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Genders 28 1998
Watch Yourself By SUSAN CANNON HARRIS [1] Recently, on an electronic discussion list
operated by the American Conference for Irish
Studies, one of the members posted a request for
information on "the alleged homosexuality of
Michael Collins," one of the primary leaders of the
Irish struggle for independence in the early
twentieth century and a major player both in the
Anglo-Irish War and in the negotiation of the peace
treaty that partitioned Ireland. In very short
order a number of listmembers, some historians and
some literary scholars, posted replies. Several
argued that these "charges" had been trumped up by
Collins's British contemporaries in an attempt to
discredit the republican movement. Others took
issue with the assumption, shared by most of these
writers, that suggesting that Collins might have
been gay was necessarily equivalent to character
assassination. As the discussion unfolded
comparisons were made to the still-current debate
about the sexuality of Padraig Pearse, leader of
the 1916 rebellion in Dublin that catalyzed Irish
resistance to British rule and eventually led to
the Anglo-Irish war.1 In
hopes of heading off a potentially hostile
confrontation, someone at last posted the
inevitable question: What difference does it
make?2 [2] This paper will use two works by Frank
McGuinness, one of Ireland's leading contemporary
playwrights, to answer that question. While not
going so far as the listmember who theorized that
Collins's acceptance of the 1922 treaty was the
direct result of a lovers' quarrel with De Valera,
I will argue that the forces that have shaped Irish
attitudes toward sexual orientation have also
influenced its political history, and continue to
exacerbate the lingering effects of colonialism and
partition in Ireland. As the Collins discussion
indicates, one reason questions of personal sexual
orientation become politically charged in Ireland
is that anxieties about sexuality and gender
identity have historically been exploited by the
British in an attempt to justify the colonization
of Ireland. From Spenser's attempt to portray the
Irish as "hypermasculine and hyperviolent" and
thereby justify England's campaign of brutal
repression to Arnold's depiction of them as
"feminine victims and romantic failures" to
Margaret Thatcher's dismissal of the H-block hunger
strikers as "men of violence" out to "prove their
virility," the attempt to enforce particular
constructions of Irish masculinity/femininity has
been integral to the process of imposing and
maintaining imperial rule in Ireland.3 For
McGuinness, then--a playwright dealing with the
legacy of occupation and partition in Northern
Ireland, and often engaging it specifically through
the experiences of queer Irish protagonists--the
question of what sexual orientation and political
orientation might have to do with each other, and
how heterosexist and imperialist systems might
collude, is a major concern. [3] McGuinness's suggestion that in Ireland
sexual and national politics are related, and that
the relationship is worth investigating, is not
new; from the obsession with personifying Ireland
as an idealized female figure that marked
turn-of-the-century art and literature to the 1937
constitution that wrote woman's role as wife and
mother indelibly into Irish law, Irish nationalism
has long linked national security and cultural
integrity with the maintenance of traditional
gender roles. The long-term results are clearly
visible in the divisive and intense battles in the
Republic of Ireland over the 1994 "X" case (in
which a fourteen-year-old rape victim was prevented
from leaving the country to seek an abortion) and
the 1986 and 1995-6 divorce referenda.4 Drama
has traditionally been one area in which public
battles over the status of gender in Irish culture
have been fought, the most famous example being the
riots that erupted when the Abbey Theatre's 1907
production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western
World challenged prevailing conceptions of
Irish femininity.5 But
while a growing body of important feminist
scholarship has explored the consequences, both for
Irish women and for Irish national politics, of
this insistence on preserving the patriarchal
family, there has been less attention paid to the
fact that this conflation of family and nation also
seeks to enforce heterosexuality. [4] McGuinness's work, by foregrounding the
issue of sexual orientation, suggests that the
restrictive structures that define political
opposition are dependent on those that uphold the
distinction between hetero- and homosexuality, and
that by subverting one of these structures it might
be possible to subvert the others. By focusing on
that interaction between sexual orientation and
political allegiance, I hope to shed light on an
important aspect of McGuinness's work that has so
far been sadly under-discussed, but also to suggest
that applying queer theory to questions of national
identity may help identify new strategies of
resistance to both heterosexist and imperialist
prescriptions and prohibitions. [5] For these reasons, I will focus here on the
two plays by McGuinness that deal most explicitly
with political conflict in Northern Ireland.
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the
Somme, McGuinness's first major critical and
popular success, tells the story of eight soldiers,
all recruited from Ulster and all Protestants,
awaiting their slaughter at the Battle of the Somme
during the first world
war.6
Justly celebrated as an original and imaginative
attempt on the part of a Catholic playwright to
engage Protestant Unionist Irish history and
culture from a "critical but sympathetic"
perspective, Observe also features a queer
protagonist named Pyper, whose homosexuality has
usually been treated by critics as either invisible
or
incidental.7
Carthaginians, set in a cemetery in
contemporary Derry, explores the impact of British
occupation on the Catholic community--specifically,
the long-term effects of the 1972 massacre known as
Bloody Sunday, in which British paratroopers shot
and killed thirteen unarmed Derry civilians. While
this play's protagonist, a young drag queen named
Dido, makes questions of sexual identity rather
more difficult to ignore, most commentators tend to
subordinate them to the play's treatment of
political history, rendering Dido just one more
oddity in the traumatized group of "pungent
crackpots" inhabiting post-Troubles
Derry.8
Although many of McGuinness's other published plays
also feature queer characters--Innocence
focuses on the Italian artist Carvaggio, Someone
Who'll Watch Over Me highlights the
relationship between a heterosexual Irish
journalist and a possibly bisexual British academic
being held hostage in a basement in Lebanon,
Mary and Lizzie suggests but does not fully
develop a homoerotic relationship between Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels--Observe and
Carthaginians are the two in which these
characters are not only queer but Irish, and in
which the intersection of sexual and national
identity is most fully explored. Deconstructing
Ulster [6] What sets Pyper and Dido apart from their
fellow-characters, aside from their sexual
orientation, is a flair for drama. As characters in
McGuinness's plays, of course, both Pyper and Dido
are performances created by actors for the benefit
of the audience in the theater, but within that
staged reality Pyper and Dido are also shown
creating their own performances for the benefit of
their fellow-characters, and it is primarily with
this kind of performance--the kind of
self-construction that Pyper engages in when he
adopts his exaggerated personae or that Dido
engages in by adopting feminine dress and a
feminine name--that this reading will be concerned.
The fact for both characters this self-conscious
self-presentation involves playing on the other
characters' (and, by extension, the audience's)
preconceived ideas about gender and sexuality
suggests that because they share desires that have
been defined as homosexual, both also share the
knowledge that their identities are, and can only
be, performative--rhetorical, constructed, assumed,
in flux--rather than essential (intrinsic, fixed,
innate).
9 [7] Each is, as Helen Lojek argues, an
"existential outsider" who is "conscious" of his
position, having been forced to confront the
fragility and incoherence of sexual
identity.10
What Eve Sedgwick calls the "chronic crisis of
homo/hetero definition" - the cultural attempt to
structure a rigid, impassable difference between
homosexual and heterosexual identities - leads to a
prevailing conception of homosexuality that is
"fractured" by so many "potent incoherences" that
any identity based on it can only be contradictory
and
tenuous.11
Pyper and Dido arrive on stage having already been
subjected to this act of definition and denied the
kind of stable and integral ego that is apparently
enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. Both
use self-dramatization to convey the understanding
that their identities as gay men are not
constituted by any innate, biologically-based
sexual orientation so much as constructed by
others' interpretations of various markers that are
tacitly understood to indicate that orientation.
Pyper deliberately manipulates those markers,
underscoring the arbitrariness of their
relationship to what they supposedly signify; the
irony that thus enters the text then becomes a
savage force which is dangerous to other attempts
at definition and which, thanks to the peculiar
circumstances created by the performance of
homosexual meaning, eventually spreads to "recruit
every signifier in the text" for its challenge to
"the notion of a
fixed...identity."12
[8] McGuinness pursues this challenge with
Dido's more radical self-construction in
Carthaginians, which influences the
conception of national identity through a
redefinition of gender difference as well as sexual
orientation. While Pyper, by mounting his attack on
the binarisms perpetuating the split at the root of
Ulster's neurosis--Protestant/Catholic,
Republican/Unionist,13
Orangeman/Papist--blows apart the structures that
have defined identity for his comrades, he is not
free to realize this briefly enacted alternative;
Dido, whose parodic deconstruction of gender
eventually disables the narratives that claim to
construct Irish identity, may come closer to moving
through the collapse of the old conception of
Irishness toward something different. [9] In both plays, reaching that goal proves to
be difficult and perhaps impossible. While
suggesting that the characters--and the
audience--must reach an understanding of their
identities as performative before they can
reconstruct them, both also clearly imply that
self-consciousness per se will not be enough. As
Judith Butler concedes in Bodies that
Matter, a subject's understanding of gender as
performative does not magically liberate him/her
from the regulatory norms that govern gender
construction, or change the fact that his/her
"existence is already decided by gender;"
and McGuinness's protagonists, even after using
their understanding of gender and sexuality as
performative to reveal political and sectarian
identity as performative, do not thereby escape the
effects of the equally potent regulatory norms that
enforce that
identification.14
The agency that Pyper and Dido make available to
their comrades on stage and to audiences in the
theater is limited by history (their own and that
of Ireland), by contemporary social and economic
conditions, by their communities, and by their own
nostalgia for the coherent, stable identity that
has been denied to them. But by making
room--however temporarily, and under whatever
restrictive conditions--for agency in the process
of identity construction, Pyper and Dido suggest a
possible strategy for rewriting the script within
which they are trapped. Rare Boyos [10] Unlike Dido, Pyper is closeted; although
his dialogue is loaded with innuendo and
implication he never explicitly declares his sexual
desires. At the same time, by conspicuously acting
as he knows his fellow-soldiers expect a gay man to
behave, Pyper deliberately choreographs for the
other recruits what Sedgwick calls the spectacle of
the closet--the view of "a closet with a
homosexual concealed, with riveting
inefficiency, in its supposed
interior."15
It is precisely the "riveting inefficiency" of
Pyper's self-containment that makes the closet
useful; Pyper compels the other characters' gazes
through his "glass closet" to the "radical and
irreducible incoherence" around which his enactment
of both the closet and the homosexual is
organized.16
[11] Pyper begins by evincing exaggerated
squeamishness at the sight of his own blood and
asking Craig to "kiss it better."17 When
Craig responds by appealing to the courage that is
supposed to define their identity as
soldiers--"you'll see a lot more than a bleeding
thumb before you're out" (14)--Pyper screams and
protests that this allusion has "really scared" him
(14). He proceeds to push toward inappropriate
intimacy ("Call me Kenneth"), impersonate Eve with
the apple he has cut himself peeling ("I can't
tempt you?"), and stare at Craig as he undresses
(14-15). All of this is enough to bring Craig to
declare--not that Pyper is gay--but that he is, if
not "a madman," then "a rare buckcat, anyroad"
(15). Moore and Millen, who are the first to hear
from Pyper that his skin is "remarkably fine for a
man" (17), and Anderson and McIlwaine, who are
greeted with the same line, refuse as Craig refuses
to use denotative language, relying instead on the
same connotative terms--Pyper is either a "rare
boyo" (19) or a "mad bastard" (36), depending. [12] Sedgwick's discussion of rarity and madness
as attached to Claggart in Billy Budd argues
that both taxonomic terms are applied in an attempt
to get one character's male-directed desires
"quarantined off and minoritized as against the
male-directed desires of the men around
him."18
This need to minoritize same-sex desire springs,
paradoxically, from "the universalizing [view] that
sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent
of stable identities; that apparently heterosexual
persons and object choices are strongly marked by
same-sex influences and
desires."19
Pyper's performance poses the interpretive problem
that Sedgwick identifies in Billy Budd--it
informs both audiences (his comrades on stage and
the spectators in the theater) that "[t]here is
a homosexual in this text--a homosexual
person, presented as different in his essential
nature from the normal men around him," and that
"at the same time, every impulse of
every person in this book that could at all
be called desire could be called homosexual
desire."20
[13] Just as the insistence on Claggart's rarity
in the narration of Billy Budd inevitably
"interpellat[es]" any "'normal nature' as part of
the creation of the homosexual," the use of "rare"
and "mad" by the characters in Observe
to minoritize Pyper's desire is inverted by
Pyper until the "forms of knowledge by which
majority and minority, illness and health, madness
and sanity are to be distinguished"
disintegrate.21
Eventually, Pyper's rhetoric transforms these terms
until, paradoxically, everyone is "rare." "Are you
rare, David?" he asks when Craig coins the term,
eliciting the admission, "When I want to be" (16).
When Moore asks, "What's a rare boyo like you doing
in an army?" (19) Pyper answers by repeating the
question verbatim back to Moore. Pyper's play
creates an environment in which being "rare" is in
fact extremely common; "rare" fastens onto the
subjects using it as well as its intended object,
universalizing its impact while preserving its
minoritizing meaning. This finally evacuates the
term, leaving Moore's question-- "If I'm rare, what
does that make you?" (19)--unanswerable. If "rare"
comes to be as applicable to Moore as it is to
Pyper, there will be no way to know exactly
what that makes Pyper--no way to
conceptualize his desires as fundamentally,
intrinsically different from those of Moore
or any of the others. And if the other characters
catch Pyper's infectious rarity, they must also
succumb to other contagions. [14] If connotation has a "particular
aptitude...for allowing homosexual meaning to be
elided even as it is also being elaborated," and is
thus a practice peculiarly well suited to the
circulation and preservation of the open secret of
Pyper's sexuality, it also has a way of introducing
into a "totalizing, tantalizing play" that
catalyzes the decomposition of the boundaries
connotation was supposed to preserve.22
Pyper's play upon the other characters' dialogue
demonstrates connotation's corrosive effect on the
supposed "integrity" of any "truly other subject
position," rendering the other characters'
professed identities just as performative as
Pyper's.23
Pyper's initial conversation with Roulston shows
how this works at the interpersonal level: PYPER: I hoped you'd never forget my face.
CRAIG: Yous two know each other? ROULSTON: We schooled together. PYPER: But we never shared together.
Roulston's best friends were always much
younger. ROULSTON: You've kept your tongue. PYPER: Are you asking to see it? ROULSTON: I've heard little of you. PYPER: Impossible. You've heard everything.
ROULSTON: I try to avoid scandal. PYPER: Then what do you preach against? (25)
Implying a former or continuing crush on
Roulston, Pyper's first line interpellates Roulston
as a past or potential object of Pyper's "rare"
homoerotic desires. His responses turn each of
Roulston's lines into a declaration of latent
homosexuality: Roulston has a penchant for younger
men, harbors a secret desire for Pyper's tongue,
gets vicarious gratification by consuming the
reports of Pyper's exploits, and in fact is
dependent upon them as the context that structures
his performance as preacher. Roulston can only
escape from the "play of connotation" by performing
an instant identity change: "I no longer preach."
This statement frees Roulston to define himself
into a "truly other subject position," but only by
"simply declaring that [he] occupies such a
position."24
Roulston's identity, either as preacher or
not-preacher, has caught the infection of
performativity from Pyper's. [15] Tracing the process by which Pyper's
performance inevitably accomplishes "the implicit
homosexualization of almost all the other male
characters" would be easy enough, but that is not,
in itself, the project of this reading. Connotation
infects the other cast members not only with
homosexual desire, but with the incoherences that
accompany it.25
The homosexualization of Roulston, Crawford,
Anderson, McIlwaine, Moore, Millen, and of course
Craig, reveals their identities--not just as "men"
or as "heterosexuals" but as "sons of Ulster," as
Protestants, as Orangemen--as performative. Once
Pyper's desires are no longer quarantinable, once
it becomes clear that all the other characters are
also rare boyos, the "something rotten" (44) that,
in Anderson's words, defines Pyper's erotic
relationship with Craig infiltrates the identities
of the others, transforming itself into "something
rotten" (44) that eats away at the idea of a
coherent, "real," essential Ulster. Something Rotten [16] This corrosive effect is clearest in the
scene that follows Anderson and McIlwaine's attack
on the allegedly Catholic Crawford, an incident
which shows how sexual and political orientation
have become fused in this social context. By
physically assaulting a Catholic almost as soon as
they enter the barracks, Anderson and McIlwaine
immediately establish themselves as Protestant
Unionists by proving that they are
aggressive, masculine, and therefore, according to
the prevailing paradigm, heterosexual; the attack
provides "evidence" in support of their initial
declaration of masculinity ("No cause for panic,
ladies. The men are here" [33]) just as it
identifies them as the play's primary proponents of
anti-Catholic bigotry and Orange
extremism.26
In answer to this assertion of heterosexuality
through sectarian violence, Pyper calls their
attention to his "remarkably fine" skin, and
Anderson responds as expected by calling him a
"milksop" (34-5). Instead of letting this
definition stand, Pyper subverts it in an ironic
move that hits Ulster where it counts: (Silence.) Come on, guess. Guess. Guess. (ANDERSON touches PYPER's right hand.
PYPER punches him in the groin.
ANDERSON screams.) MCILWAINE: You dirty bastard! PYPER: That makes three of us. (35) Pyper claims that this act of aggression is
enabled by the "remarkably fine skin" that
supposedly marks him as effeminate and vulnerable.
His ironic and contradictory use of homosexual
signifiers allows him to fight dirty, or, as he
puts it, to "perform magic"--magic being the
concealment of hard muscle under fine skin, the
separation of identity markers from what they
appear to mark, the "trick" that does away with the
possibility of an identity constituted by anything
other than word and gesture. [17] Pyper's blow to Anderson's groin is the
most literal manifestation of the assault mounted
by Pyper's rupture of the homo/hetero binarism upon
the binarisms that structure the identity that
Anderson and the others claim as sons of Ulster.
The magic trick that drags Anderson and McIlwaine
kicking and screaming into the community of rarity
and madness ("That makes three of us") also renders
their identities as Protestant Unionists as
"rotten"--as evacuated of "real" meaning--as
performative as Pyper's identity as a homosexual.
Pyper's magic trick is a retaliation against
Anderson's claim that he can "smell" Catholics
(33); it is his way of hinting that Anderson's
conception of Catholicism is as wrong-headed and
dangerous as the conception of homosexuality that
Pyper's sneak attack has just refuted. [18] Anderson is convinced to leave Crawford
alone when Millen certifies him "no Catholic" and
therefore "one of ours," but implies that this
declaration is unsatisfactory because it is merely
performative: "He might deny he's a Catholic, but
he wouldn't walk in our part of the shipyard" (34).
McIlwaine and Anderson hold onto the belief in an
essential Catholicism which is the defining
counterpart of a Protestant identity that is
equally innate, predetermined, and immutable.
Crawford, who will later come out as Catholic to
Roulston, accepts that construction when he
describes his Catholic identity as inherited from
his mother and indissoluble by any performative
action (conversion, renunciation, etc.) on his
part.27 But
Pyper's magic does its disintegrative work on the
closeted Catholic--and therefore the Protestant--as
it does on the closeted queer and the heterosexual.
[19] Before using the "remarkably fine skin"
line on Moore and Millen, Pyper interrupts their
introduction to Craig by impersonating a commanding
officer: Millen's identity as a "loyal son of Ulster" is
not merely a birthright but also something he has
to be told, something he has to learn by doing.
Pyper's subsequent slip into the "remarkably fine
skin" persona then marks the "son of Ulster"
identity as simply another rhetorical posture, as
performative as Pyper's effeminacy and as ironic.
[20] Pyper follows his Unionist act with the
parable of the "Papist whore," which plays on the
assumption of an essential Catholic (and thus
Protestant) identity. Moore consumes the story
uncritically, even when Pyper claims that this
whore had three legs and died on their wedding
night because he "sawed her middle leg off" (30).
Moore continues to believe Pyper until he claims to
have actually eaten her: "Do you not remember I was
starving in France?" (30). Moore is willing to
accept the story of amputation/castration/murder
because it coincides with his conception of
Catholicism as something biologically encoded and
fixed. Pyper pushes his parable until it shows this
conception to be the monstrous distortion that it
is, forcing Moore to admit the absurdity of the
presumption of difference on which it is based. The
suggestion that this mysterious "third leg" may be
a penis further underscores the connection between
sectarian and heterosexist models of identity;
Pyper claims that it was his "duty as a Protestant"
(30) to perform the "conversion" operation that
also upholds heterosexual rules by bringing the
whore's biology in line with his/her gender
identification and object choice. [21] Pyper's account of his own identity
formation emphasizes his conviction that his "duty
as a Protestant," if he were willing or able to
fulfill it, would commit him to literalizing that
allegorical story of double punishment, to brutally
enforcing both Unionist and heterosexist
ideologies. Pyper comes from an aristocratic
Protestant family "whose proudest boast is that in
their house Sir Edward Carson, saviour of their
tribe, danced in the finest gathering that Armagh
has ever seen" (56). Carson, the voice of militant
Protestant opposition to Irish independence, was
one of the leaders in the fight to keep Ireland
under British control or, failing that, to carve
out a separate region that would have a Protestant
majority and which would remain part of Great
Britain--a vision which was realized in the 1922
treaty that created the entity now known as
Northern Ireland. As such, he was in large part
responsible for shaping the Unionist ideologies and
attitudes shared by the characters of
Observe. Famous for his championship of the
Unionist cause, Carson was also famous as the
attorney who argued the British government's case
against Oscar Wilde in the trial of the century.
"Carson's dance," which through Pyper's dialogue
comes to stand in Observe for the
complicated process of identity production in
Ulster, thus combines the propagation, through
violence as well as rhetoric, of anti-Catholic
paranoia with the enforcement, through imprisonment
as well as legislation, of heterosexual
norms.28
[22] Throughout "Initiation" the other recruits
resist Pyper's rhetoric, refusing to understand
what he is driving at and holding onto their belief
in an Ulster whose meaning transcends social
construction and inheres in something other than
human actions and words. But in "Pairings," it
becomes clear to everyone that "Pyper the bastard
was right" (59)--that that kind of faith is no
longer possible. Each of the four scenes in
"Pairings"--Craig and Pyper at the cave, Moore and
Millen crossing the bridge, Roulston and Crawford
in the church, Anderson and McIlwaine at the
Field--depicts one pair of characters recovering
from the loss of identity they experienced during
their first tour of duty. Moore's struggle to cross
the bridge is perhaps the most literal figuring of
this attempt to cross the epistemological abyss
into which their contact with death has thrown
them; Anderson and McIlwaine's is the clearest
depiction of what that loss involves in political
terms. [23] McIlwaine and Anderson return to "the
holiest spot in Ulster" to celebrate the Twelfth of
July with the traditional Orangemen's parade.
Because it is not actually the twelfth of July,
however, they are out there alone. After alluding
to Pyper's magic trick, McIlwaine suddenly gives up
on the ritual: ANDERSON: What the hell are you doing? Waste
of good whiskey. MCILWAINE: It's no good here on your own. No
good without the speakers. No good without the
bands, no good without the banners. Without the
chaps. No good on your own. (45) Without other performers, without an audience,
the markers refuse to attach to their purported
meaning; the "holy ground" is not holy. McIlwaine
now knows, as Pyper always has, that the Protestant
gods do not stand behind the performance of Ulster,
that it is only the human audience's agreement to
participate that gives the symbols their power.
[24] When McIlwaine finally asks, "Why did we
come here?" Anderson replies, "To beat a drum"
(45). McIlwaine does, finally, beat the drum,
hoping to recover his identity by deliberately
performing an action that he knows has been emptied
of any larger significance. His attempt to recover
an identity by engaging in a performance that does
not claim to be anything but a performance is
prefigured in the gesture that closes "Initiation."
As silence descends on the barracks at the end of
the scene, Pyper, "ignored by all except CRAIG,"
deliberately slits his left hand. Craig then
"attracts the others' attention" by tearing the
sleeve off his shirt and bandaging Pyper's hand, so
that the others hear the final dialogue: PYPER: Red sky. CRAIG: Ulster. PYPER: Ulster. (37) Pyper's self-wounding--an apparently arbitrary
action--now becomes a citation of Unionist
iconography; but only because Craig assembles the
audience and says the words that enact that
meaning. Pyper resists: to Craig's invocation of
the "red hand" of Ulster, Pyper answers "Red sky,"
implying that Craig's political symbolism is as
arbitrary and empty as the superstitious assertion
that a red sky symbolizes bad weather.29 But
when Craig goes a step further and calls this
unexplained gesture "Ulster," Pyper concurs. [25] By this time it is clear that Pyper knows
that the performance of Ulster does not correspond
to any transcendent meaning, any "reality" beyond
the actions that constitute it and the histories
that those actions cite--and that so far he is
alone in this knowledge. Pyper has rebelled and
will continue to rebel against Carson's dance and
the fantasy of the "Protestant gods" (47) who
supposedly organize the performance of Ulster--a
performance that will include the mass slaughter of
its "sons." But finally Pyper, as this scene
foreshadows, agrees to participate in that
performance--on his terms. The play's momentum will
carry the characters through the epistemological
abyss traversed in "Pairings" to the attempted
recuperation, in "Bonding," of an identity that
recognizes itself as performative and performed, an
identity based not upon incoherent definitions and
ruptured binarisms but on the power of play and the
double-edged thrust of Pyper's rhetoric. [26] As Anderson and McIlwaine demonstrate at
the Field, however, creating and maintaining that
kind of identity may be impossible under the
historical pressures that operate on these
characters. If their individual identities are
constructed by their individual actions, those
actions do not take place in a vacuum; they are
conditioned by, and citations of, identities that
have been constructed over time through the actions
of previous generations, through the histories of
allegiance, violence and resistance that determine
identity for Observe's
cast.30
Just as, in Butler's model, the fact that gender is
performative does not mean that a given subject can
choose his/her gender at will or on a whim, the
discovery of a performative element to political
identity does not free these characters from the
material and cultural forces that script that
performance. While an understanding of political
orientation as performative opens up some room for
reinterpretation, the necessity of working within
an established frame of reference--the fact that
the meaning of any given performance must derive
from its relationship to previous
performances--means that the agency of the
performer remains severely limited. [27] Observe dramatizes the difficulty of
departing from the preestablished script by showing
that its characters, even after they have accepted
Pyper's knowledge about the "rotten" core of
identity, are unable to avoid citing historical
versions of political identity or to relinquish the
faith that supports them. Anderson and McIlwaine's
performance in "Pairings" ultimately fails because
it has an irresistible tendency to slip back toward
sincerity, to reach for that impossible faith.
Pyper's acceptance of Craig's name for his gesture
hints that he too may suffer from this desire for
conviction, for stability, for faith in what is
"more than right" (36)--and that he may help shut
down the possibilities that his subversive
performance opened up. Trouble in
Carthage [28] Dido's performance in Carthaginians
also attacks political difference by destabilizing
sexual difference, but uses different methods to
get different results. The Protestant-identified
cast of Observe has a radically different
relationship to the defining binarisms discussed
above than does the urban, contemporary,
Catholic-identified cast of Carthaginians.
While Pyper and the other rare boyos are interested
in recovering a separate and separatist Ulster, the
vision that conditions the formation of political
identity for the tenants of Derry's graveyard is
that of a united Ireland--one that risks referring
back to a precolonial, homogeneous, idealized
Ireland that Carthaginians argues never
existed. Decades after Yeats's death, his
"construction of an ahistorical, timeless,
'original' Ireland" still "retains a residual
attractiveness" for the dispossessed of
Derry.31
Though structured by the same binarisms that define
the sons of Ulster's dream of separatism, the
Yeatsian dream of unity through the recovery of a
lost, originary, purely "Irish" culture is
constituted differently and must be taken apart
using different tools. [29] As Riana O'Dwyer contends, in
Carthaginians "gender differences become a
metaphor for political division;" and that metaphor
is part of a long literary and iconographic
tradition that genders the relationship between
Ireland and its
occupiers.32
This tradition of linking gender roles with
colonizer/colonized roles argues a connection
between the problematic gender identity narratives
that Judith Butler discusses in Gender
Trouble and nationalist identity narratives.
The Lacanian contention that the imposition of
"paternal law" structures the development of the
subject "through the denial of the feminine," which
then becomes the "Other" parallels prevalent
narratives of Irish identity in which the
imposition of British law and order creates the
colonial subject through the denial of what is
native and Irish, which then becomes an equally
disenfranchised
Other.33
Butler points out that this identity narrative
almost inevitably "grounds itself in a story about
what it was like before the advent of the
law," requiring its adherent to fabricate a "story
of origins."34In
Carthaginians McGuinness addresses his
predecessors' temptation to conflate this story of
gender origin with a nationalist identity narrative
and pursue liberation of the repressed Irish
identity by devaluing the masculinized attributes
of the patriarchal/colonizing culture (rationalism,
linearity, law and order, "either/or") in favor of
the feminized ones assigned to the repressed
female/native "Other" (mysticism, cycles, chaos,
"both/and").35
Like the gender narrative with which
it intertwines, this version of nationalist
identity must ground itself in an originary
mythology that constructs a "single, authoritative
account" of "an irrecoverable
past."36
[30] Dido's performance, by dramatizing the
limitations of a conception of gender identity
based on the "utopian postulation of an originally
predifferentiated state...which...suffers the
process of differentiation and hierarchization
through the advent of a repressive law," signals
McGuinness's discomfort with the assumption of an
indigenous, integral Irishness that preexisted the
imposition of colonial
rule.37
Dido's performance in Carthaginians is a
two-pronged assault upon the double "myth of the
origin" that underlies this version of Irish
identity, a refutation of the "false sense of
legitimacy" that myth gives to the various
"culturally oppressive version[s]" of Irish
identity inscribed on the other
characters.38 Dido
shares Pyper's knowledge of what is rotten about
definitions and binarisms, offering his audience,
instead of the spectacle of the closet, the
spectacle of drag. Dido's cross-dressing, however,
never comes close to anything that could be
described as successful mimesis, any more than his
mock-melodrama The Burning Balaclava comes
close to legitimate theater. It is, in fact, an
especially blatant example of what Butler calls
"gender parody," one that does for gender what
Pyper's performance did for sexual
orientation.39
This version of drag performance is calculated to
impress on its audience that "true gender is a
fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of
bodies;" it is not an attempt to either imitate or
caricature an originary gender identity but to
parody "the very notion of an
original."40
[31] Dido's self-dramatization depends for its
context on a specifically Irish conflation of
gender and national identities in order to turn the
deconstruction of gender that drag enables into a
deconstruction of originary Irishness. McGuinness's
(and Dido's) use of the Aeneid as an
intertext is part of an Irish tradition of
"enlist[ing] the Carthaginians as progenitors,"
which began as a response to British attempts to
demonize the Irish by making them descendants of
the
Scythians.41
Cullingford's detailed exploration of the function
of Carthage as a metaphor for Northern Ireland in
contemporary Irish literature demonstrates that the
Scythian/Phoenician origin myth has been used both
by British imperialists and Irish nationalists to
support particular constructions of Irish identity,
and that it has been useful precisely because it
enables the "gendering of genealogy"--it allows its
user to prop up his partisan construction of Irish
ethnic identity on the comparatively solid bedrock
of gender
identity.42
[32] As Cullingford notes, Dido's multilayered
use of the Carthage story in his self-construction,
which involves allusions to the Aeneid,
Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, and various
other pop-culture and classical texts, is
significant not only because of the political
parallels it draws but because it "queers the
gendered binary that constructs colonizers as male
and colonized as
female."43
Playing the double roles of "Queen of Carthage" and
"queen of Derry," providing food and sustenance to
the other graveyard inhabitants during their vigil,
Dido is a parodic Mother Ireland whose performance
plays on the different narratives that have
constructed the dream of an original, homogeneous,
precolonial Ireland. Dido suggests this by
inventing and narrating his own origin myth: The earth of Ireland, so persistently feminized
elsewhere,45 [33] Dido's naming myth, like the play's title, suggests at first that McGuinness is attempting to recover Carthage as an originary archetype for Derry. McGuinness would not be the first to try it; the theory that Ireland may have been originally settled by the Carthaginians was propounded as early as 1772 by Colonel Vallancey, based on a supposed (and spurious) similarity between the Punic and Irish languages. Cullingford's study traces the influence of the Carthaginian theory through the fiction of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan to James Joyce's play on it in Finnegans Wake, to Brian Friel's invocation of it in the final moments of Translations,to Seamus Heaney's play on it in North.46 As Cullingford notes, however, Carthaginians is not an uncomplicated attempt to ground Irish cultural legitimacy in classical genealogy and recover an originary identity. Instead, McGuinness's use of the Carthage analogy becomes part of a highly complex system of allusion that depends on multiple intertexts and which maps Derry onto at least three distinct politico-geographic locations in three separate time periods.47 Making Dido the locus of the Carthage connection complicates it further, and allows him to use the performativity of drag to critique, rather than support, the nationalist search for a precolonial Irish identity. [34] The explicit development of the Carthaginian analogy is assigned to Paul, a former teacher and ex-quizmaster who is now building a pyramid out of garbage in the graveyard while he waits for the dead to rise: PAUL: This city is not Rome, but it has been destroyed by Rome. What city did Rome destroy? |
Click here for a text only version of the article Copyright ©1998
Ann Kibbey.
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