Specters of the Irish Borderlands: Writing Partition
- ISBN-10
- 1267110945
- ISBN-13
- 9781267110947
- Pages
- 391
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2012
- Author
- Aisling Bridget Cormack
Description
Specters of the Irish Borderlands: Writing Partition explores not only the shameful legacy of Irish partition but also writing as a way to move forward from disavowal to creative production. Although partition has been established in public discourse as a territorial and epochal line, the history and ongoing repercussions of partition have been paradoxically occluded as objects of critical and literary analysis. I use the psychoanalytic concepts of haunting, trauma, and mourning to analyze the intractability and invisibility of partition. In the field of postcolonial Irish literature, Patrick McCabe stands out as the most challenging writer on the topic of partition. The writer's repeated reconstructions of a border town and its inhabitants manifest a compulsion to work toward reparation by integrating the specters of partition into a narrative. The failure of critics to recognize the centrality of the border in McCabe's work ironically reinforces the discursive invisibility of partition against which his novels struggle. In the first chapter, I argue that McCabe's novel Carn fills in the gaps in the official histories of the state. By representing the political, economic, and psychological fallout from partition, McCabe resists the relegation of the history of the Irish borderlands to 0premodern oblivion. In my second chapter, I address the failure of critics to acknowledge the significance of partition in McCabe's novel, The Butcher Boy. The stream of consciousness narrative appears to be delocalized and dehistoricized; however, I analyze how the adolescent murderer Francis Brady ventriloquizes the borderlands' ghosts of partition. In the third chapter, I offer McCabe's novel The Stray Sod Country as a metaphor for the haunted Irish borderlands. I demonstrate that the force that breaks down the illusion of community is the strain of partition, which multiplies political and economic divisions within the Irish state. My last chapter examines the film adaptation of Breakfast on Pluto as an intertextual collaboration between McCabe's novel and Neil Jordan's earlier Troubles films. I contend that Jordan removes all traces of partition from the tale of McCabe's transsexual narrator in his attempt to forestall the political controversy generated by The Crying Game and Michael Collins.
