositional sacrificial myth, the Easter Rising, but it is also an ironic endorsement of Britain’s imperial warfare.

22 The real paradox Andrea begins to see is Andrew’s blindness to the fact that his idiom speaks of Britain’s “betrayal” in the First World War while upholding its saber-rattling; praising Thatcher’s Falklands policy, Andrew tells Andrea right before he disowns her,

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“Britain rules the waves again. […] If Maggie’d been Prime Minister when that scum rose up out of the Bogside, the Troubles would have been over in a day. She’d have sailed the big gunboats into Derry the way she did to the Falklands, an’ wiped the Fenians off the face of the earth” (268). Soon after, as an Irish emigrant, Andrea experiences firsthand the violence of such neo-imperialist mentalities pervasive in London during the 1980s. As an Anglo-Pakistani, her fiancée Hanif is targeted by a group of “skinheads […] out celebrating the English Fleet sailing from the Falklands” (271). He is left mentally disabled, acutely paranoid about racist attacks. But Andrea remains faithful to him, returning to Belfast to ask for Andrew’s blessing over their union. Upon realizing that her fiancé is part Pakistani, Andrew disowns her: “He’s an Argy! […] A half-caste! A nig-nog! […] Get back to England and keep your black bastard there with you” (271). His banishment is permanent. In this moment, the play correlates “Ulster’s” ethno-national insularity to that of Thatcherite Britain. Both are denials of demographic realities, regressive senses of Northern Irish and British national identities, which Andrea hopes to revise.

23 Thus, as Andrew is picked up to be paraded for the Somme’s “seventieth anniversary”, the scene merges with the “sound of another metal prison door closing” (271), that of Andrea’s cell in Holloway Prison in 1986. The door’s reverberation not only reinforces the sense of closed-door segregation, ethno-nationally and ideologically, but also the abuse that Andrea undergoes as a prisoner – abuse that further incites her motivation to speak on behalf of the traumatized. In her last soliloquy, Andrea reveals her situation: profiled for her Irish accent (after recent waves of IRA violence), she has been unlawfully arrested, imprisoned, and repeatedly strip-searched by British police for participating in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp protests against nuclear basing. Yet, her former presence at Greenham was as personal as it was political. Invited by Hanif’s sister, Andrea had envisioned (as she still does) the all-women’s camp as a space for women to finally act – to both protest against another global war, and to commemorate those who have already fallen to warfare and imperially – minded violence. Andrea recalls confronting anti-riot police as she lit candles with other women for family members killed in Britain’s wars. She begins to recite her grandfather’s Great War litany and concludes by adding three names: “the other three candles were for Edward Reilly and my grandfather and Hanif” (275). As Tylee points out, “Andrea subverts her grandfather’s litany […] by adding new names32”. She intends her protest to bring together voices from the margins: those of Greenham’s anti- militarist women vying to protect their children’s futures from war and conscription, those like Hanif who are denied nationality through racism – an analogy to Andrew’s attitude in Northern Ireland – and, even soldiers like her grandfather, debilitated by British-unionist jingoism and masculinist militarism, which he himself has internalized33.

24 It is crucial to note when and how Andrea begins speaking for the margins. As Imelda Foley has suggested, Andrea’s emigration “makes it more than clear that the only way out of a very sectarian, sexist historical morass is to get out. She configures change from outside, because it is impossible from within34”. Yet, it is in London where Andrea undergoes forms of (para)military violence, racism, and that are reminiscent of those she left behind in Northern Ireland. My Name goes beyond indicting these ideologies, unbound by state borders; through Andrea, the play demonstrates how “listening to another’s wound35” forms what Jon Patočka calls a “solidarity of the shaken” – that is, those victims who consolidate themselves out of

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persecution (be it war or institutional violence) in order to resist or speak out against state-level power and coercion36. My Name poses cultural change as enacted by those, and amongst those, who have suffered by the state; as such, Andrea envisions (traumatic) empathy as a requisite for reconciliation. For Northern Ireland, the play proposes coming to terms with the fact that the First World War’s exploitative mythography can be considered part of that war’s posttraumatic legacy. Indeed, My Name exposes an issue which is only now beginning to be acknowledged: that propagating the 36th (Ulster) Division’s veterans as solely embodying a unionist telos may appropriate what was for many veterans an individual, traumatic experience, into a collective legitimization for the State – moreover, it is a State which has outlived the gendered and ethno-national boundaries associated with that telos.

25 For Reid, this crux of trauma and embodiment also has a biographical dimension. When Imelda Foley once asked her about the “ambivalence” whereby she depicts the Ulster Protestant psyche “like Frank McGuinness”, Reid responded: My grandfather was like that. When I asked him about the Somme he talked about valour, patriotism, loyalty. He wouldn’t question it. He couldn’t, because to question the war would have meant questioning his peacetime allegiances too, King and Country, God and Ulster. Everything he’d lived and survived by37.

26 In My Name, Andrea expresses a similar sentiment about Andrew: You must have moments of doubt. You must have. You’re stubborn and you’re proud, but you’re not a fool. Loyalty. Patriotism. Them or Us. You daren’t question what all that has done to you, because once you question even a small part of it, you end up questioning it all. And to do that, would be to negate your whole life. Everything you’ve lived and survived by (275-6).

27 In fact, reading Andrea’s sentiment through traumatology revises the former consensus that Reid casts Andrew as rather “one-dimensional38”. Andrew’s one- dimensionality should be read as representative: he metonymizes the effects of being claimed by, and made the mouthpiece for, a particular (traumatic) mythography. As such, Reid raises a concern pertinent to current attempts at reconciliation, as Ireland enters its decade of centenaries: to what extent has individual, private processing of trauma been influenced or appropriated by sociopolitical exigencies? For as the play suggests, if Andrew cannot mourn his former best friend Edward Reilly, it is because mourning Edward – a traumatized objector – would be a “betrayal” to Ulster. Consequently, Andrew’s friend remains part of an impossible history within himself, persistently returning to him, hauntingly. But it is Andrea who brings us to this insight. She actively disembodies the conception of masculinist, ethno-nationality Andrew is locked in by acknowledging and legitimizing contiguous narratives of trauma: that is, Edward Reilly’s own conception of how the Somme should be processed, a conception which has been occluded by the same quasi-imperialist, militarist ideology that Andrea, as an Irishwoman, and her Anglo-Pakistani fiancé experience firsthand.

28 Andrea’s last attempt at reaching out to Andrew thus reflects how reconciliation is actuated by recognizing the contexts wherein “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another39”. She imagines the well-known moment when “one Christmas Day, during the First World War, a group of British and German soldiers called a halt to the fighting, and declared a truce” (276). Thinking of her separation from her grandfather in the 1980s present, Andrea’s reflection analogizes the necessity of finding common ground to reconcile ideological differences through diplomacy, especially in a decade rife with sectarian violence amongst the paramilitary forces of Northern Ireland, the

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Republic, and England: “there must be an hour, a place, where he and I can meet. A piece of common ground. A no-man’s land. If it’s possible for strangers, then it’s possible for us” (276). She anticipates the attitude toward reconciliation needed to move past ideological confinement, both within the United Kingdom and toward the Republic: “To make peace”, she concludes, she and her grandfather must move beyond mere tolerance; they must acknowledge each other’s suffering and say, “I love you, even though I have grown to loathe everything you believe in” (275). Ultimately, Andrea acts out Reid’s vision for a mode of reconciliation predicated on “listening to another’s wound40”, that is, enacting empathy by acknowledging the possibility – and legitimacy – of another’s trauma. And, as Northern Ireland and the Republic move further into a decade devoted to commemorating warfare and trauma, My Name represents literary narrative’s place in offering “a new mode of reading and listening41 ”, within and across borders.

NOTES

1. Christina Reid, Plays: 1. London, Methuen Drama, 1997, p. 276. Subsequent references appear in parentheses in the text, and the title will henceforth be abbreviated to My Name. 2. Maria Kurdi, “Interview with Christina Reid”, The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies. Vol. 6, June 2004, p. 212. 3. As Heinz Kosok notes, in My Name, Andrew reads the Troubles as an “event that to him is still the Great War”. Heinz Kosok, The Theatre of War: The First World War in British and Irish Drama, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 57. 4. Adrian Gregory and Senia Paseta (eds.), Ireland and the Great War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002, p. 6; Loughlin James, “Mobilising the sacred dead: Ulster Unionism, the Great War and the politics of remembrance”, ibid., p. 148. 5. A term coined by playwright Tennessee Williams for his play The Glass Menagerie, Williams defines the dramaturgy of the “memory play” as having a particular “freedom of convention” (XIX) […], noting that “memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic” (3). The genre of the memory play originates with Williams, Harold Pinter, and Brian Friel, although the latter two authors may not ascribe this term to their own works. As Williams goes on to describe, the genre’s conventions include heavy reliance on a protagonist’s rather dim, poetic, and quite unreliable versions of the past often vocalized through monologues and ruminations. The dramas’ sets are also minimal, drawing focus on the verbal content rather than the physical. These features are characteristic of Reid’s My Name and two other Irish First World War plays, Frank McGuinness’s Sons of Ulster (1985) and Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995). In these plays, memory is of traumatic events and loss associated with the First World War, represented by the trope of veterans as ghosts, or ghostly

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voices. For further commentary on the memory play genre, see: Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, New York, New Directions Publishing, 1999, p. XIX-3; Attilio Favorini, “Some Memory Plays before the ‘Memory Play’”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 22.1, 2007, p. 29-52. 6. Frank McGuinness, Plays, Volume 1, London, , 1986, p. X. 7. This article’s reference for assessing the sound effects of radio drama is: Dermot Rattigan, Theatre of Sound: Radio and the Dramatic Imaginations, Dublin, Carysfort Press, 2002. Rattigan’s discussions of the affective function of sound are useful in assessing My Name’s use of both distant-sounding voiceovers for Andrew’s and Andrea’s memories, and for the drama’s symbolic, physical objects, like the recurrent sound of distant prison doors shutting (of Andrea’s cell), which are also heard when Andrew is speaking. Andrew’s voiceover effect is recorded at a distance (in terms of microphone placement). This not only creates a sense of “the past” in both space and time, but also produces a disembodied-type resonance to his voice; the aural affect this creates is as if his voice utters against his own control, and those utterances intrude into the present. Furthermore, splicing those utterances with the sound of Andrea’s closing prison cell doors accentuates what Rattigan calls the “extended signification” or “sonic significance” (173) of such objects: the sound effect accentuates the notion that Andrew is also “imprisoned” or “confined” by his own utterance, reinforced when his voiceovers carry those utterances into the play’s present. 8. For sustained analyses of the sacrificial mythography ascribed to the 36 th (Ulster) Division in the North of Ireland, see: Jane G.V. McGaughey, “The Glorious First of July: The 36th (Ulster) Division at the Somme”, Ulster’s Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912-1923, Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012; Edna, Longley, “The Rising, the Somme and Irish Memory”, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle, Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1994; Thomas Henessey, Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition, London, Routledge, 1998. 9. Succinctly summarizing this now well established premise, President Michael Higgins reiterated at the Abbey Theatre’s 2014 Memory Symposium: “In the Irish context, World War One as a subject for commemoration poses the difficult issue of Ireland’s divided, or even divisive, memories. It casts the Battle of the Somme, so central to Irish Unionists’ identity versus the 1916 Rising”. Michael D. Higgins, “Of Myth-Making and Ethical Remembering”, Theatre of Memory Symposium, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland, 16 January 2014, Keynote Address. 10. Claire, Tylee, “‘Name upon Name’: Myth, Ritual and the Past in Recent Irish Plays Referring to the Great War”, Aranzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam (eds.), Dressing up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and Literature of War, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2001, p. 276. 11. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 1. 12. Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 5. 13. As a Northern Irish, working-class Protestant woman, Reid develops in My Name a unique project to Irish First World War literature, for she prioritizes women’s interrogations of the war. Her character Andrea’s cognizance about the masculine control over the writing of history and subsequent shared memory of the First World

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War and the Somme aligns My Name with Reid’s overarching theatrical project, which in Maria Delgado’s words, is to give voice to “those whose experiences lie outside of ‘official’ history – particularly working-class women” (VIII). “Introduction,” Christina Reid, Plays: 1. London, Methuen Drama, 1997. Moreover, in her references to the First World War, including those in Tea in a China Cup (1983), Reid’s objective is to depict, as Claire Tylee points out, “women’s responses to the ways in which masculine identity is constituted by violence and national identity by war”. Claire Tylee et al. (eds.), War Plays by Women: An International Anthology, London, Routledge, 1999, p. 211. 14. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 8. 15. Frank McGuinness, Plays, Volume 1, London, Faber and Faber, 1986, p. 11-12. 16. Joseph Lee, Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 14. 17. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, op. cit., p. 1. 18. Christina Coveney, “Christina Reid Obituary”, The Guardian, 5 June 2015. 19. As they are in My Name, flashbacks and/or appearances of ghosts linked to prior events of violence and the First World War are tropes in McGuinness’s Sons of Ulster and Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom. 20. For the most recent, comprehensive analysis of the performative and cultural parameters of the martial, Protestant unionist, Northern Irish male identity, see: Jane McGaughey, Ulster’s Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912-1923, Montreal, McGill-Queens University Press, 2012. 21. Claire Tylee, “‘Name upon Name’: Myth, Ritual and the Past in Recent Irish Plays Referring to the Great War”, Aranzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam (eds.), Dressing up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and Literature of War, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2001, p. 284. 22. William B. Yeats, The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose, (ed.) Richard J. Finneran, New York, Scribner Poetry, 1997. 23. McGuinness, Sons of Ulster, p. 12. 24. Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry: WB Yeats to Michael Longley, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 35. 25. The grave sacrifice made by the 36th (Ulster) Division on 1 and 2 July was significant, for four out of nine Victoria Crosses were awarded to the 36th, and they incurred 5,500 casualties and about 2,000 deaths. Unfortunately, as Philip Orr notes, amongst the backdrop of the 400,000 British soldiers lost to the Somme offensive, and given the way domestic politics anticipatively claimed the Ulster Division as their sacrificial dead, the individual soldiers were indeed the ones who paid most dearly. Ulster HQ let its troops traverse no man’s land a little too soon, and the 36th Division never received the support that other divisions, like the 18th, had received against the German machine gun fire. Orr thus points out that while touted as heroes back home, the private 36th Division soldier on the front found out that, in fact, “he was not a hero; he was simply expendable”. Phillip Orr, The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division Tell Their Story, Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1987, p. 200-201.

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26. Jim Haughey, “‘Up to Our Necks in Fenian Blood’: , Its Myths and the Somme in Christina Reid’s My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?”, Publication of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, Vol. 20, 2003, p. 10. 27. Ibid., p. 10. 28. Andrew himself sings “We are the Billy Boys”, an homage to Protestant William of Orange’s victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne. 29. Reid’s allusions here are numerous. The Twelfth of July Parade not only marks the anniversary of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne victory, which solidified the Protestant Ascendancy’s position in Ireland for centuries, but the Orange Order began integrating 1 July 1916 as part of that commemoration, not least since the Somme Offensive’s date coincides with 12 July on the Julian calendar. Likewise, the Relief of Derry (Siege of Derry), marks the beginning of the Williamite Wars of which the Boyne was later part. Finally, like Tea in a China Cup’s depictions of portraits of Northern Irish soldiers of the Somme alongside those of Dunkirk during the Second World War, My Name conveys how the pride of volunteer service amongst many Northern Irish soldiers during the First World War carried on into the Second World War, becoming a linked legacy of unionist military history. As in the First World War, conscription was never imposed in either Éire or Northern Ireland between 1939-1945, and although Northern Irish attitudes toward participating in the Second World War were divided, 38,000 Northern Irish (including 7,000 women) volunteered for service – and after the evacuation of Dunkirk, Northern Ireland saw an increase in enlistment. See: Keith Jeffery, “The British Army and Ireland since 1922”, Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A military history of Ireland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 7. 30. As such, many of Reid’s young, Northern Irish protagonists are emigrants like Andrea, including Eileen in The King of the Castle (1999) ; Sandra, in Clowns (1996). and Rose in The Belle of Belfast City (1989). 31. Imelda Foley, The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Theatre, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2003, p. 70. 32. Claire Tylee et al. (eds.), War Plays by Women: An International Anthology, London, Routledge, 1999, p. 212. 33. Andrea is inspired to transform the protest into an impromptu commemoration with an elderly Englishwoman whose male relatives have been made casualties by the British Army. Lighting candles (as does Andrea to add to her Great War litany, Hanif, Edward Reilly, and her grandfather), the women walk toward the guards as the Englishwoman protests on behalf of her “nephew crippled in the Falklands”, her “lover killed at Dunkirk”, and her “father shellshocked at the Battle of the Somme” (273). With stark irony, which is Reid’s indictment against British imperialism’s inherent racism, the British Guards accuse Andrea of being an IRA affiliate simply because she has an Irish accent; they arrest her and imprison her at Greenham, where she is then sexually abused – another permutation of martial male misogyny (273-4). 34. Imelda Foley, The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Theatre, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2003, p. 66. Elaborating on Reid’s project in My Name to envision women’s resistance to the enduring, masculinist control over the Somme’s memory, she writes: “Reid’s approach, however, is a search for a form that may define the lost lives of women who have worked to maintain the silence of the men of the Somme and their official historians maintained and defended for more than half a century. It is a

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silence that women have perpetuated, possibly against their will, a form of collusion that could never be described as ‘feminist’, a form of life that denies any kind of freedom” (67). 35. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 8. 36. Jon Patočka refers to the “solidarity of the shaken” in Heretical Essays, specifically with the First World War in mind. He goes on to write that “the solidarity of the shaken is built up in persecution and uncertainty: that is its front line, quiet, without fanfare or sensation even there where this aspect of the ruling Force seeks to seize it”. Jon Patočka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Eds. J. Dodd, transl. E. Kohak, Chicago and La Salle, Open Court, 1996, p. 135. 37. Imelda Foley, The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Theatre, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2003, p. 60. 38. This is the term interviewer Maria Kurdi uses to refer to what she views as the stereotypical depictions of Protestant loyalist Ulsterman in Reid’s plays (207), while critic Jim Haughey refers similarly to the “didactic nature” of Reid’s dialogues (12). However, this article suggests that the portrayal and dialogue of such Ulsterman is Reid’s way of signifying the way a particular loyalist narrative – or any ideology – is often ventriloquized, even if unwittingly. Reid’s dramatization of ventriloquy highlights the pressure placed on veterans who have been heroicized by the state; as Andrea points out, for such men, having any moments of doubt or questioning would mean negating their senses of survival (256). 39. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 8. 40. Ibid., p. 8. 41. Ibid., p. 9.

ABSTRACTS

Christina Reid’s radio play My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? (1987) confronts the crisis of identity that the Somme offensive effectuated for First World War veterans in the North of Ireland. Interrogating the Somme as part of Northern Ireland’s state-level political teleology, My Name exposes the hegemonic pressure that this claim put on veterans to be received as ideal embodiments of a too narrowly defined Northern Irish identity – the martial, male Protestant unionist. Reid’s play depicts the longstanding ethno-national and gendered exclusions predicated by Northern Ireland’s processing of the trauma of the Somme.

Dans sa pièce radiophonique My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?, Christina Reid aborde la crise d’identité qui affecte les vétérans de la Première Guerre mondiale ayant participé à la Bataille de la Somme dans le Nord de l’Irlande. Elle montre que la Somme fait partie d’une rhétorique téléologique perpétrée par l’État, et dénonce la pression qui pèse sur ces vétérans sommés d’incarner l’idéal d’une identité nord-irlandaise définie trop étroitement : le mâle Protestant

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unioniste martial. La pièce de Reid décrit toute la série d’exclusions générées dans le Nord de l’Irlande suite à cet événement traumatique.

INDEX

Keywords: Reid Christina, Northern Ireland, battle of the Somme (1916), trauma, radio, First World War, collective identity, body Mots-clés: Reid Christina, Première Guerre mondiale, bataille de la Somme (1916), corps, trauma, identité collective, radio, Irlande du Nord

AUTHOR

ANDRÉA CALOIARO Andréa Caloiaro holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida, where he currently teaches courses in discipline-specific writing, literature, and cultural studies. His research examines Irish First World War fiction and drama through the lenses of trauma theory, narratology, and literature’s relationship to historiography and public commemoration.

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Intimations of Mortality: Stewart Parker’s Hopdance

Marilynn Richtarik

1 Born in Belfast in 1941, Stewart Parker is best remembered today as one of the most accomplished Irish playwrights of the twentieth century. I spent the better part of twenty years researching and writing a critical biography of him that, by its very nature, emphasizes the author’s human existence at a particular time and in specific places and argue, implicitly, that these were determining factors in the writing he produced. As a scholar, then, I am intimately engaged with the theme of this issue in at least two senses: the embodiment of the (Northern) Irish author, and the body of his work. Hopdance mattered crucially to Parker in both of these aspects, but it remained unpublished and, indeed, unfinished when he died in his late forties. It is a phantom limb that exerts a constant, invisible pressure on his corpus. In 2017, for the first time, readers will have the opportunity to encounter this work, in an edition compiled by me and published by The Lilliput Press in Dublin. In this essay, I introduce Hopdance, describing and analyzing the text.

The text of Hopdance

2 Largely drafted in the early 1970s, Hopdance records Parker’s state of mind and events from his life before, during, and after the bout with bone cancer that resulted in the amputation of his left leg when he was nineteen years old. In the immediate aftermath of this surgery, the physical dimension of his loss had overwhelmed any other response. For some time after his hospital stay ended, he recalled, “I was in terrible pain, I was in a stupor [. . .]. I was drifting through life in a dream1”. He came to believe that he had been in a state of shock, “so preoccupied with trying to survive that there [was] no time for thinking about anything else2”. After the shock wore off, a resolute determination to resume his life as if the amputation were merely a minor inconvenience had helped Parker smother his fear that the cancer might recur. Finally, in his late twenties, he decided the time had come to confront the “longer term psychological effects” of the fact that “a big bit of my body was gone to the grave3”.

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3 In Hopdance, Parker transformed body into text, structuring his experience of amputation in a way that gave it meaning for him. His alter ego, Tosh (whose name signifies his callowness before this ordeal), is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin “cankers4” of a puzzling pain in his leg and a crippling loneliness. As the story of the amputation and its aftermath unfolds, Tosh begins to allow other people to share his suffering and moves closer to being able to make the great connection he has sought to another human being. His reflections on writing punctuate his process of maturation as a person. The amputation, Parker suggests, makes him a serious writer by forcing him into a more authentic relation to life, which “Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones5”.

4 Parker worked on Hopdance sporadically in 1970 and 1971 and more steadily for two years after that, completing a draft in September 1973. He then began tinkering with the order of the scenes and typing up a final draft, but by early 1975 he was only nine pages into this work and acknowledged to himself that he had lost interest in the project. He had needed to write the book but could not summon the energy to polish and revise it. Instead, he put the manuscript aside, satisfied that it had served a private, therapeutic purpose for him. Later that year, his stage play Spokesong took the Dublin Theatre Festival by storm, inaugurating its triumphal progress around the globe, and soon after that Parker abandoned poetry and experimental prose in order to concentrate on drama. Hopdance remained unfinished business for him, however, and for the rest of his life at times of emotional crisis he returned to the manuscript. In 1988, after a new cancer diagnosis, he began working on it in a concerted fashion, having decided to add several scenes, only about half of which he managed to draft before he died. Parker, then, would have considered the novel as he left it (with a few scenes typed and most remaining in manuscript) only part of a projected whole, as his post-amputation physique was only part of a body.

5 Hopdance has fascinated me since June 1994, when Parker’s executor, Lesley Bruce, allowed me to examine the manuscript. I knew the novel had never achieved the apotheosis Parker had envisaged for it, but to my mind it possessed a raw power even in its patchwork state. Although incomplete in Parker’s terms, its form meant that there were no obvious holes or gaps in it. Fragmentary by nature, it readily accommodated new fragments – and could just as easily do without them. It therefore seemed possible to me to produce an edited version of Hopdance that, while not fulfilling Parker’s ultimate vision for it, at least would not do violence to it.

6 Throughout the editorial process, my aim was to present, to the best of my ability, Parker’s words, while minimizing the distraction presented by stylistic inconsistencies. I wanted the reader’s experience of Hopdance to be that of encountering a new novel by a contemporary writer, so I avoided drawing attention to my procedures in the text itself, confining such comments to an introductory note and a series of appendices to the novel that illustrate its composition history. I am tremendously grateful to Parker’s estate for allowing me to undertake this labour of love and giving me a free hand in its completion. I also acknowledge the invaluable assistance provided by Mary Grace Elliott, who helped me to check the typescript through several drafts and to formulate the rules by which the work would be carried on, and to my agent, Jonathan Williams, who embraced this unconventional project and managed to find a publisher for it. Antony Farrell and The Lilliput Press produced a beautiful edition of Hopdance for publication in 2017, enabling a general readership to discover what I have known now

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for over two decades: that Stewart Parker was a remarkable prose writer as well as an inventive dramatist.

A reading of Hopdance

7 In Hopdance, as in an earlier unpublished novel, Parker sought to challenge novelistic conventions regarding linear structure and character development by illustrating “simultaneity of event and stasis of character […] pitted against an alarmingly unpredictable universe”. Since, he argued, “life is largely lived, not in the present tense, but in the continuous past tense”, he rejected “a step-by-step narrative” in favor of “a sequence of narrative images which will enact themselves simultaneously in the reader’s mind when he has finished reading them by the intricate way in which they are connected6”. As Tosh explains to his friend Harrison, “You take the fragments of your past […]. You fit them into whatever mosaic seems to work. It has nothing to do with time or space” – except that, in his own case, “figments” might be a more appropriate description of them: I remember single incidents with surrealistic intensity, they never happened the way they replay themselves in my head. Most of them were insignificant at the time, I’ve forgotten all the big production numbers. But these small moments obsess me7.

8 W. B. Yeats, one of Parker’s most illustrious forebears in the Irish literary tradition, stressed the performative nature of writing. In an introduction written for a projected edition of his collected works, he famously declares that “a poet writes always of his personal life” but also insists that “he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete”. In other words, a poem’s speaker may be a projection of the person who wrote it, but the “I” of the poem has no objective existence outside the text. “A novelist”, Yeats allows, “might describe his accidence, his incoherence”, but the poet must not: “he is more type than man, more passion than type8”.

9 Much as he admired Yeats, Parker always found the example of James Joyce more congenial to his own sensibility. As Joyce does in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (allusions to which abound in Hopdance), Parker regards his protagonist with both sympathy and ironic detachment. Like Joyce, he constructs his novel with scenes and vignettes representing his own youthful self. Both authors seem intent on highlighting the accidence and incoherence that Yeats decries, the way that human development proceeds in fits and starts. Joyce’s Portrait presents a series of provisional resolutions that its immature hero, Stephen Dedalus, takes for permanent ones, ending with his exultant escape from Ireland to pursue his dream of becoming an artist – an upbeat conclusion exposed at the beginning of Ulysses as yet another underestimation on his part of the actual difficulty of growing up. Parker goes even further, arranging the episodes of Hopdance non-chronologically to undercut any illusion of linear development in Tosh’s character.

10 Tosh actually learns very little in the course of Hopdance. Most of what he knows in the scenes that come last chronologically he also knew in the scenes that come first. The most obvious example of this phenomenon concerns Tosh’s attitude towards the opposite sex. Throughout Hopdance, he seeks a female soul mate to fulfill his every physical, mental, and emotional need, although the only women who genuinely excite

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his imagination are those who want nothing of the kind from him. Tosh’s girlfriend, Prudence, with whom he attempts repeatedly to break up; a schoolboy crush named Ingrid; an old flame, Cora; a nurse he dates post-amputation; nameless girls he tries to seduce in various places – all represent, or have represented, Tosh’s most exalted hopes for human connection. He acknowledges the absurdity of his impulses and actions, admitting to himself, in a scene two-thirds of the way through the novel, that you see them either as harpies or Beatrices; first as a Beatrice, then as a harpy. Your masculine bequest, that. It has to end. You turn to a woman expecting God incarnate, you’re hot for godhead more than maidenhead, it has to end9.

11 This inner dialogue echoes an earlier conversation with his friend Higgins, set pre- surgery, in which Tosh denounces the ideal of romantic love as “a con a fantasy a cruel lie”: “That the answer to whatever ails you is some magic member of the opposite sex, or your own if that’s your taste10”. Despite this mature awareness, demonstrated at intervals from beginning to end of Hopdance, the penultimate scene of the novel, and probably the last one chronologically, depicts a desperate Tosh making a clumsy pass at Prudence’s friend Florence, who, it turns out, has stopped by his flat mainly in order to tell him that Prudence would like to see him again. After all, Tosh is still a young man. Hopdance does not present his steady progression toward enlightenment, but rather flashes of illumination interspersed with episodes displaying the self-delusion he shares with everybody else.

12 Tosh’s continually thwarted efforts to make a romantic connection alternate in the novel with scenes illustrating his incipient recognition of himself as part of a larger community of people who will die. In Hopdance, Tosh grapples with the classic adolescent questions about who he is and how he fits into the world. His coming of age, like that of Joyce’s Stephen, is coloured by his conviction that he is destined to be a writer, but it is also complicated by his untimely brush with mortality. The most significant “accident” of all in the novel is, of course, Tosh’s cancer, which transforms his ordinary teenage angst into a full-blown existential crisis, forcing him to test his theories against the reality of pain and suffering.

13 In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag analyzes the peculiar horror attaching to tuberculosis and cancer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fantasies about them flourish, she contends, “because TB and cancer are thought to be much more than diseases that usually are (or were) fatal. They are identified with death itself” – and this, in “advanced industrial societies,” is increasingly hard to accept. “For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural”, she writes, “death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied11”. The problem with death-denial, however, is that it entails a similar denial of the great truth about human life: it ends. As one of the characters in Parker’s stage play Nightshade puts it, we are the tribe which has lost the knowledge of how to die. In the boundless abundance of knowledge by which we act, this supreme skill has somehow been mislaid. Yet this one action – which we all dread – is the only one that’s forced upon us all without exception. And we do it in shame and in confusion. Other tribes, who knew much less, at least knew this. They died with conviction and finesse. But we are entirely in the dark. And the black void of our ignorance spreads wider still. For a person begins to die at the moment of birth. So dying is an action that we perform throughout our lives. And so – at the heart’s core – we are the tribe which has lost the knowledge of how to live12.

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14 expresses similar ideas more succinctly in King Lear, a play that provided Parker with both the title and the epigraph for Hopdance: “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all13.”

15 Tosh does not discover that he will die as a result of the events of the novel. He knows this from the outset, like any competent adult, and is struggling to come to terms with mortality even before he understands the grave nature of his physical complaint. The fear of death, or at least a desire to find some meaning in it, has buttressed much religious conviction throughout human history, but Tosh finds little to sustain him in the faith he inherited. Having grown up surrounded by Northern Ireland’s dreary sectarianism, he instinctively rejects organized religion. Ulster Christianity, absurd and inadvertently destructive, hovers at the edges of Hopdance, epitomized in the figure of a devout lady in a who urges Tosh, lying in his hospital bed, to consider the pangs of Hell and prepare himself to meet God through self-abasing prayer. Still, in an early scene, Tosh identifies himself as an “agnostic14”, and he has clearly yearned to tap into what Evelyn Underhill, in a classic volume on mysticism, describes as “the essential religious experience of man15”, “the science or art of the spiritual life16”. “It must be easier”, Tosh reflects, “if you have the machinery. Machinery of faith. [ . . .] Machinery would keep you afloat, if I had any to believe in17”.

16 Even the generalized faith of the mystics proves no match for his critical faculty, however: “Unitive Life. That fulsome jargon: the Mystic Way. I wanted to. I can’t abide their sanctimony. Reverential earnestness. Repulsive prose18”. His own spiritual impulses, such as they are, do not tend toward what Underhill terms “complete harmony with the transcendental order19”. They express themselves, rather, in moments in which he grasps the extent of human frailty. In the same interior monologue in which he dismisses the claims of religion, Tosh asserts that I could cry for bodies. […] The young boy at the bus-stop. Just looking down on the pity of his thin shoulder-blades, the whole bus irradiated by that. For one moment. A cosmic smile. I could have embraced the world. The astonishing terrible spectacle of us all living our lives20.

17 During much of the novel, however, his own ailing body is wrenching him out of human communion, “dragging me away from that”, as he puts it, “Drowning me. Deep down into my self21”. Throughout Hopdance, Tosh seeks to understand who he really is – or, as he puts it at one point, “Where does I end22?” He does not feel truly represented by his interactions with other people, since he is different with every person he encounters. Where, then, can he locate his essential self? Is it the voice in his head, the articulator of his consciousness? But what about that consciousness itself, which has recently centered itself on a throbbing pain? Surely the “I” exists in the body, too – is at least “Voice immersed in body23”. But even this conception does not quite encompass Tosh’s sense of himself.

18 Such questions are crystallized for him on the night before his amputation, when he first learns about the impending surgery. Left alone at last, he considers its implications: Unknown was the only word for what was facing him. It might be death. Whatever that meant. It would certainly be some form of death. He pushed back the bed- clothes and placed his left leg on top of them. He wouldn’t be the same person after they took it away. A quarter of him would have disappeared.[…] He pondered on where they would take the leg, what they would do with it. Medical students would practice on it, probably.[…] At any rate, it would have preceded the

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other three quarters of his ailing animal into the purely vegetable and mineral existence of dead matter. Or into the consciousness of which all matter partakes. Or into a spot from which it could conveniently fly out to be reunited with its hip on the Day of Judgement. It was generally assumed that a faith in such convictions was essential to face ordeals of suffering and death with equanimity. Yet Tosh felt entirely composed, and certain of nothing except for his own blind ignorance. The only resource he was aware of was the voice in his head itself, the fact of his own consciousness, and it was telling him that tomorrow when the knife and the saw went in, it itself would be drowned in gristle and blood and then he would have no resources at all. The fear created by such a prospect was an experience which entirely transcended the familiar everyday emotion which had frequently loosened his bowels and dried his mouth. It was a state of emotional refrigeration which had created the almost preternatural calm in which his thoughts were ordering themselves so composedly24.

19 Parker told an interviewer in 1977 that “the worst experience a writer can have is one that is far beyond the reach of language, as pain is25”. The initial effect of the amputation is to isolate Tosh in a region of himself that he could barely imagine before it. Immediately after his surgery, “Tosh was in a new dimension beyond messages26”. He looks at a friend who has come to visit him as though through the eye of a fish. He lay like a long still fish in the murk at the bottom of a tank. He lay there out of time and space, submerged in a fluid that dissolves language and touching, entirely alone with himself, at last27.

20 This experience seems at first a mere stripping-away of identity, but eventually Tosh finds that it has added something to his self-understanding. Much later, he explains to Florence that I know my body’s a behaviourist puppet […]. The mind makes these bones talk. And the words are all we have. And beyond the words and the mind is where you feel you live. An illusory place, probably, a void, a necessary fiction. I’m very attached to that word, soul28.

21 None the less, Tosh remains what he calls “a faithful subject of the secular realm29”. His realizations in extremis drive him towards union, not with God, but with other human beings. A hospital ward, he tells Prudence, is one of the “most public places in the world”, but also one of the places “where people are most trapped in themselves”: The beds are all in rows […] But everybody believes that their suffering’s unique to themselves, it can’t be shared, and what’s happening to all the others is just an abstraction called pain or sickness, not the real actual hell that they’re in. And the visitors all grieve for their own private person, but all this private grief is going on in a vast company of isolated grieving visitors. […] If you step back and observe in these places, you get a kind of desperate, hilarious feeling that we’re all identical heads on a single body, but none of us can conceive that, because all the heads are blind. We’ve got everything in common including a conviction of personal uniqueness30.

22 In time, Tosh comes to believe that “It’s only through each other that we even begin to exist at all31”, and he grounds his new attitude in his visceral apprehension of human vulnerability.

23 Tosh’s periodic visits to the limb-fitting centre reinforce his sense of himself as “badged for life32” by his narrow escape from death. On his first visit, to be fitted for a crude pylon limb, Tosh studies his fellow clients in the waiting room: He scanned the line of feet opposite. One foot of each pair sat cocked on its heel at an odd angle; in two cases, a shiny brown patch of leg visible above the top of the contrasted oddly with the hairy whiteness of the corresponding patch

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alongside it. By these signs shall we be known. Tosh raised his eyes discreetly and scrutinised the faces: a young red-haired country boy, a heavy-set man with hair in his nostrils, a thin old man with violet strings of veins across the backs of his hands. It had not occurred to him till now that he was a member of a freemasonry. A novice arrived for initiation33.

24 A subsequent appointment finds him fascinated by how their appearances from the waist up, including his own, proclaimed an almost caricatured identity: whilst from the waist down, they were equally trouserless, each with one whole white and hairy leg and one longer or shorter stump of its fellow34.

25 All the patients he encounters at the limb-fitting centre share with him some form of the bodily lack that is an emblem of their mortality – which is to say their humanity.

26 Recognitions like these confirm Tosh’s pre-existing egalitarianism: given such a commonality, all differences must appear trivial indeed. In the final scene of Hopdance, which takes place chronologically about midway through Tosh’s ordeal, Tosh, still on crutches, “poles his way” through the windy city. Spying a one-legged beggar sitting on the footpath, Tosh approaches him. The last lines of the novel, which shift significantly from third to first person, highlight the restorative power of human connection and of story-telling: Tosh pulls off the crutches from his arms and slides down beside the man. Together they look around them. He gives the man a cigarette, takes one for himself. — What’s your story, son? the man asks him then. So I tell him my story. And at last free. Peace, for a brief spell, at least. Peace35.

27 Although readers know that nothing has been settled for good – nothing ever is, as long as one remains alive – Hopdance ends on an affirmative note.

28 Tosh identifies a similar “confessional fever” as the essence of the “artistic impulse” in an earlier scene in which he describes to Harrison his idea for a stage play based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “It’s the obsessive need to rehearse your memory of hell. If you don’t enact it from time to time, it’ll rend out your heart36”. Clearly Hopdance served such a purpose for Parker, who never made any attempt to publish it in his lifetime, but he also saw the value of honest communication between writers and readers. On 17 May 1966 – the fifth anniversary of his amputation – he wrote an essay on the nature and purpose of art that begins with his expression of “A total conviction that life as we understand it is moving towards annihilation37”. Authors of the past, he asserts, wrote with an awareness of themselves as part of an ongoing tradition; contemporary writers have neither an audience with a sense of the history of this tradition nor any reason to believe that there will be anyone left to read their work in a generation or two. Why, then, bother to write? For himself, Parker declares, art allows him “to prepare himself for my own death […] but also to prepare himself for the larger death of which I am a tiny part38”. In this way, he admits, art is fundamentally “a communion with yourself39”, but it can also be more than that because the artist is simply a man with a more than average distinctiveness and persuasiveness and originality in his voice, one who can not only offer a worthwhile vision of his own, but can also help people to find the right words or perceptions or images or tones of voice to clarify and communicate their personal truths. That is his job now, just as it has always been, and, if anything, it is more important now than ever before, and less possible40.

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29 As Tosh leaves the limb-fitting centre for the last time in Hopdance, having just received his first articulated leg, a prosthesis with a knee joint that does not have to be worked manually, the narrator observes that he “emerged into the world, moving with a gingerly limp on a stick, with a whole body again to all appearances41”. Parker here offers his readers a compact metaphor for the survival of trauma – not least the trauma of knowing, and believing, that death is not just for other people.

NOTES

1. Stewart Parker, quoted in Niki Hill, “The Way We Were”, Sunday News, 11 October 1987. 2. Stewart Parker, quoted in Caroline Walsh, “Stewart Parker”, Irish Times, 13 August 1977. 3. Ibid. 4. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, ed. Marilynn Richtarik (with the assistance of Mary Grace Elliott), Dublin, Lilliput, 2017, p. 131. 5. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, p. 11. 6. Stewart Parker, handwritten notes dated 21 January 1968, quoted in Richtarik, “A Note on the Text of Hopdance” in Hopdance, p. XIII. 7. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, p. 12-13. 8. W. B. Yeats, selections from “Essays for the Scribner Edition of Yeats’s Collected Works (1937)” in James Pethica (ed.), Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, New York, Norton, 2000, p. 300-301. 9. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, op. cit., p. 95. 10. Ibid., p. 18-19. 11. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978, p. 18, 8, 55. 12. Stewart Parker, Nightshade, Dublin, Co-op Books, 1980, p. 52-53. 13. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. David Bevington, et al., New York, Bantam, 1988, p. 120. Hopdance’s epigraph consists of lines from a speech by Edgar in Shakespeare’s play, a character who is feigning madness at the time: “The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hopdance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herrings. Croak not, black angel; I have no food for thee.” I am not aware, however, of any other explicit allusions to King Lear in the novel, and there is no explanation in the text of the Hopdance reference in the epigraph. 14. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, op. cit., p. 8. 15. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1941, p. VII.

16. Ibid., p. XIV.

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17. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, op. cit., p. 27. 18. Ibid. 19. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, op. cit., p. XIV. 20. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, op. cit., p. 27. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., p. 45-46. 25. Stewart Parker, quoted in Walsh, “Stewart Parker”. 26. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, op. cit., p. 66. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 133. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 111. 31. Ibid., p. 133. 32. Ibid., p. 91. 33. Ibid., p. 86. 34. Ibid., p. 104-105. 35. Ibid., p. 134-135. 36. Ibid., p. 55. 37. Stewart Parker, untitled manuscript essay dated 17 May 1966, included as an appendix to the Lilliput edition of Hopdance, p. 147. 38. Ibid., p. 149. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 152. 41. Stewart Parker, Hopdance, op. cit., p. 129.

ABSTRACTS

Northern Irish playwright Stewart Parker (1941-1988) as well as wrote poetry and experimental prose. His autobiographical novel Hopdance, which deals with the amputation of his left leg when he was nineteen years old, has been edited by his biographer Marilynn Richtarik and will be made available in 2017 by The Lilliput Press. This essay, introduces and analyzes Hopdance, a previously unpublished work that sheds considerable light on Parker’s preoccupations as a writer.

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Le dramaturge nord-irlandais Stewart Parker (1941-1988) a aussi écrit des poèmes et de la prose expérimentale. Son roman autobiographique Hopdance, qui parle de l’amputation de sa jambe gauche lorsqu’il avait 19 ans, fait l’objet d’une édition critique élaborée par sa biographe Marilynn Richtarik qui sera publiée chez Liliput Press en 1917. Cet article propose une introduction à Hopdance, œuvre jusqu’alors inédite qui met en lumière les préoccupations artistiques de Parker.

INDEX

Keywords: Parker Stewart, body, autobiography, mortality, contemporary literature, literature – novels Mots-clés: Parker Stewart, corps, autobiographie, littérature contemporaine, mortalité, littérature – roman

AUTHOR

MARILYNN RICHTARIK Marilynn Richtarik is a Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta and the author of two books published by Oxford University Press: Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1995) and Stewart Parker: A Life (2012). The Lilliput Press will publish her edition of Parker’s autobiographical novel Hopdance in 2017.

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Performing trauma in post-conflict Northern Ireland: ethics, representation and the witnessing body

Alexander Coupe

1 “The truth cries out, the truth cries out/ How do we still that urgent shout?” asks Danny in couplets that form the refrain of Dave Duggan’s play AH6905 (2005)1. The voices of those who died in the Northern Irish Troubles intrude into Danny’s narrative as he awaits “[t]ruth recovery”, a surgical examination and removal of the malignant past from his body (83). His body represents a Northern Ireland that cannot forget the traumatic past, the dead of which haunt the present causing “spasm[s] of pain” (85). The burden of this past, and its repetition, must be broken. But, as Danny’s refrain indicates, the question remains: how and for whom is one to work through such memories?

2 Problems arise when testimony is appropriated in ways that elide the differences between individual memory, defined by Assmann as memories that are “bound to a specific stance and are thus limited to one perspective […] neither exchangeable nor transferable”, and collective political memory formed when “embodied, homogenous and fuzzy bottom-up memory is transformed into an explicit, homogenous and top- down memory.2” Political performances of remembrance such as Northern Ireland’s annual nationalist and unionist parades use individual bodies and their testimonies to produce ideological narratives of community. What Duggan identifies as the injunction to speak of trauma can therefore become tied to collective practices that deploy the perceived incontestability of loss to sustain hegemonic structures. As representations of the conflict have become depoliticised commodities, tourist attractions in the neoliberal narrative of a post-conflict Northern Ireland open for business, personal testimonies of trauma, when not ignored in the name of maintaining public order, risk being inscribed within ethno-nationalist ideologies that homogenise the diverse experiences of Catholics and Protestants in the region.

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3 To ask for whom the past is remembered is therefore to attend to the gap between individual memory and collective forms of political remembrance, a gap that is pronounced in the case of traumas that remain resistant even to linguistic expression. As Cathy Caruth has noted, traumatic experience cannot be symbolically encoded and overwhelms the individual’s sense-making capacity. But because trauma “simultaneously demands and denies our witness” it requires a mode of representation that maintains an awareness of the ultimate inaccessibility and idiosyncrasy of that which is being communicated3. By contrast, political narratives and public demonstrations, in translating individual memories into collective political memory, often disavow this alterity.

4 Despite the dangers posed by the transformation of trauma into discourse, work exploring truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland has largely focussed on coming to terms with the past through storytelling4. The state’s official methods of gathering personal testimony, from Coroner inquests to the proposed Northern Ireland Oral History Archive, rely heavily on audio recording and transcription and therefore tend to privilege language over physical expression5. This elision is understandable in a region where difference has too often been forcibly written on the body and everyday bodily practices6. The establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly, a forum for verbal rather than physical dispute, is rightly seen as a central achievement of the peace process. However, in order to formulate an ethical approach to the staging and witnessing of trauma, we must understand how the performing body is more than merely a symptom of the absence of proper linguistic expression.

5 By analysing the representation of truth, reconciliation and remembering in Daragh Carville’s play Family Plot (2005), Duggan’s AH6905 (2005) alongside the non-fictional testimonies of Theatre of Witness, this article will outline the ways in which theatre in Northern Ireland places the body centre stage in the working through of the past. It explores both how the body bears witness to that singular aspect of trauma that cannot be transformed into discourse, that is not reducible to ideological narratives of remembrance, and how the body is also a source of empathy through which we, the collective, come to understand the trauma of the Other in relation to our own corporeal exposure. In the productions under discussion, the concomitant universality and particularity of carnal experience allows those present onstage to transmit memories that can only be partially interiorised by the audience of secondary witnesses, and that can never therefore be reduced to sectarian or state-sponsored regimes of remembrance. Caruth’s declaration that attempts to convey elusive traumatic memories require a “language that is always somehow literary” should therefore be extended to consider the body, insofar as its eloquence “defies and demands” understanding, as a site of witness7.

Re-enacting the past in parades and commemorations: regimes of remembrance

6 The difficulty in avoiding the re-inscription of divisive ideologies in remembrance is exemplified in discussion around the process of creating a shared memorial to those who died in the Troubles. In 1999 the Cost of the Troubles Study observed that the establishment of a monument would be “premature” because “tensions still exist, and

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the talks process has not arrived at any settlement or conclusion8”. A decade later, the Consultative Group on the Past reached a near-identical conclusion: The Group does not believe that a shared memorial can be agreed at this time. It remains a contentious issue for many and poses many challenging issues around which we could not see any consensus. Who should the memorial commemorate? Should it have names inscribed and if so, whose names? What should the form of wording be? What form should the memorial itself take9?

7 Both reports suggest that the creation of a memorial implies knowledge of the ideological shape of society before such a society has been achieved. Giving concrete form to an idea of “settlement” or “consensus” risks simplifying the difficult process of coming to terms with the past by reifying an idea of community in the present. In order to be as inclusive as possible, the precise form of consensus should be open to dispute. Consequently the idea of a “living memorial museum”, a space “that can evolve” through the exchange of “living active memories”, has emerged as an alternative that emphasises process rather than product10. This represents the developing understanding in Northern Ireland of collective memory as being negotiated from the bottom up out of a plurality of accounts of the past.

8 Such innovations developed in response to controversial remembrance practices that used the experience of wounding to consolidate ethnonationalist claims. This, in turn, fuelled the equally homogenising liberal narrative of the peace process that positioned the performance of remembrance as a threat to public order and Northern Ireland’s integration into global capitalism. The persistence of old antagonisms that led to the collapse of the Assembly in 2002 resulted in a doubling of funding, between 2003 and 2005, for the Northern Ireland Victims Programme11. But this intensification of memory work was so divisive that Fintan O’Toole, writing after the resumption of devolution in 2007, still maintained that “remembrance [was] as much part of the problem as of the solution12”. 2005 in particular was a watershed year: it saw both the Police Service of Northern Ireland set up their Historical Enquiries Team to investigate equally the 3000 paramilitary murders committed during the Troubles, and the establishment of the controversial “Love Ulster” campaign to advocate on behalf of the victims of IRA violence. As Susan McKay has observed, the latter group “narrated the Troubles as if it was one long IRA onslaught13”. Their 2006 march in Dublin ended in a riot when republicans attacked participants as they walked down O’Connell Street. In the following year Sinn Féin sponsored their own “March for Truth” in Belfast to highlight police collusion. Just as with Love Ulster, the remembrance parade was widely criticised, this time for ignoring both Protestant victims of IRA violence and eliding Sinn Féin’s advocacy of amnesty for ex-paramilitaries14.

9 As with Northern Ireland’s wider parading culture – those commemorating the Glorious Revolution of 1688, The Battle of the Boyne, the Somme (for Unionists) and the 1916 Easter Rising (for republicans) – “Love Ulster” and “March for Truth” were public performances of collective political memory. Both not only attempted to monopolise to their side a sense of victimhood, excluding those bodies that did not fit such narratives, but actively used individual experiences of physical or psychological pain to perform a sense of ideological strength. The spectacle of bodies processing in an orderly and dignified way to playing republican and loyalist songs was designed to express the body politic’s historical capacity for endurance in the face of violence15. In this way the vulnerability, exposure and dependence felt in the embodied experience of trauma was recuperated at the level of the symbolic: such feelings were merely trials to test the

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boundaries of the collective. Ironically, then, the very traumas caused by ethnonationalism’s drive to homogenise cultural difference were themselves homogenised within ideological regimes of remembrance.

10 Liberal advocates of the peace process have been no less keen to discursively circumscribe the plurality of bodies involved in the performance of remembrance. As McLaughlin and Baker argue, the British and Irish news media represented “social order and pacified domesticity […] as the preferred model of citizenship” for ensuring stability and attracting the international inward investment that constituted Northern Ireland’s peace dividend16. For many commentators, divisive public remembrance was a threat to the “rational democratic organisations” that would linguistically resolve disputes and oversee the region’s integration into global capitalism17.

11 Reporting on violent commemorations has routinely pathologised the public assembly of bodies using pseudo-psychoanalytic discourses. In his famous essay, “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through”, Freud observed that a victim of trauma “does not remember anything of what he has forgotten, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action18”. In this schema, victims compulsively repeat the past in the present instead of properly integrating it into memory. The ameliorative abstraction of memory in narrative, for Freud, takes precedence over the compulsive re-enactments of the “motor sphere19”. This opposition between somatic repetition and narration was adopted when in September 2005 an Orange Order parade at Whiterock, Belfast, turned into a riot. Time seemed to be out of joint, with the violence of the Troubles repeated in the streets. “Driving around Belfast” wrote Gerry Moriarty in the Irish Times, “was like driving around the city 15 or 20 years ago20”. Such repetition was symptomatic of a past improperly assimilated into language. It was “the last resort of the chronically inarticulate”, according to David McKittick, who witnessed the riot with “[a]n appalling sense of déja-vu21”. McKittrick did hazard a diagnosis: the failure to incorporate working class Protestants into the liberal-democratic order by delivering to them a peace dividend. For Max Hastings, however, the riots were merely a symptom of working class Protestants’ “rejection of rational politics” (namely, their move away from the centrist ). If Northern Irish society was to transcend such moments of mass hysteria, it needed to safely contain remembrance within an ordered discourse, no less than that of “modern history”, where “economics [was] achieving what politics [had] not22”. These diagnoses, in positioning somatic expression outside the domain of politics, obscured yet another inscription of the past within a different set of interests: liberal rather than loyalist.

12 This pseudo-psychoanalytic discourse helps explain why the embodied aspect of remembrance has been overlooked in favour of the abstraction of language. In post- conflict Northern Ireland, problematic bodies, especially in public spaces, are to be managed in order that the peace and its attendant democratic institutions be maintained. However, as Simpson has noted, this pseudo-psychoanalytic discourse is “a vacuous expediency” for “dominant political groups” hoping to stifle debate around the past23. Those losses that countermand simplistic notions of “moving on”, problematize the apolitical, benign status of the past as cultural heritage, or fall outside nationalist or unionist martyrologies, are liable to be excluded both from public displays of bodies in parades and from state sponsored reconciliation initiatives. In the end, the collective interests of ethno-nationalist or neoliberal ideologies elide the individual character of trauma and its resistance to symbolic encoding.

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Family Plot: a critique of “talking cure”

13 Drama, however, has been more critical of these pseudo-psychoanalytic understandings. Daragh Carville’s tragi-comic Family Plot, staged at the Queen’s Drama Centre in Belfast in the aftermath of the Whiterock riots, challenges the notion that talk alone can resolve the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Three generations of the same family, trapped in a life-after-death purgatory, attempt to work through the past in order to reach an afterlife. Frank, a failed father, constantly reminds his fellow sufferers that: “We have to talk”, “[w]e have to stick together” because “[w]e’re family, aren’t we? Flesh and blood24”. However, in the first act, every attempt to remember turns into verbal repetitions that the participants are “powerless to stop” (20, 32, 42). In a move redolent of the collapse of the devolved institutions, discussion only serves to re-enact well-rehearsed stories of grievance, infidelity and violence. This tendency to repeat the past verbatim results in the belated traumatisation of the next generation. Emer, Frank’s daughter, arrives in purgatory at the end of the first act to affirm that those onstage are indeed metaphorical representations of Northern Ireland’s intergenerational strife. She has committed suicide, unable to deal with the legacy of her father’s abusiveness.

14 One of the play’s key interventions is to foreground how Frank’s insistence on talk serves to obscure a chequered past of domestic violence. His injunction to remember in order to “hold the whole bloody thing together” (18) is designed to restore a form of social relations that never existed: a golden age when Emer was born and “there was love” (47). Ideologies of remembrance like Frank’s deploy nostalgia to construct an image of future reconciliation that is far too demanding given the fraught nature of the past. Worse still, his talking cure propagates a narrative of his own “impeccable behaviour” (41) based on the inaccurate and selective operations of his memory. Following the same logic as the rhetoric of order and dignity associated with parading, Frank’s projection of an idealised body politic into the future cannot sustain a plurality of voices and interpretations.

15 Carville is suggesting that, in post-conflict societies, it is important to recognise that the effects of trauma are felt unevenly through the modalities of social status and gender. Not all are equal at the “talks process” table, particularly female victims of male violence. But even as the play foregrounds the dangers of strategic forgetting in verbal acts of remembrance, the use of metaphor also limits the play’s ability to account for this diversity of experience. In reception it failed to resolve a tension between the symbolic resonance of the family-as-nation metaphor and individual manifestations of trauma. As Lisa Fitzpatrick has noted, the deployment of this metaphor “limits engagement with the characters as individuals: they are stock characters who stand for a group identity25”. Carville’s play also endorses equally glib clichés of forgiveness and theological intervention. When, at the end of the play, all but Frank disappear offstage to the afterlife having moved on from the past, Carville is merely replacing Frank’s ideology coercive model of reconciliation with what Michael Phillips calls a “theology of reconciliation26”. The Judeo-Christian injunction to transcend the past risks overlooking the productively disputatious task of remembering and learning to live with trauma. The play lumps all the traumas of the Troubles into one comprehensible metaphorical regime operating around ideas of

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familial reconciliation and the injunction to “forgive and forget” (45). This solution failed to satisfy reviewers, who variously saw Family Plot as offering “little comfort to those afraid to lay down their burden”, and as caught between “specificity and universality27”. The ties of “flesh and blood” only function as a somewhat inadequate incarnation of Northern Irish inter-communal violence. The plurality of local and embodied experiences of trauma during the Troubles cannot be sustained when inscribed within such ideological or theological conceptions of reconciliation and remembrance.

AH6905 and the body beyond metaphor

16 Dave Duggan’s play, staged in Derry/Londonderry in October 2005, attempts to resolve the tension between universality and specificity by deploying the body both as a metaphor for politics in Northern Ireland and as an intrusive material object. Truth recovery is rendered as a surgical operation conducted on Danny, the play’s sole character, who, seated in a hospital waiting room, suffers from a psychosomatic illness close to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The DSM-IV describes the symptoms of DID as the presence of “two or more distinct personality states that take control of behaviour28”. The personalities that intrude on Danny’s narrative consist of those killed during the Troubles on all sides, from bomb casualties to victims of army violence (85).

17 Using DID as a model for the haunting of the past allows Duggan to depict traumas and their competing demands for justice as unmediated by a pre-emptive notion of reconciliation. Even as we are able to witness glimpses of the past in AH6905, Danny never actually remembers his own trauma onstage. Neither does he incorporate the intrusive voices of the dead into a unified sense of self – that process of reconciliation is delayed until “tomorrow” and his scheduled truth extraction (104). His performance instead becomes the medium for competing political subjectivities – the multitude of past victims demanding justice – demonstrating a process of remembering that is always under negotiation. This is illustrated by Danny’s moments of insecurity, such as when he finally resolves to undergo surgery so “the record can be set in stone” before mocking himself for “[a]cting like I’ve got it all worked out” (103). The final process of recollection remains for the audience to imagine, suggesting that what is appropriate for Danny may be different for other individuals. In order to be inclusive the process of truth recovery must not presuppose a specific form of resolution, but requires a shared commitment that itself performatively constitutes the beginnings of a post-conflict political community.

18 Duggan’s deployment of surgical procedure as a metaphor for truth extraction and, by extension, psychiatric therapy, is crucial since the body functions in the play as both a communal sign and designates the Other as Other. Jon Erickson has observed in his study of the body in performance that: When the intention is to present the performer's body as primarily a sign, idea, or representation, corporeality always intervenes, and it is too much of a body […] it is the “problem of other minds” which posits the “as if” of projection, but finds its identification always incomplete […]. The body can be seen, then, both as instrument for the sign and something inexplicably Other29.

19 Danny’s body in AH6905 certainly functions effectively as a sign. In Scene 7, for example, traumatic memory is represented as a wound, a “raw place, still oozing pus and blood”

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that causes pain: “the steady hum of something not properly addressed” (99). The metaphor enables the audience to translate Danny’s traumatic memories – intruding as psychosomatic pain – in terms of their own experience of bodily affliction. The images of the bleeding body and Danny’s “spasm[s] of pain” (88) make intelligible both the trauma of the body politic of Northern Ireland and the personal trauma of the individuals afflicted. The actor’s body is a common sign encouraging a degree of empathic identification, where empathy entails a shared experience of corporeal vulnerability that is analogous to that performed by the Other.

20 Duggan is nonetheless quick to forestall any complete identification between audience – spoken to as if they are hospital visitors – and Danny. This manoeuvre has an ethical purpose. As Megan Boler has pointed out, there is often a gap between “passive empathy” and “acting on another’s behalf”: an audience must be incited to reform themselves and their society when confronted with the trauma of the Other, or as Danny puts it, “[i]t has to be more than just telling stories. It has to be” (99)30. The injunction to do more than merely remember – “making sure that it doesn’t happen again” (94) – is enhanced by a refusal of complete identification. Even if Danny functions as a sign for every body in the audience, so to speak, he insists on his own particularity by demanding action from them: “Don’t ask me to do the truth recovery while you stand on the sidelines” (94). The spectator must not merely imagine her body as if it were Danny’s but must actively seek to undergo the same process of “lift[ing] the nails out of the flesh, pris[ing] back the knuckles” (95). Danny, at one stage pointing at the audience, forces them to be conscious of their own embodied presence within the theatrical event. The stage metaphor gives way: they are no longer fictive visitors, but individuals whose singular embodied experiences are being invoked. Fundamentally Danny’s body is never opened up onstage just as he never reveals the kernel of his traumatised past. Both remain, in Erickson’s words, “inexplicably Other31”.

21 Because the Other’s body defies complete identification, performance is well equipped to resist the reification implicit in ideologies that seek to privilege one version of the traumatic past over another. The excessive corporeality of the performer’s body emphasises the plurality of experiences of trauma across Northern Ireland without homogenising those experiences within a singular mode of remembrance. Duggan’s staging of the body beyond metaphor challenges what Jacques Rancière calls “the essence of consensus”: “the annulment of surplus subjects, the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body32”. Just as with the idea of a “living memorial”, AH6905 proposes that such abstract metaphorical conceptions of community serve to negate the presence of a multitude of witnessing bodies. The incitement to remember should concentrate intellectual resources in the hands of the individual, rather assimilate them into a collective body, because, “in a theatre […] there are only individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs33”. That is not to say that truth recovery is conducted in isolation, but that it is founded on a presumption of equality when processes of coming to terms with past wrongs are negotiated. When reminded of their corporeal specificity by Danny, the audience at AH6905 have to imagine their own modes of truth and reconciliation.

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Theatre of Witness: negotiating the ethics of witnessing

22 Theatre of Witness is an applied theatre project based in Derry and Funded through the European Union’s PEACE III initiative. It was founded by American practitioner Teya Sepinuck in order to “bear witness to issues of suffering, redemption and social justice34 ”. The methodology involves gathering participant testimonies and, with the collaboration of a director, editing these into a coherent production for the stage. This process of mediation is designed to prevent traumatic repetition (or re-traumatisation) by affording participants a sense of critical distance from the rawness of their memories35. As we shall see, this combination of careful mediation and real people (not dissimilar to Duggan’s model) is necessitated by the political challenges of post-conflict Northern Ireland.

23 To date there have been six Theatre of Witness productions in Northern Ireland. We Carried Your Secrets (2009) involved recollections of growing up during the Troubles; I Once Knew A Girl (2010) explored the impact of violence towards women of both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds; Release (2012) featured an all male cast that included a former IRA volunteer and members of the security forces. Sanctuary (2013) investigated the stories of those who seek asylum in the North. Our Lives Without You (2014) centred on those who lost loved ones in the 1971 . Unspoken Love (2014) staged the testimonies of those in mixed marriages. Allessia Cartoni and Thomas Spiers, two practitioners mentored in the Theatre of Witness process by Sepinuck, directed, respectively, the two most recent plays.

24 The process of resisting ideological co-optations of remembrance is particularly important where conceptions of the “public good” prevent individuals from properly working through the past. Cartoni’s production, Our Lives Without You, is of interest because it staged the testimonies of those whose family members were murdered by the British Parachute Regiment in the 1971 Ballymurphy massacre. The fact that, unlike previous Theatre of Witness productions, the play involved only participants from the Catholic community might be construed as running counter to the demands of the PEACE III funding, designed with the stated aim of subsidising projects concerned with “reconciling communities”36. It is important, therefore, to consider whether, in voicing counterhistories to liberal narratives of redemption, Our Lives perpetuated republican narratives of victimhood.

25 Performed in Derry in 2014, Our Lives used applied theatre to bring into focus those bodies and voices that are excluded from official forms of history making. Even while the production was being devised, members of The Ballymurphy Families group exploited the explicitly performative power of such counter-memories. Faced with repeated delays to the Coroner’s inquest over funding and alleged “issues of national security”, they hoped to establish an independent enquiry into the massacre37. Theresa Villiers, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, deemed this request against “the balance of public interest38”. In a press conference arranged shortly before the opening night of the play, Briege Voyle, a participant in the Theatre of Witness production, publically destroyed the letter Villiers had sent the families informing them of this news39. In tearing up this metonym for the British state, Voyle refuted the graphic legitimacy of a British government whose process of dealing with crimes against the Catholic population was perceived as ideologically tainted40. Without access to the

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privileged mode of remembering and recording injustice Voyle resorted to a physical performance that, unlike governmental programs perceived to involve “too much bureaucracy and not enough feeling”, expressed the affective persistence of trauma41.

26 Continuing this emphasis on stage presence, Our Lives was devised in such a way as to balance the aesthetic accessibility and resistance of the performer’s witnessing body. Pat Quinn, whose brother was shot in Ballymurphy, illustrates the demand for restitution inherent in the constant physical presence of trauma: “this body wants to dance, this body wants to break free, this body wants to fly42”. He gestures to “these eyes”, “these hands”, “these feet” and “this body beaten up by the British army” (Figure 1). In Pat’s hands, history is no longer the abstraction of the Coroner’s report, but is a memory of the flesh: the residue of physical pain and psychological torment. His gestures, as well as his testimony, afford the audience, in Felman’s words, “the imaginative capability of perceiving history – what is happening to others – in one’s own body43”. It is through our common predicament as bodies exposed to pain and capable of pleasure that we are able to empathise with the memories of violence and trauma Pat Quinn feels reverberating in his flesh.

Figure 1

27 Demonstrations of anti-British counter-memory such as Pat’s nevertheless risk being folded back into the abovementioned pain-exploiting practices that dominate the Northern Irish public sphere. For playwright Tim Loane, Theatre of Witness as a whole fails to “challenge the audience’s preconceptions and ” and therefore elicits a passive response: In this process of distillation for “performance” it is nigh impossible to resist sentimentalizing and celebrating victimhood. This in effect means presenting the audience with exactly what it wants and gives them an easy way out through a hyper-emotional reflex44.

28 Our Lives does indeed resort to easy clichés characteristic of “Troubles plays”: the domestic space, for example, is figured in Pat Quinn and Rita Bonner’s testimonies as an idealised, prepolitical realm tainted by the violence45. It does not, however, locate redemption in pacified domesticity: all the participants express both their frustration

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with the state’s delays in recovering the truth and their anger at the British Army’s actions. Moreover, Teya Sepinuck’s writing on the Theatre of Witness methodology shows an awareness of the risks of passivity. Like Loane, Sepinuck hopes to encourage “ active listening”, not only by allowing audience members to question directorial decisions in the post-show Q&A sessions, but also by remaining faithful to the necessity of “seeing oneself in every human”, a process which, nevertheless, “can only be an aspiration46”. In other words, even as we attempt to empathise, it is crucial to recognise that the Other always resists our frameworks of understanding.

29 This resistance is particularly evident in Our Lives during the testimony of Eileen Corr, daughter of Joseph Corr, a victim of the massacre. She declares that she “can’t remember what happened after [her father’s] death”. Instead her memory is represented in the oblique tattoos Eileen drew on herself as a child (Figure 2). The body, in particular these markings, makes sensible and visible the otherness of Eileen’s traumatic experience. The audience can, perhaps, imagine her grief as comparable to the physical pain of the tattoo needle. Nevertheless the meanings of such markings are never explained and perhaps cannot be made intelligible. These physical wounds are a part of Eileen’s sense memory: that non-narrative trace of past pain that is felt in her body alone. The tattoos, in their stubborn resistance to reading, are a reminder of the insistent and necessary corporeal inaccessibility of the Other.

Figure 2

30 Cartoni, as in other Theatre of Witness productions, also gives space to non-speaking participants who, through the fact of their physical presence onstage, attest to their untold or untellable stories47. In Our Lives, Alice Taggart, whose father was also murdered in the massacre, remains largely silent and still in her chair. Her niece, Aisling Devlin, a member of “the next generation who is a witness to these stories”, recalls, in her aunt’s stead, what she has learned of Daniel Taggart’s death. During her account she constantly refers to Alice’s physical presence, what she sees rather than hears: “I see a woman who is carrying the burdens of the past” (my emphasis). Aisling observes in the body, rather than in language, her aunt’s testimony, an observation that

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is only partial because viewed from the outside. Here, then, to be silent is not to be condemned to invisibility within a culture that insists on narrative remembrance. Rather, Alice’s stoical presence marks a refusal to transform her memories into a discourse that the audience can passively absorb into pre-established politicised memorial narratives. The visibility of this apparently “surplus subject” also flouts the linguistic abstractions of history enacted in Villiers’s letter and the Coroner’s report. Even as the specificity of Alice’s personal trauma remains indecipherable, her physical silence communicates the demand for a form of recognition, legitimacy and dignity unavailable in such crude accounting processes.

31 Sepinuck’s ethics of “active listening” emerges in the audience’s negotiation of such representations of stoical alterity. The feedback for Our Lives suggests that the production, by placing corporeal limits on the readability of the testimonies, avoided being uncritically inscribed within the prefabricated narratives of the two traditions. One respondent, a “Protestant from the Shankill”, notes that they were “deeply touched by the stories” adding that “[w]e have all suffered way too much48”. Such feelings of empathy transcend hierarchies of victimhood that foreclose the possibility of seeing the Other as equally vulnerable. But the responses also give a sense of how the body is paradoxically both the condition of and impediment to empathy. One observer declares the testimonies “deeply personal” and “feel[s] blessed to have been in contact with [them]” while another notes that they “didn’t really understand what it must have been like for all you wonderful and brave people49”. Like the first respondent, they talk of being moved while remarking on the alterity of the body they have been “in contact” with and moved by. This impossibility of total identification bespeaks, in other responses, the need for each individual in Northern Ireland to participate in actively processing the past: “The story-tellers become vessels for the untold stories in the larger community. As they heal they invite/inspire the rest of us to heal50”. Audience members felt incited to act precisely because they could neither take the place of the Other, nor could the Other take theirs. And indeed audience members did end up participating in subsequent productions, answering Danny’s call not “to stand on the sidelines51” (94).

Conclusion

32 For Freud, to work through trauma is to combat its somatic symptoms, namely repetition compulsion. Talking cure is “a perpetual struggle to […] keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct to the motor sphere52”. Making trauma visible is a question of transforming it into discourse. However, such a view simplifies the body’s role in remembering. Traumatic memory is often co-opted in sectarian discourses of community and victimhood performed on the streets in the form of marches. Here, the body is not instinctually “acting out”, but is disciplined within a regime of remembrance that choreographs diverse individual performing bodies into a univocal expression of belonging, or, as in Family Plot, a performative metaphorical structure: the “flesh an blood” family.

33 The kind of empathic identification with the Other’s trauma enabled by corporeal metaphor is of course crucial in processes of reconciliation. In Theatre of Witness the body is represented as a repository of traumatic memories that are silenced within dominant regimes of remembrance. It is in our identification with the bodily pain of

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those like Pat Quinn and Eileen Corr that we can glimpse psychosomatic trauma and its destabilising effect on official histories. But the body also functions metonymically in relation to the irretrievable otherness of traumatic memory. It is both the expressive surface on which we read and understand the pain of another and a figure standing in for the unspeakable otherness and corporeal individuality of trauma. As discussed, its alterity has important ethical functions in post-conflict Northern Ireland. In AH6905, Danny’s insistence on this alterity prevents him from becoming a sacrificial figure that can be processed as a surrogate for the rest the community. Indeed such a performance of trauma calls into question the very possibility of embodying, in a single person, an idea of community because we cannot merely transcribe individual embodied memories, such as those of Our Lives, into abstract historical narratives (whether statistical, ideological, or archival) without defacing the otherness of the body. By drawing attention to the intrusive materiality and alterity of the body, theatre can nevertheless elicit an ethical form of witnessing that never allows the audience to complacently incorporate trauma.

NOTES

1. Dave Duggan, “AH6905”, Plays in a Peace Process, Derry/Londonderry, Guildhall Press, 2008, p. 85. All further references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Aleida Assmann, “Memory, Individual and Collective”, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 213, p. 216. 3. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 5. 4. See Jo Berry et al., Ethical Principles – Storytelling and Narrative Work: relating to the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland, Belfast, Healing Through Remembering, 2009; Graham Dawson, “Life stories, trauma and the politics of memory in the Irish peace process”, Memory Ireland: The Famine and the Troubles, New York, Syracuse University Press, 2014, p. 195-214; Kirk Simpson, Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009, p. 58-76. 5. Northern Ireland Office, The Stormont House Agreement, London, Northern Ireland Office, 2014, p. 5. 6. See William F. Kelleher, The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003, p. 80. 7. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, op. cit., p. 5. 8. The Cost of the Troubles Study: Final Report, Belfast, 1999, p. 42. 9. Report of the Consultative Group on the Past, Belfast, 2009 p. 104 [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ victims/docs/consultative_group/cgp_230109_report.pdf].

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10. The Report of the Healing Through Remembering Project, Belfast, 2002, p. VI [http:// cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/victims/docs/healremember02.pdf]. See also Cost of the Troubles, p. 103. 11. Source : CAIN website [ http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/docs/nia/ofmdfm/ report_06.pdf]. 12. Source :CAIN website [ http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/docs/newspapers/guardian/ otoole_gu_210707.pdf]. 13. Susan McKay, Bear In Mind These Dead, London, Faber & Faber, 2008, p. 299. 14. Ibid., p. 302. 15. Love Ulster was attended by “six loyalist flute bands” and the March for Truth “featured Republican flute bands and people dressed up as British soldiers”. Alison Morris, “Fraser praises gardai”, Daily Mirror [Eire Edition], 23 February, 2006, p. 23; Carissa Casey, “2,000 at Sinn Fein march”, Irish Times, 13 August, 2007, p. 9. 16. Patrick McLaughlin and Stephen Baker, The Propaganda of Peace, Bristol, Intellect, 2010, p. 13; Brian Kelly, “Neoliberal Belfast: Disaster Ahead”, Irish Marxist Review, 1.2, 2012, p. 47-53. 17. Tim O’Halloran, “Marchers, rioters and McDowell share the shame”, Irish Examiner, 6 March 2006, n.pag. 18. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud, Vol. 12, London, Hogarth Press, 1958, p. 150. 19. Ibid., p. 153. 20. Gerry Moriarty, “Flashback to the worst days of ‘war’”, Irish Times, 13 September, 2005, p. 14. 21. David McKittrick, “Violence in Belfast: How a Banned March Revived the Troubles”, Independent, 14 September, 2005, p. 4. 22. Max Hastings, “A Society Left Breached by History”, Guardian, 15 September, 2005, p. 33. 23. Kirk Simpson, Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland, op. cit., p. 101. 24. Daragh Carville, Family Plot, Belfast, Tinderbox Theatre Company, 2005, p. 17. All further references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 25. Lisa Fitzpatrick, “Performing Gender, Performing Violence on the Northern Irish Stage: ‘Spittin’ blood in a Belfast sink’”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23.3, 2013, p. 305. 26. Michael Phillips, “Aboriginal Reconciliation as Religious Politics: Secularisation in Australia”, Australian Journal of Political Science, 40.1, March, 2005, p. 111-124. 27. Grania McFadden, “Review: Family Plot”, Belfast Telegraph, 4 November, 2005, p. 25. 28. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition, Washington DC, American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 484. 29. Jon Erickson, “The Body as the Object of Modern Drama”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 5.1, 1990, p. 242. 30. Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze”, Cultural Studies, 11.2, 1997, p. 255. 31. Jon Erickson, “The Body as the Object of Modern Drama”, op. cit., p. 242.

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32. Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics”, Theory & Event, 5.3, 2001, website, [http://web.archive.org/web/20151008040011/http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques- ranciere/articles/ten-thesis-on-politics/] (my emphasis). 33. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, tr. Gregory Elliot, London, Verso, 2009, p. 16. 34. Source: Theatre of Witness website, [http://www.theatreofwitness.org/about- us-2/]. 35. On the use of mediation to prevent re-traumatisation see Teya Sepinuck, Theatre of Witness, London, Jessica Kingsley, 2013, p. 182. 36. Source: Special EU Programmes Body website, [ http://www.seupb.eu/ programmes2007-2013/peaceiiiprogramme/overview.aspx]. 37. For “issues of national security” see BBC News website, [http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-northern-ireland-20340606]. See also Ballymurphy Families, Ballymurphy Independent Panel: A proposal by bereaved families, Belfast, Ballymurphy Families Campaign, website, [http://www.ballymurphymassacre.com/cms/wp-content/ uploads/2014/01/Ballymurphy_Independent_Panel.pdf] p. 3. 38. Source: Northern Ireland Office website, [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ decision-on-ballymurphy-independent-review-panel]. 39. Source: BBC News website, [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern- ireland-27199485]. 40. See Patricia Lundy, “Can the Past be Policed?: Lessons from the Historical Enquiries Team Northern Ireland”, Journal of Law and Social Challenges, 11, 2009, p. 109-156. 41. Source: CAIN website, [http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/docs/political_parties/apni/ report_300605.pdf], p. 2. 42. Theatre of Witness, Our Lives Without You, dir. Chris McAlinden, art dir. Teya Sepinuck, prod. Alessia Cartoni, Derry/Londonderry, Cmore Films, 2014, DVD. All subsequent quotations transcribed from DVD recording of The Playhouse performance. 43. Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Abingdon, Routledge, 1992, p. 108. 44. Quoted in David Grant & Matthew Jennings, “Processing the Peace: An Interview with Teya Sepinuck”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23.3, 2013, p. 317. 45. See Mark Phelan, “From Troubles to Post-Conflict Theatre in Northern Ireland”, Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 374. 46. Teya Sepinuck, Theatre of Witness, op. cit., p. 231-234. 47. For example, asylum seeker Maryama Yuusuf in Theatre of Witness’s 2014 production entitled Sanctuary. 48. Source: Theatre of Witness website, [http://www.theatreofwitness.org/reflections- our-lives-without-you/] (en erreur en 2017). 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Kathleen Gillespie performed in I Once Knew A Girl (2010) having been an audience member at We Carry Your Secrets (2009). See Teya Sepinuck, Theatre of Witness, op. cit., p. 191. 52. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, Working Through”, op. cit., p. 158.

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ABSTRACTS

This article evaluates the role of the body in the performance and reception of trauma testimony in post-conflict Northern Ireland. It explores how the body is exploited in public performances of nationalism and unionism, marginalised in psychoanalytic discourses around memory work, and rendered invisible within state-sponsored reconciliation processes. By contrast, the body is central to representations of truth recovery and remembrance in fictional theatre, and in the performed testimonies of applied theatre. Analysing three recent productions, this paper argues that the strategic use of the body as a site of witness facilitates an ethical form of empathy that respects the alterity of trauma.

Cet article examine le rôle du corps dans les représentations artistiques ou officielles du traumatisme et dans l’impact que ces représentations peuvent avoir sur leur audience dans l'Irlande du Nord post-conflit. Il explore la manière dont le corps est exploité dans les événements publics nationalistes ou unionistes, marginalisé dans les discours psychanalytiques sur le travail de mémoire et rendu invisible dans le processus de réconciliation orchestré par l’État. A contrario, le corps joue un rôle central dans les représentations de la mémoire et la recherche de vérité dans le théâtre fictionnel ainsi que dans les témoignages personnels du théâtre appliqué. Fondée sur l'analyse de trois productions récentes, cette étude montre que l'utilisation stratégique du corps en tant que site témoin du traumatisme permet une forme éthique d'empathie qui respecte l'altérité du traumatisme.

INDEX

Keywords: body, trauma, drama, Northern Ireland - post-conflict, religion, social role of the artist, reconciliation Mots-clés: corps, Irlande du Nord - post-conflit, réconciliation, théâtre, rôle social de l'artiste, trauma, religion

AUTHOR

ALEXANDER COUPE Alexander Coupe is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD student in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. His project, provisionally entitled ‘Embodying community: politics as performance in post-Agreement Northern Ireland’, explores how the body is used to represent and enact ideas of community across a range of performance contexts. He is co-organiser of the Gender, Sexuality and Violence Research Network, a project funded by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts in South East England. He also teaches at Canterbury Christ Church University and sometimes talks about masculinities in schools.

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Ciaran Carson and the Theory of Relativity

Julia C. Obert

1 Ciaran Carson’s poetry has long argued for the importance of perspective: in his writing, seeming absolutes are often “t[old] … slant1”, and how one sees depends largely on where one stands. Carson frequently raises the concept of subjective situatedness in relation to the conflict in Northern Ireland, suggesting that sectarianism is bred rather than inborn and offering alternatives to partisanship by providing “shifts in position and perspective” in his work2. In his most recent original collection, Until Before After (2010), though, Carson’s preoccupation with perspectivalism becomes even more pronounced. Written chiefly while his wife Deirdre was seriously ill (happily, she has since recovered), the volume turns and returns to sickness and the spectre of death3. However, it finds some relief from anxiety and grief in the interweaving of poetry and theoretical physics – specifically, in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

2 Carson has been interested for many years in such theories. In a 2000 interview with John Brown, he explaine: Language may be dodgy but we need it to talk with. Life is dodgy. Matter itself, things, if we are to believe the quantum physicists, is very dodgy indeed. The funny thing is that I think the essences of things can cross space and time, maybe because of that very dodginess. As if the matter of the poems were in the ether, swirling around invisibly for the last century or so4.

3 Although here Carson is discussing his poetic process, in Until Before After, he brings this “dodginess” to bear on life and death themselves. Both space and time, the volume contends, are observer-dependent; we do not exist on a neat linear continuum, and so life and after-life are actually simultaneous. As one contemplates being-towards-death, Carson indicates, these insights can be surprisingly therapeutic. In fact, Einstein himself, after his friend Michele Besso’s death, wrote to Besso’s sister and son that departing the world as we know it means little in the face of physics: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion5”. With his wife in hospital, Carson takes up much

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the same argument, taking comfort in this meeting of the sacred and the scientific. Ultimately, then, Until Before After ends up theorizing away its titular concepts — or at least asserting that these concepts are subjective rather than given — in order to subvert death’s seeming finality.

Seeing and believing

4 In order to lay the groundwork for his engagement with space-time, Carson peppers the first half of Until Before After with a trope familiar to his long-time readers: that of refracted perspective. As I have argued elsewhere, Carson’s poetry frequently severs seeing from believing6. His collections suggest that there is no absolute knowing, only apprehending an object or event from a situated perspective – and even that apprehension can shift with the passage of time. This is why Carson’s “Revised Version” quips that “[t]he city is a map of the city7”; no cartographer can keep pace with Belfast’s builds and demolitions, no snapshot can capture the turbulent energies of its loneys and by-ways. As Alan Gillis puts it, it is impossible to “see what’s before your eyes” in Carson’s work because the poetry “turbinates with the relativity and contradictions of multi-perspectivalism8”. Until Before After is no exception to this rule; the volume describes scenes from various points of view, revealing each standpoint as partial and provisional and calling fixed perspectives into question.

5 Early in the collection’s “Before” section, perspective begins to proliferate kaleidoscopically. For example, “An airman” and “From below,” which are juxtaposed in the volume, offer contrasting views of a bank of clouds. The airman, of course, takes in the scene from above the fray: he “sees through gaps/in the cloud-/cover the movements/of armies/yet without radio/cannot communicate9”. In contrast, the ground-level viewer sees “From below,” and s/he apprehends “a great cloud/roped like/a heavy cable/being slowly paid/by its own weight/before settling into/gross coils10”. We are not told whether these scenes are simultaneous — and in a sense, this temporal ambiguity proves Carson’s point. (That said, two pages later, the poem “Which cloud” suggests a potential confluence of events: here the speaker lies “on my back/on the green grass,” then suddenly sees “clouds/of explosion boom[ing]/from the horizon11”.) The cloud-watcher in “From Below” is focused on the coils of cabled vapor overhead, and if the advancing troops are indeed nearby, they are beyond his/her line of sight. In other words, this narrator’s perspective is limited, and s/he cannot know what surpasses his/her visual field. The airman’s bird’s-eye view, on the other hand, affords him a miniaturizing perspective on the events below. He can see the troops mobilizing, advancing a coordinated attack. If we imagine his poem’s future, though – which Carson invites us to do, telling us that the airman “sees what lies before/his loved ones12” – we can envision precisely what he will not see: the faces of his enemies; the battlefield carnage. Carson therefore implies that every perspective is limited, and that every view of the world is relative. No onlooker, not even a high-flying top-down spectator, can be omniscient13.

6 Likewise, the poem “The lightning” offers multiple perspectives on the same scene, reiterating the idea that sight is subjective. The poem’s narrator sees lightning strike, and describes how to his/her eye, its illumination seems “white like/a flash from/a looking glass.” However, a second viewer sees the same flash as “rose-/coloured and lilac,” a kind of electrostatic rainbow14. The poem does not resolve the contradiction,

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nor does it try to explain why one person’s white light is another’s prismatic array – it simply offers double vision as a condition of intersubjectivity15. This is not to imply that matter is static and that our sensory faculties are deceptively variable; in fact, as Doreen Massey explains, “[i]n modern physics, … the identity of things is constituted through interactions … [between t]he observer … [and] the observed world 16”. By granting both the narrator and the other’s descriptions of the lightning equal weight, Carson reiterates Massey’s point: it is not simply that sight is subjective (that either the narrator or his colleague is ‘correct’), it is that space itself is observer-dependent17.

7 Neal Alexander’s 2010 book-length study of Carson’s writing, written just before the publication of Until Before After, describes Carson’s poetry as producing “an effect akin to that of parallax, whereby shifts in perspective lay bare the processes through which […] place is constructed and deconstructed18”. Carson’s prose works also feature such disorienting shifts; in his 2001 novel Shamrock Tea, for instance, Jan van Eyck’s painting The Arnolfini Portrait serves as a wormhole of sorts, a portal that transports Carson’s young narrator to other times and places. Shamrock Tea therefore thematizes point of view – its narrator is at one moment an Irish Catholic schoolboy, and at the next a librarian at an asylum in Ghent – in order to “call the codes by which our own version of ‘reality’ is constructed into question19”. Such questions are foregrounded even more prominently in Carson’s most recent collection, with poems like “The lightning” revealing space as a shared (and sometimes unshared) vision rather than a fixed field.

Life in four dimensions

8 Beyond asserting matter’s “dodginess20”, Until Before After takes Carson’s quantum insights a step further. In this volume, Carson insists that we consider life in four dimensions; by constantly conflating, even confusing, spatial references with temporal terms, his poems think in space-time rather than in Euclidean geometry. This shift relies on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a theory that drew on Hermann Minkowski’s earlier research to frame space and time as parts of a single four- dimensional fabric (versus treating time as a constant distinct from space’s three dimensions). Relativity indicates that temporal simultaneity is actually in the eye (or ear) of the beholder: it depends on one’s relative rate of motion and on the strength of one’s gravitational field21. As physicist, Brian Greene explains, this means that there is no “universal now”: “Clocks that are in relative motion or that are subject to different gravitational fields tick off time at different rates; the more these factors come into play, the further out of synchronization the clocks will fall. Individuals carrying such clocks will therefore not agree on what happens when … [and so] what constitutes a moment in time is completely subjective22”.

9 Once we involve motion and velocity in our understandings of space, linear concepts of reality are upended, and notions of past, present, and future are revealed to be fluid. Put otherwise, “[r]elativity strongly suggests that the whole history of the world is a timeless unity; present, past, and future have no meaning apart from human subjectivity23”. It is not just sight, then, that is perspectival – our sense of both where we are and when we are depends on our individual situatedness. For Carson, who is facing his wife’s illness and contemplating mortality, these insights are a tonic of sorts. If we “shatter […] our comfortable sense that the past is gone, the future is yet to be

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and the present is what truly exists24”, we must confront the vertiginous possibility that life and the afterlife always already coexist.

10 The first gesture towards Carson’s interest in space-time in Until Before After is the title of the collection. Carson organizes the volume around its three titular prepositions, with each term heading its own section of 51 poems. Additionally, every poem in the collection at some point incorporates the preposition under which it is filed. The concepts “until”, “before”, and “after” therefore take on a driving importance in the book. However, these words are all slippery, and their meanings ambiguous. “Until” is a term that usually measures time (often synonymous with something like “up to…”), but without a resolving noun, its meaning is indeterminate. This leaves the word as itself an in-between space – a kind of linguistic bridge to nowhere. Moreover, when Carson deploys “until” in particular syntactical contexts, the term sometimes takes on both spatial and temporal valences. For instance, in the poem “Overhead”, the falcons circling overhead eye the ground “until/when or where/they see then/seize their prey25”. These lines are intentionally indefinite: we cannot know whether the falcons are waiting for the right place, the right moment, or both, to swoop down and attack.

11 Similarly, the terms “before” and “after” are equally temporal and spatial, and Carson often takes advantage of this flexibility to conflate distance and duration. “Before” is sometimes doubly confusing, as it can connote events in both time and space, as well as in both the past and the future. Indeed, in “Here lies”, the line “the road before” seems to indicate a space (“the road”) yet to come (here “before” perhaps means “ahead”). However, two lines later, the word pivots, attached to the turn of phrase “all/who went before;” now “before” appears to point towards a time since lapsed26. In the light of “before’s” second usage, the reader is tempted to return to the first, wondering whether it was indeed a gesture towards the future or whether the poem ought to remain consistently in the past tense. This recursiveness also means that the act of reading the poem is not necessarily linear; its own past-ness and futurity are relative. Carson’s use of the word “after” is often similarly ambiguous; in “Asleep”, when the poet-speaker walks through “ward after ward27”, the gesture is both spatial and temporal, and while in many places, the word clearly points to a past event (“after gazing/at the cloud/…/you watched/the sunflower28”), “For all” pronounces that “after/is not yet29”. This linguistic confusion implies that, for Carson, time and space are part of an interwoven fabric, and it prompts the reader to consider the plasticity of both matter and temporality – the poet’s sense that “the essences of things can cross space and time30”.

12 Carson’s conflation of time and space operates thematically as well as syntactically in the collection. In the poem “If presently”, for example, the march of time can be gauged geographically: when the city is subject to the movements of the familiar pedestrian, “the hour is/not of the clock/but measured/by…/distances.” (That said, these “distances” are also temporal, as they are later described as “epochs of before/ fattening in the now31”.) Conversely, “I looked through” depicts the church bells that Carson and his wife can hear from her hospital room as measuring “time after time” as they “boom … out/over the city32”, but the sound of time passing, here, also locates the hospital in space. Indeed, this recurring temporal-auditory cue, which echoes through the yard of the nearby “old jail33”, helps us to locate the hospital on Belfast’s Lower Crumlin Road (it is likely the Mater Infirmorum). Put otherwise, while “If presently” argues that one can gauge the time by the distance one has travelled through the city,

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“I looked through” suggests that one can also gauge the length and breadth of the city’s spaces by the chiming bell, a marker of time.

13 Once Carson has thus established his desire to render life in four dimensions, he begins to thematize the malleability of time. He follows Bergson in counterposing clock time to lived time or durée – the notion that we often do not experience time as consistent or linear. In this volume, time’s relativity is shored up by the monotony of Deirdre’s hospital visits; in the light of illness and boredom, the hours pass so slowly that her stays seem almost interminable. In fact, the Wake Forest UP edition of the collection sets the stage for this theme on its cover page by juxtaposing the Rorschach blot of an X-ray – the “shadow” that, “They said” tells us, must be surgically excised34 – with the image of a wristwatch. For instance, in the side-by-side poems “Figure” and “All day long”, time seems to slow to a crawl. The former follows the measured plod, “figure/ after figure,”, of “the minute hand/the hour hand” of a clock, and this plod is mirrored by the poem’s own deliberate pace, its dwelling throughout on a single image (“the bow the link/the swivel/the bolt-ring/the escapement35”). “All day long” similarly describes the patient staring out her room’s window, watching a cloud that appears not to have “moved/since yesterday36”. In other words, given the tedium of her hospitalization, time seems to hardly advance at all: it is “measured/footfall by footfall/drip by drip37”. Metrically, too, the poems convey a sense of deceleration. Their short lines are methodical, even sluggish, piling monosyllable upon monosyllable (“that had not”, “what had been”) and stressed beat upon stressed beat38. Time creeps along for us as we read, just as it does for Deirdre as she awaits surgery.

14 Likewise, the volume’s ‘trauma poems’ point to lived time as looping or recursive rather than linear. In trauma, one is repeatedly re-possessed by the traumatic event; it revisits the mind again and again, forcefully and against one’s will. Therefore, as Cathy Caruth describes it, “the impact of [trauma] … lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time39”. Carson’s poetry has often engaged notions of trauma, although typically this trauma has been that of the Troubles – the insecurity of living in a conflict zone. Many critics have commented on this aspect of his writing: Alex Houen, for example, has identified Carson’s obsessively recurring images as “exploded tropes”, reflections of the “dangerous contingencies of the political situation [in the North]40”, while Rand Brandes’ “The Dismembering Muse” points to the mutilated limbs in Carson’s poetry as obvious indices of the trauma sustained both by individual Northern Irish bodies and by the body politic41.

15 In Until Before After, however, trauma becomes more personal, more intimate. While the poet-speaker is still facing the initial shock of his wife’s illness in all its immediacy (the final poem in the collection thematizes their return home from hospital, so we are not yet presented with the episode’s aftermath), he anticipates its cyclical return by linking this traumatic event to past hauntings. Several of the poems in the collection are elegies for an unnamed man (perhaps the poet’s father, William Carson/Liam McCarráin), and they describe how the past often re-presents itself very palpably in the present – in other words, how trauma frustrates time’s seeming linearity. In “Did not know”, memories of the dead return unbidden when the poet-speaker gets a whiff of a familiar aftershave; things that “were until/now forgotten” are vividly re-experienced in the throes of this olfactory cue42. Elsewhere, Carson frankly renders the operations of such hauntings by saying, “[r]epeatedly/what was gone/comes back43”. Relatedly,

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the poem “Away in” returns the elegized subject briefly to life, depicting him towards the end of his days. In age, his mind takes him “back in time/if not in place”, and although it is unclear whether these wormholes of memory lead to moments of pleasure or of pain, Carson tells us that “over/and over/he would return/to that nameless town/though he had long/abandoned it44”. Clearly, then, time in this collection is firmly perspectival rather than universal or absolute.

16 Some of the poems in Until Before After are, moreover, portals to previous Carson volumes, as they make past themes present. The collection’s elegies transport the long- time Carson reader, for example, back to 1989’s Belfast Confetti, particularly to “Bed- Time Story” and “Ambition”, Carson’s earlier odes to his father. In fact, “Ambition”, a poem that recounts a father-son hike up Black Mountain, actually sets the stage for Carson’s current preoccupation with repetition and recurrence. The poem describes “trauma time” – in this case, William Carson’s seemingly involuntary recollections of his seven-week internment while under suspicion of Republican paramilitary involvement – as “a road,/ … fraught with ramps and dog-legs, switchbacks and spaghetti; here and there,/ The dual carriageway becomes a one-track backward mind45 ”. Until Before After is rife with such “dog-legs”, the zig-zag “switchbacks” of illness and death, as well as with feedback loops that allow Carson’s earlier collections to echo throughout his contemporary work.

17 There are also a number of poems in the volume – particularly in its final third – that explicitly collapse ideas of past, present, and future in order to think more flexibly about being-towards-death. If “before” and “after” are relative terms, then perhaps somewhere, somehow, from some perspective, at some velocity, our dead are still with us. Colin Graham’s article about the collection, “‘strange architecture’: Ciaran Carson’s Until Before After”, argues for a numerological reading of the book (three sections, 51 poems in each section, linked in groups of three, with two five-couplet poems followed by one seven-couplet poem), suggesting that this is a poetry on the verge of divine revelation. Graham concludes, however, that “where numerology asserts significance and divine pattern, as Augustine believes, Until Before After is a secular book wishing for evidence of the hereafter, putting together the strands and words of a life at a possible moment before death, and straining to see and hear what lies after death46”. I agree with Graham that this collection is a kind of meeting-place of the sacred and the secular, but I think we must extend his analysis: Carson actually deconstructs notions of “before death” and “after death”, borrowing from theoretical physics to find the “hereafter” alongside the “here” in the face of his wife’s illness.

18 The poem “What is” offers one such muddying of past and present. “What is/ aftermath”, it wonders, “if not swathe/upon swathe/of wave before/wave-break47”? In other words, the motion of tides – perpetual, cyclical, and a function of gravitational forces – is a kind of loop in which “before” is also “after”; the two cannot be neatly disentangled. Carson then goes on to conflate “the world to come” with the world “where/we abide” and to juxtapose that which is “nearest in time” with the “nearest timeless48”. These poems set the stage for the ghostly presences that creep into Carson’s lines late in the collection – hauntings that subvert the idea of mortality as we know it. For example, “Asleep”, the third poem in a trio with “What bodes” and “For all”, finds the poet-speaker at home, where his wife is both absent and present: “I find you/next to me/for all you/are not here/as yesterday/tomorrow/and today49”. Taking this logic a step further, “So far” suggests that there is but a thin skin separating the

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(seemingly) living from the (supposedly) dead. The poem describes someone “throwing/pebbles at/an unanswered/window”; the person can see “shadows” moving behind this window, just out of reach, and s/he laments “how … / difficult it is/for the living/to get through50”. Finally, “To enter” actually sketches a kind of “portal” through space-time: here Belfast is framed as “ever bleeding/into that other/city glimmering/within this one51”. In other words, the universe defies our conceptions of fixed space and linear time, and Carson wonders if we might find a way to apprehend life as it “glimmers” beyond our perceptual limits.

The backstitch

19 Traditional Irish music is also central to Until Before After, both in terms of theme – Carson and his wife play tin whistle and fiddle together, and many scenes of music- making appear in the book – and of form. Indeed, in his Acknowledgements, Carson explains that “[s]ome of the poems depend on the terminology of Irish traditional dance music, where the first part of a tune is often called ‘the tune’ and the second part ‘the turn52”; the volta that often appears in his modified fourteen-line “sonnets” is therefore more like the B-section of a traditional tune. This preoccupation with music, I suggest, is actually fundamentally connected to Carson’s experiments in space-time, surprising though this confluence of a centuries-old art form and quantum physics might sound.

20 For one thing, Carson has described traditional tunes as being “capable of infinite variation53”, indicating that (unlike Classical pieces) they are player-dependent and therefore open to endless reinvention. Additionally, as Carson indicates in his two full- length books on traditional music, The Pocket Guide to Traditional Irish Music (1986) and Last Night’s Fun (1996), the genre can evade conventional measures of time. The tunes must be learned by ear, Carson says, because it is impossible to notate the flourishes that able players use to embellish the music. For instance, sometimes “a good musician can produce a pulse against the ostensible rhythm of the tune”, a technique that Carson calls “double entendre – like hearing two beats at once54”. Given these insights, I suggest that traditional music provides the basis for a new, non-Euclidean worldview in Until Before After: rife with its own double entendres, the poetry offers a kinetic, relativistic, non-linear means of apprehending space and time.

21 Carson’s writing has long been indebted to the workings of Traditional music55. In a 2009 interview with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Carson explained: “Some of my own work has been called ‘genre-defying’: maybe I learned that from the music, since every tune recalls other circumstances in which it has been played… The tunes themselves are ostensibly simple, but […] [t]he music is always renewable in the light of the now56.” Put otherwise, traditional music bears at once towards the past and towards the future – it “recalls” prior playings, but it is also infinitely variable – and Carson tries to capture this curious temporality in the poetry. Similarly, Last Night’s Fun describes the ability of Cathal McConnell, a traditional flautist, to “” through a “vast cartography of time and place”, bearing back “strange new tunes[,] […] as if he were invisible”, into today’s session57. In other words, here, a player appears to time-travel on the back of a tune, simultaneously circling back to past playings and improvising his way into the future.

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22 Until Before After is structured around this premise of “repetition with variation” – the notion that “[t]he musician [or the writer] does what he is doing […] and then he does it again, only differently58”. As such, the volume ends where it began, “only differently”: its final poem, “I open the door”, echoes “open the door”, the last line of “So it is”, the second poem in the volume. However, where “So it is” opens a door to allow a soul to escape as “death draws/nigh59”, “I open the door” does so with a new lease on life – here Carson and his wife return from the hospital, crossing their house’s threshold and mounting the stair to their “room/full of light60”. The gesture repeats itself, but it takes a different, more hopeful inflection the second time around; paradoxically, then, repetition admits newness into the collection.

23 Indeed, Carson clearly figures traditional music as a source of potentiality and novelty throughout the volume; the variability of the tune under different fingers (and likewise the poetic trope under successive renderings) provides for both well-worn patterns – a hearkening back to the song’s long history – and the surprise of new possibility. As Carson elsewhere explains this seeming temporal paradox, “Each time the song is sung, our notions of it change, and we are changed by it. The words are old […] But every time is new because the time is new, and there is no time like now61”. The poem “From whom”, for instance, dwells on an unnamed tune, one that goes so far back in his partnership with his wife that he cannot recall “whether/you [got it] from me/or I from you”. This sense of collaboration, of a common musical language, is figured as central to their relationship in the volume, and this tune is a part of that intimately shared history. However, while the tune is familiar, it is far from frozen in time: the more often they play it together, Carson explains, the more they “happen/on other ways/around it”. Indeed, though this song carries the weight of the past, Carson ultimately frames it as a bridge between present and future; the tune, he says, is “ever/ changing into/what comes after62”.

24 Likewise, “The turn”, a direct address to (presumably) Deirdre, thematizes what might become of a favorite tune “in the light of the now63”: an improvisatory flourish –“turn[ing]/ a tune another/way” – can recast a seemingly familiar song in entirely new terms. As Carson puts it here, such “turnings” can “find what/one or other/never knew the tune/beyond the tune64”. Moreover, with the word “beyond”, the poem actually compresses past, present, and future into a single gesture; a tune with a rich history is re-envisioned in the present moment in a way that accesses something yet to come. This temporal compression is important to Carson, as it also reflects the poet’s experience of his wife’s illness. The first inkling of that illness (“The turn/you took abroad65”) is just as present to him in its traumatic power as is her current hospital stay (“this the aftertime/of what/has been66”), and his fantasies of the “beyond” also inhabit the present moment.

25 On this note, the poem’s title points to the effects of ill-health (“the turn” Deirdre took abroad was perhaps the first symptom of her illness), but also, as I’ve suggested, to the B-section or latter half of a traditional tune. This understanding of “the turn” indicates the poet’s desire for resolution, for his wife’s healthy return home. However, given that tunes are played in cyclical, recursive ways during sessions – the same songs are repeated over and over with an eye (or an ear) to previous playings, but different players also offer their own variations on the tunes’ themes – their endings are necessarily also beginnings. Indeed, a turn, if sharp enough, is also a return to one’s point of departure. This poem therefore longs for finality (an end to an extended period

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of illness) even while acknowledging that finality as such is illusory. This acknowledgement admits the possibility of the illness’s recurrence alongside its remission, but it also gestures towards the more radical possibility that even death itself is not absolute. As Carson explains in Last Night’s Fun, traditional music teaches us that time is a loop rather than a line: the tune’s “present time, imbued with yesterday, comes out with bent dimensions”, and its capacity for infinite variability means that “[a]lternative universes loom before us with their many shadows” during each session67.

26 Beyond their relativism, Traditional tunes also use figures that elude the calculus of mechanical time. As Last Night’s Fun describes this phenomenon, sometimes ornaments “consist of the merest flick of the fingers, and seem to exist outside conventional time68 ”. In Until Before After, for example, Carson discusses the “backstitch”, a kind of staccato triplet that Trad players occasionally employ to embellish a tune – and, interestingly, an ornament that is virtually impossible to notate (and so must operate by the ear alone) because it confounds conventional time signatures. As the poem “It’s one of those” describes this curious temporality, the backstitch forces the listener to “re-/ negotiat[e] what/you thought/[the phrase] was”, defying one’s efforts to count one’s way through the piece. Clock time “founder[s]” in the face of such ornaments, and the auditor is left “unstitched/by afterthought”: the backstitch appears to fall after the beat, or between beats, in a way that bewilders the ear and that cannot be captured on the page69.

27 The poem itself works similarly; its form is puzzling, with its line breaks often falling against the grain of its syntax. For example, when read alone, its third couplet, “negotiating what/you thought70”, seems to refer to a one-time action in the present moment (“negotiating”). However, when the reader jumps back across the gap between the second and third couplets to recall the “re-” of line 4, she is reminded that the poem’s temporality is actually recursive. Rather than “negotiating”, we are “re-/ negotiating”, suggesting that we are revisiting a past action, that we have somehow been here before. In a sense, then, Carson’s audience is “unstitched/by afterthought” when approaching this poem; its arrangement is “dodgy71”, forcing the reader to loop back again and again through foregoing lines in search of a satisfying close reading (which it never quite delivers). Carson’s form therefore matches his theme: time, the poem insists, is not neatly linear. This relativistic worldview, Carson reveals elsewhere, is rooted in his experiences of traditional music: Some grooves are worn deeper in our brains than others, as we go back to a favourite tune at staggered intervals; or, mental synapses are zapped, creating fractal pathways where we scarcely know the route, as when we hear a tune we used to play, played differently by someone else. Perhaps the person picked it up from us directly, many years ago; maybe it had gone through many hands, as it must have done before it reached our ears; and who knows where it starts or ends72?

28 These “fractal pathways” fundamentally shape Until Before After. Linguistic patterns recur throughout the collection, with later turns of phrase sending the reader back through earlier poems in search of their syntactical counterparts (particularly since each telegraphic poem, taken alone, is quite difficult to parse). Although the collection does follow a kind of chronology, moving through Carson’s wife’s illness, it also builds in its own wormholes, developing synaptic connections between distant poems that confound linear readings. As I’ve suggested, this strategy has a therapeutic value in the volume: by making the point that seeming absolutes – including concepts of past,

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present, and future – are actually subjective, Carson contests death’s finality. As he contemplates his wife’s mortality, imagining thresholds or “portal[s]” between dimensions and envisioning the city that “shadow[s]”, the one that he himself appears to inhabit allows Carson to deconstruct the concept of the “afterlife73”. If time is observer-dependent, then “after” is a relative term; could one occupy a different perspective, perhaps by experimenting with velocity or the effects of gravitational pull, one might see “that other/[ghostly] city glimmering/within this one74”. Again, given that Carson has explicitly expressed an interest in quantum physics, and a conviction that “the essences of things can cross space and time”, it is perhaps unsurprising that his poetry has come to bear out these “crossings75”. In light of these observations, we might rethink the volume’s title: rather than reading punctuation into Until Before After and treating each term (and each temporal unit) independently (“Until, Before, After”), we should take the title as given. Without implied commas, the phrase “Until Before After” collapses notions of chronology, describing instead a state of perpetual simultaneity. This volume orients itself towards such simultaneity, and Carson uses the concept, as Einstein did before him, to reimagine the dead among the living.

NOTES

1. Ciaran Carson, Opera Et Cetera, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1996, p. 19. 2. Jonathan Stainer, “The possibility of non-sectarian futures: emerging disruptive identities of place in the Belfast of Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005), p. 390. 3. Although the text never names Deirdre directly, Carson has revealed at readings that these poems take up the subject of his wife’s illness (see Naomi Marklew, “Remembering and Dismembering: Ciaran Carson’s Elegies for Belfast”, Irish University Review 45.2, 2015, p. 368). 4. Ciaran Carson, Interview with John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland, Ed. John Brown, Cliffs of Moher, Salmon, 2002, p. 151. 5. Quoted in Freeman J. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe, New York, Basic Books, 1979, p. 193. 6. Julia C. Obert, Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, Syracuse, Syracuse UP, 2015, p. 24. 7. Ciaran Carson, “Revised Version”, Belfast Confetti, Winston-Salem, N.C., Wake Forest UP, 1989, p. 66. 8. Allan Gillis, “Ciaran Carson and History”, The Cities of Belfast, ed. Nicholas Allen and Aaron Kelly, Portland, Four Courts Press, 2003, p. 183. 9. Ciaran Carson, “An airman”, Until Before After, Winston-Salem, N.C., Wake Forest UP, 2010, lines 1-6. 10. “From below”, ibid., lines 1-7.

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11. “Which cloud”, ibid., lines 2-3, 8-10. 12. “An airman”, ibid., lines 11-12. 13. The intertextualities of these two poems also offer a refracted narrative perspective: “An airman” recalls Yeats’ famous WWI poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, while “From below” is taken nearly verbatim from an 1871 entry in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ journal. “The lightning”, too, is borrowed in part from Hopkins’ journal, with the initial viewer being Hopkins himself and the second Victor Lentaigne, a fellow Jesuit. 14. Ciaran Carson, “The lightning”, Until Before After, op. cit., lines 1-3, 5-6. 15. Our idiosyncratic points of view, of course, don’t necessarily mean mutual misunderstanding. Carson has said in interview that storytelling is an imaginative effort to “see the world through another’s eyes”, and in “The lightning” the ‘I’s’ “eye zigzag[s]” with precisely this sort of effort (see “For All I Know: Ciaran Carson in Conversation with Elmer Kennedy-Andrews”, Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Dublin, Four Courts, 2009, p. 24, 13). 16. Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time”, New Left Review I/196, 1992, p. 76. 17. One of the most compelling indications of “the observer effect” in quantum physics is the so-called double-slit experiment. In this experiment, a series of photons are fired at a plate with two slits. If no one the experiment, the photon acts like a wave, and passes through both slits at the same time. However, if an observer witnesses the experiment, each photon travels through only one of the slits. The experiment therefore implies that a photon does not have a location in space-time until it is observed, and that all matter is inherently probabilistic. (For a good explanation of this experiment, see Vesselin Petkov’s “Physical Laws and Worldlines in Minkowski Spacetime”, in Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later.) 18. Neal Alexander, Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing, Liverpool, Liverpool UP, 2010, p. 3. 19. Ibid., p. 170. 20. Ciaran Carson, Interview with John Brown, op. cit., p. 151. 21. Hans Reichenbach, Defending Einstein: Hans Reichenbach’s Writings on Space, Time, and Motion, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2006, p. 102. 22. Brian Greene, “The Time We Thought We Knew,” NY Times, 1 January 2004, [http:// www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/opinion/the-time-we-thought-we-knew.html?_r=0]. 23. Lee Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, New York, Mariner Books, 2013, p. 2. 24. Brian Greene, op. cit. 25. Ciaran Carson, “Overhead”, op. cit., lines 7-10. 26. Ciaran Carson, “Here lies”, op. cit., lines 1-3. 27. Ciaran Carson, “Asleep”, op. cit., line 9. 28. Ciaran Carson, “All day long”, op. cit., lines 1-2, 9-10. 29. Ciaran Carson, “For all”, op. cit., lines 2-3. 30. Ciaran Carson, Interview with John Brown, op. cit., p. 151. 31. Ciaran Carson, “If presently”, op. cit., lines 8-12, 3-14. 32. Ciaran Carson, “I looked through”, op. cit., lines 10-12.

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33. Ciaran Carson, “From a window ledge”, op. cit., line 3. 34. Ciaran Carson, “They said”, op. cit., line 1. 35. Ciaran Carson, “Figure”, op. cit., lines 1-3, 4-7. 36. Ciaran Carson, “All day long”, op. cit., lines 7-8. 37. Ciaran Carson, “In your absence”, op. cit., lines 7-9. 38. Ciaran Carson, “All day long”, op. cit., lines 3, 5. 39. Cathy Caruth, ed., Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, p. 9. 40. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson, Oxford, Oxford UP, 2002, p. 273. 41. Rand Brandes, “The Dismembering Muse: Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Kenneth Burke’s ‘Four Master Tropes’”, Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts, and Sciences 38.1, 1994, p. 177-94. 42. Ciaran Carson, “Did not know”, op. cit., lines 9-10. 43. Ciaran Carson, “Repeatedly”, op. cit., lines 1-2. 44. Ciaran Carson, “Away in”, op. cit., lines 5-6, 9-14. 45. Ciaran Carson, “Ambition”, Belfast Confetti, Winston-Salem, N.C., Wake Forest UP, 1989, lines 13-15. 46. Colin Graham, “‘strange architecture’: Ciaran Carson’s Until Before After”, Irish University Review 43.2, 2013, p. 396. 47. Ciaran Carson, “What is”, op. cit., lines 1-5. 48. Ciaran Carson, “What bodes”, op. cit., lines 1-3; “For all,” lines 8, 10. 49. Ciaran Carson, “Asleep”, op. cit., lines 1-7. 50. Ciaran Carson, “So far”, op. cit., lines 2-14. 51. Ciaran Carson, “To enter”, op. cit., lines 2, 7-10. 52. Ciaran Carson, op. cit., p. 109. 53. Ciaran Carson, “For All I Know: Ciaran Carson in Conversation with Elmer Kennedy- Andrews,” op. cit., p. 15. 54. Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music, New York, North Point Press, 1996, p. 11. 55. For details of the relationship of Carson’s ‘long line’ poetry to traditional music, see Julia C. Obert, Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, op. cit., chapter 3. 56. Ciaran Carson, “For All I Know: Ciaran Carson in Conversation with Elmer Kennedy- Andrews,” op. cit., p. 15. 57. Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun, op. cit., p. 88. 58. Ciaran Carson, Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music, Belfast, Appletree Press, 1986, p. 7, 9. 59. Ciaran Carson, “So it is”, op. cit., lines 2-3. 60. Ciaran Carson, “I open the door”, op. cit., lines 13-14. 61. Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun, op. cit., p. 116. 62. Ciaran Carson, “From whom”, op. cit., lines 2-4, 6-8, 9-10.

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63. Ciaran Carson, “For All I Know: Ciaran Carson in Conversation with Elmer Kennedy- Andrews”, op. cit., p. 15. 64. Ciaran Carson, “The turn”, op. cit., lines 9-11, 11-14. 65. Ibid., line 1. 66. Ibid., lines 5-7. 67. Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun, op. cit., p. 90, 189. 68. Ibid., p. 55. 69. Ciaran Carson, “It’s one of those,” op. cit., lines 4-7, 11, 13-14. 70. Ibid., lines 5-6. 71. Ciaran Carson, Interview with John Brown, p. 151. 72. Ciaran Carson, Last Night’s Fun, op. cit., p. 110. 73. Ciaran Carson, “To enter”, op. cit., line 2; “Of assignations”, op. cit., line 8. Additionally, perhaps this statement accounts for Carson’s interest in China Miéville (whom he recognizes in the collection’s Acknowledgements) and Haruki Murakami’s work. Carson has explained, for instance, that he loves Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World for its engagement with an “Otherworld”, and its depictions of characters moving “in and out of that world through dream portals” (interview with John Brown, op. cit., p.148). A similar kind of movement is apparent in Until Before After. 74. Ciaran Carson, “To enter”, op. cit., lines 8-10. 75. Ciaran Carson, Interview with John Brown, op. cit., p. 151.

ABSTRACTS

Ciaran Carson’s poetry collection Until Before After (2010), written while Carson’s wife Deirdre was seriously ill, turns and returns to sickness and the spectre of death. However, it finds some relief from anxiety and grief in the interweaving of poetry and theoretical physics – specifically, in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Both space and time, the volume contends, are observer- dependent; we do not exist on a linear continuum, and so life and after-life are actually simultaneous. As one contemplates being-towards-death, Carson indicates, these insights can be surprisingly therapeutic. Additionally, traditional music provides the basis for a new, non- Euclidean worldview in Until Before After. As Carson’s work on traditional music suggests, the genre can evade conventional measures of time. For instance, sometimes “a good musician can produce a pulse against the ostensible rhythm of the tune”, a technique that Carson calls “double entendre – like hearing two beats at once”. Until Before After borrows such double entendres from traditional music, allowing the poetry to offer a kinetic, relativistic, non-linear means of apprehending space and time.

Dans le recueil Until Before After (2010), écrit alors que sa femme Deirdre était atteinte d’une maladie grave, Ciaran Carson revient sans cesse sur la maladie et le spectre de la mort. Il trouve cependant un certain répit à l’angoisse et à la douleur en mêlant poésie et science physique – en

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particulier dans la théorie de la relativité d’Einstein. Le recueil dans son ensemble suggère que l’espace et le temps dépendent de qui les observe. Nous n’existons pas dans un continuum linéaire, et par conséquent la vie et le temps qui lui succède sont en réalité simultanés. Carson montre que ces intuitions peuvent être puissamment thérapeutiques au moment où l’on contemple son être-pour-la-mort. En outre, la musique traditionnelle offre le socle d’une nouvelle vision du monde non-euclidienne dans Until Before After, car ce genre peut s’affranchir des modalités conventionnelles de mesure du temps. Ainsi, parfois « un bon musicien peut faire surgir une pulsation qui va à l’encontre du rythme immédiatement perceptible de la mélodie », technique que Carson qualifie de « double entendre – comme si l’on entendait deux pulsations en même temps. » Until Before After emprunte ce double entendre à la musique traditionnelle, et permet à la poésie de proposer un mode d’appréhension du temps kinétique, relativiste et non- linéaire.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Carson Ciaran, corps, mortalité, musique, poésie, science Keywords: Carson Ciaran, body, mortality, music, poetry, science

AUTHOR

JULIA C. OBERT Julia C. Obert is Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of English at the University of Wyoming. Her book, Postcolonial Overtures: The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, was published by Syracuse UP in 2015. Her work has also appeared in New Hibernia Review; Irish Studies Review; Eire-Ireland; Postmodern Culture; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Textual Practice; Emotion, Space and Society; Postcolonial Text; and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, and is forthcoming in Irish University Review.

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“We’re Only Monsters”: Punk Bodies and the Grotesque in 1970s Northern Ireland

Timothy A. Heron

“There1 was a nightmare coming to life, it was overpowering and disturbing. Something had been given permission to show itself, it was exploding out2.” – Mary Harron

1 “Ballroom dancers would have run for their lives had they been at the Pound Hall in Townsend Street, Belfast, last night”, reads an article on the front page of the Belfast Newsletter on Friday 13th January 19783. Visitors, it warns, “are liable to be spat upon – at least”. This highlights an aspect of punk which is often forgotten or glossed over: its grotesque nature. Indeed, as a cultural phenomenon and as a mode of artistic and human expression, punk juxtaposed elements that were generally seen as mutually exclusive, developed an aesthetic which celebrated the monstrous, and encouraged performances and behaviours which were deemed abject, thus disturbing boundaries and provoking strong emotional responses4. Now that the codes and iconography of punk have been integrated into mainstream fashion, media and advertising, and at a time when punk’s fortieth anniversary is being celebrated in London with the official support of the Mayor’s Office and the British National Lottery, it is easy to forget how disturbing it really was. And yet it was this very quality that made punk – despite a relatively small base of participants – such an influential cultural force.

2 Punk is notoriously hard to define; it is a both a subculture5 and a complex cultural phenomenon which spanned several decades and several media – music, fashion, the visual arts, the alternative press, etc. Punk rock was an aggressive, fast and minimalist genre of popular music which partly arose as a reaction against contemporary popular music which was perceived as being too commercial and unexciting or too pretentious and removed from the fan. This dissonant style of music was associated with a discordant style of dress. Punk’s colourful and eccentric haircuts, its angular lines and its rip-and-tear aesthetic defied high street 1970s fashion, upset parents and drew daring young people to this “new teenage cult”6. As a subculture, it emerged in London

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in 1976 and soon made its way to Northern Ireland7. Although the violence of the Troubles and the climate of fear affected music groups – the 1975 Miami Showband massacre8 discouraged many international rock bands from visiting Northern Ireland – a vibrant local scene emerged, with many young people starting bands such as the Undertones, Rudi, Stiff Little Fingers, the Outcasts, Ruefrex and scores of others. At a time when prolonged cross-community contact was relatively uncommon, despite the efforts led by government agencies and religious organisations to foster better community relations, punk attracted both young Catholics and Protestants who temporarily set aside their political, religious and class differences and met up in streets and record shops (Caroline Records, Good Vibrations) or one another’s homes during the day, and at night crowded into the few spaces that allowed punk rock bands to play (bars such as the Harp, the Pound in Belfast or the Casbah in Derry, etc.). Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, punk provided these young people with the opportunity to secure a space in the margins where they could temporarily retreat from the conflict and create an “Alternative Ulster” in which cross-community coexistence, cooperation and camaraderie was possible. Elsewhere I have dealt with the emergence of a punk scene in Northern Ireland despite the lack of a proper infrastructure for rock music, thanks in part to punk’s adoption of do it yourself practices, and I have discussed how, why and to what extent the facilitated the transgression of sectarian, class and gender barriers9. In this paper I will articulate several related concepts – the grotesque, the abject and the monstrous – in order to argue that punk encouraged or at least enabled the questioning of gender and sectarian boundaries in a society where they were strictly codified. I will focus on punk bodies as well as on the representation of grotesque, monstrous bodies in punk songs.

Dress to Distress

3 People generally encountered punk dress before hearing punk rock, not only because of limited airplay on radio stations, but because punks appeared in the streets before the first singles or were pressed: thus punk’s initial shock was visual. Punk dress10 has a complex genealogy, but its most recognisable form emerged from the cross- pollination of entrepreneurs and designers Malcolm McLaren and and an art school milieu nicknamed “the Bromley Contingent” which converged around the and the couple’s Sex/Seditionaries boutique on London’s King’s Road in 197611. The dress style was picked up by the broadcast media and immediately associated with punk rock. A less art school, more street-orientated style emerged as young people across the isles drew inspiration from these images to construct their own punk dress in their own contexts. In 1970s UK and Ireland it was not difficult to stand out: cutting one’s hair or getting one’s trouser legs taken in were enough to single one out from the crowd. Cobley notes how the “muted tones” of punk dress in Wigan and other peripheral areas were enough to shock: in rural areas and towns unused to flamboyant self-expression, punks “did not have to work as hard to provoke onlookers” as their peers in London12. And yet punk dress in the north of Ireland was by no means subdued. Reading testimonies and perusing pictures of the era, it becomes clear that Northern Irish punk dress shared many of the characteristics of its London counterpart. Recourse to customised clothes or repurposed items may well have played a more important part than in major English cities – DIY (do-it-yourself) practice was particularly important in peripheral scenes – but many Northern Irish punks

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occasionally made the bus and ferry journey to London to stock up on clothes from Sex/Seditionaries and other boutiques. For an overview of Northern Irish punk dress, it is best to turn to the testimonies of participants themselves: [We wore] safety pins, rips, chains, writing, badges; every punk cliché you could think of was used, […], dyed spiky hair, blue suede buckled creepers, bondage gear, leathers, t- the whole shebang13. Torn , Dr. Marten and army were in, along with granddad shirts and ripped black jumpers; out went parallel trousers and bell-bottom , along with jet-wing-collar shirts and steel-capped Oxford brogues. […] I used [razor] blades to hack through my hair in order to create that messed-up spiky14 look I had seen first on Brighton’s streets and later in downtown Belfast. […] My mother […] even designed my own bondage trousers made from stolen pieces of manhole tape and the buckles of old schoolbags15.

4 Although they were a minority, women played a more prominent role in punk than they had in previous subcultures: We wore that were bought and cut up. We discovered fishnet in Anderson and McCauley/Robinson & Cleavers and my mum’s original stiletto heels which I squeezed into. Later on we wore Monkey boots with leather trousers, kilts and a motor bike studded … I sometimes made my own clothes and trimmed t-shirts with fur, lace, sequins, pins and put studs on my leather jacket16.

5 The clothes and items mentioned in these extracts were assembled to create a dress style which contrasted sharply with 1970s mainstream fashion. Punks generally favoured black, red and metallic colours over brown, yellow and pastel colours, and tight-fitting garments and angular, harsh lines over wide, flowing clothes17. Consciously or not, they borrowed from earlier and contemporary subcultures: Dr Martens boots from the skinheads, “drainpipe” trousers and brothel creeper shoes from the boys, studded leather from the rockers or bikers of the 1950s, and bondage gear from alternative sexual subcultures which in the 1970s were still mostly associated with LGBT communities, such as leather or PVC fetishism communities and BDSM subcultures. In contrast to the prevailing post-hippie trend of “natural beauty”, faces were pale rather than tanned, hair was chopped short and dyed in bright colours, and heavy make-up was worn by young women and occasionally by young men. Because of its oppositional aesthetic, Dick Hebdige has argued that punk was the subculture that best dramatized what had come to be called “Britain’s decline”. Indeed, punks appropriated the era’s rhetoric of crisis and anarchy18 and thus tapped into contemporary fears (mass unemployment, violence, immigration, totalitarianism, evolving moral standards, etc.) by presenting themselves as “degenerates19”. However, Hebdige interprets punk as a response by disaffected working-class youths to their subaltern position in late 1970s society, while in reality many punks were from middle- class backgrounds20. In the late 1970s it was not punks so much as skinheads who “claimed to speak for the neglected constituency of white lumpen youth21” and who best evoked stereotypical, imagined working-class and masculine values through their tough-looking, stripped-down dress. Punk dress by contrast was closer to science fiction than to social realism22: it drew inspiration from “low” or maligned aspects of popular culture such as pornography and the horror genre. If punk was in any way Dickensian, it was not because of its “proletarian accents” but because of its use of the grotesque23.

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Grotesque Bodies

6 The grotesque is a notoriously difficult concept to define, but for the purpose of this study we will describe it as a mode of artistic and human expression that is characterised by a conflation of disparate or mutually exclusive elements whose locus is the body, but which provokes, involuntarily or not, a disturbance, deformation and distortion of order; it produces an emotional response which, initially at least, is experienced as shock, strangeness or even estrangement24. With punk it seemed that the body and its excessive physicality were both celebrated and loathed: “the uglier you were, the more true to the punk spirit you were”25. At any rate, it put the body on display. Young people who did not match the beauty ideals of glossy magazines wore clothes which drew attention to the body. Overtight trousers, short , underwear worn as outerwear, oversized coats, pullovers and boots, short spiky hair or asymmetrical hairstyles distorted the body’s proportions. Bondage trousers, heavy boots and stiletto shoes forced punks to adopt unnatural postures and gaits. Even in its more subdued manifestations, punk dress expressed distortion and deformity: rips, tears, zips, holes, asymmetrical lines, graffiti, studs, out-of-place objects attached to clothes or to the flesh, etc. Although there was a strong element of playfulness to punk dress26 – as in most incarnations of the grotesque – punk seems to have held particular appeal for young people in Northern Ireland who felt that they did not fit into their families, their communities or into wider society. “For anyone in the UK at that point who felt cast out because of class, sexuality, perception, gender, even choice, who felt useless, unworthy, [punk] was an attraction/repulsion machine of […] infernal power that offered the chance of possible transcendence. In becoming a nightmare, you could find your dreams27.”

Abject Bodies

7 Initially however, punk was not seen by the media28 or by the wider public as a source of liberation. The provocative acts of the Sex Pistols – notably their swearing on a live chat show on a local London television channel in December 1976 and their boat trip on the Thames on the day of the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II to promote their single “God Save the Queen” in June 1977 – were opportunities used by the media to whip up a moral panic about the emerging phenomenon. They focused on the unconventional style and behaviour of punks, exaggerating the scene’s violence and its most sensationalist aspects. Although the media frenzy was short-lived, its description of the subculture in terms evoking abjection (“unpleasant”, “sick and filthy”, “degenerate”, “revolting”, “repugnant29”) had long-term effects: it not only framed punk’s reception by the wider society but also played a part in shaping the meaning of the phenomenon for punks themselves, as the representations circulated in the media were sometimes the only ones accessible to aspiring punks in peripheral areas. The abject, which was already a particular source of fascination for punks, thus became even more closely associated with the subculture. In common parlance, the abject refers to that which is vile and inspires disgust; etymologically, it signifies the state of being cast off and degraded. As such it is a feature of the grotesque body, with its “irrepressible growth, producing excrescences, protuberances, enormous noses and ears, pimples, tumours, genitalia30”. And indeed, “vomit, snot, spitting, menstrual blood, fetishism, obscenity,

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perversion, violence, unreason31” were used as inspiration for the names of Northern Irish punk bands (the Outcasts, Victim, the Defects, Stalag 17, Stage B, Toxic Waste…) and art (the sleeve of Rudi’s 1978 single “Big Time” featured a zombie-like monster32), and was theatricalized in the performances, practises, and bodies of punks. Safety pins were pushed through earlobes or other body parts; a few punks practised self-mutilation. A much more widespread practise was “gobbing”: spitting on band members during performances, a phenomenon which lasted longer in Northern Ireland than in Britain. Through these abject displays, “punk [acted] out a literally violent rejection of mainstream models of identity, as expressed through dominant ideals of bodily decorum33”. This rejection was further emphasised by the use of fascist imagery, a practice which has been interpreted both as a quasi-Situationist attempt to demystify the sign and as a generational, adolescent act of provocation, “an anti-mums and anti- dads thing34”. Pictures and testimonies reveal that Northern Irish punks, just like their London counterparts, toyed with Nazi symbols (swastikas, surplus German army jackets, the infamous “Destroy” t-shirts, which featured a large swastika) and occult imagery (pentangles, upside-down crucifixes, Satanic inscriptions, etc.)35. The display on punk bodies of symbols which referenced what Julia Kristeva calls the “abjection of Nazi crime” or which celebrated that which is “immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady” stemmed from punks’ conscious desire to set themselves apart, to mark themselves as dejects36. For Julia Kristeva, the abject not only has the quality of being opposed to the “I”, it is “something” that the “I” does not recognize as a thing37. It defies categorization; it disturbs order and meaning, and can thus be seen as a feature of the grotesque. Abjection is caused by an encounter with the grotesque body’s individual parts – which challenge order because of their excessive or unusual features or functions – and with the grotesque body as a whole, because of the sum of its disparate or mutually exclusive parts. It is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite38”. The display by punks of their abject, grotesque bodies had the unintended consequence of drawing attention to the fragility of the boundaries they inhabited; at the very least, they hinted at the possibility of transgression.

Monstrous Bodies

8 Whether punks wanted to cause abjection or not, their grotesque bodies were perceived by others as abject. They themselves also depicted the body as grotesque in their songs. The figure of the monster being one of the most widespread embodiments of the abject and the grotesque in postwar popular culture, notably in horror and in science fiction, it is no surprise that monsters feature prominently in punk iconography, either in the form of human murderers or other-than-human creatures. Monsters, like the punk body, disturb boundaries: Monsters are un-natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge39.

9 The monstrous is particularly noticeable in the material of one of Northern Ireland’s most popular punk rock groups, the Outcasts, from Belfast. Their song “The Princess Grew Up A Frog”40 tells the tale of a “cute little girl with golden curls”, who is told by her family that she is “God’s gift to the world” and is so pretty that she appears in an

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advertisement for children’s clothes. However, this leads to her becoming arrogant, and her hubris is punished when “at thirteen she got spots/And at fourteen she had to wear a brace”. The princess thus grows up a “green green, slimy green” frog but is unable to find a prince willing to “break the evil spell”. The contempt of the narrator is obvious in the disparaging tone of voice adopted by Outcasts frontman Greg Cowan, who spits out the words with a mixture of glee and disgust. It is tempting to read the song as a subconscious expression of the fear of the mutating adolescent body, and notably of the female body. Conventionally, the female body is seen as metamorphic (“menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause”), which makes it an essential aspect of the grotesque41. Puberty in particular is the moment “when childhood innocence may be swapped for the of monstrosity associated with abject fecundity”, and here that mantle takes the shape of a frog, but, contrary to the fairy tale, it is a monster which cannot be redeemed42. Femininity is both desired and “feared and abjected” because of male castration anxieties or envy of women's reproductive power43, but especially due to the fact that the feminine is always the other against which the masculine is defined. There is an attempt to sublimate or at least to manage the monstrous-feminine in the Outcasts song “Clinical love”. The song opens with the chime of a music box – a sound both evocative of childhood and a common trope in horror films44 – but is then replaced by low-pitched, midtempo palm muted guitar downstrokes which soon become the backdrop to Cowan’s gloom-laden vocals: “2023 AD/Germs and illness have been eradicated/Physical contact is outdated/ Except for the selected breeding few/And we are two of the potent few”. The female body – whose presence is implied, but not mentioned in the verse – is sanitised, regulated and, ultimately, repressed by a dystopian society which still needs it for reproduction: it is a fecund body with the abject (“germs”, “illness”) removed. However, in the chorus, physicality and sexuality reassert themselves; the repressed abject returns: “Come on be my zombie babe/Come on be my lover too/Come on be my zombie babe/Give me love/So cold and clinical”. It turns out that the potent, selected breeding few are zombies – the most abject of monsters, for they are animated corpses, creatures both living and dead. The attempt to contain sexuality, and especially the female body, has failed. As in science fiction or horror narratives, the creatures have escaped from the laboratory, which here may stand for a safe, pre-pubescent space, and they have emerged into a world where they can now mate without control and for pleasure rather than for reproductive purposes. And yet the narrator asks the “zombie babe” for a form of “cold and clinical” love, a sexual encounter devoid of the abject – which, of course, is impossible. These lyrics seem to betray a longing for the certainties or the familiarity of the pre-pubescent stage of development and a fear of female desire and of the monstrous-feminine body. The explicit expression of abjection when dealing with the ambiguous attraction-repulsion impulse found in these two songs is characteristic of punk sexual discourse. The female body, constructed as metamorphic and abject, is feared because it threatens the relationship between the sexes as well as the identity of each sex, according to Kristeva45. Because of its position of power and the fact that it defines itself in opposition to other gender identities, it is hegemonic masculinity which risks being called into question; the boundaries it uses to construct itself risk being displaced or dissolved.

10 This is illustrated in the song “Bewerewolf46” by another Belfast band, Rudi, in which a werewolf is threatened with being shot with a silver bullet. Although in contemporary popular culture the werewolf is generally depicted as a masculine monster, its lack of

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control over its own body and appetite, its association with the moon and its cycles, and its animality are characteristics historically used to describe and abjectify the female. What is feared is not the werewolf’s animality but its ambivalence, the fact that it is both human and other-than-human and that it is not reducible to one or the other. The threat of the silver bullet being fired into the penetrable, monstrous-feminine flesh of the werewolf can then be read as an attempt to put an end to the curse of an unstable, metamorphic body and to reassert hegemonic masculinity over and against feminine and other subaltern gender identities. The monstrous-feminine body, no longer concealed, must be got rid of. In an interesting twist, the title of the song and lyrics of the chorus are themselves ambiguous: “Silver silver bullet/Beware wolf” could also be understood as “Be werewolf”, as the spelling of the title suggests. The warning issued to the werewolf can thus be read or heard on another level as being a call to become the shapeshifting creature, and to embrace rather than resist the monstrous. And indeed, in several Northern Irish punk songs, the monstrous is reclaimed or celebrated. In “Clinical Love”, both the narrator and the “zombie babe” are monsters; this is even clearer in songs like “Cyborgs” by the Outcasts or “We’re Only Monsters” by the Co-ordinates, which we will come to later. Songs such as these reveal the fluidity of the boundaries between man and monster, male and female, living and dead, normal and abnormal.

11 The thematic exploration of the grotesque and the monstrous in Northern Irish punk rock songs47 did not amount to a conscious transgression of gender and sexual boundaries48, but the playful, parodic use of common fairy tale figures and tropes – no doubt inspired by their reinterpretation in contemporary horror and science fiction comics, films and television series – and in particular the repositioning of the feminine body, threatened to subvert the codes of heteronormative sexuality and of hegemonic masculinity, and pointed to the instability of boundaries in a society where they were deemed immutable.

Blurring the Lines

12 The instability of boundaries was further signalled by the fact that punk dress cultivated an ambiguous . The wearing of earrings and bondage gear by both sexes, the juxtaposition of short dyed hair and leatherwear or PVC clothing, and the occasional use of makeup by young men not only blurred the boundaries between male and female, they were also direct appropriations from and culture as well as from alternative sexual subcultures. Punk’s “queerness49” often provoked a negative reaction, especially outside cosmopolitan London, where being a punk was “an affront to an assortment of deep-rooted values: class, masculinity, “decent” behaviour, locality and “tradition50”. In British towns in the 1970s, where unemployment was rife, there existed a “white underclass […] in which the men [were] the most likely of all men to adopt aggressive masculine styles and values whereby status [was] imparted to those who display[ed] loyalty and bravery in confrontation with outsiders”. In Northern Ireland, challenging established boundaries was particularly transgressive because it was a highly gender- and heteronormative society, where bodies were routinely controlled51: indeed, paramilitarism reinforced a martial view of masculinity, while the power of religious institutions – the Catholic church as well as Protestant and especially Evangelical churches – meant that even among young people, social attitudes

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regarding sexual mores tended to be conservative: in 1978 Northern Irish male teenagers were much more likely to frown on pre-marital sex than their English peers, for instance52. Above all it was the body and sexuality of women and LGBTQ people which were controlled: legal access to abortion was and still is heavily restricted and homosexual acts were only decriminalised in 198253. In this context, the punks’ blurring of the boundaries meant that they were sometimes the target of abuse, which could range from being called homophobic slurs to being beaten up. The punks’ non- normative bodies were seen as so threatening because According to Freud, the outlines of the body are the foundations of the bodily ego and hence the sense of the self. In punk culture, the outlines of the body are no longer stable. The violence and anarchy embraced by the punk movement were terrifying to the mainstream in part because they were ultimately directed at the dominant conception of selfhood. Punk threatened not the dissolution of society but, more radically, the dissolution of the self54.

13 However, I would argue that punk could indeed be taken to threaten the dissolution of society, precisely because it threatened the dissolution of the self. In the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, the use of the grotesque in punk dress and songs did not only challenge preconceived notions about the gendered and heteronormative self; it also threatened ethno-religious identification. While walls, murals, flags, painted street kerbs, graffiti were used in urban spaces as markers of identity which signalled the territorial and cultural boundaries of nationalist-republican and unionist-loyalist communities, signs of difference were also located in the body itself. The desire to police the boundaries of the community and to seek ways of identifying the other was seen as a form of self-preservation. The fear of the other was increased by the very real danger posed by undercover soldiers, paramilitaries or sectarian killers like the Shankill Butchers55. Thus people in Northern Ireland, especially those living close to “interface” areas, quickly became used to the practice of scanning strangers for signs of otherness. In a discussion of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism – which can be applied to analyse the process of othering subaltern groups living in colonial or post- colonial contexts within Western societies – Ghaforian, Moosavinia, and Niazi assert that “othering codifies and fixes the self as the true human and the other as other than human56”. Thus signs which may have seemed anodyne elsewhere were invested in Northern Ireland with meaning: the style of clothes, the haircut, vocabulary, accents, pronunciation of a consonant, even the features of the body. Irish people had been described as racially and ethnically other as far back as the Anglo-Norman conquest57; in Britain and in the United States Irish Catholics in particular were not considered fully white until the late nineteenth century. During the Troubles, since skin colour could not be used as a sign of difference, other physical markers were constructed. Thus Catholics were described by Protestants as being skinny, having dark hair and eyes, and always looking hungry – bringing back to life the haunting memory of victims of the Great Famine. Protestants were themselves perceived by Catholics as being blonde, having big bones and large features, and rarely smiling or talking to strangers58. Both communities described the other as having their eyes set close together, and in some working class neighbourhoods, children were even taught that Catholics had horns under their hair59. In Northern Ireland the bodies of members of the other side were thus described in terms which evoked the grotesque and the monstrous. But while each community was busy projecting monstrous characteristics onto their rivals and mutually accusing each other of abject behaviour, punks, as we have seen, openly submitted their own bodies to monstrous mutations and revelled in

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the grotesque. Almost simultaneously to punks’ bodily experimentations there emerged a new form of political protest, which similarly put the grotesque and abject body on display: the 1978-1980 “dirty protest” and the 1980-1981 hunger strikes by republican prisoners. If the “emaciated, gaunt, sometimes twisted bodies of the hunger strikers challenged the fantasy of the macho warrior by depicting the consequences of war on the male body60”, the grotesque bodies of punks evoked something entirely different. Redolent of Catholic crucifixes, the “fragile, weak, wounded and frail” bodies of the republican protestors had a purpose: they saw themselves as offering up their bodies as a “Christ-like sacrifice” which would redeem the nationalist community. This near-religious structuration of abjection purifies and sublimates the abject: the bodies of the hunger strikers become sacred, consecrated. Not so for punks, whose abject, monstrous bodies signalled their participation in a subculture which in terms of the Troubles was – initially and superficially at least – apolitical, and which, rather than reinvigorating one of the two communities, challenged the boundaries of both. Punks seemed to lie outside the frames of interpretation of both communities: they could be made to fit neither the nationalist-republican narrative of self-sacrifice, submission to the community and devotion to the struggle against British rule nor the unionist- loyalist narrative of loyalty to the British Crown and defence of a Protestant “Ulster”. The refusal to play by the rules of Northern Irish society is expressed in the Outcasts song “You’re a disease”, which, although it appears to be a break-up song, can be interpreted as dealing with the abjection of sectarianism and its consequences: “You’re a disease/I don’t want to catch”. The implications of participation in an “in-between”, “ambiguous”, “composite” subculture become clearer in the Outcasts’ song “Cyborg”: “We are the new generation/We are the new scientific creation/Half-machine, half-boy and girl/Sent to overrun the rule of nature”. Given the primary context of reception of this song – the largely cross-community Northern Irish punk subculture – the “we” can be taken to represent both Catholic and Protestant young people. Indeed, a cyborg is a composite being, an organic creature whose functions are restored or enhanced through artificial means. “Cyborgs”, argues Csicsery-Ronay Jr, “are by definition not linked to traditions, to families and clans, and to traditional nations”. In science fiction, they are an “attempt to imagine what personal identity might be like after the full deconstruction of traditional communal loyalties61”. The Outcasts’ hymn to hybridity thus contains a warning: “You are the old days, we are the new ways/You are the old ways, we are the new days”. It is interesting in this regard to note that the word monstrum – which in Latin means “portent” – derives from the etymon monere: “to warn”. Punks were monsters because they threatened to reveal the arbitrary nature of the Us-Them binary and to disrupt the process of othering: they were “transgressors of social norms and violators of accepted cultural codes62”; they “threatened to overturn cherished ideals, their symbols and institutions63”. Punks could be seen as abject not only because of their grotesque dress style but because they raised the fear of “the shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery64”. As a result, they were often picked on by peers within their respective communities and beaten up – just as they were for their perceived queerness – and on a few occasions they were threatened by both republican and loyalist paramilitaries. The song “We’re Only Monsters” by the Co-Ordinates was written as a response to the attitudes of peers, authority and the media towards punks in Northern Ireland: “They're trying to tell us/We're only monsters/Anti-establishmentarianism/We're only monsters/The youth of today should be thrown in prison/We don't care what they say/Give us music any old way65.” Despite

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the perceived transgressiveness of punk, what attracted young people to it was the exciting music and the promise of “unbridled leisure, pleasure and carefree fun66”. Because of this, young Catholics and Protestants from both working-class and middle- class backgrounds, and to a certain extent both young men and young women, continued to meet up in shared spaces across Northern Ireland. Not all punks were non-sectarian, and the fragile unity of the 1970s punk subculture was sometimes put to the test, but all in all punk levelled the field: if young Catholics were monsters, if young Protestants were monsters too, then they had more in common than they had previously thought. The spaces in which the grotesque punk bodies assembled were thus the site of carnivalesque interactions in the Bakthinian sense: they allowed eccentric behaviour of a sacrilegious nature, carnivalistic misalliances, and the free and familiar interaction between people who were normally separated. The world was thus turned upside down and normal rules were suspended. But like the feast of fools, like Foucault’s heterotopias, these interactions were limited in time and space. In the early 1980s, changing trends in music, the break-up of many of the original bands, the rise of sectarian skinheads and the climate of increased sectarianism following the republican hunger strikes and the subsequent backlash all contributed to the demise of the first wave of Northern Ireland punk. Nevertheless, for a short while at least, punk in Northern Ireland acted as a hybrid space – as theorised by Bhabha – insofar as it provided a “liminal space at the boundaries of two cultures”, a space from which power relations were not magically elided but which enabled them to be negotiated in novel ways and, ultimately, challenged67. By using the grotesque and the monstrous not as a process of othering and abjectifying people from rival communities, but rather as a tool for aesthetic, lyrical and stylistic expression, punks unwittingly launched themselves into an exploration and a questioning of some of the boundaries which were fiercely enforced in Northern Irish society. What Jim Ellis has said about LGBTQ people and “unconventional” women can thus be applied to the young Northern Irish punks of the 1970s: for them, for a while at least, punk marked “the triumph of the freakish outsider68”.

NOTES

1. This article was written thanks to the support of the SOFEIR research scholarship. 2. Jon Savage, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and beyond, New York, St. Martin's Griffin, 2002, p. 241. 3. In Northern Ireland the main newspapers mostly ignored the punk phenomenon, as they had more urgent matters to cover. However, local editions of the British tabloids were published. 4. For a longer discussion of the grotesque, see below. 5. Use of the term “subculture” is controversial, but we use the concept as it is defined by Paul Hodkinson, who addresses much of the criticism that has been directed against it. According to his definition, a subculture must respond to four different criteria:

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identity, commitment, consistent distinctiveness and autonomy. See Paul Hodkinson, Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture, Oxford, Berg, 2002, p. 29. 6. Nationwide, 12 November 1976, BBC One. 7. Punk spread to Northern Ireland much as it did to the cities and regions of Britain: through John Peel’s late night radio BBC One programme, music papers – NME, Sounds, Melody Maker – sensationalist reports in tabloids, siblings or friends coming back from a visit in Britain, and, by the summer of 1977, through the appearance of punk rock and new wave bands on Top of the Pops on the BBC. 8. On 31 July 1975 three members of the popular Miami Showband were gunned down by the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force on their way back to Dublin and the other two were injured in a sectarian attack. The incident shocked opinion north and south of the border. 9. See for instance Timothy Heron, “Alternative Ulster: Punk and the Construction of Everyday Life in 1970s Northern Ireland”, Popular Culture Today. Imaginaires no 19, Presses universitaires de Reims, 2015 and “Parochial, not provincial? Punk outside the metropolis: the case of Northern Ireland”, Four Nations History Network, 2015 [https:// fournationshistory.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/833/]. 10. For the purpose of this article, I rely on Joanne Eicher’s definition of dress: “A system of nonverbal communication that enhances human being’ interaction as they move in space and time. As a coded sensory system, dressing the body occurs when human beings modify their bodies visually or through other sensory measures by manipulating color, texture, scent, sounds, and taste or by supplementing their bodies with articles of clothing and accessories, and jewelry.” Monika Sklar, Punk Style, 2014, London, Bloomsbury, p. 8. 11. A similar scene emerged in the seaside resort of Bangor in Northern Ireland: the “Young Americans” were to Northern Ireland what the Bromley Contingent was to London. See book The Punk Trilogy (web) by Dee Wilson. 12. Paul Cobley, “Leave the Capitol” in Roger Sabin (ed.) Punk rock, so what? the cultural legacy of punk, London, Routledge, 2009, p. 171. 13. Joe Donnelly in Sean O'Neill and Guy Trelford. It Makes You Want to Spit!: The Definitive Guide to Punk in Northern Ireland, 1977-1982, Dublin, Reekus, 2003, p.79. The book contains numerous first-hand testimonies by participants of the Northern Irish 1970s punk scene. 14. Despite subsequent representations in popular culture, the famed “Mohican” haircut was only adopted by punks towards the end of the 1970s. 15. Henry McDonald, Colours: from Bombs to Boom, Edinburgh, Mainstream, 2004, p. 57. 16. Maureen Lawrence, personal interview, 2016. 17. Monika Sklar, op. cit., p. 80, and Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, PM Press, 2015, p. 118. 18. It was not the use of the word “anarchy” by the Sex Pistols and other bands which was shocking, but the fact that punks seemed to welcome and celebrate anarchy. Indeed, the word was used prominently in the media throughout the 1970s. To give just one example, in 1974 The Times described the UK in the following terms: “A world increasingly ruthless and increasingly irrational, a world in which the principle of order is by its nature exposed to furious attack […]. The vanguard of anarchy is loose in

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the world”. Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain, 1974-1979. London, Penguin, 2013, p. 125. 19. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, London, Methuen, 1979, p. 85. 20. London punk was composed of both working-class and (lower) middle-class elements. My fieldwork in Northern Ireland has brought me to similar conclusions about the 1970s and 1980s punk scenes in Belfast and Derry although a widescale ethnographic survey would need to be carried out to settle the question. 21. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, op. cit., p. 63. 22. Johan Kugelberg, Jon Savage, William Gibson, Linder Sterling, and Gee Vaucher, Punk: An Aesthetic, New York, Rizzoli, 2012, p. 344-346. 23. In reality, punk was rarely naturalistic. Even in punk’s more social realist manifestations – which would emerge in the 1980s in street punk, oi and anarcho-punk, but which had been foreshadowed by bands such as the Clash in London and Stiff Little Fingers or Ruefrex in Northern Ireland – society’s ills were conveyed through the grotesque and the abject. As Jello Biafra, the lead singer of American punk band the Dead Kennedys, has said: “What would happen if I took the horror of Alice Cooper […] but made it about real things that happen to people. Instead of vampires and monsters… police brutality”. Jello Biafra in Punk: Attitude, dir. Don Letts, Capitol Entertainment, 2005. 24. See Stell Butter, “The Grotesque as a Comic Strategy of Subversion: Mapping the Crisis of Masculinity in Patrick McGrath’s ‘The Grotesque’”, Orbis Litterarum 62:4, 2007, p. 338; Donald H. Ross, “The Grotesque: A Speculation”, Poe Studies, June 1971, vol. IV, no 1, p. 10-11 and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, “On the Grotesque in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2002, p. 71-99. 25. Daniela Soave in Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan, Punk, London, Bounty, 2013, p. 317. 26. The pleasure of putting together punk dress, of getting ready to go out and of shocking onlookers features prominently in the interviews I have carried out. 27. Jon Savage, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, op. cit. 2002, p. XV. 28. At first the only music magazines to embrace punk were the NME, Sounds and, somewhat later, Melody Maker. 29. Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Powers and Meaning in Punk Rock, Oakland CA, 2015, p. 142. As mentioned above, British tabloids, which were quick to use this type of language, were sold in Northern Ireland. 30. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, “On the Grotesque in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1. 2002:87. 31. Paul Cobley, “Leave the Capitol” op. cit., p. 174. 32. Good Vibration Records, 1978. 33. Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations, Minneapolis, U of Minnesota, 2009, p. 57. 34. Siouxsie Sioux in Jon Savage, op. cit., p. 241. 35. Henry McDonald, Colours: from Bombs to Boom, op. cit., p. 37.

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36. Julia Kristeva and Leon S. Roudiez, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia UP, 1982, p. 4 37. Ibid., p. 1-2. 38. Ibid., p. 4. 39. Noël Carroll in Alexis de Coning, “Sympathising with a Monster: An Exploration of the Abject ‘Human Monster’ in Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory”, in Elizabeth Nelson, Jillian Burcar and Hannah Priest (eds.), Creating Humanity, Discovering Monstrosity: Myths & Metaphors of Enduring Evil, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010, p. 164. 40. This song and all other Outcasts songs mentioned in this paper are from the album Self Conscious Over You, Good Vibrations Records, 1979. 41. “The association of the female body with materiality, sex, and reproduction in the female body, makes it an essential – not an accidental – aspect of the grotesque”. Miles in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, op. cit., p. 86. 42. Jane M. Ussher, Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body, London, Routledge, 2006, p. 8. 43. Ibid., p. 6. 44. Both The Innocents (1961) and Rosemary's Baby (1968) feature nursery rhymes and music box tunes. 45. Julia Kristeva and Leon S. Roudiez, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, op. cit, p. 71. 46. Rudi, “Bewerewolf!”, Spit Records, 2015, vinyl record (reissue of 1981 EP). 47. It also appears in songs like “Bondage in Belfast” by the Androids, “Rabies” and “Strange Thing by Night” by Victim, “Lizzie Borden” by Stage B, “Fringes” by the Doubt, “Barbed Wire Love” by Stiff Little Fingers, etc. 48. Although the 1970s punk subculture often acted as a safe space for women and for LGBTQ people, it was still in many ways a heteronormative culture. 49. For a general discussion of the links between 1970s punk and queerness, see Tavia Nyong’o, “Do You Want (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s”, Radical History Review, Volume 2008, Number 100, 2008, p. 103-119. 50. Paul Cobley, “Leave the Capitol” op. cit., p. 171. 51. The conflict led to specific forms of body control which could potentially affect anyone: from official forms of policing which consisted in searching and patting people down at checkpoints or in front of shops to the brutal forms of social control exerted by paramilitary groups (kneecapping and punishment beatings), as well as the British army’s aggressive “five techniques” of interrogation. 52. Ed Cairns, Caught in Crossfire: Children and the Northern Ireland Conflict, Belfast, Appletree, 1987, p. 72-76. 53. Even then, the age of consent was 21. 54. Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations, op. cit., p. 57. 55. The “Shankill Butchers” were an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang which from 1975 to 1977 roamed the streets of Belfast and carried out a series of horrific murders. They are believed to have killed at least 19 people, almost all of whom were Catholic. “Violence – Significant Violent Incidents During the Conflict”, CAIN Web service.

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56. S. R. Moosavinia, N. Niazi and Ahmad Ghaforian, “Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Study of the Self and the Other in Orwell’s Burmese Days”, Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2011, p. 105. 57. Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland (1188) and Expugnatio Hibernica (1189), which were written to justify the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, described the Irish as barbarians and were later relied on by English writers. S.J. Connolly, The Oxford Companion to Irish History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 230. 58. See Frank Burton, “Ideological Social Relations in Northern Ireland”, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 1, Wiley, 1979, p. 61-80; Ashley Merryman, “Divided Loyalties”, National Catholic Reporter, 8 April 2005; Dervla Murphy, A Place Apart: Northern Ireland in the 1970s, London, Eland, 2014, p.73 59. One ex-punk from the Shankill, a staunchly loyalist area, remembers how children from the neighbourhood had a close look at his friend from the nationalist Falls Road to see whether his eyes were set close together and checked his hair for horns, as they had been taught that Catholics displayed such unusual features (Lee Martin, personal interview, 2014). 60. Edwin Coomasaru, “Emaciating machismo: masculinity, murals and memorialising hunger strikes”, The Irish Times, 5 May 2016. 61. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, op. cit., p. 77. Csicsery-Ronay Jr argues that cyborgs are seen as embodiments of the “negative” grotesque until the mid-80s, after which representations of cyborgs become much more positive. 62. Alexis de Coning, The Wasp Factory, op. cit., p. 165. 63. Paul Cobley, “Leave the Capitol”, op. cit., p. 175. 64. Julia Kristeva and Leon S. Roudiez, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, op. cit., p. 2. 65. Shellshock Rockers, Spit Records, 2011. 66. Bill Osgerby, “The teenage aesthetic and genealogies of American punk”, in Roger Sabin (ed.) Punk rock, so what? the cultural legacy of punk, London, Routledge, 2009, p. 156. 67. F.C. McGrath, “Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory”, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, November 2012, p. 467. 68. Jim Ellis, Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversations, op. cit., p. 58.

ABSTRACTS

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when cross-community contact was relatively uncommon in Northern Ireland, the punk subculture attracted both young Catholics and Protestants who temporarily set aside their political, religious and class differences. These young people signalled their participation in the subculture by adopting a dress style which, at the time, was considered shocking. Indeed, punk bodies were interpreted by observers and constructed by punks themselves in terms that evoked the grotesque, the abject and the monstrous. Such bodies were also a common feature in punk iconography and appeared in punk

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rock songs. In this paper I aim to show how Northern Irish punks, by displaying and celebrating these bodily characteristics in a society where they were generally used to identify and describe the “other” in a sectarian framework, threatened to disturb order and encouraged or at least enabled the transgression of gender and sectarian boundaries.

Tout au long des années 1970 et 1980, à une époque où les contacts entre les communautés étaient relativement limités en Irlande du Nord, la sous-culture punk attira à la fois des jeunes catholiques et protestants qui faisaient provisoirement abstraction de leurs différences politiques, religieuses et sociales. Ces jeunes gens signalaient leur appartenance à la culture punk en adoptant un style vestimentaire qui, à l’époque, paraissait choquant. De fait, les corps punks étaient perçus par ceux qui les observaient, et construits par les punks eux-mêmes, comme relevant du grotesque, de l’abject et du monstrueux. Ces corps apparaissaient fréquemment dans l’iconographie punk, ainsi que dans les chansons des groupes de punk rock. Dans cet article je montre que les punks nord-irlandais, en exhibant et en célébrant ces caractéristiques corporelles dans une société où elles étaient généralement utilisées pour identifier et stigmatiser l’« autre » catholique ou protestant, menaçaient de perturber l’ordre public et encourageaient, ou du moins rendaient possible, le franchissement de barrières religieuses et genrées.

INDEX

Keywords: punk, body, Northern Ireland, popular culture, youth, collective identity, individual identity Mots-clés: punk, corps, Irlande du Nord, culture populaire, jeunesse, identité collective, identité individuelle

AUTHOR

TIMOTHY A. HERON Timothy A. Heron is a PhD student and junior lecturer (PRAG) at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. His dissertation, supervised by prof. Sylvie Mikowski, is entitled ‘Alternative Ulster’: Punk and Transgression in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. He is researching the Northern Ireland punk phenomenon during the ‘Troubles’ and examining its impact on the practices and outlook of those involved. He is a member of the ANR-funded PIND (Punk is not dead. Une histoire de la scène punk en France, 1976-2016) research team. His wider interests lie with Irish studies, gender issues, and popular and alternative cultures. His first article was published in issue 19 of the journal Imaginaires (Presses universitaires de Reims, 2015).

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“Bubbles of joy”: Moments of Pleasure in recent Northern Irish Culture

Caroline Magennis

“Pleasure1 can get out of hand2.”

1 It might be stating the obvious to assert that Irish literary and cultural criticism is in thrall to trauma, violence and a reconsideration of the most contested elements of the past. Critical texts often use psychoanalytic and deconstructive frameworks, including the work of Cathy Caruth and Dominic Le Capra in their analysis3. There are intellectual and institutional imperatives for this focus, and comparative perspectives are often thought to yield a way out of Irish exceptionalism, but an over-deterministic focus on a painful past has come to dominate criticism on Northern texts. In this age of the academic funding imperative, particularly in the British climate with the impact agenda, many projects have sprung up to discuss “dealing with the past” and the commemoration of violent events.4 There is a danger that literature and culture have come to be used in instrumental ways, to discuss what they can tell us about the politics of the author or a particular historical moment and they are often read as palliatives for perceived ethical gaps in a flawed process. The frustration is palpable and understandable; critics want literature to do things that politicians in Northern Ireland seem unable or unwilling to do. But, quite often in these analyses, literature is not set within its formal contexts and culture is expected to do transformative ethical and political work. This impulse has also led to those texts which are seen to engage most directly with political violence receiving not only disproportionate critical attention, but also being widely taught to “sex up” courses on Northern Irish culture. Through this process, trauma texts come to dominate the focus of Northern Irish literary scholarship, while texts which speak to broader political questions are elided from the cultural landscape. Of course, this goes to the heart of a fundamental issue of academic value: what critical objects are worthy of study and why? What is considered to be a “serious” object of academic inquiry in this area and who gets to speak for these objects?

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2 While a focus on trauma is perhaps natural in this political and social context, it is not sufficient to explain contemporary Northern Irish culture’s engagement with history, politics and sexuality. Consequently, this essay advocates for something of a critical turn – a turn towards the representation of pleasure in Northern Irish texts. Moments of pleasure within literature and culture will be examined as a space for exploration and contestation of hegemonic ideas of home, sexuality and political life. However, while undertaking this reassessment we must be careful not to set up a false dichotomy between a “pleasure text” and a “trauma text”: Northern Irish literature and culture has moments of both, often situated side by side. The issue here, then, is not with texts but with readings, and the aim is not to replicate one over-deterministic critical practice with another. Instead I propose we seek out moments of pleasure and let them stand beside moments of pain, to do justice to the myriad of affective states expressed by Northern Irish writers. This essay will consider depictions of pleasure in a selection of recent texts which are written by authors from Northern Ireland and which engage directly with both this geographical context and also with pleasure in the “post”- conflict era: Glenn Patterson’s novel The Rest Just Follows (2014), Billy Cowan’s play Still Ill (2014) and Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection Multitudes (2016). The focus will be on the depiction of pleasure, particularly sexual, to see whether these texts offer new ways of being an erotic subject in the changed political climate, or whether the sexual charge still lies in the fissures of unresolved conflict. On this, I follow Laura Frost’s reading of “pleasure as a bodily, individual experience that is simultaneously located in a social field as well as, most importantly, a textual one5”.This essay will situate Northern Irish pleasure in its social and textual contexts and suggest that there is a “new pleasure” that has emerged in Northern Irish texts.

3 Alexander Beaumont discusses how a representational burden was felt on British fiction during the decline of leftist politics in the 1980s as “the expectation placed on expressive culture to do the work of political action”. However, he notes that “today, the British novel is frequently marked by structures of failed utopianism, frustrated or incomplete experiments and even withdrawal and quietism6”. Beaumont’s identification of the consequences of critical expectations on British fiction can be compared to the current situation in Northern Ireland, and we must guard against the ossifying effects of wanting literature to fit into our critical and political paradigms. The distinction should be drawn between this sort of broad, political utopian project and the generative possibilities espoused by Eve Sedgwick in her essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (2003)7. As Robyn Wiegman summarises, Sedgwick’s approach to reading and recovering is: about learning how to build small worlds of sustenance that cultivate a different present and future for the losses one has suffered. You could say that it’s about loving what hurts but instead of using that knowledge to prepare for a vigilant stand against repetition, it responds to the future with an affirmative richness8.

4 In what follows I will consider how contemporary Northern Irish culture can create these “small worlds of sustenance” and how writing about the past also has the potential to foreground intimacy in a body of work more normally associated with trauma and violence. In this context, the writing of mutually enjoyable intimate encounters, which will be broadly conceived of as “pleasures”, has the power to realign traditional cultural narratives of sexuality, family and the domestic. These representations stand against what we might call the “melancholic erotic” in Northern Irish writing: where intimacy is asked to repeatedly stand in for the politics of the

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Troubles. Examples of this include Joan Lingard’s Across the Barricades series, where Kevin and Sadie’s cross-community relationship is set up as a paradigm of political co- operation, or in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street, where the ceasefires are met with a surge of sexual activity among Jake Jackson and his friends. However, there could be the suggestion that this is merely replacing one set of ossifying representations for another, and expecting the erotic to be a political agent. Instead, we can think of the experiments of pleasure as moments which do not have to stand for anything else but themselves. Pleasure is an easy metonym when it is written in purely orgasmic terms, that is as an end in itself. As Laura Frost notes “in the same way that an orgasm-centred theory of sexuality does not account for vast registers of eroticism, the idea of pleasure as a performance that has ended or a dam that has burst imposes false borders on the experience9”. The space between desire and the traditional ideas of satiation (through climax) can be written as an experimental place of connection and collaboration. A criticism aware to the powers of pleasure in Northern Ireland will be alert to the imposition of these “false borders” in more ways than one. This essay will argue that beginning to account for these “vast registers of eroticism” (devoid of false borders) is exceptionally powerful in Northern Ireland if we want to loosen the representational stranglehold on sexuality. These moments cannot be forced into dominant reading paradigms but can, instead, be aberrations in texts which have been read as straightforwardly political. I want to follow what in Time Binds (2010), Elizabeth Freeman describes as “the unintelligible or resistant moment” alongside how Virginia Woolf uses the idea of the “moment” in Mrs Dalloway (1925), to convey a variety of temporally constrained pleasures10.While Woolf’s repeated use of this term varies, it is in her iconic encounter with Sally Seton (“Only for a moment; but it was enough”) where the moment of pleasure has the sort of power Freeman discusses11. For Woolf’s characters, these moments are as much about the realisation of pleasure as being lost in a moment, the pleasure is one of recognition. Of course, the spectre of World War One recurs throughout Woolf’s novel, and this pleasure/trauma representational bind is also prevalent in Northern Irish cultural context.

5 Pleasures may be politically incorrect, we may find pleasure in trauma, the meaning of an event may shift and change over time, what once gave us pleasure may no longer hold appeal, particularly under scrutiny. Lauren Berlant reminds us that, in criticism, there “is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory12”. Literature and culture are sites where we consume for pleasure but also see pleasure represented. That is, to follow Roland Barthes, both the pleasures in the text and the pleasure of the text. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973) he distinguishes between Plaisir/Pleasure as “euphoria, fulfilment, comfort” from jouissance/Bliss as “shock, disturbance, even loss13”. However, this term is also used by French feminist thinkers to unpack what they see as the radical power of female sexuality, such as in Helene Cixous’ essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror as “that sublime affect which shatters or overwhelms the subject’s stability in language, identity and therefore also in society. In this conceptualization, women are positioned to generate a radically different kind of language, law and desire14”.

6 However, Barthes, Cixous and Kristeva foreground the more extreme sensation rather than explore the symbolic potential of “euphoria, fulfilment, comfort” to be politically transgressive. To write about bliss can be radical, but to examine everyday intimate life in culture might also reveal a great deal. Frost notes that pleasure is “semantically

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unconstrained and apparently ahistorical, although close attention to the way the word is deployed will reveal that one era’s pleasure is not the same as another’s15”. It is this ambivalent historicity of pleasure that I want to draw out: how it lives in the place between cultural construction and “pure” feeling. One encounter can waver between these modes and as we slip in and out of our heads and bodies. A “moment” of pleasure, then, can be powerful indeed, particularly in its relationship to ideas around analysis: we have a developed psycho-critical apparatus to discuss desire and a physiological language for orgasm, but less debated is the broader construction of erotic pleasure with and without the assumed end.

7 If pleasure is something which is difficult to critically discuss, or resistant, this process is even more fraught in a society where the dominant critical paradigm is the discussion of trauma. The challenge for this criticism is how to attend to the present moment and also gesture towards futurity. This paradox is well expressed by Heather Love in Feeling Backwards (2007) where she argues that a “central paradox of any transformative criticism is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma and violence16”. To consider how culture might represent Northern Irish intimate life we can bear in mind Love’s ideas about how queer culture responds to its painful past. Culture can respond to this imperative: it can move beyond this paradigm, be haunted by it or develop new forms of writing about intimate life. It is, of course, complex to foreground pleasure while still acknowledging and respecting the years of suffering in Northern Ireland. Ireland, North and South, has a complex judicial and cultural relationship to pleasure in addition to the mainstream biopolitics by which populations are managed. Fintan Walsh, for example, notes “the centrality of gender and sexual power dynamics to the maintenance of social and political stability in the North17”. Indeed, instances of the perceived danger of sexuality are not hard to find in Northern Irish public life, whether the Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign or the recent controversy around Rihanna’s clothing when filming in Clandeboye.18 However, this is obviously an over-simplistic stereotypical view of Northern Ireland as a sexually repressed society which does not necessarily map on to either culture or people’s lived experience.

8 Instead of thinking that all people in Northern Ireland are under the yoke of unassailable prohibition, we can turn instead to cultural representations where sexuality was so often used metonymically for sectarian politics – metonyms where the language of sensuality was not often co-opted. Turning towards pleasure as a critical practice should not negate anyone’s lived experience of violent conflict and the continuing legacy of the conflict. These two ideas do not have to compete: discussing pleasure in culture does not lessen anyone else’s experience of victimhood, but it does raise some questions about why, politically, pleasure is a taboo. In Northern Irish political discourse, the language of desire/want/demand occurs quite frequently, but the language of bliss/satiation/fulfilment is less common. The inaugurated a consociationalist political economy that relies on the tacit agreement that neither community has their political wishes fully satisfied. More so than most political settlements, the terms of Power Sharing in Northern Ireland have relied upon leaders from both communities claiming victory when, in truth, it was impossible to fulfill both national desires concomitantly. The status quo is maintained as long as both parties are satisfied with being dissatisfied. To describe positive, contented feelings can

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feel inappropriate to the political moment; to claim that you’re experiencing pleasure can limit your political bargaining in the discourse of truth and reconciliation.

9 In addition to this frustrated body politic, the language of desire has a complex relationship with religious and national ideologies. The political power of sexuality in the Northern Irish experience has been detailed by Clair Wills, in Improprieties (1993). Wills notes that “maternal sexuality, prostitution, , or simply explicit sex, sex for pleasure and adolescent sex – become ways of questioning the propriety of political processes, nationalist and unionist concepts of community, and the very basis of the idea of home19”. When the denial of sexual autonomy and bodily rights is one of the few things Northern Irish political parties have in common, small worlds of sustenance, small intimacies, can be radical. This is not to say that the people of Northern Ireland must “fuck for peace” but rather turn towards cultural representations of sexuality that resist the over-deterministic focus on one type of experience. As critics, we must embrace these improprieties as moments of pleasure that can refute totalising narratives of power and rethink the power of cultural depictions of intimate life.

10 Literature written during the Troubles used the love plot as a political metonym or used the erotic charge of the conflict in a way which often drew its sexual energy solely from asymmetries of power or the charge of the cross-community taboo. Widows were often fetishise, particularly by men who were implicated in their husband’s deaths, such as Marcella in Cal (1983), and female combatants on screen were depicted as highly sexualised, such as Jude in The Crying Game (1992). In particular, the Troubles novels of Eoin McNamee feature sexual encounters that have a complex relationship with the idea of pleasure, such as the ill-fated brothel in The Ultras (2004) or Victor Kelly’s relationships in Resurrection Man (1994). While that is in keeping with the highly stylised noir aesthetic of his crime fiction, the representational optics are clear: in these fictions, it is often the historical context that is imbued with an erotic charge. When it has occurred, Northern Irish textual pleasure has had a distinct focus on the male orgasm. Women’s writing such as Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones (1987) and Anna Burns’ No Bones (2001), often, and for understandable reasons, equate sexuality with forced reproduction, abuse and traumatic pregnancy. This responds to the legacy of moral conservatism and silence around sexual violence in Northern Ireland20. But, to draw attention to representation of politically-charged sexuality is a certain kind of exceptionalism which ignores kinship with the exploration of this topic by both British and Irish authors. For example, Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty (2004) and Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing (1992), directly contrast homosexuality and the AIDS crisis with their political context, Thatcher and Haughey respectively. Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s depiction of lesbian sexuality is set against the evangelical community in the North of England in Oranges are not the Only Fruit (1985). Anne Enright’s novels often juxtapose sensual and erotic pleasures against the constraints placed upon women in their public and private lives. Compared to Northern Ireland, then, authors from Britain and Ireland are equally engaged in placing pleasure alongside political and social concerns.

11 The interplay of politics and pleasure is explored in the work of Billy Cowan, a playwright from County Down whose plays have been performed in London, Birmingham and in theatres in Greater Manchester, including in the Contact theatre in Manchester and the Lowry in Salford. Cowan’s play Still Ill, follows the return of a gay

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exile to Strangford to find his brother, Dave, and sister-in-law, Elaine, running a sex shop with proceeds from drug dealing. Elaine claims she bribed the local “Ulster says No brigade” with pornographic magazines and that “We’re now the sex an’ drugs capital of the North. We have swinger nights down at The Oul Cross. And you’ll love this… there’s even a cruising ground for dirty old like yourself21”. In this play, Cowan clearly sets out to excavate the secret pleasure seekers from suburban Northern Ireland and to expose the hypocrisy of the way in which the repression of sexuality is used for political gain. Tommy details his happy, bourgeois queer life in Manchester – he even has an allotment – but cannot resist the lure of his former teenage crush, Gary, and this despite the revelation that Gary is involved in the intimidation of Tommy’s brother. Here, the traditional Troubles erotic of the “sexy hard-man” is queered to the soundtrack of The Smiths, but as Gary sings “There is a Light That Never Goes Out”, Tommy resits this nostalgic imperative: “The hunger strikes. The bombings. The Riots. The unemployment. Great stuff22.” The tension in this encounter is between Gary wanting to unravel the minutiae of the past – re-enacting it in their adolescent outdoor adventures – and Tommy wanting to forget the past, a past linked with his mother rejecting him before her death. Finally, the rational, restrained Tommy breaks down his reserve and shares a tactile erotic memory: I remember you lifting me up and kissing me on the forehead when I agreed that I Know It’s Over was a far superior song to There’s a Light That Never Goes Out. I remember the reflection of the fire in your pupils and thinking how fucking beautiful you were23.

12 It transpires that during that fateful summer Gary slept with nearly everyone they knew, but it is the legacy of paramilitary gang structures in Northern Ireland, rather than the homosexual love plot, that leads the play to its tragic dénouement.

13 Cowan’s depiction of Northern Irish pleasure is complex, then, and demonstrates the continued hold of the Troubles taboo over the depiction of eroticism in Northern Ireland. Tommy and Gary are each other’s fetish: Tommy as the bourgeois queer migrant offers Gary the promise of a different lifestyle while Gary as the queer hard- man allows Tommy to reconcile his sexual awakening in Northern Ireland to the present moment. As noted earlier, it was not that politically transgressive erotic encounters, such as Gary and Tommy’s, were not happening, but that they were not culturally depicted. Not every Loyalist enforcer was rigidly heterosexual: former UDA hitman Sam “Skelly” McCrory is now a Gay Rights Campaigner and Jim “Doris Day” Grey was widely regarded to have been bisexual. However, the taboo over homosexual relationships is strong in both communities. Writing about the Save Ulster from Sodomy (1977) campaign, Sean Brady notes that for Ian Paisley: Ulster, the hallowed province, had to be made fit for the second coming of Christ, and therefore needed “saving” from sodomy. In a society riven by male-dominated violence and religious conflict, LGBT people at the very least would be wary about exploring their sexuality, and certainly emotions of guilt shaped and directed their lives, freedom of action and sense of agency24.

14 While conflict taboos are still at the root of sexuality in Still Ill, the tension between Tommy and Gary can be read as symptomatic of a wider conflict: those who left Ireland during the Troubles and those who stayed. The story of the Irish homecoming is, of course, common to the point of cliché, but Cowan allows this story of domestic, intimate life to play as a queer melodrama. In many ways, the structure of the play is fairly conventional: Cowan employs realism in his short scenes over experimental

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techniques. This serves to contrast the play’s queerness against the more straightforwardly “political” realism of the usual “Troubles” play. The pleasures in Cowan’s text contrast strongly with the rest of the narrative: they are punctures and interruptions in an otherwise standard Troubles drama plot about enforcers and conflicts of family loyalties. The queer sex in the play begins aggressively and fits in with traditional representations of sexuality in Northern Irish writing: “they start to make passionate, almost violent love25”. However, this initial violence is transformed into something approaching real intimacy or, at least, as much as the stage allows. The violence of the Troubles keeps intruding after intimate interludes, as public political life steps on private intimacies.

15 The sexual other that engenders the intimate encounters in the text is the presence of the North of England, through Tommy’s homecoming and the continued references to Steven Morrissey. Specific moments of pleasure (lyrical and acoustic) from Morrissey’s oeuvre are eroticised when Gary uses their adolescent charge in his seduction of Tommy: “a few crates a beer, my Smiths CDs and a couple a hundred of condoms26.” In this sense, Morrissey becomes a way for them to navigate their erotic lives, to make sense of their moments. The play represents a host of small intimacies from play wrestling to playing cards and bawdy jokes (“Nah, my taste is in your arse27”). However, these moments of pleasure and queer potential with the narrative do not signal queer futurity. In Cowan’s drama, queer representational politics and the conventions of the Troubles drama intersect: the fatalistic catalyst is the spectre of the Troubles rather than of the AIDS epidemic. The play’s final moments sees the lovers torn apart by the threat of political violence, and an ambiguous, possibly fatal, conclusion. Gary’s final cry is high melodrama filtered through the language of The Smiths: “My eyes were closed and all I could see was you […] It’s always been you. […] Tommy don’t walk away! […] Tommy! To die by yer side28…” Before this, Gary had expressed intimacy to Tommy through sexual jokes, but here he expresses a painful vulnerability. This is filtered through that most fatalistic song, “There is a Light That Never Goes Out”, but instead of a double-decker bus, the legacy of the Troubles appears to be the agent that intervenes in intimacy. As we will see in Patterson’s work, popular culture can offer a language for intimacy that is otherwise inaccessible in this political context.

16 Glenn Patterson has represented bodily and emotional intimacy throughout his writing life. His novels are almost exclusively set in Northern Ireland and deal with various periods of history, whether the decades long sweep on Number 5 (2003), the birth of the Civil Rights movement in The International (1999), 19th-century shipbuilding in The Mill for Grinding Old People Young (2012) and the DeLorean factory in Gull (2016). Yet, despite these ambitious engagements with history, all of these novels have been replete with intimate moments. All of these novels, even when they deal with the violence of the Troubles, feature characters who experience pleasurable moments. Patterson also co- wrote the screenplay for the film Good Vibrations (2012), one of the most notable expressions of Northern Irish joy on screen. Patterson’s body of work, then, allows histories of pleasure and trauma to weave together but his work is often read over- deterministically for what it can tell us about a liberal Protestant tradition of writing29. This, however, is to miss the texture and the complexity of his writing, which treats pleasure with the same narrative power as political violence. The Rest Just Follows (2014) deals with a broad swathe of history from the 1970s to the present day and offers a variety of pleasurable encounters. The novel spans the adolescence to middle age of

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Maxine, St John and Craig and is filled with nostalgic detail, from cigarette brands to fashion and film. Rather than a literary quotation, the title and epigraph is from Tracey Thorn’s memoir Bedsit Disco Queen (2013) about the nature of adolescent friendship. While diverse sexual encounters are woven throughout the narrative, other connections are also foregrounded. This is not the heightened, politically symbolic coupling of earlier novels but the smaller intimacies of, for example, teeth brushing before sex or tea and biscuits in front of an electric fire. The significant events in the lives of the characters are their relationships, from family illnesses to new parenthood and infidelity.

17 Patterson’s fiction is significant for the representation of the sort of improprieties that Wills saw as being so significant in poetry. But it is not the thrill of transgression but rather the deep ordinariness of sexual life that is remarkable in Patterson’s writing. Gay characters in his novels are not a plot device, or symbolic, rather they are just getting on with their erotic and quotidian lives. This is plaisir not jouissance. However, his novels are unique in male-authored Northern Irish writing for their representation of potent, active female desire. The adolescent sexuality in The Rest Just Follows positively crackles, particularly the sensory stimulation of Maxine’s first fashionable haircut. The jukebox in the hairdressers “was playing a song she had never till that moment heard but would ever associate with that day, that whole period of her life30”. The song is Magazine’s “Shot by both Sides”, which in a more traditional Troubles novel would be a loaded reference, but in this case functions as an ironic commentary on the expectations of popular culture references in Northern Irish fiction. Patterson details life in the hairdressers with relish: every song, every outfit and the “cocktail” made in the hair-washing basin. As the male stylist Max circles Maxine, she takes pleasure in the details of his appearance: “He wore a T- ripped at the shoulders (his arms looked to have been knotted together from the discarded material) and a pair of red-and-black-striped jeans so tight you could see the shape of him like something on the butchery counter31”.This intimate encounter is full of tactile, aural and visual pleasure, and the intimacy of the moment is carefully constructed: Maxine glimpses a nipple or an Adam’s apple or catches Maxʼs scent, she lets him completely reshape her appearance, to her eventual pleasure. It is significant that the last pleasure is Maxine’s, as she stands in that iconic hairdressers and relishes her independence.

18 However, as well as these aesthetic pleasures, the novel also features some connections which carry the charge of a more well-worn Northern Irish history. Craig, our revisionist historian turned Unionist politician, rolls a joint on RF Fosterʼs book on Lord Randolph Churchill and also takes on his own dead mentor’s work as the starting point for his PhD. He begins an affair with his former teacher’s partner and this is part of a long tradition of what one might call the “sexy widow” in Northern Irish fiction, where a young man is sexually initiated by a woman whose partner has died during theTroubles. Patterson’s language to describe their encounter is similar to Cowan’s: “It was frightening the way they went at one another, scratching and biting […] and for a long time after they had rolled apart neither of them could bring themselves to speak32.” This charge of history is further extended in Craig’s encounters throughout the novel, with his infidelity to Maxine arising from his speaking engagements at peace-building conferences. However, this is not to say that representing pleasure linked to the Troubles is wrong, or regressive, or that people who experience such pleasures are inapposite. What is significant is that Patterson gives us a range of pleasures and desirous engagements with history: all of his characters suffer missed

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connections or loss; they are affected by the political context to a greater or lesser degree, but all of them know intimate connections that cannot be read easily as political metonyms.

19 As new generations of writers emerge in Northern Ireland, new variants of pleasure have been explored. Lucy Caldwell is the author of three novels, Where They Were Missed (2006), The Meeting Point (2011), and All the Beggars Riding (2013), which was chosen for Belfast’s and Derry’s “One City One Book” initiative. Her novels, like Patterson’s, are often dense with sensuality: Where they Were Missed has moments of heady teenage obsession which are observed in careful detail. All the Beggars Riding presents a daughter imagining her mother’s seduction of her absentee father, right down to the . This novel is deeply concerned with the power of connection and disconnection, and Lara’s visceral identification with the city of Belfast as a sensual object is a central narrative catalyst. Under consideration here, though, will be a story from her 2016 collection Multitudes. The short story, formally, can be better equipped to consider moments of pleasure, since it does not always have the same narrative baggage as the novel where pleasures can often feel like interludes within the prose. The short story can be read as a self-contained unit, an enclosed structure that can carry the intensity of a pleasurable moment in a manner which would be unsustainable if held over 300 pages.

20 Lucy Caldwell’s short story “Here We Are” demonstrates both the possibilities of this genre as well as the power of the representation of female desiring subjects. The story centres around two schoolgirls who fall in love after being asked to perform a duet at a school concert. Angle’s father is a staunch Unionist councillor whose opprobrium eventually separates them. However, rather than focus on the ways in which the story carefully traces the structural operations of , the narrative concentrates on Belfast as a site of pleasure. The title, “Here We Are” functions as the loversʼ refrain, grounding their romance geographically. The city becomes another character in the loversʼ tale, providing long walks from Cutters Wharf “along the Lagan and through the Holylands; Palestine Street, Jerusalem Street, Damascus Street, Cairo Street […]. The tide is turning and a two-person canoe is skimming downriver, slate grey and quicksilver33”. The story, then, is replete with Belfast pleasures. Indeed, the narrative’s most significant specter is not historical or political but rather an afternoon over coffee in The Other Place on Botanic Avenue where “I felt as if my blood was singing – that sparks were shooting from me34”. This encounter is rendered in intimate detail, where the girls imagine an unselfconscious future where they can express their intimate desires.

21 When our narrator first begins to feel desire for Angie, she is unable to fully express her longing as anything other than a bodily sensation. Their exchanges before their sexual intimacy are fraught with sensual power as Caldwell deftly explores the all- consuming nature of adolescent desire and the power of moments of pleasure. Throughout the story, she represents lesbian sexuality as a joyous, unselfconscious pleasure: “We started giggling again, ridiculous bubbles of joy35.” She repeatedly uses words like “easy” and “free”, which is directly contrasted with their eventual shaming and break-up. Following the Marriage Equality March, she considers looking up the now-married Angela but, walking the streets of East Belfast in her dreams, decides that her desirous memories are enough. These moments are reminiscent of Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Sexton’s carefree adolescent flirtation and are written by Caldwell

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as snapshots of possibility. Their moments of desire are playful and temporarily unconstrained by political forces. As critics, we do not want to render the pure, unconstrained joy that leaps off the page tawdry with an over-deterministic political reading of the politics of Unionist lesbianism. For Caldwell, pleasure and desire are utopian spaces where experimentation can flourish.

22 It is clear that, in these fictions published in the 2010s, certain key themes predominate. Adolescent sexual awakenings are set against the morally repressive political regime in Northern Ireland. Queer and non-reproductive sex occurs frequently, and it is difficult to make any one act among many symbolic of political allegiance. Representations of sensuality, whether interpreted as improprieties or resistant moments, are rampant in recent Northern Irish writing but critical work has yet to catch up with this “new pleasure” or to reclaim the texts from the past’s limiting paradigms. Cowen, Caldwell and Patterson demonstrate, at times, markedly different approaches to the interplay of sexuality and recent history. When set against a cultural and critical climate where sexuality is used in over-deterministic, instrumental ways these representations can challenge representational and interpretive norms. Berlant notes that “even if desire fails to find objects adequate to its aim, its errors can still produce pleasure: desire’s fundamental ruthlessness is a source of creativity that produces new optimism, new narratives of possibility, even erotic experimentality36”. With these directives in mind, we must not treat Northern Irish culture as an instrumental tool to do the ethical work of politicians. Instead we must listen out for small words of sustenance these texts contain, be it in new forms, new desires or new pleasures. Our critical work must take on the same impulse as this erotic experimentation.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank the London Irish Seminar at the Institute for English Studies, Senate House, for inviting me to present this work and to Christopher Vardy and Jane Kilby for their comments on drafts of this piece. 2. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, New York, Colombia University Press, 2013, p. 8. 3. Recent examples include: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem”s The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Shane Alcobia- Murphy, “‘Snared by Words’: Trauma and the Shoah in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian”, Études Irlandaises, 36-1 (2011), 109-120; and Robert F. Garratt, Trauma and History in the Irish Novel: The Return of the Dead, New York:, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 4. Recent examples include: Bill Rolston, “Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland: The Current State of Play”, Estudios Irlandeses, 8 (2013), 143-149; and John D. Brewer and Bernadette C. Hayes, “Victimhood and Attitudes towards Dealing with the Legacy of a Violent Past: Northern Ireland as a Case Study”, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 17.3 (2015), p. 512-530.

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5. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 25. 6. Alexander Beaumont, Contemporary British Fiction and The Cultural Politics Of Disenfranchisement, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2015, p. 2. 7. Eve Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 123-153. 8. Robyn Wiegman, “The Times We’re In: Queer Feminist Criticism And The Reparative ‘Turn’”, Feminist Theory, 15 (2014), 11. 9. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 12 10. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham, Duke, 2010, p. XVI. 11. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 2000, p. 27. 12. Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love, New York, Punctum Books, 2012, p. 5. 13. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure Of The Text, New York, Hill and Wang, 1975, p. 19. 14. Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love, op. cit., p. 59. 15. Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, New York, Colombia University Press, 2013, p. 7. 16. Heather Love, Feeling Backward, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 1. 17. Fintan Walsh, “Saving Ulster from Sodomy and Hysteria: Sex, Politics and Performance”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23.3 (2013), p. 292. 18. Tim Hume, “Farmer orders Rihanna to cover up during risqué video shoot”, The Independent, 28th September 2011. 19. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 3. 20. I address the history of sexual violence against women in Northern Ireland in “‘That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?’: The spectre of misogyny in The Fall”, in Fionnaula Dillane, Naomi McAreavey and Emilie Pine (eds.), The Body in Pain in Irish Culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2016. 21. Billy Cowan, Smilin” Through & Still Ill, Portsmouth, Playdead Press, 2014, p. 138. 22. Ibid., p. 158. 23. Ibid., p. 182. 24. Sean Brady, “Ian Paisley (1926-2014) and the “Save Ulster From Sodomy!” Campaign”, Notches Blog [ http://notchesblog.com/2014/09/16/ian-paisley-1926-2014- and-the-save-ulster-from-sodomy-campaign/] [Accessed 8th April 2016]. 25. Billy Cowan, Smilin” Through & Still Ill, op. cit., p. 171. 26. Ibid., p. 196. 27. Ibid., p. 202. 28. Ibid., p. 227. 29. Laura Pelaschiar, “Transforming Belfast: the evolving role of the city in Northern Irish fiction”, Irish University Review 30.1 (2000): 117-131. 30. Glenn Patterson, The Rest Just Follows, London, Faber, 2014, p. 58. 31. Ibid., p. 57. 32. Ibid., p. 119. 33. Lucy Caldwell, Multitudes, London, Faber, 2016, p. 113.

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34. Ibid., p. 129. 35. Ibid., p. 126. 36. Berlant, Desire/Love, p. 43.

ABSTRACTS

This essay considers the representation of pleasure in three “post”-conflict Northern Irish texts: Glenn Patterson’s novel The Rest Just Follows (2014), Billy Cowan’s play Still Ill (2014) and Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection Multitudes (2016). A framework is offered that advocates a turning away from the dominance of trauma theory in Northern Irish cultural criticism towards a recognition of the plurality of experiences which these texts represent. This essay uses theoretical insights from Lauren Berlant, Heather Love, Laura Frost and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to consider the unique affective topography in which Northern Irish writers represent their pleasures. In these texts, published in the last few years, we see the representation of queer and non-reproductive sexual encounters set against the backdrop of the social and political policing of morality in Northern Ireland. This essay, however, will argue that these texts are not simple metonyms but rather present complex sensual experiences which enrich our understanding of the emotional landscape of contemporary Northern Ireland.

Cet article s’intéresse à la représentation du plaisir dans trois textes nord-irlandais « post »- conflit : le roman de Glenn Patterson The Rest Just Follows (2014), la pièce de Billy Cowan Still Ill (2014) and le recueil de nouvelles de Lucy Caldwell Multitudes (2016). Il s’écarte du cadre théorique de la théorie du trauma souvent privilégié pour l’étude de la culture nord-irlandaise et plaide pour la reconnaissance de la pluralité d’expériences que représentent ces textes. Il emprunte des outils théoriques à Lauren Berlant, Heather Love, Laura Frost et Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick et aborde la spécificité de la topographie affective dans laquelle les écrivains du Nord de l’Irlande inscrivent leurs plaisirs. Ces textes récents montrent des rencontres sexuelles queer et non-reproductives sur fond de régulation socio-politique des mœurs et de la morale. Cependant, cet article démontre que ces textes n’ont pas seulement valeur de métonymies, mais qu’ils présentent des expériences sensuelles complexes qui enrichissent notre compréhension du paysage émotionnel de l’Irlande du Nord.

INDEX

Keywords: literature – novels, literature – short stories, body, contemporary literature, drama, Northern Ireland - post-conflict, sexuality - sexual identity, trauma Mots-clés: Irlande du Nord - post-conflit, littérature – nouvelles, sexualité - identité sexuelle, littérature contemporaine, théâtre, trauma, corps, littérature – roman

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AUTHOR

CAROLINE MAGENNIS Caroline Magennis is a Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Salford. She is on the executive boards for the British Association for Irish Studies, the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, EFACIS, and the editorial board for the Irish Studies Review. She has published widely on theoretical approaches to Contemporary Northern Irish Literature and Culture.

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Making a Scene: The Diceman’s Queer Performance Activism and Irish Public Culture

Tina O’Toole

He [Thom McGinty] was our King – the King of everyone ever called a faggot or queer or weirdo or blow-in, of everyone who ever dared to truly be themselves and even those too scared to try; of everyone eccentric or outcast or different, he was High King of all the diversity without which any society cannot grow1.

Introduction

1 Thom McGinty, better known as his alter ego “The Diceman”, was a performance artist whose street theatre is synonymous with Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s2. In this essay, I argue that his sexually bold interventions were crucial to the construction of a visible identity for Irish LGBTQ+ communities in the period. Moreover, I explore the ways in which the Diceman’s Dublin performance activism, in tandem with the mass demonstrations mobilised by his New York contemporaries in the Irish Lesbian & Gay Organisation (ILGO), laid claim to the Irish public sphere as a legitimate venue for queer political action. Both interventions exhibit the forms of agency and resistance Judith Butler exhorts in her 2011 essay “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street”. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s 1960s assertion of the “right to have rights”, Butler focuses on those excluded from the public sphere but who nonetheless take action to lay claim to their rights: “[w]hether abandoned to precarity or left to die through systematic negligence, concerted action still emerges from such sites3”. Based on two urban sites of Irish queer resistance in the 1980s and early 1990s, I argue that these interventions expanded the boundaries of the Irish political domain sufficient to combat the “systematic negligence” and death of so many of their generation. Ultimately, this work aims to enliven the extent to which the public sphere was redefined by performance activism and by public protest in that period.

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National

2 To understand the full dissident charge of such interventions, it is necessary to situate them in the context of late twentieth-century public culture in the . Michael Warner argues that “[n]ational heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behaviour, a space of pure citizenship. A familial model of society displaces recognition of structural racism and other systemic inequalities4. Ireland can be characterised in just this way, in a period we associate with the 1983 referendum on the 8th Amendment when an overwhelming majority, 69.9% of voters, elected to include a so-called “Pro-Life” clause in the national constitution. This was compounded in 1986 when a proposal to remove the constitutional prohibition on divorce was defeated in another referendum by a “no” vote of 63.48%. Both referendums dominated the Irish public sphere throughout the 1980s, indicative of the frenzy here to protect the familial model of society from perceived attack by international modernity, in the specific form of feminists and queers. Battles over abortion and divorce displaced all other social justice struggles in the public mind5.

3 In hindsight, the period may be characterised by reactionary responses to rapid social change across the previous decade; we associate the 1970s in Ireland with industrial growth and economic expansion, hand-in-hand with the emptying-out of rural communities as young people migrated to urban centres for work. The 1970s saw the emergence of indigenous women’s and gay rights movements, creating a climate of social change. Nonetheless, for those progressives surviving the 1980s, the impact of referendum defeats was pervasive. In order to preserve that “sanitized space” and “immaculate behaviour” necessary for a heteronormative state, the lives of Irish women and queers were deemed expendable. We might read this within the framework of necropolitics. Athanasiou and Butler describe the contemporary process of “socially assigned disposability6” which brings to mind Ann Lovett or Joanne Hayes, whose lives were destroyed shortly after the abortion referendum, as a direct result of the repressive regime perpetrated by the Pro-Life campaign7. Nor was such disposability confined to women: two , Declan Flynn and Charles Self, were killed in separate homophobic attacks in Dublin in the early 1980s, sacrificed at the altar of national heterosexuality 8. Declan Flynn’s murder by homophobes in Fairview Park on 10 September 1982 is referred to as “Ireland’s Stonewall” by Ger Philpott9. When brought to trial, the youths involved admitted that they had been “queer-bashing” that evening, yet all four were given suspended sentences and allowed to walk free; they subsequently held a “victory parade” through Fairview Park. In response, a protest march was staged by gay community groups and their allies, including trade union representatives, from Dublin city centre to Fairview Park. Numbering seven hundred people, it was the largest such demonstration Dublin had seen; Ed Madden characterises the Flynn murder and trial as a “pivotal and galvanizing moment in gay and lesbian community organizing in Ireland”10.

4 These tragedies in the wake of such bitterly-fought referendum campaigns resulted in the evacuation of the public sphere; a significant number of activists turned their backs on public engagement, some giving up their ambitions to change civil society in Ireland. For others, emigration seemed like the obvious response, and many left to create new lives elsewhere. For instance, Anne Maguire, a founder member of ILGO, left

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for New York in 1987. She describes the state she left behind thus: “The backlash came in the 1980s. In the midst of a deepening economic depression the government, in tandem with the Catholic Church, waged a campaign of extraordinary virulence against women’s hard-won rights11.”

5 While the 1980s referendums are read as manifestations of biopolitical control (as Catholic state-sponsored campaigns), for social conservatives, the attainment of the repressive social regime they looked for had unlikely outcomes. Following the bitter social battles and their bloody outcome, just as Pro-Choice activists evacuated the public domain, many of those who resisted social change also rejected the public sphere, taking refuge in religious mysticism. In July 1985, thousands of Irish people gathered at rural grottoes to profess their faith in Marian apparitions. Ballinspittle in Co. Cork was central to the so-called summer of the “moving statues”, following an episode where local women reported seeing the statue of the Virgin Mary breathing and moving “her” hands. As buses from all over the island brought the faithful to isolated rural grottoes, a Ballinspittle woman, Kathy O’Mahony, told a BBC Newsnight reporter that she experienced “a sense of peace and protection, that we were being protected” (presumably she means protected from the onslaught on traditional family values)12. Another (male) bystander asked about the effect of the moving statues, stated: “I think there are more people praying. Husbands have returned to their wives and all that sort of thing”. This construction of the familial model of society, praying together and reestablishing their commitment to the heteropatriarchal family unit, can hardly provide a clearer picture of the “sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behaviour” suggested by Warner13. Undermining that image of national heterosexuality, however, is the tragic death of Ann Lovett, who died giving birth at a grotto in Granard just the previous year.

The Diceman

6 While Marian grottoes commanded public attention at mid-decade, Dublin had its own moving statue, which attracted just as many people along to gape and pray. The Diceman was an arresting figure in Dublin’s Grafton Street for a decade or more in the 1980s and early 1990s, as reliable a presence on the street as Pete Short in his usual spot outside Bewley’s Café selling In Dublin magazine. Both Grafton Street regulars provided an alternative reading of contemporary Ireland, a glimpse of the counter-culture which would eventually come into its own in the 21st century. Those of us coming of age then were part of an increasingly urbanised state, as well as being much more easily connected to our migrant peers (by email) than previous generations who “stayed behind”. While it did seem for a time as though Ireland would remain forever locked into that “sanitized space”, in fact the conservative flare-ups of that period were a sign that national heterosexuality would soon be put to the test. The Diceman was a harbinger of that challenge14.

7 Having moved to Dublin from Glasgow15 in 1976, Thom McGinty applied for work as an artist’s model at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). Initially unsuccessful, he drew on his background in street theatre and went busking in the Dandelion Market; having painted his face, he sat silent and immobile throughout the market day, rewarding those who dropped coins with an arch wink or an outraged expression. Dubliners quickly became acquainted with the mime act of this “Dandelion Clown”.

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McGinty subsequently worked at NCAD, becoming involved in the Grapevine Theatre Company (along with Susie Kennedy and others), before moving to Galway in the 1980s to form The Dandelion Theatre Company in Spiddal. To support this, McGinty continued his street theatre performances, travelling to Dublin to advertise a games shop called “The Diceman”. He adopted the same performative approach as before, covering up in white makeup, except that now he stood tall, becoming a “human statue” in the street (while such street performances are now ubiquitous, early 1980s Dublin had never seen the like before). Wearing a sign to promote the games shop, soon that name, “The Diceman”, became his. As his popularity grew, crowds gathered to view his performance, and he accepted offers of work from other businesses. However, the audiences attracted to his street theatre began to block the street, and the Gardaí began to move him on. The Diceman solved this problem by developing a painstakingly slow walk, by which means he could move along the street and avoid blocking pedestrian traffic. However, by combining very limited physical movement from the waist up with an exaggeratedly slow gait, McGinty ensured that the stillness of his initial performance was not lost in the Diceman’s new way of inhabiting the street.

Queering the pitch

8 Paula Meehan’s poem “Dharmakaya”, published in 2000 and dedicated to Thom McGinty, captures the stillness and silence of his performance: Remember the first step on the street - the footfall and the shadow of its fall - into silence. Breathe slow- ly out before the foot finds solid earth again, before the city rain has washed all trace of your step away16.

9 Even the poem’s form, the arrangement of words on the page, restrain the reader, stopping the eye from running along the line. Breaking open the word “slowly” (separated by a line, dash, and stanza break), urges the reader to slow down, to breathe. The stealth of the Diceman’s process is suggested by the shadow of a footfall, not something we notice when walking at a normal pace. The poem keeps returning to the breath; from a dying breath, back to a breath taken in woodland, that breath “cupped” in hands as “a gift, a bowl of grace”. This focus on the breath and on mindfulness (awareness of that foot finding solid ground), along with the poem’s title “dharmakaya”, explicitly links the subject to Buddhist principles, specifically that of being alive to the world, to the power of healing and the possibility of transformation. Clearly, these ideas have a wide application, not least in the context of Meehan’s other work in this collection, but when read specifically in relation to McGinty’s work the poem is revealing. In particular, connecting his street theatre to the stillness of breath work and meditation draws attention to the atemporality of his practice. The gift of breath “cupped” becomes “a bowl of grace/you brought home to us”. Ultimately, this is transformed, “become a still pool/in the anarchic flow” of the street, with the power to redeem, suggesting a powerful transformative capacity for McGinty’s craft and enlivening the liberatory aspects of his art17.

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10 Achieving that degree of silence and stillness in the midst of one of the capital’s busiest shopping streets could be described as queering the pitch. Sara Ahmed describes “desire lines”, a term from landscape architecture to denote unofficial paths, “where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow. Deviation leaves its own marks on the ground, which can even help generate alternative lines, which cross the ground in unexpected ways”18. In a busy commercial district everyone is in a hurry, keeping on the move. To halt this flow of traffic and chatter, bringing a sense of stillness in the heart of Joyce’s “Hibernian metropolis”, creates a different sense of being on the street, a deviation from the path. The intervention of Gardaí, as mentioned, highlights the extent to which urban movement is regulated. Street theatre interrupts and subverts these straight lines of authority. Of course, the Diceman’s performances were primarily commercial in impetus but his creations often exceed the limits of their form; moreover, the degree of high camp he brought to even the straightest of roles opened up alternative readings of his presence in the disrupted streetscape19.

11 Introducing a contrary impulse to an otherwise commonplace scene, the Diceman stopped everyone in their tracks, slowing us down as we stopped to watch, to breathe, to speculate, and ultimately to reconsider the space as it constituted itself around him. Bell and Valentine observe that “[t]he straightness of our streets is an artefact, not a natural fact, and… non- or anti-heteronormative acts make this clear by making it queer20. The sight of a large figure wearing a bulky picture frame promenading slowly down a busy thoroughfare has just that effect, particularly if the person in question is dressed from the waist up as the Mona Lisa (wearing a frame bearing the legend “Mona McGinty”) but underneath sporting , hairy legs, white , and shoes. Thus drawing on a drag aesthetic, there could be no question about the anti- of this scene; an idealised (and heteronormative) feminine beauty is gestured towards but immediately undermined.

12 While McGinty certainly queered for laughs on Dublin streets, this wasn’t always the case; some of his manifestations had a political edge. His appearances at Pride marches deepened the available queer readings of his Grafton Street performances (for instance, I remember him handing out pink carnations to the crowd in 1993, dressed in a and outsized pink triangle)21. Bell and Valentine describe the extent to which Pride marches disrupt the “ambient heterosexual” streets: “by coming into straight space [Pride marches] inevitably queered the streets, indeed queered the whole city22”. Outside the Dáil in 1988 during a lesbian and “kiss in”, the Diceman stalked solemnly in his trademark white makeup wearing a blood-spattered sheet and carrying a sign referring to Declan Flynn and Charles Self. His placard read “What’s Another Queer? Murdered men, suspended sentences23.” This act of public mourning was predicated on their specific deaths but the wider application of his protest outside parliament buildings, a key national space, extended to the lost lives of an entire generation, or more, of Irish queers24.

Public bodies

13 Describing his work as “living visual” art, McGinty said: “I’m in the business of making pictures using my body and my face, with make-up and costume; rather than seeing a picture on the wall or an advert on a hoarding it’s walking down the road in front of

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you, a living visual. This very public aspect of my work is vital to me as I aim to entertain as many people as possible in a live sense25.” Putting his body on display in the public domain in a range of revealing costumes provoked multiple reactions, not all of which were positive: Some people treat you as if you really were inhuman. Apart from kicking, punching, burning and other unprintable things they might do to you, people stand there discussing the hairs in your nose, the pimple protruding through the make-up or whether the beer-belly is a cushion or an advanced pregnancy26.

14 More remarkable is the considerable number of passers-by who avert their gaze or look simply uncomfortable, as evidenced in the many press photographs of the Diceman’s performances. From “kicking, punching, burning, and other unprintable things” to curiosity, aversion, and denial, this range of reactions could be said to be a list of twentieth-century Irish responses to human bodies (particularly fertile or queer bodies). Such reactions were state-sanctioned at the time; after all, both twentieth- century Irish states perpetrated and/or actively condoned the violent subjugation of human bodies, whether those of women incarcerated in Magdalene Laundries, children abused in industrial schools, or prisoners on hunger strike in Long Kesh or Armagh Women’s Prison.

15 As constructed by Catholic social teaching, the body was to be repressed, mortified, and where necessary extinguished, certainly not allowed free reign of expression in public. Gerardine Meaney and Tom Inglis, among others, have highlighted the level of bodily self-regulation instilled by contemporary (Catholic) state strictures; we find these represented in Edna O’Brien’s mid-century fiction, and later in Colm Tóibín’s and Anne Enright’s writing, to powerful effect. In a recent interview, Tóibín alluded to his own socialisation: “I don’t think I saw anyone naked until I put my mind to the subject, aged around 20. I was at a boy’s boarding school. We had locks on the doors to the showers. You changed in your own cubicle. You had your own cubicle27.” Against this backdrop of corporeal regulation, the Diceman’s manifestations out on the city streets liberated the ways in which we, his audience, constructed the body and its appearance in the public domain. Moreover, many of his public performances gesture to the queer body, whether that of his sailor boys, or the infamous Vamp outfit (for which he was prosecuted for public indecency in 1991)28. These references reveal LGBTQ+ countercultures available in 1980s Dublin; the Diceman profiled our (sub)cultural icons in the public domain, along with an entire backdrop of gay gossip, innuendo, and ways of inhabiting the body. This is remarkable, particularly given the absence of queer representations in contemporary Irish culture; even in contemporary theatre, Brian Singleton observes, “lesbian and gay culture […] had been virtually invisible” in the pre-1993 period29.

16 Revealing that which was deliberately occluded in the culture was a key element in the Diceman’s performance activism. In Hannah Arendt’s discourse on political action, she argues that an identity can only be forged by acting in the public domain; in this way, “men show who they are […] and thus make their appearance in the human world”30. She acknowledges the risk of such disclosures in an unstable public realm where “nobody is the author or producer of his own life story”31. However, in order to forge a public identity or lay claim to political rights, one must become an actor, or in Arendt’s terms a “who”, in the public mind. Extending this analysis in her consideration of mass demonstrations, such as the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising, Judith Butler argues that “political claims are made by bodies as they appear and act […]. It is not that bodies are

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simply mute life-forces that counter existing modalities of power. Rather, they are themselves modalities of power, embodied interpretations, engaging in allied action32”. By mobilising “productive and performative bodies”, Butler argues that mass demonstrations provoke questions about “what it means to move through space in a way that contests the distinction between public and private33”. By bringing what was private (to be kept in “your own cubicle”) right out into the public domain, the Diceman articulated something we all knew: that the body was there, right at the centre of hegemonic practices, and that Irish society could not afford to ignore that any longer. This inevitability was brought home to the gay community, with devastating consequences, by the end of the 1980s.

AIDS activism

17 As with the “What’s Another Queer?” costume mentioned, blood was frequently invoked in the Diceman’s performances, which draw on Dracula and cognate Gothic horror figures. Folded inside these (often hilariously) melodramatic performances was a testament to abiding anxieties about cannibalism, contagion, and bodily invasion in Irish culture. Crucially, by the time Thom McGinty tested positive for HIV in 1990, the blood intrinsic to such costumes, and the queer body itself, had begun to take on new significance in Irish culture. The AIDS “crisis” brought Irish bodily anxieties to the fore; this deadly disease could be transmitted by bodily fluids, which of course provoked homophobic panics of various kinds including the refusal of health and prison workers to deal with HIV+ patients and inmates34.

18 The epidemic made visible the extent to which the Irish state could, and did, disavow those who refused to assimilate to dominant social paradigms, and who were thereby deemed beyond the remit of health and social welfare services. Remember the sexual continence demanded by contemporary hegemonies: male homosexuality was illegal until 199335, and contraception was banned until 1978 (condoms only becoming widely available in 1992). These circumstances, quite unlike those experienced by our contemporaries in other western countries, proved incredibly challenging for sexual health advocacy. Furthermore, the degree to which AIDS was seen as an alien threat is seen in the first government-sponsored public information campaign here, with posters reading “AIDS: Don’t Bring It Home”36. This message, directed at migrant Irish gays, was that their sexual practices were damaging the sexually-continent Irish “back home”. Nonetheless, state neglect galvanised activists and voluntary workers, in tandem with the support of families and friends, who established an impressive range of grassroots advocacy initiatives, care provision, and campaigns to legalise condoms, provide wider access to healthcare for HIV / AIDS patients, etc. The reality behind the slogan “silence=death” (created in 1987 by ACT-UP and later adopted by Irish activists) galvanised gay community organisations to attain visibility, occupying the public domain to win healthcare provision for their dying brothers37. The concomitant strengthening of relationships between those living with HIV/AIDS and their carers/ advocates in that desolate period during the 1980s underpinned Irish LGBTQ+ communities from then on.

19 The Diceman contributed to that emerging visibility of Irish LGB communities, putting his body on the line by performing at fund-raisers for HIV/AIDS charities. Thom McGinty’s appearance on The Late Late Show in 1994, talking candidly about his health

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condition, was a clear signal of that commitment. His openness, not long after the death of Irish DJ Vincent Hanley, whose illness was utterly shrouded in secrecy (an indication of the stigma attached to AIDS then), underlines McGinty’s determination to bring word of the disease into the public domain. While sterling work was ongoing by Gay Health Action and AIDS Alliance volunteers, and some healthcare providers (notably the HIV clinic at St James’s Hospital), their combined efforts to effect attitude change gained little traction. As Cormac O’Brien notes, “the national epistemology underwriting AIDS as an Irish cultural narrative is steeped in contagion paranoia, and tainted by deeply-embedded institutional stigma towards HIV-positive citizens”38. In that context, McGinty’s willingness to subject himself to the gaze of a mass media audience is testament to his commitment to change public perceptions of people with HIV/AIDS. O’Brien posits “truth telling as a means of […] disrupting the stigmatizing cultural narrative of AIDS in Ireland” and, while this still had a way to go in 1994 (and still does), McGinty’s efforts in this regard are laudable39.

ILGO: Irish Queers in New York

20 Meantime, while the decriminalisation debates and HIV/AIDS advocacy commanded the attention of Irish-based activists in the early 1990s, their New York contemporaries mobilised the “productive and performative” queer bodies of a new generation of Irish migrants, members of ILGO. I have no memory of people screaming at us; I was not aware of any noise. I felt like a spectator with a panoramic view that swept from one side of the cathedral steps to the other. The lasting impression was of hugeness and quiet, the mayor only a slight figure in this vast scene. He seemed too delicate set against the physical mass of the cathedral and the bulk of the men who stood in wait for him. […] Nothing stirred, the stillness broken only by the mayor dressed in Kelly-green dashing up the steps towards a gathering of men trimmed in crimson and behind them row upon row of clerics garbed in black. It felt like nobody breathed until it was over. The mayor moved gracefully down the steps ready to continue on the route after shaking several cold white hands40.

21 This piece of “street theatre” at the centre of ILGO’s participation in the 1991 New York St Patrick’s Day Parade (from Anne Maguire’s memoir, 2005), is set in another “key national space”, St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The central actors here are important community leaders, New York Mayor David Dinkins, and Cardinal John O’Connor backed up by a phalanx of Catholic churchmen standing “in wait”. As with the speaker in Meehan’s poem, Maguire attends to movement and to breath here but, unlike the life-giving breath “brought home to us” in McGinty’s vital hands, nobody breathes here, the grudgingly-offered hands are “cold white” ones.

22 Maguire’s construction renders this key episode in Irish LGBTQ+ history as a silent and still encounter, thereby focusing our attention on the theatricality and the symbolism of the moment, in which (it seemed41) ILGO had won their struggle to march in the main parade. While a full account of the ILGO struggle to participate in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade is beyond the scope of this essay42, readers will be aware of these events. Evidently, the city mayor was barely acknowledged by the cardinal, then the most powerful figure in the Irish-American community, because of his support for ILGO. In Maguire’s depiction, a lone figure moves against a backdrop of “hugeness and quiet”; the performance is visually stunning but the sound is turned down; the sense of

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the individual pitted against the serried ranks of church and state power foregrounded in her account. We cannot hear the barrage of noise from kerbside, as anti-ILGO protestors attempt to storm police barricades, hurling beer cans, what Maguire calls “the usual epithets” and death threats. The media onslaught is likewise muted here, so the reader is momentarily insulated from local and transnational political wrangling (events on Fifth Avenue were keenly watched “back home” in Ireland that day and since). Nonetheless, Butler’s observation that during mass demonstrations, “the very public character of the space is being disputed and fought over” is apposite43.

23 In this way, a group of Irish expats, initially drawn from that generation of dissidents mentioned earlier who emigrated in the 1980s, continued to stage their challenge to the “public character” of the space and to “national heterosexuality”. Given Irish women’s history of containment in or expulsion from public domain in the 1980s, it seems apt that ILGO was an organisation led by women; the number of out in the group (including Anne Maguire and Marie Honan), was a sign of things to come (much later) back in Ireland. That their struggle happens to be located in a different geographical space is incidental, they continued to battle a national culture which excluded them; after all, New York had no problem in the 1990s with queer activists marching or having a public presence, the difficulty arose in this contingent space given over annually to the Irish community. The virulence with which ILGO’s bid to march and to be considered part of the New York Irish community (“our refusal to be dispossessed of our Irish and gay identities”, as Maguire puts it) was resisted is an indication of the deeply-entrenched homophobia of that community. Katie Conrad describes ILGO as an “otherable group”, arguing that “by excluding it physically from the parade, the AOH [Ancient Order of Hibernians] […] expressed a hope to exclude the people it represents from the narratives of Irish, Irish-American, and American identities44”. Conrad and Lucy McDiarmid both recount incidents of the hostile crowd chanting “Queers Go Home, Queers Go Home” to which the ILGO protestors replied “We are home45”. This is bound up with the sense of “the homosexual as a foreign body”, to quote Conrad, “an infectious agent in the family cell” – bringing to mind the “Don’t Bring it Home” slogan mentioned above, which derives from the same mindset46. As Conrad observes, “[in] Irish-American constructions of identity and public space, homosexuality must be located elsewhere47”.

24 Ironically that elsewhere is the Republic of Ireland, which suggests that the AOH wanted these “foreign bodies” contaminating their “space of pure citizenship”48 repatriated back to Ireland. Perhaps they perceived the modernising Irish state as a threat to the sanctity of their late lamented homeland; Ireland then was (slowly) beginning to come to terms with its “others”, chiefly as a result of the strenuous efforts and increasing confidence of emerging LGBT communities. In March 1992, another piece of queer street theatre saw a lesbian float win an award for “best newcomer” at the St Patrick’s Day parade in Cork. That the women flew a banner reading “Hello New York”, while ILGO were again proscribed from the AOH parade, highlights the interaction between these, increasingly, distant loci in Irish national culture (several participants in the Cork parade travelled to participate in subsequent ILGO protests). This moment is a revealing one, showing the unevenness with which the public sphere deals with the challenge posed by “subaltern counterpublics” (Nancy Fraser’s term). Thus, a queer group in Cork claim their space with a knowing glance in the direction of New York; moreover, their participation and ironic humour is rewarded by the dominant culture

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in Ireland; yet, this takes place a full year before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland.

Conclusion: Queer Irish Futures

25 Butler suggests that at such moments, protestors act in concert to “[open] up time and space outside and against the temporality and established architecture of the regime, one that lays claim to materiality, leans into its supports, draws from its supports, in order to rework their functions”49. In like manner, the Diceman’s iconic performance at Dublin Pride in 1993 (which celebrated decriminalisation, the announcement made the day before the march), was a stand-out moment for all of us there on the day50. Costumed as a cartoon-style convict (arrow-painted , outsized ball-and-chain), he performed what might be described as a “decriminalisation striptease”, slowly divesting himself of his shackles. Butler underlines the extent to which the material environment is re-configured and re-functioned” during street demonstrations, as protestors adapt urban architecture to their needs51. In just this way, using the steps of the Central Bank as a platform for the Diceman’s gay agitprop re-functioned that space. In 1993 of course, the Central Bank occupied a key position in Irish capitalism in an economy barrelling into the “Celtic Tiger” period52. While the Diceman’s performance referred to the lifting of a draconian and punitive law demonising gay men for over a century, in retrospect we might read its staging as prefiguring the part played by “the gay lifestyle” in Ireland’s economic boom and bust. During the Celtic Tiger period, as Irish citizens were recategorised as consumers, many gay men (and some lesbians) became part of a social elite. Moreover, within a decade of decriminalisation, the public image of gay men in Ireland went from that of a threatening and criminalised underclass to that of a cosmopolitan social group and, from a neoliberal perspective, a privileged consumer group.

26 Of course, such constructions are completely predicated on a homonormative (young, single, white, male) professional subject, as Anne Mulhall shows; she underscores the extent to which such gay men are received as good subjects in contemporary Irish society, while “women and non-white Irish are culturally marginalised or injured by the law”53. The use of economic arguments during the 2015 Marriage Equality campaign underlines the imbrication of “the gay community” in Ireland with neoliberal capitalism: “[o]ur reputation for being a welcoming country that respects diversity is also good for foreign investment. International companies like setting up in countries where their employees will be protected and treated equally. It leads to better productivity and a greater market reach for them”54. Frankly, it is difficult to reconcile this homonormative capitalist outlook with the Diceman’s challenge to the status quo on the steps of the Central Bank that day in 1993. But then, a homonormative queer future is very far removed from the Ireland many of us grew up and came out in; the DIY nature of 1980s/90s LGBT resource-building and collaborative action, whether on protests, performance spaces, or palliative care for the dying, underscores the absence of commercial advantage to be gained from queer communities at that time55. Social divides plainly evident in the present queer scene are perhaps the most visible sign of how much has changed in the intervening period.

27 This is not to suggest that nostalgia for the “good old days” of DIY community-building should cloud our judgement, particularly in relation to the advances made by Irish

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LGBTQ+ activists and communities in the recent past. While arguing for the important dissident force of the Diceman’s interventions, this is not to forget that the “still pool” conjured up in Meehan’s poem was permitted no audible out-breath. That silent centre at the heart of the peformance reflects the near-deafening public silence about queer lives and experiences in 1980s Ireland. It is especially poignant to recall that Thom McGinty’s funeral (attended by the Mayor of Dublin and several thousand people who stood silently and still as his coffin was carried through Grafton Street56) was covered in its entirety by the national broadcaster on the radio show. While Ryan himself (and others like him) contributed hugely to the opening up of discussion in relation to Irish LGBTQ+ lives from the 1980s on, the same cannot be applied across the board57; the silences and invisibilities attendant on queer lives are endemic to Irish culture in the late twentieth century. By contrast, recent Marriage Equality and Gender Recognition campaigns in the Republic of Ireland have been characterised by the willingness of many, gay and straight people, to “go public” about their lives and the brutal effects of national heternormativity. The extent to which the Irish public domain has yielded ground to LGBTQ+ activists may be assessed by comparing the queer interpolations made by the Diceman and by ILGO from the fringes of the Irish public domain with the public and state-sponsored venues afforded, at home and abroad, to the more recent performance activism of Bliss and the Marriage Equality campaigners. This comparison alone underlines the extent to which the boundaries of the Irish public domain have been redefined by queer performance activism and LGBTQ+ public protest in the intervening period, for which those queer Irish community activists on both sides of the Atlantic should be given due credit today58. Their efforts, along with McGinty’s performance activism, Meehan’s poem reminds us, were “a gift of grace” to the whole community in which they created a queer new space, A still pool In the anarchic flow, the street’s unceasing carnival of haunted and redeemed59.

NOTES

1. Dermot Bolger, Irish Independent 25 February 1995, p. 29. 2. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Tonie Walsh (Irish Queer Archive), for his unstinting generosity with both his time and resources during my research process; I am very grateful too to Joan Murphy, Rena Blake, and Lucy McDiarmid for their recollections of specific demos. 3. Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street”, in Transversal 10 (October 2011). [http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en/print] 4. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, New York, Zone Books, 2005, p. 189.

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5. One exception is the Dunnes Stores workers’ anti-apartheid strike in Dublin from 1984-87. 6. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013, p. 145. 7. Linda Connolly and Tina O’Toole, Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave, Dublin, Woodfield Press, 2005, p. 65-67; p. 111-113. 8. On Charles Self, see Out for Ourselves: The Lives of Irish Lesbians and Gay Men, Dublin, DLGC/ Women’s Community Press, 1986, pp. 192-194; also [http:// www.independent.ie/irish-news/garda-homophobia-played-a-part-in-the-failure-to- solve-case-26748125.html] 9. See Philpott, “Martyr in the Park”, GI [Gay Ireland], No. 1, November 2011, p. 52-58. 10. See Ed Madden, “Queering Ireland, in the Archives”, Irish University Review Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, p. 131-145. 11. Anne Maguire, Rock the Sham: The Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization’s Battle to March in New York City’s St Patrick’s Day Parade, New York, Street Level Press, 2005, p. 30. 12. See: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZjM83wZmWw] 13. Ibid., p. 189. 14. Perhaps McGinty’s appearance as God at the 1993 Galway Arts Festival should have been taken more seriously; see Olaf Tyransen “Senses Working Overtime”, Hot Press 11 August 1993. 15. McGinty was second-generation Irish (his mother came from Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow) and self-identified as a Scottish-Irishman. 16. Paula Meehan, Dharmakaya, Manchester, Carcanet, 2000, p. 11. 17. Ibid. 18. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, Durham, Duke UP, 2006, p. 19-20. 19. See Gallery of Photography online exhibition 14th July 2011, “The Diceman Cometh”, curated by Darragh Shanahan: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1363FrC5y-4]. 20. David Bell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 19. 21. Tonie Walsh mentioned McGinty’s participation in the inaugural 1987 beauty pageant. See Ed Madden “Queering Ireland, in the Archives” Irish University Review 43.1 (2013, 189): p. 131-145; Fintan Walsh, Queer Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) for more on the pageant. 22. David Bell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, op. cit., p. 18. 23. For this and other press photographs of the Diceman, see: [ http:// www.irishtimes.com/culture/photography/saluting-the-diceman-a-life-in- pictures-1.2162668] 24. McGinty’s activism was not confined to LGBTQ issues, he also participated in demos supporting the Birmingham Six and the Pro-Choice movement, among others. 25. Out magazine, No. 15, Sept/Oct 1988, p. 18. 26. Ibid.

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27. Colm Tóibín, Interview by Paul Morton, [ http://www.bookslut.com/features/ 2009_06_014545.php] Accessed 5th May 2016. 28. McGinty was arrested wearing a G-string, fishnet tights and a feather boa (which got caught in the door of the garda van during the episode) while promoting The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He received a probationary sentence. See Lawrence William White “The Diceman”, History Ireland No. 6, Nov/Dec 2010. 29. Brian Singleton, “Queer Eye for the Irish Guy: Transgressive Sexualities and the Performance of Nation” in Melissa Sihra and Paul Murphy (eds.), The Dreaming Body: Contemporary Irish Theatre, Buckinghamshire, Colin Smythe, 2009, p. 99-113, p. 99. 30. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 1958, Chicago, University Chicago Press, 1998, p. 179. 31. Ibid., p. 184. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. See [ http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/30-years-of-despair-and- hope-1.591603#]. 35. Decriminalisation came five years after a European Court ruling in favour of David Norris in 1988, the culmination of his sixteen-year legal battle against the proscription of male homosexual acts (Mary Robinson represented him at the Irish Supreme Court in 1983, where the case was rejected by five judges). 36. Three such campaigns in the period were modified, following Church intervention, to remove references to anal sex; the 1993 campaign was refused by RTE. See Fiona Smyth, “Cultural Constraints on the Delivery of HIV/AIDS Prevention in Ireland”, Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 48, No. 6, 1998, p. 661-672. 37. See William O’Connor, “Prelude to a Vision: The Impact of AIDS on the Political Legitimacy and Political Mobilization of Gay Men in Ireland” in Íde O’Carroll and Eoin Collins (eds.), Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, London, Cassell, 1995, p. 183-198. 38. See O’Brien, “Performing POZ: Irish Theatre, HIV Stigma, and ‘Post-AIDS’ Identities”, Irish University Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2013, p. 74-85, p. 75. 39. Ibid., p. 83. 40. Ibid., p. 17. 41. Twenty-five years passed before Irish queers would march in the parade again. 42. For further reference, consult Maguire, Conrad, ibid.; also, Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame, London, Ashgate, 2007. 43. Ibid. 44. Kathryn C. Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse, Wisconsin, U Wisconsin P, 2004, p. 67. Conrad quotes from Marie Honan’s 1997 ACIS paper, in which she recounted how she and Maguire were accused by Irish nationalists in New York of being “traitors and British spies” (despite their Irish republican sympathies); see p. 149 n. 79. 45. Lucy McDiarmid “Lesbians, Gays, and the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade”, unpub. lecture delivered at Cornell University, November 1998. 46. Ibid., p. 67.

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47. Ibid., p. 63. 48. Warner, Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, op. cit., p. 189. 49. Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street”, op. cit., 2011. 50. For instance, both Tonie Walsh (Irish Queer Archive), and Brian Finnegan (editor of Gay Community News) highlight the Diceman’s performance in their accounts of that day (see [http://jrnl.ie/2181184] for instance). 51. Ibid. 52. The Central Bank was named in the 2016 Banking Inquiry as having contributed to the economic crash in Ireland by not putting a brake on aggressive lending and an over-reliance on the property market. 53. Anne Mulhall, “Queer in Ireland: ‘Deviant’ Filiation and the (Un)Holy Family”, in Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, (eds.), Queer in Europe, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, p. 99-112. 54. See [www.marriagequality.ie]. 55. The 1995 Nexus/Combat Poverty survey and report “Poverty, Lesbians and Gay Men: The Economic & Social Effects of Discrimination” underlines this point. 21% of respondents were living in poverty, 57% found it hard to make ends meet; moreover, according to the report “[m]any respondents’ job opportunities were severely narrowed because they avoided work for which they were qualified (21%) or categories of work (39%) through fear of discrimination, both of which can lead to downward mobility” (xiv). See [http://www.combatpoverty.ie/publications/ PovertyLesbiansAndGayMen_1995.pdf]. 56. John Maher, “Grafton Street Stands Still for the Diceman: Thousands applaud Thom McGinty as his funeral passes”, The Irish Times 17th November 1994. 57. Ryan’s grasp of the issues at stake for at that time was impressive, as witnessed by this author when taking part in a radio interview with him during Pride Week events in UCD 1991. 58. In his work on contemporary drag performer and Irish queer icon, Panti Bliss, Fintan Walsh connects Panti’s speech acts and public lectures with the Irish seanchaí [storytelling] tradition (ibid., 25). Panti is probably best known internationally today for her support for the 2015 Marriage Equality referendum, during which she became a national queer icon. This was partly as a result of her “noble call”, an invited oration made from the stage of the national theatre on 1 Febrary 2014 following a performance of James Plunkett’s The Risen People. Strongly staking her claim to the public sphere, Panti called out the entrenched homophobia of Irish society and underlined its oppressive impact on generations of Irish citizens. 59. Ibid.

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ABSTRACTS

This essay explores two key interventions in the twentieth-century urban history of Irish LGBTQ+ protest. Over the past five decades, there has been a transformation in attitudes to / representations of sexual identities in Ireland. Ever since 1983, when a broad-based protest march moved through Dublin in response to the gaybashing and murder of Declan Flynn in Fairview Park, street demonstrations, guerrilla theatre, and public performance have been used by Irish queer activists to protest the pathologising of sexualities and impact of biopower on all of our lives. Focusing on the street theatre of “The Diceman” [Thom McGinty], this essay captures the public staging of Irish queer resistance in 1980s/90s Dublin. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performance activism (and its roots in Hannah Arendt’s work), it explores the The Diceman’s key role in creating a public identity for Irish LBGTQ+ people in the period before the decriminalization of (male) homosexuality in 1993. Extending the analysis to queer Irish migrants in New York in the same period, the essay argues that performance activism was crucial to the emergence of queer political action in the Irish public sphere.

Cet article s’intéresse à deux interventions cruciales dans l’histoire du mouvement LGBTQ+ de l’Irlande urbaine au XXe siècle. Au cours des cinquante dernières années, on observe en Irlande une transformation des attitudes envers les identités sexuelles et de leurs représentations. Depuis l’agression homophobe et le meurtre de Declan Flynn à Fairview Pak et l’importante marche de protestation qui s’ensuivit à Dublin, les activistes queer irlandais ont recouru aux manifestations de rue, au théâtre d’intervention et aux performances publiques pour dénoncer la pathologisation des sexualités et l’emprise du biopouvoir sur la vie de chacun. En se penchant sur le théâtre de rue du Diceman [Thom McGinty], cet article étudie la mise en scène publique de la résistance queer irlandaise dans le Dublin des années 1980 et 1990. Il se fonde sur la théorie de l’activisme performatif de Judith Butler (et sur ses racines dans l’œuvre d’Hannah Arendt) et analyse le rôle décisif que joua le Diceman en contribuant à créer une identité publique pour les membres de la communauté LGBTQ+ irlandaise pendant la période qui précéda la décriminalisation de l’homosexualité (masculine) en 1993. En se penchant sur la communauté de migrants irlandais queer à New York au cours de la même période, il montre que l’activisme performatif fut au cœur de l’émergence de l’action politique queer dans la sphère publique irlandaise.

INDEX

Keywords: activism, body, drama, sexuality - sexual identity, social role of the artist, public debate Mots-clés: corps, débat public, militantisme, rôle social de l'artiste, sexualité - identité sexuelle, théâtre

AUTHOR

TINA O’TOOLE Tina O’Toole is Senior Lecturer and programme director of the MA in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland.Her work focuses on women’s agency, dissident sexualities, and diasporic and

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transnational representations. Her publications include The Irish New Woman (2012); a study of the second-wave Irish Women’s Movement, Documenting Irish Feminisms (2005; co-authored with Linda Connolly); and three edited books including the recent Women Writing War: Ireland 1880-1922 (2016; co-edited with Gillian McIntosh and Muireann O’Cinnéide). Her journal publications include essays in Modernism/Modernity, Irish University Review, and New Hibernia Review, and she has edited journal special issues including Éire-Ireland (47) on “Irish Migrancies” (2012; with Piaras Mac Éinrí).

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Comptes rendus de lectures Book Reviews

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Beata Piatek, History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction Krakow, Jagiellonian University Press, 2014

Bertrand Cardin

RÉFÉRENCE

Beata PIATEK, History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, Krakow, Jagiellonian University Press, 2014, 197 p., ISBN 9788323338246, 9,25 €.

1 Enseignante chercheuse à l’université Jagellonne de Cracovie, Beata Piatek s’intéresse aux relations complexes entre histoire, mémoire et trauma dans la fiction anglophone contemporaine. Son ouvrage, History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, étudie quatre romanciers – deux Britanniques et deux Irlandais – dont les œuvres explorent les blessures du passé dans les sphères publiques et privées.

2 Le livre est composé de deux parties dont chacune comprend deux chapitres. La première partie, intitulée « History and Trauma », se focalise sur des œuvres de Pat Barker et Sebastian Barry. La seconde, « Memory and Trauma », est consacrée à des romans de Kazuo Ishiguro et John Banville. L’objectif n’est pas de comparer écrivains britanniques et irlandais, mais de montrer, à partir de leurs textes, la diversité avec laquelle sont appréhendés les événements du passé.

3 Ces analyses textuelles sont précédées d’un chapitre théorique qui recense chronologiquement les réflexions d’intellectuels sur la mémoire, à partir de Platon jusqu’à Pierre Nora, retrace les interrogations sur l’histoire soulevées notamment par le scepticisme postmoderne, et définit la notion de trauma et son évolution dans le cadre des trauma studies.

4 Intéressant et original, le propos développe des analyses pertinentes et convaincantes. Sebastian Barry, souvent considéré comme révisionniste, a tendance à ressasser les

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mêmes événements historiques tout en les traitant selon des points de vue de personnages différents. Piatek montre bien qu’au fil de ses publications, cet écrivain réagit aux critiques formulées sur son œuvre antérieure : par exemple, dans The Secret Scripture, Barry continue d’explorer des thèmes qui lui sont chers (les effets destructeurs des politiques nationalistes ou des secrets de famille), mais s’efforce aussi de porter un regard plus nuancé sur l’histoire irlandaise, qu’il n’aborde plus de manière simpliste et manichéenne comme il le faisait jusqu’alors.

5 Tandis que Barry, dans ses « métafictions historiographiques », narre les destinées de modestes personnages marginalisés, Banville, lui, se détourne de la fiction historique, bien que l’Histoire reste sous-jacente dans ses romans étudiés ici (Eclipse, Shroud et Ancient Light). Témoins d’un trauma, les protagonistes de Banville souffrent d’une mémoire envahissante et peinent à relire leur parcours comme un récit cohérent.

6 Les analyses des textes de Barker et Ishiguro sont également très stimulantes, même si le lecteur ne peut s’empêcher de penser que le trauma revêt une portée particulière pour ce dernier, né à Nagasaki dans les années 1950… Les spécificités propres au parcours de chaque écrivain risquent toujours d’être aplanies dans une étude globale et thématique de textes d’auteurs divers comme celle-ci, mais c’est là un écueil que Piatek parvient généralement à éviter.

7 En revanche, il aurait été intéressant de chercher à comprendre pourquoi les écrivains contemporains manifestent un tel engouement pour le passé individuel et la mémoire collective. Cet attrait se constate également dans les nombreuses autobiographies publiées ces dernières années. La recomposition de destinées personnelles et la réécriture d’événements historiques illustrent à quel point le passé peut être rejeté, interprété et transformé. Ce travail de remémoration et d’exhumation du passé est-il révélateur d’un besoin incoercible de s’interroger, s’examiner ou tout simplement, dans le sens du conseil socratique, de se connaître soi-même ? Ce mouvement de retour observable dans des textes publiés autour de l’an 2000 est-il à mettre en lien avec le changement de millénaire ? Participe-t-il d’une démarche visant à mieux apprivoiser le présent et emprunter plus sûrement le chemin de l’avenir ? Les raisons pour lesquelles ces thèmes sont si prégnants dans les textes de fiction contemporains auraient mérité d’être creusées davantage.

8 Indépendamment de ces remarques, l’ouvrage témoigne d’une excellente connaissance des romans, d’une grande maîtrise de l’appareil critique et des publications sur l’Histoire, la mémoire et le trauma, y compris les plus récentes. D’une écriture limpide, il se lit facilement et reste très accessible, d’autant plus qu’il n’est pas nécessaire d’avoir lu l’intégralité des ouvrages étudiés pour suivre et comprendre le propos.

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Claude Fierobe, Les Ombres du fantastique. Fictions d’Irlande Dinan, Terre de Brume, 2016

Sylvie Mikowski

RÉFÉRENCE

Claude FIEROBE, Les Ombres du fantastique. Fictions d’Irlande, Dinan, Terre de Brume, 2016, 206 p., ISBN 978-2-84562-586-2, 18,00 €.

1 Claude Fierobe, l’un des meilleurs spécialistes français de la littérature irlandaise, et en particulier de la littérature gothique, mais aussi l’un des « pères fondateurs » des études irlandaises en France, revient dans cet ouvrage sur ses lectures d’auteurs qu’il fréquente depuis longtemps, comme Charles Maturin ou Sheridan Le Fanu, mais commente également des écrivains tout à fait contemporains. Ce n’est pas un hasard si l’idée de « retour », ainsi que celle de « fréquentation », voire de possession, par certains tropes ou images récurrentes, nous viennent à l’esprit en parcourant cet ouvrage qui explore la relation unique qu’entretient la littérature irlandaise avec l’étrange, les mondes parallèles, et en particulier avec les revenants et autres esprits fantômes. Ce n’est pas tant que roman, théâtre et poésie irlandais abondent en apparitions surnaturelles, et en phénomènes inexplicables, mais surtout que tous ces textes font écho les uns aux autres de génération en génération, reprenant et retissant les images spectrales qui trouvent leur origine dans ce que Claude Fierobe appelle « les trois piliers » de la fiction fantastique irlandaise : Maturin, LeFanu et Bram Stoker. L’auteur nous entraîne à la suite de Melmoth dans un voyage qui traverse les siècles pour parvenir jusqu’à Joyce, Beckett, puis Banville, Trevor, Bolger, , mais encore Joseph O’Connor, Colum McCann, Eoin McNamee, , Keith Ridgway, Paul Lynch, et d’autres. Il tisse un réseau entre des écrivains à priori éloignés les uns des autres, mais les apparences sont trompeuses. Tous par exemple sont visités d’une manière ou d’une autre par « le spectre du père », celui de James Joyce, lui qui a initié « l’incartade fantastique » au cœur du récit réaliste, en ayant recours aux épiphanies, à

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la méthode mythique, et par son ambition de faire proliférer le sens des mots et des images : les personnages jouent des rôles multiples, et ainsi tout se transforme.

2 Les écrivains irlandais sont également hantés par la question centrale de l’identité, d’abord celle de l’Irlande elle-même, éminemment floue et insaisissable. La question est abordée dans le seul roman « irlandais » de Bram Stoker, The Snake’s Pass, que Claude Fierobe a traduit aux mêmes éditions Terre de Brume sous le titre Le défilé du serpent. Ses analyses font d’ailleurs écho à celles de Derek Gladwin qui consacre un chapitre à ce même roman dans Contentious Terrains. Bogs, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic1 qui, étrange coïncidence (!), paraît en même temps que ce livre. Pour Claude Fierobe – comme pour Gladwin – « la tourbière est métaphore de l’imaginaire qui creuse le discours » (p. 57). Dans Star of the Sea de Joseph O’Connor, cette métaphore de l’inaccessibilité de la vérité et de la dualité des apparences est celle du navire qui emporte les personnages ambigus qui fuient la famine vers un avenir incertain. Passé et futur se mélangent aussi étrangement dans Red Sky in the Morning de Paul Lynch qui met en scène la figure gothique du fugitif, et ressuscite la mémoire oubliée de cinquante-sept Irlandais morts sur un chantier de chemin de fer de Pennsylvannie. Claude Fierobe propose des rapprochements audacieux entre les écrivains qu’il convoque, comme celui qu’il établit entre John Banville, considéré comme un chantre du postmodernisme, et Dermot Bolger, généralement rangé parmi les auteurs traditionnels. Pourtant Claude Fierobe rend justice au goût de Bolger pour le néo-victorianisme, pour les intrigues labyrinthiques et les resurgissements d’un passé maudit. Claude Fierobe consacre également de longues analyses à Murphy de Beckett, écrivain chez qui il retrouve « un terrifiant ressassement » qui évoque « les plus fantastiques paysages intérieurs » (p. 143).

3 On appréciera l’écriture fluide et élégante de ce livre, qui n’a jamais recours au moindre jargon ni emphase, et qui n’est d’ailleurs pas de nature académique, mais qui permet à Claude Fierobe de laisser libre cours à une réflexion toute personnelle nourrie d’une connaissance intime de la littérature irlandaise. Cette fréquentation passionnée et assidue aussi bien des classiques du gothique, que des grand maîtres Joyce et Beckett, mais aussi des œuvres les plus contemporaines, sert à nous offrir un survol presque vertigineux des thèmes récurrents de la littérature irlandaise, tels que l’aliénation, la folie, l’indétermination, l’entre-deux, la quête désespérée de l’identité, la fuite ou l’exil. Vue à travers « a glass darkly », la littérature irlandaise semble distiller les sourdes angoisses d’une nation encore travaillée par un passé de dépossession, de violence, de faim, de soumission au religieux et d’exil.

NOTES

1. Derek Gladwin, Contentious Terrains. Bogs, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic. Cork University Press, 2016.

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Donald E. Morse (ed.), Irish Theatre in Transition. from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Alexandra Poulain

REFERENCES

Donald E. MORSE (ed.). Irish Theatre in Transition. from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 265 p., ISBN 978-1-137-45068-5, 65.25 $.

1 The title of Donald E. Morse’s edited volume quotes the first sentence of the first essay in the collection, Christopher Murray’s “The Irish theatre: The First Hundred Years, 1897-1997”: “The best theatre is always in transition”. The whole volume is intended as a homage to Murray’s major contribution as a critic of Irish theatre, and more specifically as a response to this essay which was initially published in 1997, a hundred years after the inception of the modern Irish theatre in 1897. Murray’s essay proposes a re-evaluation of the standard narrative of the history of modern Irish theatre, offering not one foundational moment (the creation of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897) but a succession of re-foundations and paradigm shifts – from the initial Ibsenite model of the Little Art Theatre to Yeats’s realignment with a Shakespearean model, after he visited Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901 and, argues, Murray, “misread Shakespeare’s history plays” as dissolving history into, as he phrased it, “‘something almost mythological’” (17). Another foundational moment in the history of Irish theatre coincided with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922: only after this event can Irish theatre be “described as postcolonialist”, Murray claims, thus controversially enforcing a strictly chronological understanding of the term and countering most definitions of postcolonialism as offered by postcolonial critics themselves. Thus resignifying the term “postcolonialist”, Murray problematically hails O’Casey as “the

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first postcolonialist Irish dramatist”, whose demythologising, revisionist agenda was henceforth picked up by such major figures as Behan, Friel and Murphy. In the final section of his essay, Murray looks towards female voices as possible alternatives to the largely bourgeois, modernist model of Irish theatre. Making a convincing case for the importance of the insufficiently remembered Alice Milligan in the beginnings of the modern Irish theatre, he points out the relative scarcity of contemporary women Irish playwrights, with the exception of Marina Carr and Paula Meehan. Almost twenty years after the initial publication of this essay, just as it was re-issued in this volume, the “Waking the Feminists” campaign, triggered in November 2015 by the outrageous under-representation of women playwrights and directors in the Abbey’s programme for the centenary of the Easter Rising, revealed the extent to which gender discrimination still operates at every level in Irish theatrical institutions.

2 The fifteen essays that follow, all written by eminent critics of Irish theatre, almost always reference Murray’s essay, though none of them really engages (critically or otherwise) with its revisionist agenda. Rather, they offer varied and often exciting insights about new developments in Irish theatre since the publication of the essay in 1997, and thus constitute a sequel to Murray’s appraisal of “the first hundred years”. In the first part, “Engaging with a Changing Reality”, two essays by Eamonn Jordan and Maria Kurdi look at Celtic Tiger plays, while Jose Lanters’ contribution offers an exciting reading of changing representations of queer sexualities in Synge, Behan, Kilroy and Friel. Finally, Donald E. Morse’s piece registers the dramatic ageing of Irish population over the last two decades and provides a sensitive reading of the dramatisation of dementia in Frank McGuinness’ The Hanging Gardens. The second part, “Enhanced Theatricality”, is concerned with formal experiments in recent Irish drama. Csilla Bertha looks at modalities of metatheatricality in McGuiness’ Carthaginians and Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. Eric Weitz analyses the complex activity of laughing in experimental dramaturgies which dispense with the convention of the fourth wall and thus reconfigure the spectator-performer relationship. Ondřej Pilný convokes the categories of the grotesque and the sublime in a stimulating reading of Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus. Part Four, “Reframing Transition”, is concerned with performance history. Patrick Lonergan provides a highly informative survey of productions of Shakespeare at the Abbey between 1970 and 1985. Nicholas Grene shares his experience as Theatre Judge in 2006 and offers a selection of twelve snapshot descriptions of productions he attended in this capacity. Peter James Harris contributes a survey of productions of Irish plays in London “from Independence to the Present”, and in the process usefully redefines what can be deemed an “Irish Play”. Part Five, “Inventiveness and expanding the Stage”, offers readings of experimental playwriting: Helen Heusner Lojek on Frank McGuinness and Joan Fitzpatrick Dean on Pat Kinevane’s monologic explorations of abjection. Other essays in this section look beyond the stage at Irish dramatists’ experiments with other media. Clare Wallace offers a compelling reading of Stewart Parker little known work for television, and Dawn Duncan writes about teaching Beckett on Film.

3 In the inaugural essay of the book, Christopher Murray quoted Philip Edwards’ quip that Yeats had attempted to make Shakespeare “an honorary Celt”. The volume comes full circle with Stephen Watt’s elegant piece on Sam Shepard, which stands alone in the final part, “On the Re-Foundation of the Irish Theatre.” Paying close attention to Shepard’s 2007 play Kicking a Dead Horse, written for Stephen Rea, Watt argues that

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Shepard should be considered an honorary Irish playwright, and detects themes and patterns in his writing (like the focus on loneliness, the recurrence of regional speech patterns and the emphasis on storytelling) which place him in a venerable line of Irish playwrights from Synge to Beckett.

4 The close attention paid to the book’s structure makes it more than a collection of disparate essays, and the volume constitutes an extremely valuable contribution to Irish theatre studies.

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Keith Hopper and Neil Murphy (eds.), Dermot Healy, The Collected Plays Dublin, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016

Shaun Richards

REFERENCES

Keith HOPPER and Neil MURPHY (eds.), Dermot Healy, The Collected Plays, Dublin, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016, XXXIII+583 p., ISBN 978-1-56478-930-3, 20,66€.

1 With Dermot Bolger’s The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989), the stage world of Connemara kitchens was decisively displaced by a play which was formally radical and broke with the traditional tropes of Irish theatre in presenting a bleak contemporary Dublin scarred by unemployment and heroin addiction. However, five years before Bolger’s iconoclastic breakthrough, Dermot Healy’s first play, Here, and There, and Going to America (1985), broke equally new ground in following the journey of a Sligo punk and his skinhead brother away from the local dole office to London as an intended staging post to the USA. The play covers 14 scenes, each introduced by “a character in and tails who will turn over the pages on a noticeboard where in legible scrawl are the names of the scenes’” which include a graveyard in Sligo and a squat in London. Now, with the publication of Healy’s collected plays in the ambitious Dalkey Press project edited by Keith Hopper and Neil Murphy, we can see that throughout his thirteen plays, which date from 1985 to 2010, Healy was a restless experimenter with form and subject but also one who never settled into an individual style which developed depth and resonance.

2 Only four of Healy’s plays were produced by professional theatre companies, Mr Staines (1999) by Pan Pan, On Broken Wings (1992) and Last Night’s Fun (1996) by Omnibus Theatre and Metagama (2004) by Theatre Hebrides; with only Pan Pan still functioning

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as an active company. The rest were performed by various community and youth groups, schools, and prison inmates and, as in the case of Men to the Right, Women to the Left (2001) and A Night at the Disco (2006), frequently written in collaboration with them. As Healy said of his work with a school in Ballina, Co. Mayo, “It may be local and appear trivial, but to them at the time it was all important … They wrote it, and I listened in.”

3 The strength of Healy’s drama is then its wholehearted commitment to giving voice to those outside of professional, Dublin theatre – and its audiences. Indeed only two of his plays were premiered in Dublin, the rest in Ennis, Clones, Castlerea, Drogheda, Ballina, Stornoway and, particularly, Sligo, with Healy directing eight of them. The result of this engagement with the non-metropolitan world of grass-roots theatre is a freedom to experiment and the plays are innovative in their use of swiftly flowing scenes, lights, masks and music. They range in subject from the absurdist meta-drama Mr Staines and the pacy, music-based comedy, Last Night’s Fun (1996) to more realistic themes of the prison play, Serious (2005), and The Long Swim (1987) with its sensitive depiction of the effect of Alzheimer’s Disease on a marriage.

4 The attraction of Healy’s drama lies in its thematic variety and exploration of experimental staging – even in the most socially-engaged plays. But perhaps as a consequence of never establishing a partnership with an established company, such as that of Tom Murphy with Druid, which would have honed his dramatic skills, none of the plays achieve the power and mastery of his novels even while they share their concern with the displaced and marginalised. However, Healy’s engagement with local groups makes him and his plays significant in a theatre culture so dominated by Dublin, and in a world where the Connemara kitchen is the default position of Irish drama, Healy’s formal experimentation is to be celebrated. This first edition of his collected plays is to be welcomed as a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complex totality of Irish theatre.

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G. K. Chesterton, Impressions irlandaises Versailles, Via Romana, 2016

Christophe Gillissen

RÉFÉRENCE

G.K. CHESTERTON, Impressions irlandaises (préface de Pierre Joannon, avant-propos de Philippe Maxence, trad. Mathieu Grossi), Versailles, Via Romana, coll. « Les amis de Chesterton », 2016, 315 p., ISBN 978-2-37271-051-0, 12 €.

1 G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), homme de lettres anglais prolifique et touche-à-tout, a profondément influencé de nombreuses personnes à travers le monde, depuis des écrivains comme jusqu’à des philosophes tel Etienne Gilson, en passant par des républicains irlandais dont Michael Collins. Il reste pourtant quelque peu méconnu en France, et on ne peut que se réjouir que l’Association des amis de Chesterton ait mis à disposition du public francophone deux ouvrages rédigés par l’écrivain à l’occasion de visites en Irlande en 1918 puis en 1932 : Irish Impressions (1919) et Christendom in Ireland (1932). Il s’agit des premières traductions en français de ces textes, réunies ici en un seul volume, avec une introduction de Philippe Maxence, ainsi qu’une préface de Pierre Joannon qui réussit en quelques pages à brosser le portrait d’un personnage hors normes, doté d’une profonde sympathie à l’égard de l’Irlande.

2 Les deux textes furent écrits dans des circonstances fort différentes. En 1918, pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, l’Irlande était en plein émoi, l’introduction de la conscription par le gouvernement britannique ayant soudé la majorité de la population autour du Sinn Féin et de son projet indépendantiste. Personnalité publique affable et très appréciée, Chesterton fut envoyé en Irlande pour encourager ses habitants à participer à l’effort de guerre contre l’Allemagne. S’il avait dénoncé la répression brutale du soulèvement de Pâques 1916, il estimait, à l’instar de John Redmond, que

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l’enjeu de la guerre – la défense de la civilisation et de ses valeurs – était plus important que celui des clivages anglo-irlandais.

3 En 1932, converti de l’anglicanisme au catholicisme depuis dix ans, Chesterton se rendit au Congrès eucharistique international à Dublin, où Eamon de Valera et le Fianna Fáil venaient juste d’être portés au pouvoir, à la consternation de Londres. Il tenta de partager sa conviction que, loin d’être un territoire aux marges de la civilisation, l’Irlande, centre temporaire de la chrétienté, était moins provinciale et superstitieuse que l’Angleterre, et que sa population était animée d’un véritable esprit démocratique.

4 Ces contextes différents expliquent des textes de nature et de longueur très différentes. Le premier rend compte de la découverte de l’Irlande par Chesterton et de sa participation aux débats qui agitaient alors le pays. Pour en comprendre toute la finesse et l’intérêt, une bonne connaissance de l’histoire de la période est cependant nécessaire, car les nombreuses allusions à l’actualité de 1918 peuvent être déroutantes pour un lecteur non averti, même si l’introduction et la préface y remédient en partie. Le second texte, qui fait état de l’émerveillement d’un catholique anglais face à la lumineuse manifestation de la chrétienté à Dublin, constitue un témoignage de première main irremplaçable sur un événement souvent négligé par les historiens au profit de la riche actualité politique irlandaise de 1932.

5 Mais dans les deux cas, l’on retrouve le style inimitable de Chesterton, qui aimait à jouer de paradoxes et de jeux de mots, et à retourner les évidences dans des fulgurances bien plus sérieuses qu’elles n’y paraissent à premier abord. Cette prose n’est pas aisée à restituer en français, loin s’en faut, et il convient à ce titre de saluer la qualité de la traduction de Mathieu Grossi.

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