Patrick McCabe's Ireland: The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood: 23 (Dialogue)

200 Pages·2018·8.981 MB·English

by  Jennifer Keating

Patrick McCabe’s Ireland
Dialogue
Executive Series Editor
Henry Veggian (unc Chapel Hill)
Editorial Board
Manisha Basu (University of lllinois at Champaign- Urbana)
Jennifer Keating (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jason Stevens (University of Maryland, Baltimore)
Richard Purcell (Carnegie Mellon University)
Thomas Reinert (unc Chapel Hill)
Founding Editor
Michael J. Meyers† (DePaul University, Chicago)
VOLUME 23
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ dial
Patrick McCabe’s Ireland
The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto
and Winterwood
Edited by
Jennifer Keating
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: John Carson.
The Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available online at http:// catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2018963902
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
ISSN 1574-9 630
ISBN 978-9 0-0 4-3 8899-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-9 0-0 4-3 8900-7 (e- book)
Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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For Dad,
because this is your Ireland too
∵

Contents
Preface ix
Colin MacCabe
Notes on Contributors xiv
1 Introduction 1
Jennifer Keating
2 Attack of the Killer Clones: Attachment and Trauma in Patrick McCabe’s
Films and Fiction 10
Luke Gibbons
3 The Social Fantastic: Graphic Violence in Patrick McCabe’s Fiction 27
K. Brisley Brennan
4 A Portrait of the Artist as a Madman 45
Barbara M. Hoffmann
5 Specters of a Border Town: Irish History and Violence in Patrick
McCabe’s The Butcher Boy 65
Aisling B. Cormack
6 Exploring Home from Stranger Shores: the Irish Experience in Patrick
McCabe’s Mondo Desperado 93
Flore Coulouma
7 Violence, Peace, and Priests in Adapting Breakfast on Pluto 110
Lindsay Haney
8 Possible Worlds in Breakfast on Pluto and Winterwood 125
James F. Knapp
9 ‘It Ain’t Like the Old Place Anymore’: Contemporary Ireland and
the Postmodern, Fragmented Individual in the Fiction of Patrick
McCabe 140
Kristina Varade
viii Contents
10 ‘Sinking the Pail into the Self-Conscious,’ Bubble Gum Ballads and Other
Conversational Circles: Patrick McCabe, London 2015 164
Jennifer Keating
Index 181
Preface
Colin MacCabe
My mother’s birthday was March 10. We were a family that celebrated birth-
days; they were major events. My mother was devoted to writing. Not the histo-
ries and essays that my father read but poetry and drama; and often, with a fo-
cus on Ireland. At the end of the war my mother and father moved to England.
My father hated Ireland: the sexual repression, the social hypocrisy, the terrible
poverty. But my mother felt very strongly that, however much she loved Lon-
don, she was an Irish woman and that we were an Irish family. Every March
17th fresh shamrock would arrive in tobacco tins and we would pin it in the
lapels of our school uniforms before going to school, where a select number
of other boys would be similarly attired. But the real connection was poet-
ry: above all, Yeats’ s early poems – the poems of the Celtic twilight. And plays,
always plays. I remember as a teenager going to Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and
the Stars and to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
My mother’s birthday often involved going to a play, and quite often, the
theme was an Irish one. In retrospect, my mother’s identification as Irish – to
the extent of getting us Irish passports as teenagers – is something of a mystery.
Her brother and sister, who also moved to England after the war, made no such
identification. As is perhaps common with immigrants, family ties were un-
usually strong and our three families lived almost as one. But my cousins were
brought up English, they did not go to Ireland once or twice a year. They were
not drowned in Irish literature.
My father died the year before I became an economic migrant and began
a lifetime of teaching from January to April each year in the United States.
By chance, the University of Pittsburgh’s spring break was in early March.
My mother’s birthday, therefore, became a particularly charged encounter to
which I looked forward with both anticipation and dread each year. I found the
London theatre more and more irritating and, attending with my mother, I was
inexcusably incapable of not letting that irritation show. There were magnifi-
cent exceptions – Brian Friel’s Translations remains vividly in my mind – but
often, my reaction to the stage was sullen and ungrateful.
A variation on the routine occurred in March 1998, when my mother sug-
gested a film: The Butcher Boy (BB). I was delighted at the choice for Neil Jordan
was one of the great directors of my generation. Nothing, however, prepared
me for the film. From the opening moments we were in an Ireland that I had
x MacCabe
never known. In the county of Monaghan, in the town of Clones and in a ru-
ral poverty that I had glimpsed but not seen. But this was no “miserabilist”
account of Irish social conditions. If one of the centers of the film was the
abuse of vulnerable children by the Church that had taken power but not re-
sponsibility in 1922, this was not a “social drama” of victimhood. Francie Brady
might easily have been portrayed as such: drunken father, mad suicidal moth-
er, abused by priests. It was difficult to imagine making a carnivalesque hero
out of that material. But carnival hero Francie Brady was and there were two
saving graces. First, there was the Irish language. It was not the Gaelic that a
terribly beaten and humiliated people had abandoned in the early nineteenth
century but that extraordinary version of English that we find in the texts of
John Millington Synge and James Joyce. It is the language that we hear in the
accents of Monaghan that animate the film. Second, the incredible energy of
the Anglophone popular culture (film, comics, television), which allows Fran-
cie to produce an imaginative structure for his life.
Here was a film that celebrated the realities of Irish culture and its “miscege-
nations on miscegenations,” as Joyce called them. It had no truck whatsoever
with the manufactured mythic Irish culture of Padraic Pearse and Eamonn De
Valera, with its mendacious version of a past that never existed and a language
that lived on signposts and in compulsory school classes but gave no access
to any living cultural reality. Indeed, the film situates itself in the early sixties
when the introduction of television to Ireland signaled the death knell of the
narrow and bigoted Catholic Irish culture. The Church’s centrality to symbolic
civil life was ushered in with the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell and the forma-
tion of the Free State in 1922. Its erosion, however, was laid in the introduction
of pop culture through television.
McCabe’s presentation of Irish culture in the film was one that I had known
as a child. If it had its version of warmth and security, it was imbued with a vi-
cious hatred of both the sexual body and the inquiring mind. My teenage judg-
ment on a culture, which locked its congregations into the Churches once Mass
had started, was deepened and intensified as I wrote a dissertation on Joyce in
counterpoint to the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and their cult
of violence. For me, the Ireland of 1922 was still the Ireland of my mind.
I knew that joining the European Union in 1973 had made some difference
in Ireland’s isolation and I also knew there had been striking developments in
the culture in music and film in the eighties. My mother kept me supplied with
contemporary novels and the news that the Bishop of Galway had fathered a
child. I also knew that Mary Robinson had produced a completely different
version of Ireland in which the question of borders were dissolved into a ques-
tion of a diaspora and of a people for whom exile was the dominant condition.