Scheible, Ellen

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Bridgewater ReviewVolume 31 | Issue 1 Article 5Jun-2012Reanimating the Nation: Patrick McCabe, NeilJordan, and the Bog GothicEllen ScheibleBridgewater State University, ellen.scheible@bridgew.eduThis item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.Recommended CitationScheible, Ellen (2012). Reanimating the Nation: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and the Bog Gothic. Bridgewater Review, 31(1), 4-6.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol31/iss1/54 Bridgewater Reviewto provide brief essays on either specificauthors or specialized topics that couldinform and loosely contextualize thehistory and significance of the collec-tion. I provided the entry entitled“TheBog Gothic” and focused on a few con-temporary Irish writers and filmmakers,particularly Patrick McCabe and NeilJordan,who aestheticize the Irish cul-tural experience through acontemporary gothic lens.Over the course of the weekend Ihad the opportunity to meet PatrickMcCabe, and the encounter led me toreflect on the overlap of my scholarshipand my pedagogy.McCabe yokedtogether the educator and the writerin me,making manifest one of themany reasons I remain invigorated bycontemporary Irish Studies: a split orbifurcated identity can be a culturaland political survival tool rather thanan alienating force.When I first introduced myself toPatrick McCabe, I was unable to stopmyself from telling him how much mystudents love his novels.He looked mein the eye and said,“Why do you thinkthat’s the case?”Feeling surprised andslightly worried, I spat out, far tooquickly and embarrassingly articulatelyfor casual conversation:“Your novelspersonify the bifurcation of Irish cul-tural identity in a way that allows thestudents to identify with your characterson a personal level while maintainingin their minds a larger national andpolitical critique.You have somehowcaptured the multi-tasking generation’sattention by legitimizing their constantoscillation between various forms ofinformation and representation,bothpublic and private.”The last evening of the colloquiumculminated in the final series of readingsfrom writers who were featured in theIrish prose exhibit.McCabe was oneof these writers and he was waitinguntil the last possible minute to selecthis reading for the evening because heneeded time to decide what excerptwould have the strongest effect basedon his perception of the audience.Unsure of what effect he was going for,I assumed we would be barraged byeither comedic violence or overt sexualdeviancy. Instead,he read a scene from arecent novel where a female characterslyly visits a barbershop and suggestivelyconverses with the barber. It was a dis-creetly provocative passage with foggysexual undertones that were reinforcedby the mundane, everyday personalitiesof the characters. I was seated to the sideof the podium and what unfolded wasstrangely surprising,not only becausethe prose that was almost entirelydialogue toggled carefully betweentwo characters who embodied strongstereotypes of their opposing genders,but also because McCabe physicallyacted out the parts behind the podiumas he read! Most of the audience did notsee this, but from the angle of my seat, Iwatched as he raised his leg at the kneeand he shifted his weight to extend onehip out sideways, placing a hand on thatsame hip, each time his voice rose toemphasize a female octave. I thenwatched as he relaxed his posture,placedboth feet on the floor, and stood back,one hand in his pocket,when hedropped his voice to read the male char-acter’s parts.Although this was subtle, itwas a tremendously informative. Ithelped me articulate what it is aboutMcCabe’s work that eliminates some ofthe distance between reader and audi-ence while simultaneously presentingabsurd,over-the-top, sometimes evensupernatural scenarios.His writing, eventext that consists only of dialogue,useslanguage to express and often privilegephysical experience,not by describingphysical acts, but by emphasizing thebody even when the prose is abstract orvague or about everyday small talk likethe weather.One of his many talents ishis ability to equally represent the bodyand the mind in his work,but not bycollapsing them. Instead,he preservestheir separation while unifying thedualism through narrative. Somehow,McCabe’s novels personify competingoppositional forces and use the bodyto unify them,while defending, some-times to the point of hostility, theirnecessary separation.Reanimating the Nation:Patrick McCabe,Neil Jordan, andthe Bog GothicEllen ScheibleIn a rare moment of academic vacationing, Itraveled to Princeton University in February 2011for the opening of the“Cracked Looking Glass”exhibit, an extensive collection of Irish prose rangingfrom the nineteenth century to today.As part of thesymposium for the exhibit, a number of contemporaryIrish writers and Irish Studies critics were invitedto attend a series of lectures and dinners celebratingthe massive private donation that sponsored this richcollection.Those of us who contributed to thecatalogue that accompanied the exhibit were askedJune 2012 5Gothic fiction is a visceral genre.Fromthe late eighteenth-century work ofAnn Radcliffe to Bram Stoker’s 1897masterpiece,Dracula,McCabe’s novelsparticipate in an historical chain of nar-rative that is saturated with the dangersand pleasures of physical experience.Since I began teaching gothic fiction, Ihave found that the human body trumpsall other symbols as the most consistentdoppelganger for the prominent struc-tures within the common gothic narra-tive: the aristocratic but decaying housethat parallels the interiority of a charac-ter’s mental decline, the refined but dis-eased familial bloodline that surfaces in asickly or incestuous body,or even thedividing religious interpretations oftransubstantiation that become personi-fied in the vampire’s physical existence.In McCabe’s case, the mind/body dual-ism is a metaphor for the inherent para-dox underlying national identity: aunified nation depends on the erasure ofpersonal identity,while individualismresists conformity, thereby evading theforward motion of cultural and nationalmodernity.When McCabe performedhis narrative in an instinctual and spon-taneous way, I realized that this paradoxtranslates as a physical experience.Mystudents might connect to his textsbecause they understand what it meansto physically experience many things atonce,be they technological, visual, orverbal forms of stimulation.Some ofthese things represent modern progres-sion and others emphasize individualthinking or perception,but they arecoexisting forces that characterize bothMcCabe’s fiction and my students’contemporary disintegrated modeof perception.Although he does not employ the term“bog gothic”directly in his introductionto the Cambridge Companion to ModernIrish Culture, Joe Cleary identifiesauthors such as Patrick McCabe andfilmmakers such as Neil Jordan as pro-ducing fiction where“the old naturalismhas … acquired the high voltage of newtechnical innovations, some newViagraof hectic experiment or extravagance,to resuscitate it into some new lifeor half-life.”Cleary’s gothic paintingof experimental ‘resuscitation’ for amodern culture is one of many criticalapproaches to contemporary Irish writ-ing that has birthed, in the fashion ofDr.Frankenstein, the critical attentionpaid to the gothic fiction of late twenti-eth-century Ireland.Technical innova-tion brings with it the ‘high voltage’ofexperimentation and sews together themonstrous invention of a reanimatedgothic identity. Just as Dr.Frankensteingives birth to an undead being in askewed creation narrative that imaginesthe disastrous effects of scientific power,Patrick McCabe, in Breakfast on Pluto,invents Patrick“Pussy”Braden, a trans-gendered character who is born justsouth of the border between NorthernIreland and the republic.Breakfast on Pluto is not McCabe’s mostpopular novel, but it is the text that mostexplicitly engages partition as a centralforce in its otherwise overly personal,first-person adaptation of a transgen-dered bildungsroman.McCabe has writ-ten numerous texts that confront thedualistic components of Irish identity,but in Breakfast on PlutoMcCabe joins,on the landscape of the transgenderedbody, the interiority of the self with thephysical otherness that disallows that selffrom locating its point of origin.Pussyimagines the sexual interaction thatled to her conception but cannot everuncover the reality of her birth. Just asPussy will never be traditionally male orPhoto by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame6 Bridgewater Reviewfemale, partitioned Ireland must acceptthe coexistence of two nations on onegeographical location. In Pussy’s imag-ined memoir, the parish priest, FatherBernard,Pussy’s unidentified biologicalfather, rapes his young, extremely naïve,female housekeeper who consequentlygives birth to Pussy and thus creates theunconfirmed story that comprises themajority of the novel:A first, she really was one hundredper cent certain that it was a joke[…]Which made her go: ‘oh now,Father!’ and ‘Eek!’ and ‘Oops! Thathurt!’ until all of a sudden she cried:‘Ow! I’m being split in two!’ andthere was so much squirty stuff alldown her she thought that maybeFather Ben was playing moregames—squidgies with the FairyLiquid washing-up bottle that she’doften seen the kiddies doing. It wasonly when he fell back across theroom with a Hallowe’en mask onhim that she really became con-fused, thinking to herself:‘But it’snot Hallowe’en!’ How long it wasbefore she realized that it was infact her Employer’s actual face shewas looking at—and not a whey-coloured Egyptian mummy-typepapier mache affair—is impossibleto say but she eventually did, realiz-ing too that the Fairy Liquid—itwasn’t Fairy Liquid at all! And thatthing—that glaring red thing withits malevolent eye—what was that?The housekeeper’s pronouncement thatshe is ‘being split in two’becomes themetaphor for Pussy’s struggle through-out the narrative.Pussy is not conceivedfrom a unifying sexual act and, thus,enters the world with a literal ‘split’identity;her transgender status is pre-supposed and thus inevitable.Thehousekeeper’s difficulty in distinguishingthe reality of her experience from thesuperficial illusions of game-playing and‘Halloween’ further underscore thebody’s detachment from the mind’s con-ceptions. Pussy’s origins are multi-faceted before she even emerges fromthe womb;partition in Ireland mightbe an unavoidable natural creation,but it is birthed from the ideologicallyhybridized relationship between sexualrepression and religious power.Neil Jordan has adapted into filmPatrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy andBreakfast on Pluto, but Jordan is bestknown for The Crying Game, a 1992film.Similar to McCabe’s Breakfast onPluto, Jordan’s film also tells the story ofa transgendered character,“Dil,”whoselife is threatened after her boyfriend,Jody, is killed by the IRA in NorthernIreland and one of the IRA membersresponsible for his death guiltily seeksher out in an act of penance.Fergus,or‘Jimmy’ as he renames himself whenhe gets to England, tries to protect Dilbut ends up falling in love with herand consequently trapping himself in analmost fatal confrontation with his for-mer IRA compatriots.Dil and Fergusboth survive,but their relationshipremains sexually ambiguous. Similar toMcCabe’s novels, Jordan’s films combineviolence,disorientation, and humor tounderscore both the anxiety and traumathat produce what literary critic EndaDuffy has called the“viral discourse”of the Bog Gothic.Duffy identifiesmimeticism as one of the definingfeatures of Bog Gothic fiction,wherethe strangeness of the texts develops arhythm mirroring material reality.Although contemporary Irish criticismmay never resolve either the discordantanalyses of modernity in Ireland or theIrish literary interpretation of the BogGothic genre, Irish prose continues totransform and reanimate an undead,gothic tradition capable of articulatingthe simultaneity of the Irish condition.There are two specific scenes in TheCrying Game that emphasize the dualis-tic tension illustrated compellingly inMcCabe’s novels and further empha-sized in Jordan’s films.The first sceneoccurs in the first half of the film,whenwe see Fergus conversing with his pris-oner, Jody,before Jody is killed whiletrying to escape.The ‘scorpion and thefrog’ fable that comprises this sceneemphasizes the dual but separate con-nection between natural instinct andsocial desire; Jody tries to convinceFergus that both good and evil are natu-ral behaviors and some are just betterat controlling their impulses.This themeis then physically enacted in a separatescene where Fergus must hold Jody’spenis, so that the shackled and hoodedJody can urinate.Like McCabe, Jordanunifies the film’s separated identitiesthrough a basic physical need.Thesecond scene takes place much later inthe film and, though short in length,expresses Jordan’s concern with identitythat cannot exist as a partitioned whole,but rather must move from one extremeto the other.The main female characterin The Crying Game, Jude,who passes fora traditional Irish woman who supportsthe IRA in the first half of the film,has been transformed to a gun-carrying,violent terrorist by the second half.However,her split identity is a forcedillusion,not an organic separation, andJordan emphasizes its unrealistic exis-tence by reflecting multiple images ofJude in a prism-like mirror;nationalist-terrorist Jude is herself inescapably split.And,of course, she does not survive theend of the film. In both McCabe’s noveland Jordan’s film, the characters whodo survive are transgendered men wholive as women.Seeing Patrick McCabeperform the bifurcated self in his readingat Princeton helped me understandmore clearly the resonance that the BogGothic and the notion of split identities(national and sexual) has for my studentsat Bridgewater State.Ellen Scheible isAssociate Editor ofBridgewater Review andAssistantProfessor in the English Department.

Reanimating the Nation: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and the Bog Gothic

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Reanimating the Nation: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and the Bog Gothic

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