Gerry Erang 12156272
University of Amsterdam
“Where the fuck is my mammy?”
Allegorical Parenthood Quests, Identity, and Irish Neocolonialism in Patrick McCabe
Abstract
This thesis explores the representation of neocolonial Ireland in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto by focusing on subtle allegorical correlations between the
individual and the national psyche. It situates his work in relation to recent critical analyses of allegory as a driving force in contemporary Irish fiction and builds on a range of theoretical voices to scrutinise one key motif that has, until now, been critically underexamined:
parenthood. It argues that McCabe creates characters whose search for different kinds of parent figures simultaneously expresses the varied psychological ways in which both postcolonial individuals and societies attempt to construct personal and national identities.
Table of Contents
Introduction – Patrick McCabe, Irish Neocolonialism and Allegory ... 4
Chapter One – Biological Mothers and the Retrotopian Impulse ... 11
Chapter Two – British Surrogate Parents and Mimicry ... 25
2.1 - From Mimicry’s Colonial Origins to its Neocolonial Appeal ... 25
2.2 – Incomplete Identities and British Surrogate Parents ... 31
Chapter Three – British Substitute Parents and Violence ... 38
Chapter Four – Abusive Father Figures and Irish Catholicism ... 43
Conclusion – Towards a New National Voice and a Feminine ImagiNation? ... 52
Introduction – Patrick McCabe, Irish Neocolonialism and Allegory
In an interview, Irish novelist Patrick McCabe looked back at his own childhood and
lamented that, as an Irish native, “you would be aware, even growing up, that you come from a brutalised culture […]. It wasn’t overt but you were always conscious of it” (Cormack 69). I argue that this statement contains the interpretive key to the subtler dimensions of McCabe’s grim narratives. In fact, the novelist links the cultural aftermath of Ireland’s scarring colonial experience with the individual psyche. Even if this connection is not necessarily, as he puts it, “overt,” it is nevertheless lurking in the background - both in twentieth-century Ireland and implicitly in his own fiction.
The fact that this subtly allegorical quality suffuses the Irish writer’s bleak narratives has not gone wholly unnoticed by literary critics. Tim Gauthier for instance goes in this direction in his own essay on McCabe’s 1992 The Butcher Boy. The novel is set in neocolonial Ireland during the both nationally and internationally tumultuous 1960s and, according to the critic, the microcosm of the protagonist’s tormented psyche can be read as an allegorical mirror for the political macrocosm of Ireland’s postcolonial situation. The latter is above all characterised by an acute “state of indeterminacy” (196). In the wake of the former coloniser’s departure, Gauthier argues, the national and the personal go hand in hand; both the Irish state and its citizens embark on a pressing “search for identity” (196) that proves to be a doomed enterprise. Critics like Eve Patten, Patrick Mullen and Tom Herron offer similar insights. Herron for example claims that McCabe’s novels host disturbed individuals who are, like their country, “pathological” (169) and Eve Patten insists that “abused, victimised or emotionally stunted” characters embody Ireland’s historical trauma and “deep-seated disturbances in the national psyche” (259). Patrick Mullen, in his comparative study on McCabe’s novels and Neil Jordan’s screen adaptations, situates himself in the same
history, particularly to the legacy of the struggle for national independence from British rule” (118). The protagonists’ problematic behaviour and lack of a clearly defined identity force into the open repressed histories and “the pathologies of an entire brutalized society” (121). Despite their argumentative differences, these critics thus agree on two key points: on the one hand, even though McCabe’s novels are not explicitly postcolonial in the way that for
example many African or South American novels are, they implicitly paint the colonial past as a spectral presence that stubbornly continues to contaminate post-independence Ireland. On the other hand, the (lack of) individual identities of McCabe’s characters allegorically mirrors Ireland’s quest for a clearly defined national identity.
This thesis situates itself in this exegetic tradition that examines questions of identity and allegorical correspondences between the deeply personal and the political. I mainly focus on The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto but also draw parallels with other novels such as Carn and The Dead School where appropriate. Building on some of the points that the aforementioned critics have made, this thesis still goes a step further and pivots around a leitmotif that has hitherto been underexamined: I argue that various quests for different forms of parenthood lie at the heart of several of McCabe’s narratives. More precisely, I
demonstrate that the characters’ search for different kinds of parent figures allegorically reflects the varied psychological ways in which both postcolonial individuals and societies try to construct personal and national identities.
Before ending my introduction with an overview of each chapter’s key elements, I want to elaborate on two concepts that require clarification: the role of allegory in
contemporary Irish fiction and the question of Ireland’s neocolonial status. As Liam Harte and Michael Parker remark in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, many contemporary Irish novelists intertwine the personal with the political in allegorically coloured narratives. “While contemporary Irish novels deal with specific situations and characters,” they explain, “many also bear the imprint of unresolved political and cultural
narratives and debates” (2). I want to add that a tumultuous political climate dominated Ireland throughout the twentieth century and its impact weighs heavy on the national artistic consciousness. In Harte and Parker’s words, “traces of allegory [are therefore] embedded in the fabric of recent Irish fiction;” the problematic existence of private people “often becomes an illuminative metaphor of the public and national destiny; texts frame the history which itself has framed them” (2). It should therefore not come as a surprise, as Joe Cleary puts it, that “modern Irish literature is intimately connected to this traumatic history of colonialism and resistance” (542). McCabe’s texts are only subtly allegorical but many of his
contemporaries produced more obviously allegorical narratives around the same time. In John McGahern’s Amongst Women for example, the protagonist’s “pious patriarchy, stifling
paternalism and proud isolationism” (Harte 3) invite the reader to see him as a fictionalised alter ego of Irish politician Aemon de Valera, who also forms, as I demonstrate in my first chapter, a haunting presence in McCabe’s works. It should become clear that Ireland’s colonial history continues to be a nightmare from which both contemporary authors and their characters are trying to awake.
On the note of allegory in the postcolonial context, it is inevitable to mention Frederic Jameson’s controversial essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism,” in which he announces that “all third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private […] necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory” (69, my emphasis). Despite the fact that the narrative seems invested in the private lives of its characters, he continues, it “is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (ibid). Even though Jameson was harshly criticised for his sweeping generalisations,1 I nevertheless want to retain some aspects of his argumentation
1 Unsurprisingly, Jameson came under fire not only for his reductionist division of the globe into three
worlds but several scholars also accused him of propagating essentialism and Orientalism. In what became one of the most famous responses to the essay, Aijaz Ahmad for example denounced
that prove helpful to probe into the inner workings of McCabe’s fictional universe. On the most basic level, Jameson’s paradigm helps to understand why authors from “third-world” countries still bearing the scars of colonial oppression may display an inclination towards allegory. Developing nations that recently became independent continue to face economic and social problems, which understandably influence novelists.
There has been much critical debate around the question of whether or not Ireland qualifies as a post- or neocolonial nation. Several scholars have argued that Ireland was complicit in her colonisation in a way that Third World countries were clearly not. They therefore refrain from aligning post-independence Ireland with the world’s more
unequivocally postcolonial nations. However, countless other critics have vehemently
challenged this view and compellingly argued the opposite. Joe Cleary for example provides a long historical overview of Ireland’s colonization, arguing that “Ireland may be considered one of the earliest and most thoroughly colonized regions of the British Empire” (539) up until the Irish Free State was proclaimed in 1922 and Ireland was officially made a republic in 1949. While I agree with Cleary, I have nevertheless decided to adopt the terminology of Tim Gauthier and Ella Shohat, who refer to Ireland as “neocolonial.”2 Even though the question of complicity is debatable, the emerald isle qualifies, to a certain extent, as a Third World
Country. As Eoin Flannery reminds us in his paper on the economic difficulties during the Celtic tiger period, Ireland exhibited the similar social problems as many developing countries outside of Europe, including poverty, marginalisation and inequality. During a
Jameson’s rhetoric of otherness and his unnuanced universalism, which is most clearly detectable in his use of predeterminers like “all” and adverbs such as “necessarily” (Ahmad 4).
2 In her “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial’,” Shoat for example argues that the term “postcolonial” is
inadequate because it implies that colonialism belongs entirely to the past. Echoing the notion of contamination that I discussed earlier, Shohat argues that the “economic, political and cultural deformative-traces” of colonialism extend into the present moment (326).
conference held in Dublin in 1991, participants surveyed the country’s economic and social conditions, concluding that, despite its membership within the European Economic
Community, Ireland’s various problems and its colonial past still more closely aligned it with the so-called third, rather than the first world (Flannery 396-397). Biologist Tomas Mac Siomoin addressed the same question more recently in his book The Broken Harp: Identity and Language in Ireland. Even though Ireland is a modern Republic and a member state of the European Union, he explains, it “conforms more closely to the condition of colonized indigenous peoples around the globe” (11). He even goes a step further and claims that there is biological proof that the historical trauma is “genetically transmissible” and “inscribed, at least partially, in the DNA […] of past and current Irish populations” (11).3 Having
established that allegory in Irish fiction is a literary device worth examining and that Ireland should indeed be classified as neocolonial, it is now time to give a brief overview of the five chapters of this thesis.
In my first chapter, I discuss the protagonists’ idealisation of their biological mothers, which, I argue, allegorises the desire of the postcolonial nation to return to a mythical and re-imagined utopian past. Mainly drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s recently published book Retrotopia, I demonstrate that idealisation and retroptopian memory become the main defective tools to create a jointly personal and national identity. To bring out the allegorical dimension even more clearly, I also scrutinise McCabe’s subtle interweaving of retroptopian
3 This may come as a surprise to many readers but even a recent report from the European
Commission has demonstrated the same phenomenon: “investigations indicate,” the report reads, “that the impact of [historical] trauma experienced by mothers affects early offspring development, but new research is also discovering that it is also actually encoded into the DNA of subsequent generations.” The notion of a trauma that can be passed on through mothers is particularly relevant in the context of McCabe’s parenthood leitmotif.
political intertexts, such as Irish politician Aemon de Valera’s controversial speech “The Ireland we dreamt of.”
The second chapter focuses on British surrogate parent figures and questions of mimicry. I argue that the characters’ desire to be adopted by the surrogate parents allegorically reflects the way in which a part of Irish society shapes its identity in direct relation to the former coloniser by imitating dominant English culture. The first part of the chapter combines insights from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth with Tomas Siomoin’s analysis of Ireland’s traumatic colonial past to obtain a better understanding of the logical transition from mimicry’s colonial origins to its neocolonial appeal. I then apply this sociological analysis to McCabe’s narratives in order to discuss the significance of the leitmotifs of the child and the pig. The second part of the chapter focuses more distinctly on McCabe’s critical literary approach to mimicry as an identity strategy in the two novels. In this context, I draw on Jacques Lacan’s account of the mirror stage to argue that McCabe’s recurring motif of the mirror implicitly expresses the idea that mimicry cannot provide a fixed identity to postcolonial individuals and societies.
My third chapter echoes Frantz Fanon’s radical advocacy of violent decolonisation and focuses on the characters’ forceful rejection of their British surrogate mothers, which, I argue, allegorises the brutal uprising against the coloniser. Keeping the idea of violence as a way to create an identity in mind, I also analyse the hidden psychoanalytical dimensions and implications of McCabe’s reappropriation of the vagina dentata myth in the context of violently invaded uterus-like spaces.
The fourth and final chapter revolves around the characters’ detrimental contact with abusive father figures who embody Irish Catholicism. I again combine Fanon’s insights with a range historical and sociological sources in order to analyse how McCabe’s texts imply that Ireland’s neocolonial state of uprootedness is partly responsible for the flourishing of religion as a treacherous means to create an unfulfilling second-hand identity. Special attention is
given to McCabe’s literary approach to the deplorable historical reality of child abuse in clergy-run industrial schools, trauma narratives and the unsettling function of his jocoserious style.
I want to underline that both the motif of the allegorical parenthood quest and Fanon’s theories of (post)colonial identity politics form a unifying substrate throughout this thesis. At the same time, my structure reflects a certain temporality, moving from a mythical and distant past in the first chapter to the colonial moment in the second and third chapter to explicitly neocolonial identity strategies in the final chapter. To summarise, this thesis draws on a wide range of theoretical voices to argue that McCabe uses the multifaceted leitmotif of parenthood to problematise the question of personal and national identities in neocolonial Ireland. In his subtly allegorical narratives, the quests for parenthood are simultaneously quests for
Chapter One – Biological Mothers and the Retrotopian Impulse
He looked back to retain as much as possible.
Which means he knew what was needed for some ultimate moment When he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last.
– Czeslaw Milosz, “From the Rising of the Sun”
I will enter McCabe’s literary universe and examine Francie Brady and Patrick Braden’s respective quests for a lost biological mother in Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto after briefly expanding on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia. The Polish sociologist draws on other scholars such as Svetlana Boym to argue that nostalgia as a social phenomenon has undergone profound changes over the centuries. It was still “treated as an eminently curable disease” (2) in the seventeenth century and then gradually morphed into humanity’s emotional ground tone in the modern age. In Bauman’s words, the twentieth century “began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia” (2). Political, economic and social developments are crucial in this context: the second half of the twentieth century, Bauman argues, saw the efficiency of traditional nation states plummet. Political impotence and major crises, along with “accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (3) as well as a Hobbesian
capitalist war of all against all have led to general disenchantment with the present and future moment. Yearning for community and better times, humanity has instead entered the age of nostalgia. Individuals seek refuge in homely memories of a paradise lost that can be
remodelled at will to evade contemporary issues. The retrotopian impulse leads to “iteration, rather than reiteration, of the status quo ante […] – its image having been by now
significantly recycled or modified anyway, in the process of selective memorizing,
be clear: the nostalgic romance with history all too easily falls prey to subjective modification and excessive idealisation of a collective past.
I argue that Bauman’s insights, even though this has not been done before, can easily be tied to canonical postcolonial voices such as Frantz Fanon’s. In his belligerent book-length study The Wretched of the Earth,4 Fanon concedes that a positive remembrance of things past can, in the best case, serve as “a justification for the hope of a future national culture” (209). A positive reclaiming of a national history can help overcome the inferiority complex that the colonisers have instilled in the indigenous nations. He nevertheless advises caution and puts his reader “on guard against the most dangerous will 0’ the wisps: […] the withdrawal into the twilight of past African culture” (11). In his characteristically metaphorical style, Fanon thus identifies excessive nostalgia as an illusionary light that draws the postcolonial wanderer off his path towards true decolonisation of both country and mind. Fanon revisits this idea in a later chapter and similarly argues that postcolonial nostalgists are “hypnotised by these
mummified fragments which […] are symbols of negation and outworn contrivances” (223). He employs the metaphors of hypnosis and mummification to emphasise the
detrimental effects of glorifying the past. Prefiguring later thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak, whose well-known paper “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is, as she puts it, also “committed to the notion that […] a nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism’ (87), they both emphasise that the pre-colonial
4 As I have already demonstrated in my introduction, Ireland and African countries share several a
strikingly similar fate. Apart from Siomoin, Patrick Hogan is another scholar who argues that Irish and African literature display similar characteristics and share their “concern with identity.” He also argues that occasionally extend “back through history to a time before colonization, a tradition whose origins are separate from the colonizer” (Hogan 164), which echoes the arguments I develop in this
chapter. Even though Fanon mainly writes about Africa, his psychoanalytical examination of psychopathology and alienation is also relevant for the Irish context because McCabe’s texts relentlessly force the reader into the troubled minds of Irish postcolonial individuals.
past in its unbiased form is not accessible. Quite the opposite, it is tinted and mediated through the colonial experience itself.
With Bauman and Fanon’s combined insights in mind, I now turn to McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. The novel is set in small-town neocolonial Ireland during the both nationally and internationally tumultuous 1960s and recounts the gradual decline of young first-person narrator Francie Brady into neurosis and murder. Both the protagonist and his dysfunctional family were gradually turned into social outcasts by the village; they came, as Gauthier puts it, “to embody the Other for the Community” (197). Francie’s unreliable narrative is in itself a retrotopian effort of sorts: Francie opens his tale of woe by explaining that the events he is about to recount occurred “twenty or thirty or forty years ago” (1), long before he was put in the mental asylum from where he narrates. McCabe’s use of analepsis is revealing because this literary device already implicitly emphasises the idea that the tormented protagonist mentally inhabits the past rather than the present moment.
Francie is not the only one has let recycled memories usurp the hegemony of the present: over the course of his narrative, the disturbed protagonist introduces several characters that remain equally locked in the stalemate of perpetual nostalgia.5 There is Francie’s alcoholic and abusive father who, according to another local, “was a great man one time, […] one of the best musicians there ever was in this town” (14). Even though he never made it as a musician and remains crippled by the traumatic memories of abuse he suffered at the hands of Catholic priests, the father still idealises the past and convinces himself of an
5 Derrida’s “nostalgeria” (52) is also a helpful concept to strengthen Bauman and Fanon’s insights.
The French philosopher defines nostalgeria (a neologism combining nostalgia and Algeria) as a haunting “dream” (36), or the paradoxical yearning for what one has irrevocably lost even though one never truly possessed it in the first place. Feeling alienated in their new society, exiles similarly attempt to overcome their cultural traumatism by escaping into a “handicapped memory” (54) of their native country’s precolonial past. This highly idealised past, however, is imagined rather than real and thus unable to provide a true identity.
alternative reality in which he could have been successful. Apart from the nostalgic father, the village’s sergeant repeatedly reminisces about past amorous conquests and “how he’d courted [a woman] years ago when she was one of the nicest women in town” (70). A local gardener similarly gazes back at Easter Week and the heroic days when he allegedly “fought for this country” (96). Even though Francie’s narrative is unreliable at best and occasionally phantasmagorical at worst, there are clear indications that the father, the sergeant and the gardener all share a penchant for re-imagining and embellishing past events to make the present bearable. Their visions of self are, as Bauman would phrase it, “located in the lost / stolen / abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet-unborn and so
inexistent future” (5). The sergeant is unlikely to have been a successful philanderer and even a naïve character like Francie questions the degree of truth in the gardener’s hyperbolic tale. McCabe thus creates numerous characters who nostalgically erect an identity on the pillars of a romanticised past. The reader also does not learn their proper names, which further
emphasises their absence of a valid individual identity. Tellingly, historical events and the colonial past are only hinted at. Revolutionaries like Michael Collins may be occasionally mentioned en passant (96) or a character might allude to the hate for the English but most of the time the collective memory of colonialism is repressed. The characters do not work through historical trauma and denial perpetually permeates McCabe’s fictional towns.
The first type of parent figure that I discuss in the following paragraphs is Francie’s biological mother, an emotionally unstable and occasionally violent character who eventually commits suicide. In neocolonial fashion, she prefers denial over agency and, instead of fulfilling her role as a parent, she repeatedly asks her son to “never let [her] down” (4). Brady nevertheless convinces himself of an alternative reality in which his mother was utterly flawless and thus illustrates Fanon and Bauman’s theories that many postcolonial subjects find solace in an idealised past. Even though his biological mother is clinically depressed and never very talkative, Francie repeatedly employs the expression “ma used to say” in his
narrative and still sees “ma smiling” (100). Another example for the same psychological predisposition involves Francie’s memories of his mother’s favourite song: the eponymous “Butcher Boy” ballad. Recounting the sad plight of a girl who took her own life, the ballad, on the one hand, foreshadows the mother’s own suicide. On the other hand, it also illustrates Francie’s aspiration to flee the Hobbesian Brady household and return to an ideal past. Francie’s memory of the song does not conjure up, as one might expect, traumatic
associations with his mother’s nervous breakdowns and suicide. It instead resuscitates images of carefree togetherness and dancing “around the room” (20) in the kitchen. Francie thus turns himself into a paragon of Bauman’s analysis of the modifying powers of retrotopian
resurrection.
Individual examples like these abound in the narrative but I argue that there is one major leitmotif that illustrates Francie’s idealisation even more poignantly: the alleged memory of his parents’ honeymoon to the popular seaside resort of Bundoran. In his first account of the honeymoon, Francie blissfully narrates how “everybody was happy,” how his parents “held hands along the strand and talked about the brass band he’d started in the town” (92). Francie stresses that “there was no row that day no whisky, nothing” (92), summoning up a picture of marital bliss and proudly adding that the landlady of their holiday apartment called them “lovebirds” (92). He presents a second slightly altered version of the same memory at a later stage of his narrative. This time, he exalts the imagined love between his parents even more, explaining how he “knew that they were both thinking of the same things, all the beautiful things in the world” (146). It is now also his father, not the landlady, who affectionately uses the “lovebirds” expression. All of these minor alterations already subtly hint at Francie’s penchant for changing memories and fleeing into a retrotopian universe. A painfully ironic anti-climax occurs towards the end of the novel. Francie travels to Bundoran to seek out the landlady and inquire about his parents’ honeymoon. Unsurprisingly, the truth violently clashes with his cherished idealised version: his parents were bitterly fighting for the
entire duration of their stay and his mother, as the landlady recalls, “mustn’t have seen him sober a day in their whole honeymoon” (198). The idealised honeymoon memory thus runs through the entire novel like a sadly melancholic undercurrent. In his painfully ironic subtlety, McCabe annihilates his characters’ nostalgic tunes of hope by demonstrating that an excessive celebration of the past can only beget deteriorating mental health.
The relationship between the protagonist6 of Breakfast on Pluto and her biological mother is similarly characterised by the retrotopian discrepancy between exaltation and reality. Before going into greater detail about Braden’s retrotopian relationship with her absent biological mother who gave her away as a baby, I want to underline that Breakfast on Pluto is more explicitly allegorical than Butcher Boy. McCabe intertwines his protagonist’s life with key historical events in a way that brings to mind other key postcolonial texts such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The novel’s prelude is a key example for McCabe’s allegorical strategy. The novelist chronologically cites numerous important dates and
monumental figures from Irish history up until 1992, which is when the “geographical border [was] drawn by a drunken man” and an “ugly state of perennial limbo” (x) ensued. It is into this universe of neocolonial indeterminacy that McCabe consciously plunges his protagonist: “dysfunctional double-bind of border-fever, mapping out the universe into which Mr. Patrick Braden, now some years later found himself tumbled” (x). In other words, McCabe makes it clear that Braden’s quest for “home, belonging and […] peace” is simultaneously the quest for identity of postcolonial Ireland.
Even though her mother belongs to an inaccessible past, Braden becomes haunted by the damaging desire to find her. She is introduced already in the prelude as an infant “sucking his thumb and dreaming of Mama” (xi) and, later in her life, she imagines her mother to be
6 The protagonist Patrick “Pussy” Braden was born a boy but becomes a trans woman, which is why I
“so beautiful she looked not unlike Mitzi Gaynor the well-known film star” (8). Braden is forced, as critic Ake Persson rightly remarks, to cling to “assemblage” formed of “loose information given to the ten-year-old Patrick” (47) but she nevertheless constructs her own idealised narrative of her mother. Like Francie’s tale, her narrative is thus also a retrotopian effort. She gradually convinces herself that “mammy was special” (92) and decides to “give my life to find the one-and only Eily Bergin” (75). Braden’s search, however, remains unfruitful; in her own resigned words at the end of her narrative, she “never did find Mammy though” (198). The deluded remembrance of things past draws her on a disconcerting and unproductive quest for motherhood that culminates not only in prostitution and attempted rape but also, as the reader finds out at a later stage of the narrative, in her commitment to a mental hospital where she is treated for an excessive mother fixation.
I argue that Francie and Braden’s idealised memories of their biological parents are representative of Ireland’s retroptopian quest for a post-independence identity. The
idealisation of the biological mother mirrors the neocolonial glorification of a re-imagined Mother Ireland situated in the past. Even though Ireland was never free of problems (which McCabe repeatedly expresses by the themes of alcoholism, famine and domestic abuse in his novels), most of the characters construct an identity by imagining an Edenic pre-colonial realm absent of troubles.
I want to draw attention to the fact that he weaves images and text fragments of highly publicised political speeches into the fabric of his own text in order to illustrate more
poignantly my argument regarding McCabe’s allegorical equation between personal and national. Aemon De Valera’s 1943 radio address “The Ireland that we dreamed of” for example represents a crucial intertext in several of McCabe’s novels. One memorable part of the speech is worth quoting in full:
The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people […] satisfied with frugal comfort […]– a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, […], whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age (De Valera).
De Valera’s Victorian language summons up an ideal Ireland that is rooted in traditionalism and situated in a dreamy utopian past, rather than the future.7 Because of
its retrotopian rhetoric and bathetic sentimentalism, it becomes the perfect target for
McCabe’s scathing irony. As I will argue in the following paragraphs, McCabe’s critique of the retroptopian impulse echoes Frantz Fanon’s denunciation of political leaders that use an idealized past to create a soi-disant new national identity after the departure of the coloniser. “The leader,” Fanon laments, “refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie [and] asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led to their independence” (168). Even though de Valera does not elaborate on Ireland’s pre-independence period but rather conjures up a mythical pre-colonial realm, the dubious logic of revisiting an idealised past remains the same. This antiquarian approach to history, to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s terminology, 8 can serve neither nation nor individual. Uncannily
7 The idealization of the past remains a common trope in politics today. The rhetoric surrounding
Brexit (advocating a return to a time before the European Union) and Donald Trump’s electoral campaign (“Make America Great Again”) are similarly marked by the retrotopian impulse.
8 The “antiquarian” method is one of three modes of history that Nietzsche identifies. An antiquarian
historian is an individual who perpetually “preserves and honours” (10) the past, nostalgically living in memory rather than in the present moment. Echoing Fanon’s metaphor of the mummy, he similarly proclaims that the antiquarian method can “cripple the active man” and the “historical sense no longer conserves life but mummifies” (12).
bringing to mind de Valera’s radio speech, Fanon explains that the leader may make “an effort” from time to time by “speak[ing] on the radio or mak[ing] a tour” but the summoning of a past paradise lost only “brings people to a halt and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in in it” (168). I argue that McCabe ridicules De Valera’s pastoral vision in several of his novels in order to point out the inherent dangers of constructing a retrotopian identity.
Breakfast on Pluto is, in some ways, a subtle yet withering parody of de Valera’s romanticised vision. Instead of “cosy homesteads,” conjugal serenity and happy families, McCabe blows away the retrotopian fairy dust and presents broken households, alcohol-induced domestic abuse and epidemically declining mental health. Even more importantly for the scope of my thesis, he parodies several of the politicians’ key motifs and interlinks them with the motherhood theme. The idealisation of the biological mother in McCabe therefore, I argue, mirrors De Valera’s idealisation of the Mother Ireland myth. Tellingly, the only examples of happy homes in Breakfast on Pluto are figments of Braden’s imagination, echoing Bauman’s claim that the retrotopian spirit leads individuals to “confuse the actual home and the imaginary one” (3). In the chapter “Chez Nous,” she presents a utopian vision of her ideal home. Braden conjures up the image of a “small cottage” that emanates
“peacefulness” (109). The cottage is home to a “gentle” husband with “great big shovel hands” and a loving wife who “now softly reads to her bright baby” (109) when she is not baking the family’s own bread.9 The child, in return, is “always with his mammy by his side” (110). This dream-like and homely fantasy bears uncanny resemblances to De Valera’s
9 In Butcher Boy, the motif of baking also signifies the discrepancy between imagination, memory and
reality. Francie happily remembers how his mother frantically baked “towers” of cakes for a
celebration (27) and interprets his mother’s efforts as an attempt to create a happy home. In reality, the feverish baking was the beginning of her next nervous breakdown.
speech: Braden not only uses a similarly pastoral setting but also emphasises the same traditionalism with regard to gender roles. The fantasy is just as unrealistic as De Valera’s vision and stands in diametrical opposition to the grim real households that the characters inhabit.
Another key leitmotif that McCabe takes from De Valera is that of the fireplace. When she presents his utopian vision, Braden specifies that “tiny curls of smoke” are “coming from the chimneys” (109), which indicates the presence of a hearth inside the cottage. He similarly travels back in time in a later chapter and imagines the home of his grandparents. Apart from the fact that this is another example of his retrotopian inclination, he also explicitly mentions the “hypnotic motion of the flames in the grate” (125). As numerous historians have shown, the hearth played a key role in traditional Ireland. Gabriel Cooney for instance explains that the hearth, complete with its connotations of warmth and light, traditionally symbolised unity and well-being (61). Estyn Evans similarly argues that “the fireside and not the table is traditionally the centre of family and social life in an Irish country house” (Evans 47). Heidi Hansson adds an interesting dimension to the, explaining the hearth is not only the axis mundi of family life in rural Ireland, but it is also tied to nationalism. 1887 for example saw the foundation of the Irish Fireside Club, an educational “movement […] engaging young people in pursuits intended to advance cultural nationalism” (Hansson 51). Is should therefore come as no surprise that the hearth figures so prominently in De Valera’s nationalistic vision.
McCabe parodies the same symbol in Butcher Boy. When Francie for example goes to Dublin, he decides to buy a gift for his mother. The present he ends up with is a “slice of a tree cut out and a rhyme carved into the wood and decorated […]. At the bottom was an old woman in a red shawl rocking by the fireside.” The gift also carries the inscription “a
mother’s love’s a blessing no matter where you roam” (45). Once again, Francie’s sentimental imagination stands in painful opposition to reality: in his own home, as the reader learned at an earlier stage of the narrative, “there never was a fire ma never bothered to light one” and
his mother only remains “sitting bent over the fire only there was no fire” (7), staring into the “dead fire” (8). McCabe’s decision to turn the traditional fireside into a “dead fire” is
therefore a symbolic inversion of the homogenous and over-simplified narrative that officials like De Valera promoted. Impregnating his narratives with an allegorical subtone, McCabe subtly presents a more heterogenous version of the past. Echoing Fanon, he highlights the pitfalls of idealising memory and ridicules the retroptopian rhetoric that pervaded the political discourse of post-independence Ireland. Idealised myths of Mother Ireland are debunked as mere pipe dreams that lead people to stagnate in an imaginary picture-postcard world.
The allegorical undertone and retrotopian spirit also characterise the political sphere that McCabe constructs in Breakfast on Pluto. In the first part of the novel, the reader witnesses Braden’s unusual relationship with a local politician that she lovingly calls “Dummy Teats” I argue that this character is one of McCabe’s most revealing literary creations in the context of allegory because he personifies the retroptopian impulse that animated post-independence Irish politics. On the one hand, Teats represents an alter ego of Eamon de Valera: Teat’s real first name is actually Eamon. On the other hand, the politician’s retrotopian disposition also manifests itself in a way that aligns him with some of the other characters I have already discussed: like Francie and Braden, he craves an idealized mother. He sends Braden to a homely cottage that “had belonged to his mother” (33) and mentions that he continues to “miss her so much, my mother” (33). His craving for a lost mother even leads him to see in Braden a surrogate mother and to call her “mammy” (34). If we believe Carl Gustav Jung, the characteristic effects of a mother complex on a son are “Don Juanism, and sometimes also impotence. […] In Don Juanism, he unconsciously seeks his mother in every woman he meets” (Jung 162). A mother complex is in itself a kind of retrotopian project that, however, can only lead to “self-castration, madness and early death” (Jung 162). Jung’s theory holds true for Teat: he transforms the women in his life into mother figures and
helplessly regresses into a child-like state of complete powerlessness. Braden, in return, happily fulfils Teat’s fantasy and assumes the role of a surrogate mother:
I came up with this idea of inserting my thumb into his mouth. It was quite the spontaneous gesture on my part – but oh boy did he love it! ‘Oh, Mammy! Mammy!’ he’d cry, sucking away on it like it was nobody’s business. […] He just could not get enough of it! (34)
Braden is thus complicit in allowing Teat fully to abandon the real world and present moment in favour of a retrotopia in which he projects his mother on his sexual partners. To come back to Bauman, Teat seeks relief in this return “from that mysterious, recondite, unfriendly, alienated and alienating world […] to the familiar, cosy and homely […] world of memory” (6). McCabe’s fictional politicians employ a similar modus operand than De Valera, refuse to deal with the problems that postcolonial Ireland is facing and instead resurface into a retrotopian universe that can be remodelled at will.
The motif of political violence also plays a key role in McCabe’s depiction of the political sphere. Throughout the narrative, it remains unclear whether Teat is involved with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitary movement; Braden merely explains that “there were many who would impugn his good name – importing arms for the IRA” (32). More importantly, I argue that IRA terrorism is again tied to the retrotopian impulse of its disillusioned members and subtly expressed through the parenthood motif. McCabe
ironically defines the IRA as an organisation that takes turns between “blowing up England and vowing that [it] didn’t agree with the deaths of civilians” (73) and at the same time connects nationalist brutality with the unfulfilling quest for an idealised mother. One chapter in particular, fittingly called “Where the Fuck is My Mammy?,” contains illuminating examples for this interweaving of motifs. Braden heads to a bar where
“yum yum Mama songs […] lit the night” (74) while drunken suspected IRA members shout “I love my mammy!” and “I loved her more than anyone that ever walked this earth” (75). The proclaimed love for a lost biological mother, I argue, is simultaneously a
displaced manifestation for their craving of different, precolonial Mother Ireland. Tim Gauthier limits his essay to Butcher Boy but his argumentation that “nationalist movements are often founded on the evocation of a past where issues of identity were unsullied by the coloniser’s stamp” (207) is nevertheless a helpful insight to understand McCabe’s depiction of the IRA in Breakfast on Pluto. Even though Gauthier does not discuss the concept of retrotopia, I argue that Bauman’s ideas can easily strengthen his comment: the sociologist explains that the retrotopian impulse plays a particularly important role in the birth of nationalism because it “sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures” (63). In McCabe’s fiction, nationalistic characters also modify and re-imagine such a pre-existing or, in the Irish context, supposedly pre-colonial culture. Violence becomes the main means to achieve a temporary feeling of relief from the debasing feeling of their own perceived inferiority. After all, as Bauman writes, “absolute powerlessness can also corrupt absolutely” (46). It should be sufficiently clear by now that Brady, Braden and the IRA members’ respective idealisation of their mothers allegorically reflects Ireland’s
unproductive desire to reconnect to a precolonial past.
To conclude this first chapter, I want to stress that the characters’ romanticising of the past is representative of the psychological defence mechanism that neocolonial societies employ. Instead of truly addressing the (colonial) past and working through trauma, they repress and displace their problems by creating alternative versions of the past that are less threating to the subconscious mind. The idealisation of dysfunctional biological mothers, as I have shown, also allegorically mirrors the tendency of postcolonial individuals to create a flawed identity by fleeing into a remodelled past. With scathing irony, McCabe manages to
denounce the retrotopian project as a mythical glorification of a past that has never truly existed as such. The characters’ retrotopian longing in Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto is indeed what Fanon called a will-o’-the-wisp, a subjective re-imagining that only leads further astray. After all, the deceitfully flickering light of hope can never truly be reached. The mothers remain absent centres that only exist as immobile mummies in the sarcophagus-like minds of the postcolonial individual. Instead of actively shaping their own future, the pursuit of infantile bliss through idealising gymnastics of recall symbolises both the regression into child-like refusal of responsibility and the incapacity to find a true identity.
Chapter Two – British Surrogate Parents and Mimicry
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
– Samuel Johnson, The Rambler No. 135
2.1 - From Mimicry’s Colonial Origins to its Neocolonial Appeal
In my first chapter, I have demonstrated that the characters’ idealisation of the biological mother allegorises the common desire among postcolonial individuals to flee into a
retrotopian and re-envisioned precolonial past. This chapter revolves around a different parent figure that features prominently in the two novels: the ambivalent British substitute parent. I argue that the characters’ complex relationship with this kind of parent figure allegorically mirrors the binary way in which many Irish citizens attempt to create a neocolonial identity. In fact, they either imitate the dominant English culture or they violently reject it. McCabe has his central characters try out the two options in order to demonstrate that both of them are inherently flawed because they unavoidably force the new identity to be fashioned in relation to the coloniser.
Fanon’s outspoken disdain for mimicry in The Wretched of the Earth again provides us with a valuable starting point to analyse the first alternative. Famously promoting violent uprisings over any form of subservience, he belligerently instructs his readers to “not waste time in nauseating mimicry” (310). A (post)colonial nation, in his view, can “do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe” (311). Even though Fanon concedes that it may be tempting to find the
“European model […] the most inspiring,” he nevertheless stresses that imitation can only result in “mortifying setbacks” (311). Mimicry, just like the escape into a retrotopian past, can only “throw us off our balance” (311) and therefore does not represent the right strategy to create new personal and national identities. In his famous essay “Of Mimicry and Man,”
postcolonial heavyweight Homi Bhabha takes a different approach to the concept of mimicry and argues that the alleged “civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double” (127). Mimicry in the colonial context thus becomes a strategy of resistance because it borders on subtle mockery and consequently annihilates hegemonic structures and discourses. However, as the following paragraphs will show, McCabe shares Fanon’s rather than Bhabha’s take on mimicry and ultimately rejects the imitation of the coloniser as a legitimate way to create a new identity.
I will turn to this chapter’s main theme of surrogate parent figures after
complementing Fanon’s insights with Tomas Mac Siomoin’s contemporary research into Ireland’s neocolonial plight. Even though Siomoin does not explicitly address the concept of mimicry, I argue that his historical analysis of Ireland’s gradual cultural genocide is helpful to understand both the origins of mimicry and its neocolonial appeal for Irish citizens. In his chapter “The First Colonisation of the Irish Mind,” Siomoin traces the start of Ireland’s colonial decline back to the 17th and 18th century. England started forcefully to strengthen its hegemonic status on the emerald isle through various repressive tactics. Siomoin particularly expands on the role of Britain’s repression of the native Irish language. He for example draws on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to argue that the “adoption by the colonised subject of the colonizer’s language” represents the “defining colonizing moment” (29). As the native language is being eradicated, “the coloniser’s world view superimposes itself on that of the colonized subject” (29). This language shift and gradual anglicising were accompanied by detrimental psychological effects and indirectly facilitated Ireland’s subjugation as the country gradually found itself conscripted into foreign cultural and cognitive modes. Even though the decline of Ireland’s language is something that McCabe only briefly touches upon in novels like The Dead School,10 it is nevertheless a crucial historical fact that helps us to
10 Headmaster Raphael Bell for example mourns the loss of the Irish language and takes an immense
understand the allure of mimicry. In fact, the “shamefaced rejection of the ancestral tongue” (Siomoin 24) partly results in another psychological affliction that McCabe repeatedly addresses in his fiction: the neocolonial inferiority complex. Siomoin explains that the colonizer’s “imposition of a foreign language on children […] unavoidably undervalued the child’s home culture and elevated the status of the language of the colonizer” (33-34). The linguistic prescriptivism thus not only led to cultural alienation but also, over the centuries, played a key part in fostering a deep-rooted inferiority complex in Ireland’s collective psyche. Fanon goes in a similar direction in The Wretched of the Earth when he argues that Europe has actively sown an “inferiority complex” (94) in African countries. The colonisers made every effort to “bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture, […] to recognise the unreality of his nation” (235). Shame and self-blame came to dominate the colonised subject’s emotional ground tone and persist well after the coloniser’s departure. As Siomoin painfully puts it,
the Irish colonized subject understood from its English master that he was of a lower order of being, gormless but sly, humorous and sometimes charming. The
quintessential Paddy was scatter-brained and childlike, thus inherently incapable of governing himself […]. (45, my emphasis)
In other words, the English coloniser instilled in its Irish subject an inherent inclination towards servitude and a child-like inability to protect him or herself. Siomoin speaks in this context of “self-fulfilling colonial mythologies” (44). The British coloniser repeatedly abused his position of power to force the image of a disorganised child unto the Irish population. The colonised nation eventually really risked forfeiting its essence and metamorphosing into that superimposed image. Siomoin’s argument that Britain played a role in manufacturing a “childlike” Irish servant also explains why regressions into an infantile state represent, as I
will show at a later stage, such a prominent leitmotif in McCabe’s fiction. I argue that both in Breakfast on Pluto and in Butcher Boy, the novelist creates characters who suffer from a residual inferiority complex that dictates their actions and explains why they readily put blame on themselves. When Braden for example thinks back to a day when she was angry at her biological mother for giving her away as a child, she remorsefully sighs that she “was sorry […] for saying that Mammy was wrong for leaving me” (102). Instances like this abound in the narrative but this minor example is already symptomatic instead of accusing those who hurt and betray her.
Siomoin’s analysis also allows us to better understand the prominent leitmotif of the pig. On the one hand, pigs feature heavily in Butcher Boy because the animals, as Sarah Townsend reminds us in her study on animal stereotypes in colonial Ireland, “functioned as a popular racial caricature, encapsulating in animal form the colonised country’s perceived failings” (55). In his afterword to the novel, McCabe conceded that “pigs as a metaphor for the inheritance of malignant, perhaps colonial shame had been on my mind for quite a long time” (238). I argue that pigs are a key component of the novelist’s colonial allegory and symbolize traits such as laziness and lack of hygiene that the colonizers have long associated with their Irish subjects. On the other hand, the pig motif also implicitly demonstrates the mechanism behind what Siomoin calls self-fulfilling mythologies. This phenomenon becomes most apparent in Francie’s interaction with Mrs. Nugent, who is a key character that I will come back to when I discuss mimicry and the protagonist’s aspiration to British surrogate parent figures. Francie explains that the affluent Nugent family “used to live in London but [the] parents are from the town and they have come back here to live” (2). Because of their markedly English behavior, the Nugents benefit from a higher social standing than the rest of the village community.11 Even the surname Nugent, critic Aaron Kelly explains, echoes the
11 Both Mrs Nugent and her husband distance themselves from the rest of the village community by
expression “new gents,” suggesting “both a new bourgeois modernity and a concomitant recasting of colonial forms of authority, an aping of the British gentry” (131). The first interaction between Mrs. Nugent and the Brady family is not only marked by an unbalanced power dynamic but also shows how colonial stereotypes continue to haunt post-independence Ireland. When Mrs. Nugent visits Mrs. Brady to address a harmless prank that Francie has played on her son Philip, the personal grievance quickly morphs into a withering attack against the entire Brady household. Francie recounts how she “started on about the pigs” and “said she knew the kind of us long before she went to England,” adding that Francie’ father was “no better than a pig” (4) because of his alcoholism. Apart from reiterating colonial stereotypes of pigs and laziness, her diatribe against the family also echoes Siomoin’s analysis of colonial discourse and identity politics. Like the British colonizers, Mrs. Nugent claims that she exactly knows the Brady family’s “kind” of identity and consequently abuses her position of power to force that humiliating identity onto them. It is also at this point that Siomoin’s “self-fulfilling colonial mythologies” come into play. Having heard this scathing critique from a figure of (British) authority and lacking a sense of selfhood, Francie really starts to equate his family with the “pig family” (5) and assumes the identity of “Francie Pig” (14). His interior monologue after his mother’s death is equally revealing in this context: “I hope he’s proud of himself now, the pig, after what he did on his poor mother” (48). His inferiority complex thus leads Francie to share Braden’s penchant for self-blame. The title of the novel also adds another dimension to the pig leitmotif. At a later stage of his narrative, Francie recounts how he worked in an abattoir and earned money to kill pigs. In other words, McCabe turns Francie the pig into a slaughterer of pigs, subtly illustrating the self-destructive quality of the neocolonial inferiority complex. To conclude, I have demonstrated in the
but he spoke like it. He said good afternoon when everybody else said hardy weather” (56). Linguistic mimicry of the former coloniser thus plays a key role.
preceding paragraphs that Britain has used a number of tactics to instil low self-esteem in the Irish natives and wrest any sense of selfhood from them. It is therefore no surprise that McCabe presents mimicry as an attractive and convenient solution to regain a sense of self-worth. I now turn to concrete examples of mimicry in his fiction and show how they are once again linked to the motif of parenthood.
2.2 – Incomplete Identities and British Surrogate Parents
In Butcher Boy, Francie aspires to two surrogate parent figures: his uncle Alo and Mrs. Nugent. Even though both of them are technically Irish, they spent time in London and abandoned their Irishness in favour of a marked Britishness. They are perceived as belonging to a hegemonic British class and consequently enjoy more power, affluence and a higher social status when they return to the Irish village. Uncle Alo comes home “all the way from London” (16) on Christmas and does not fail to impress Francie with his “English accent” (23) and extravagant clothes. The “lovely red hankie in his breast pocket and a beautiful blue suit” (16) make him look, as Francie explains, “like someone in the government” (16). The village community is equally in awe, whispering that he has “a great big job and more luck to him it’s not easy in these big places like London” (16). Alo’s aura of superiority profoundly enchants Francie, who “couldn’t stop looking at him, the gold tiepin and his polished nails, the English voice” (28). I want to derive to main ideas from these examples: on the one hand, the figure of Alo allows McCabe to demonstrate how mimicry of the culturally dominant can be appealing because it goes together with second-hand power and conveniently boosts self-confidence. On the other hand, the scenes involving Alo are instrumental in constructing Ireland as the perceived antithesis of London and therefore of refinement and savoir-vivre. The Irish town is described in terms of coarseness, poverty, unemployment and dirty clothes while London, in the collective Irish psyche, connotes “great big job[s],” finesse of being and fashion.
There is one moment during the Christmas dinner scene that illustrates this contrast even more poignantly: within two paragraphs, McCabe juxtaposes descriptions of Francie’s idealized surrogate father Alo with descriptions of the protagonist’s dysfunctional biological father. Francie’s real father, we learn, morosely sits in his chair and the party guests “hardly noticed him at all. His eyes were small like ball bearings he just moved along the edges
getting drink and saying nothing” (29). Alo is constructed in diametrical opposition to the father: everybody is watching him and
Alo’s eyes were brightly lit what about a song he says and off we went to the sitting room. He angled his elbow on the piano and when they sang White Christmas you could hear him above everybody else (31, my emphasis).
In other words, Francie’s father is characterized by his small drunken eyes, his passivity and the deadly silence surrounding him. Alo’s “brightly lit” eyes, on the contrary, are brimming with life and confidence. Whereas “the silence around da made [Francie] ice all over” (34) and “a glass wall of silence” (34) seems to separate father and son, Alo joyfully plays music and exudes life. The fact that “you could hear him above everybody else” simultaneously expresses his perceived superiority: his mimicry of the culturally dominant allows Alo to position himself above the Irish town population. It is also no coincide that he arrives on Christmas: Francie venerates Alo as a larger-than-life Christ figure while his real father gradually morphs into the Antichrist. However, I argue that that there is a subtle yet crucial discrepancy between appearance and reality. McCabe insinuates that Alo’s mimicry is, in reality, a desperate attempt to overcompensate for his lack of individual identity but ultimately does not suffice to provide true satisfaction. The descriptions of his clothes and artificial behaviour dominate the narrative while the reader needs to interpret subtle clues to glimpse behind the glorious mask. McCabe’s repeated use of the preposition “like” is indicative of Alo’s plight. He remains a mere surface that is forever doomed to be “like” someone else, representing a defective imitation without individual substance. Despite his apparent success, he is deeply unsecure and, echoing Siomoin’s analysis, fundamentally child-like. When Francie’s father for example ridicules his career, Alo “looked like a child who had soiled his trousers” (36). His infantilism and lack of selfhood are also expressed by
his tendency to pick protective mother figures as partners. Tellingly, the only girl he ever loved in Ireland is called Mary. Keeping in mind that Alo represents a Christ-figure, the name Mary of course alludes to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus and personification of
motherhood per excellence. According to Francie’s father, Alo was only involved with one woman in London and “took her to the altar because he was afraid to ask anyone else. Twenty years his senior” (35). Alo’s decision to marry a woman who is significantly older than him similarly indicates his reliance on mother figures to give him guidance and provide him with a sense of individuality. Critic Enda Duffy is therefore mistaken when she argues that Alo, because of his eccentricity and extravagant clothes, is “no more than a caricature from a comic-book” (50). If he were a mere caricature, he would not be able to put the entire village community under his spell and when we look at him through the neocolonial lens, his
behaviour becomes symptomatic of Ireland’s national pathology. By creating ambivalent characters like Alo, McCabe manages simultaneously to illustrate the appeal and the pitfalls of mimicry.
I have argued that Francie idealises Alo precisely because of his implicit ties to Britain’s hegemonic status and, partly due to this derivative authority, views him as a
surrogate father figure. The main instance of mimicry in the novel, however, takes place when Francie visits the Nugent home. The Nugents, as I have already mentioned before, return from London and McCabe constructs them as an antithesis to Francie’s own family. While the Brady family is dysfunctional and impoverished, the Nugents’ middle-class lifestyle is replete with the qualities that allegedly justified the English coloniser’s claim to govern the Irish. Like Alo, the Nugents are described in terms of their clothes, refinement and homely order. Caught up in an emotional whirlpool of jealousy and loathing, Francie recounts how Mrs Nugent’s son Philip has “been to private school and [that] he wore this blazer with gold braid” (2). He is torn between profound disdain and admiration for the expensive clothes, the refined accent and the exotic “crocodile-skin music case” (20). Even though Francie initially stressed
that “we don’t want to be like the Nugents” (20), he starts fantasising about assuming Philip’s identity in order to be adopted by Mrs Nugent. He for example steals Philip’s British comic collection, which I interpret as an early attempt to replicate his identity. An incident of mimicry with more far-reaching implications follows these comparatively innocent instances of cultural imitation. After his mother’s death, Francie visits the Nugent home when the family is away and indulges in a complex identity fantasy. In Francie’s mental theatre, Mrs Nugent invites him to partake in the family’s homely bliss and even calls him “Mr Francie Brady” (61). Francie thus sheds his previous identity of Francie Pig in favour of a superior anglicised identity. At first, he employs vocabulary and rhetoric that he deems British, using old-fashioned terms such as “scullery” and pretending to give a speech (61). He then marches to Philip’s room, opens his wardrobe and violates Fanon’s maxim “not to imitate Europe” (Fanon 312). He puts on his “school uniform the one he wore at private school in England,” complete with trousers and “black polished shoes you could see your face in them” (64). Looking at himself in the mirror, he starts talking in an English accent and pretends to be Philip:
I say Frawncis would you be a sport and wun down to the tuck shop for meah pleath? I did a twirl and said abtholootely old boy. I say boy what is your name pleath? Oo, I said, my name ith Philip Nuahgent. Then I went round the house like Philip. I walked like him and everything (64).
Francie’s mimicry of perceived Britishness sheds light on his repressed desires. The theatrical fantasy reflects his craving for self-worth and respect as well as a parent like Mrs Nugent. In McCabe’s allegorical equation, mimicry as a strategy to create a postcolonial identity is again intertwined with the parenthood motif. In fact, Francie’s fantasy reaches its climax when he repeatedly calls Mrs Nugent “mother” and watches as she “unbuttoned her blouse and took
put her breast” before choking him with the “fat, lukewarm flesh” (64). Francie’s devolution into what Siomoin would call a quintessentially child-like state,12 I ague, is deeply symbolic: the text implies that postcolonial subjects who vainly stick to the foreign colonial identity will never be independent but are doomed to remain the coloniser’s voiceless child.
There is a moment in Breakfast on Pluto when Braden embarks on a similarly
allegorical quest for a British surrogate mother that also causes her to regress into a child-like state of dependence. Haunted by her retroptopian longing for her real mother, Braden travels to London. Instead of her finding her biological mother, however, she moves in with Louise. Louise, like Mrs Nugent, represents a British surrogate mother that Braden temporarily aspires to in order to create an identity. The “darling landlady” is a motherly character who can be seen “flicking tea towels” (91) and constantly cleaning used cups. I argue that
McCabe, over the course of this episode, brings to life an allegorical equation in which Louise stands for Britain while Braden personifies neocolonial Ireland. The reader learns that Louise recently lost her Irish husband and her child, paralleling England’s loss of Ireland as a colony and the end of the colonial master-child relationship. Like Francie, she gradually assumes the role of the adopted child and agrees to Louise’s “scheme” (92) of dressing up like an English child. Louise even calls Braden by her dead son’s name while she starts “sucking on her nipple and going Mammy” (92). Braden also explains that they complement each other because with “her it was her son, with me it was a mother” (91). I argue that McCabe’s use of grammar in this seemingly innocuous example reiterates the allegorical connection between motherhood and Irish (post)colonialism. When Braden thinks about Louise’s child, she
12 Siomoin’s metaphor of the Stockholm syndrome for Irishness represents another illuminative way to
look at Francie’s subordination. His imitation of supposedly cultivated speech and behaviour evoke, to use Siomoin’s terms, a “submissive emotionally-charged response to […] symbols of British power evidences a Stockholm-Syndrome-like condition” (123).
employs the possessive determiner “her” to Louise has only lost one son. In the allegorical equation, this mirrors England losing Ireland as a colony. Braden, however, has lost “a
mother.” The use of the indefinite article “a” is revealing: the protagonist’s mother emerges as an unfixed category, which, in return, reflects the postcolonial subject’s desperate quest for any kind of identity. The relationship between Louise and her newly found surrogate child carries a distinctive hint of an allegorical fantasy in which coloniser and colonised celebrate a temporary neocolonial reunion. Louis the coloniser is ecstatic to have reclaimed a part of herself that she had deemed irrevocably lost. Braden as the ex-colonised is equally euphoric because she can use the relationship and mimicry to construct a temporary identity.
In Butcher Boy, the idea that mimicry cannot provide a fixed identity is also implicitly expressed by the motif of the mirror. I argue that a hidden Lacanian subtext suffuses the scene at the Nugent home. Jacques Lacan’s earlier accounts of the mirror stage provide a helpful theoretical framework to understand why Francie first looks at himself in the mirror (64) and later breaks the mirror “into pieces” (65) when Mrs Nugent offers him her breast. In a 1949 lecture, the French psychoanalyst defined the so-called mirror stage as a profound experience of identification in an infant’s development, consisting of three main stages. In the first stage, the infant sees its image in a mirror and mistakes it for a real other being. During the second period, the child discovers that the reflection is just an image rather than a real entity. The final stage operates dialectically: “once the image has been mastered and found empty” (Lacan 1), the child recognises that the reflection is only an image but simultaneously realises that this image is his own. Lacan scholar Joel Dor emphasises that this newly acquired body image represents “a structuring factor in the formation of the subject’s identity, since it is through this image that he achieves his primal identification” (96). At the same time, this new relationship with body image and identity is a deeply ambivalent one. On the one hand, the child adores its mirror image and, as Lacan puts it, celebrates this “jubilant assumption of his spectacular image” (2). The image represents the “Ideal I” (Lacan 2) that the child would like
to be. On the other hand, the child is also subconsciously aware of the fact that this image is an idealized version of his identity and does not necessarily correspond to reality. He or she consequently feels self-hatred and a sense of “alienating identity” (Lacan 4). It is above all this third period that helps us understand Francie’s behaviour at the Nugent home. When he looks at himself in the mirror while mimicking Philip’s British identity, he initially perceives that image as an Ideal I because it provides him with everything that he previously craved. At the same time, he quickly comes to the painful realisation that this image does not represent his real self or identity. A deep-seated sense of alienation quickly ensues, and he feels
profound hate both for Mrs Nugent and England who made him betray his biological mother13 and, by allegorical extension, his homeland. Francie’s shattering of the mirror right after that realisation is therefore symbolic: the conflicted protagonist interrupts the final moments of the mirror stage and is consequently left with no identity at all.
I want to conclude that McCabe’s texts echo Fanon’s zealous warning that mimicry as a tool to create a postcolonial identity can only trigger “mortifying setbacks” (Fanon 311). Like the idealisation of a mythical past that I discussed in my first chapter, imitation of the coloniser in McCabe’s fiction is again tied to the parenthood motif. Infusing his text with historical and psychoanalytical dimensions that I discussed above, McCabe subtly
demonstrates that mimicry fails to encompass the politics of emancipation and true decolonisation that could lead to new individual and communal identities.
13 When Mrs Nugent offers him her breast, Francie starts screaming “Ma! It’s not true!” (65) out of
guilt towards his dead biological mother. There is a clear parallel in Breakfast on Pluto: Braden also feels guilty after spending time with Louise and regrets “sitting on a strange woman’s knee” (93).
