NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND

IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

Excess in
Modern Irish Writing
Spirit and Surplus
Michael McAteer
New Directions in Irish and Irish American
Literature

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Department of English
Framingham State University
Framingham, MA, USA
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 Michael McAteer

Excess in Modern
Irish Writing
Spirit and Surplus
Michael McAteer
Department of English Literatures and Cultures
Institute of English and American Studies
Pázmány Péter Catholic University
Budapest, Hungary

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-37412-9 ISBN 978-3-030-37413-6 (eBook)
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For Tina,
Szeretettel
 Preface

This book has its origins in some of the material that I taught as a lec-
turer in Irish Writing at the former School of English, Queen’s University
Belfast, between 2002 and 2012. Working with old acquaintances and
colleagues Eamonn Hughes, Fran Brearton, Sinéad Sturgeon, Mark Phe-
lan and the late Siobhán Kilfeather, I absorbed and questioned a range
of ideas about modern Irish writing as it developed through the course
of the twentieth century. Out of this I turned towards Alain Badiou’s
work, Being and Event, that was first published in English translation in
2006. I was struck by how one of the most important ideas in this work
bore a direct relation to a particular perspective on Irish writing and cul-
ture that could be traced back to Matthew Arnold’s influential writing
on Celticism: the idea of excess. This idea gained renewed impetus dur-
ing the 2000s with the dramatic acceleration of the Celtic Tiger economy
in the Republic of Ireland (and also Northern Ireland), followed by the
economic collapse of 2008 and subsequent rebooting of the financial-
corporate system. The issue that arose for me against this backdrop was
as follows. Is there a significant relation between the Arnoldian (and later
Wildean) idea of excess and that of Badiou? Given the impact of Arnold’s
idea of Celtic excess and its subsequent transformation in the work of
Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats at the end of the nineteenth century, does
this connection reveal an important relation between excess in twentieth-
century Irish writing and excess as a distinguishing feature of modernity
in its twentieth-century phase? Situating Badiou’s approach in the context

vii
viii PREFACE

of the idea of excess as it appears in modern philosophical thought from

Hegel and Kierkegaard through to Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille,
Adorno, Derrida and Sloterdijk, these are the questions with which my
book is primarily concerned in its discussion of a broad range of works by
major Irish-born authors through the course of the twentieth century.

Budapest, Hungary Michael McAteer

 Acknowledgements

Despite the persistent obstacles encountered, teaching Irish writing in

Hungary since 2012 at the Institute of English and American Studies,
Pázmány University, Budapest, has enriched my perspectives on Irish writ-
ing in its European contexts. This is so not just with regard to those
writers like Joyce and Beckett who are well known for their move to
the continent, but with equal regard to several other writers discussed
in this book, writers who lived predominantly in Ireland or England. This
enrichment is not just a result of different contexts that some students
whom I have taught in Budapest have brought to Irish texts, Hungarian
students in the main, but also students from surrounding countries and
west Asia. I include among these Orsolya Szűcs, Angelika Zheltysheva,
Erzsébet Petrányi, Klára Ladányi, Gellért Hujbert, Angela Sallai, Szófia
Medgyessy and Zsuzsanna Balázs. Since 2015, I have taught Irish liter-
ature with my colleague Márta Pellérdi as part of postgraduate seminars
on Celticism, colonialism and Postcolonialism in Irish, Scottish and En-
glish literature during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. This
has influenced some of the critical perspectives that I put forward in this
book. The same also holds for the introduction course in twentieth cen-
tury British and Irish literature that I have been teaching with Benedek
Tóta since coming to Budapest.
I appreciate the feedback given to an early draft of Chapter 2 of this
book at the ‘Work-In-Progress’ seminar managed ably by Shakespeare
scholar Natália Pikli at the School of English and American Studies,

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) Budapest. In particular, I am grate-

ful to Andrea Timár at ELTE for pointing me in the direction of the
work of Peter Sloterdijk, a thinker who inflects the idea of excess with a
different stress to that of Badiou. Responses from Győző Ferencz, Ferenc
Takács and Dalma Véry have also been useful. In the course of writing
this book, I have been struck by the enthusiasm for Irish literature that
many scholars carry in Central and Eastern Europe. There is the long-
vibrant Irish Studies scene at Prague driven by Ondřej Pilný, Clare Wallace
and Justin Quinn. I have also encountered the admirable efforts of Aidan
O’Malley in Zagreb and Rijeka, Erika Mihálycsa in Clúj/Kolosvár, Wit
Pietrzak, Michael Lachmann and Katarzyna Ojrznyska at Lódž, Leszek
Drong at Katowice, Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs at Vienna and Stefan
Pajović at Novi Sad. My journey in writing this book in Budapest has been
made rewarding in coming to know the Hungarian literary translator and
Armagh native, Owen Good; modern Irish historian and Szeged native,
Lili Zach; gender studies and Irish poetry scholar, Borbála Faragó; Sadhbh
De Barra and Zsuzsanna Kiss. It has also been enriched by the visits of var-
ious Irish writers and scholars to Budapest since 2013, especially Medbh
McGuckian, Deirdre Madden, Glenn Patterson, Gearóid MacLochlainn
and Sorcha de Brún. The journey could not have been undertaken with-
out the affection and companionship of my wife Eglantina. I dedicate this
book to her indelible sense of fun; her ineffable patience; her love of fres-
coes, oil painting and figure skating; her saintly capacity to summon a
smile when dealing with the delights of Hungarian administration.
 Praise for Excess in Modern Irish
Writing

“In his brilliantly exposed and finely nuanced study, Michael McAteer
demonstrates the centrality of various forms of excess in Irish writing from
the period of the Revival to the present. His meticulous and incisive read-
ings of a wide array of writers from W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and James
Joyce to Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Glenn Patterson, and Medbh
McGuckian unearth deep-seated connections between their works. Above
all, McAteer illuminatingly theorises the multiple political and philosoph-
ical dimensions of excess as an animating and variegated facet of Irish
writing. His arrestingly original account of the ongoing aesthetics of ex-
cess deftly reconceptualises them and invites us to revise our views of a
host of texts.”
—Professor Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin

“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ It was William Blake,
most English of poets, who wrote this line in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell. Many decades later, Matthew Arnold identified the Celtic peoples
with an extravagance of imagination and a stubbornly wayward refusal to
confront the despotism of fact. By the end of the nineteenth century Irish
writers, Wilde and Yeats at their foremost, were revaluating this associa-
tion of Irishness and excess, rethinking Arnold through Marx, Schopen-
hauer and Nietzsche, as later generations of writers would through Bataille
and Heidegger, to spin literary gold. In this remarkable study, written
in a luminously clear style and with real critical verve, Michael McAteer

xi
xii PRAISE FOR EXCESS IN MODERN IRISH WRITING

makes several brilliant raids on modern Irish literature in the modernist

and contemporary moments and on French and German philosophies of
the abject and the ecstatic to show just how protean, productive and com-
plex the concept of excess remains even today. McAteer opens a startling
new turn in Irish studies where literature and philosophy, the material and
spiritual converge in brilliant detonations.”
—Professor Joe Cleary, Yale University
 Contents

1 Introduction: The Idea of Excess 1

Part I Mystical Excess

2 Excess as Spiritual Ecstasy: Yeats and Joyce 21

3 Oriental Excess: Wilde, Yeats, MacNeice 43

4 Transgressive Sacrifice: Pearse, Yeats, Carr 67

Part II Material Excess

5 Money and Melodrama: Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw 95

6 Disposable Living: O’Casey, Beckett, Doyle 119

7 Trashing Ulster: Patterson and Reid 143

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

Part III Mythic and Linguistic Excess

8 Mythic Excess: Finnegans Wake 171

9 Voiding the Subject: Bowen and Beckett 199

10 Here Beyond: Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian 221

Conclusion 245

Bibliography 249

Index 271
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Idea of Excess

Within the field of Irish cultural and literary criticism that has expanded
enormously—excessively perhaps—over the past thirty years, the extent
of direct references to the idea of excess is paradoxically moderate. The
opening of David Lloyd’s Ireland and Postcolonial Modernity hints at
why this may be so: excess is simply taken for granted in stereotypical
ideas of Irishness. Considering the human mouth as a primary locus of
activity, Lloyd contends that what goes on in an Irish mouth ‘does so to
excess. We drink too much and talk too much, at times even too well:
we sing and we blather, bawl as we brawl and wail as we grieve’.1 On
the matter of alcohol consumption, the idea of excess is embedded in
the Catholic religious movement that was founded to counteract it: the
Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, begun in 1898 by the Jesuit priest,
James Cullen. The prayer of the Pioneers refers to ‘the conversion of
excessive drinkers’.2 Diarmuid Ferriter points out that however much it
might have been a stereotype, the extent of ‘actually-existing alcoholism’
in late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Ireland was remarkable. Over
13 million pounds were spent annually on alcohol in the last decade of
the nineteenth century. In 1891–1892, 100,528 arrests for drunkenness
were recorded within a population of less than 3.5 million people. Ferriter
draws attention to the fact that, against this backdrop, the Pioneer Total
Abstinence Association went on to become the largest lay Catholic organi-
zation in twentieth-century Ireland and ‘as a percentage of its population,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_1
2 M. MCATEER

one of the largest movements of its kind in the world’.3 The result was a
society that combined excessive drinking with excessive abstemiousness.
In contrast to such notions as transgression and subversion in Irish
criticism, the idea of excess in Irish writing and culture enjoys much less
consensus as to its emancipatory value. In her evaluation of the perfor-
mance of memory in modern Irish culture, Emilie Pine notes the persis-
tence of the figure of the ghost in Irish film and drama. Drawing on the
thought of Paul Ricoeur, Pine considers how the ghost in Irish culture
manifests an ‘excess of memory’, the past exerting ‘an excessive grip’ on
identities and attitudes into the present times.4 In her powerful attack
on Martin McDonagh’s backfired attempt to Tarantino-ize the North-
ern Irish Troubles with his 2001 play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Mary
Luckhurst refutes the notion that McDonagh’s ‘excess’ is radical. On the
contrary, she argues, McDonagh trades in some of the most jaded English
stereotypes of the Irish temperament as violent and stupid.5 Victor Merri-
man goes further in suggesting that the success of McDonagh’s plays from
the later 1990s measures the extent to which Irish society was entering ‘a
hyperactive phase of globalization’ that was producing an indigenous new
generation of millionaires for the first time in the history of the Irish state.
By this account, the nativist excess of which Luckhurst writes becomes an
inverse image of the corporatist consumer excess of the globalized Ireland
that Merriman identifies as the ideal audience for McDonagh’s so-called
‘white-trash’ theatre, within which Irish historical experience is reduced
to garbage, surplus to trans-national corporatist capitalist requirements.6
There are moments in which Irish criticism endorses the view of excess
as a radical challenge to authoritarian and hegemonic tendencies. In her
consideration of Charles Gavan Duffy’s dispute with W. B. Yeats over
plans for a New Irish Library during the 1890s, Helen O’Connell sees
the pragmatist nationalism of Duffy as a socially conservative ‘regulating
force, fostering a necessary postponement of gratification and a reining in
of excess (both literary and political)’.7 She notes that one of the books
selected by Duffy for inclusion in the New Irish Library, E. M. Lynch’s
1894 adaptation of a Balzac novel under the title A Parish Providence,
the author was adamant in his refusal to idealize the Irish peasant in any
way. O’Connell regards Lynch’s representation of practical, materialistic
Irish peasants as a deliberate rebuttal of the spiritual otherworldly orien-
tation that Yeats attributed to them in his poetry and folklore writings
of the 1880s. In keeping with an ideology of improvement in Irish writ-
ing that O’Connell tracks through the course of the nineteenth century,
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 3

Lynch’s novel represents Duffy’s practical nationalist rejection of the idea

of the native rural Irish people as ‘“highly strung” (and therefore given
to excess)’, an idea that feeds what O’Connell identifies as the aesthetics
of excess in the 1890s writing of Yeats, developed further in the 1900s
dramas of Synge.8
Discussing what Synge referred to as ‘the Rabelaisian note’ when
defending The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, Bernadette Bourke
lauds Rabelais for bringing to the fore an old medieval peasant tradition
of ‘rituals and carnival excesses’ that returns on stage in the 1990s Irish
dramas of Marina Carr.9 Likewise, Mária Kurdi praises Marina Carr’s
drama for its ‘Gothic excess’.10 Drawing on the thought of Georges
Bataille, Michael Mays offers a plausible argument for the idea of excess
as a central component in the hostility towards middle-class commercial-
ism that is a feature of Yeats’s poetry during the 1910s, particularly the
volume, Responsibilities. Mays identifies in this hostility Yeats’s response
to the coercive force of homogenization that bourgeois society in Ireland
was imposing upon the human impulse to creative freedom and inventive
living during his era. Mays judges the artistic admiration in which Yeats
holds the idea of excess to be his counter-reaction to this homogenization,
citing his 1897 essay ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ and his American
lectures of 1932–1933 by way of examples.11 Flore Coulouma observes
the same counter-homogenizing deployment of excess being undertaken
in a very different way and in a very different context: The Irish Times
columns of Myles na nGopaleen, pseudonym for Brian O’Nolan, more
widely known as the novelist Flann O’Brien. The very name of the news-
paper column, An Cruiskeen Lawn (the little brimming jug), discloses the
function of the satire that O’Brien deploys within it: working ‘by excess’
in order to expose what Coulouma regards as ‘the vacuity’ of its various
targets, whether they be state practices of mid-twentieth-century Ireland,
or figures of importance in Irish society of the time.12
Both Mays’ reading of Yeatsian excess and Coulouma’s reading of
excess in O’Brien’s Myles na gCopaleen correspond in different ways to
the value laid upon excess within the distinction that Victor Merriman
draws between postcolonial and neo-colonial theatre in modern Ireland.
The latter endorses the contemporary moment of globalization as a point
of final arrival, the former instead draws upon the Irish past ‘as a libertar-
ian struggle to exceed the coercive boundaries set by neo-colonial con-
ditions’.13 The problem with Merriman’s proposition, however, is that
it deploys excess to attack excess. Exceeding those restrictive boundaries
4 M. MCATEER

that Mays, drawing on Bataille’s concept of excess, observes as symp-

tomatic of a process of homogenization in capitalist society, the post-
colonial Irish drama that Merriman prefers is positioned in opposition
to excess as it appears in two inter-related aspects. These profiles are that
of historical Irish culture when it is considered dispensable as garbage
within the contemporary phase of globalization; that of the exorbitant
levels of consumerism and debt within Irish society during the period of
the so-called Celtic Tiger economy of 1998–2008 and even in the cur-
rent post-Celtic Tiger economic phase of economic collapse and badly
managed recovery.
Merriman’s contradictory attitudes to the notion of excess reach back
to the thought of Patrick Pearse at the start of the twentieth century.
Along with that of Christ, the mythical figure of Cuchulain was Pearse’s
greatest inspiration in leading him eventually to direct a rebellion against
British rule in Ireland in 1916. Philip O’Leary points out that Pearse
worked from the Book of Leinster medieval manuscript version of the Táin
Bó Cuailgne (War of the Bull of Cooley) when reading of Cuchulain’s
exploits and his defence of Ulster in the legendary Irish saga. In doing
so, Pearse avoided the accounts of the Táin that are found in two other
medieval Irish manuscripts, Lebor na hUidre (UL) and the Yellow Book
of Lecan (YL). Apart from the fact that the accounts contained in these
manuscripts are more fragmented than that found in the Book of Leinster,
they also present a more excessive image of the Irish warrior. O’Leary
mentions two incidents in the UL and the YL that Pearse would have
wished to avoid in the image of chivalrous heroism that he cultivated
for his students: Cuchulain beating fifty members of the Boy Troop and
subsequently hiding from their parents: Cuchulain killing a servant for
waking him up too early (an understandable reaction, perhaps, in a coun-
try that the ancient Romans called ‘Hibernia’). Rejecting the UL and the
YL manuscript versions, Pearse was also rejecting accounts that pictured
Cuchulain in ‘an excessively violent light’.14 Pearse’s unease with violent
excess in this instance contrasts with his admiring evocation of Cuchu-
lain’s excess of service in another. In his famous attack of 1912 on the
British education system in Ireland, ‘The Murder Machine’, he writes of
Cuchulain showing a ‘love and a service so excessive as to annihilate all
thought of self’, a display of humility that Pearse regards not only as the
inspiration of the tale of Cuchulain, but also that of the life of the sixth-
century Irish abbot, St. Colmcille.15 Pearse’s phrase may well have been
the direct source for a famous couplet that Yeats employs in his poem
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 5

commemorating the 1916 Rising, ‘Easter 1916’, one in which the poet
wonders if the rebels had been bewildered by ‘excess of love’.16 Yeats’s
own attitude to excess on this occasion repeats the contradiction in that
of Pearse. Excess may have led Pearse and his comrades to their deaths,
deaths that may ultimately prove to have been ‘needless’ in Yeats’s mind.
If this was indeed the case, then the violence that the rebels unleashed in
Dublin in April 1916 would have to be considered, like that of Cuchu-
lain, as excessive in nature. Yet this same excess is precisely the kind of
counter-homogenizing freedom of spirit that Yeats regards as the mark of
the artist, the aristocrat and the wandering beggar.
Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus takes this conflict-
ing attitude as its point of departure, tracing it to Matthew Arnold’s idea
of the Celt in his famous 1867 work, On the Study of Celtic Literature,
and the reaction to Arnold’s thought that we find in the writing of Oscar
Wilde. Arnold’s work has received widespread attention in Irish criticism
over the past thirty years. This is particularly so with regard to what is seen
as his colonial attitude to Ireland, underwritten by a racial idea of civi-
lization through which he supports his case for political union between
Ireland and Britain (Irish critics have little to say on Arnold’s extensive
discussion of Welsh literature as Celtic in On the Study of Celtic Litera-
ture).17 Arnold regards the Celt as the ‘colossal, impetuous, adventurous
wanderer, the Titan of the early world’ and comments on the Celt ‘strain-
ing human nature further than it will stand’.18 However much it carries
the weight of racial assumption that informed ethnological studies as they
developed during the Victorian era, Arnold’s judgement proves difficult
to refute when readers encounter the warp-spasm or so-called ríastrad
that Cuchulain undergoes in moments of untamed fury in the Táin Bó
Cuailgne. These are moments in which the warrior’s bodily organs not
only inflate to enormous proportions but also turn inside out.19
Arnold’s well-known argument is that whereas the civilization of
ancient Greece (his ideal model) exhibits measure and balance, that of the
Celts is marked by passionate excess, incapable of coming to terms with
what he calls ‘the despotism of fact’. This is a phrase that Arnold borrows
from his friend, the French priest Henri Martin. Martin includes a chapter
on the Celts in his 1830s multi-volume work, Histoire de France.20 Joseph
Valente categorizes this idea according to an intriguing, if internally con-
tradictory, definition of manhood pertaining to the Victorian era as one of
‘self-disciplined excess’.21 In support of this notion, Valente cites Arnold’s
injunction that the Celt should not have less passionate feeling, but that
6 M. MCATEER

he should have more mastery of it. Indeed, Arnold writes that one can
never have enough of sensibility—‘the power of quick and strong percep-
tion and emotion’—but only so long as one remains its master and not
its slave.22 There is a fundamental contradiction at work here: by def-
inition, excess of feeling cannot be mastered. If it can, it is no longer
an excess. Valente considers Cuchulain’s ríastrad as the disclosure of this
contradiction through the impossibility of maintaining both of its terms.
What Valente terms the ‘hypermasculinity’ of Cuchulain in this moment
of fury at once establishes and subverts the grounds of the warrior’s man-
hood, when manhood is understood in Arnold’s Victorian terms: ‘the
very excessiveness whereby it [the ríastrad] comes to simulate an ideal of
masculinity simultaneously spells a loss of the rudimentary benchmark of
masculinity, the capacity for effective self-will’.23
In her consideration of the influence on Oscar Wilde of Ireland’s pre-
eminent melodramatist of the nineteenth century, Dion Boucicault, Sos
Eltis turns to Wilde’s essay ‘The Critic as Artist’ in the light of Arnold’s
ideas on passionate but impractical Celticism. Wilde directly refutes the
assertion that Arnold makes in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present
Time’ (1865). This is Arnold’s belief that the duty of criticism across all
branches of learning is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’.24 This
statement bears a direct relation to ‘the despotism of fact’ against which
the Celt is constantly rebelling as Arnold sees it. In his dialogue with
Gilbert, the character Ernest in Wilde’s ‘The Critic as Artist’ pronounces
‘that the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
not’.25 That which Arnold denigrates in On the Study of Celtic Literature
Wilde regards as a virtue; that which Arnold considers as confined to past
times (the Celt as interesting for his/her past rather than his/her present
condition), is now considered modern.26 If the Celt is one who rebels
against ‘the despotism of fact’, then s/he epitomizes the spirit of modern
criticism for Wilde. Eltis considers Wilde’s turning Arnold’s thought on
its head as a gesture of immense significance. It is one in which Celticism
becomes the embodiment rather than the antithesis of the modern spirit:
‘Celticism is no longer a decorative sprinkling of fairy dust on the vital
project of imperial expansion, industry and scientific progress; it is the
driving intellectual force of civilization’.27
The argument of Eltis is compelling, particularly when considered in
relation to Jarlath Killeen’s exploration of Wilde’s writings in relation to
nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism and Catholic–Protestant doctrinal
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 7

issues in England and Ireland.28 If Wilde radicalizes Celticism as epito-

mizing the spirit of modern civilization, however, then this must involve a
concomitant revision of Arnold’s understanding of modern culture as lib-
eral, rational and progressive. The spirit of the modern age moves from
Arnoldian reason to Wildean excess. Wilde’s idea of the modern spirit as
one of perpetual creative invention stands squarely at odds with Arnold’s
insistence on balance and measure in On the Study of Celtic Literature.
It is in this aspect that Wilde’s affirmative revaluation of Arnold’s idea
of the Celtic temperament can be re-conceived as emphatically modern—
Wilde’s contemporary times (and personal lifestyle) as one of excess. In
doing so, however, those Arnoldian notions of imperial expansion, indus-
try and scientific progress to which Eltis refers are thrown into crisis.
Considering the role of idleness in Wilde’s thought, Gregory Dob-
bins makes a telling observation that illustrates this transition from the
Arnoldian conception of culture to the Wildean. Discussing Wilde’s affec-
tation of idleness in his writing and lifestyle as epitomizing his attachment
to English upper-class society, what Dobbins terms ‘the leisure class’,
Dobbins notices that Wilde introduces an element of parody into his
performance. He does so by ‘making it excessive, a spectacle, something
not “natural” but artificial’.29 Dobbins argues that through this excessive-
quality, the English stereotype of Irish laziness is implicitly brought into
consideration in the aristocratic leisure lifestyle that Wilde represents.30
As a result, Arnold’s contrast of the Saxon industry and sobriety against
Celtic ineffective dreaminess is brought seriously into question. Dobbins
overreaches himself in attributing idleness to the entire panoply of late
Victorian English upper-class society as presented in Wilde’s plays. An
Ideal Husband, for example, is a play in which British imperial policy
is at stake. His argument is also weakened by its lack of any reference
to the seminal work on the leisure class that was first published just a
year before Wilde’s death in November 1900: Thornstein Veblen’s The-
ory of the Leisure Class (1899). This being said, his blending of the idea
of English upper-class leisure with that of native Irish indolence through
Wilde’s performance of excess works against imperial values of industry,
science and progress, even if that blending is implicit only in Wilde’s
writing. Wilde never lived among the Irish migrant poor in England and
whatever he may have thought of their plight, he still moved in some of
the most privileged circles of London society until his trials and impris-
onment in 1895. For this reason, Dobbins’s contention is in serious need
of qualification. Nevertheless, his suggestion remains an intriguing one:
8 M. MCATEER

through Wilde’s performance of leisure, English aristocrats appeared vir-

tually indistinguishable in temperament from Irish paupers, pointing to
the profound challenge within Wilde’s life and writing to colonial rela-
tions between the English ruling class and the Irish poor. Dobbins’s inter-
pretation of Wilde thereby indicates a transition from the confident mod-
ernizing ethos of the Victorian era to the insecurities of modernism.31
Wilde is aware of this movement towards a modernist sensibility when
he speaks of ‘the object in itself as it really is not’. In this phrase, he is
doing something more than refuting Arnold. He is drawing a direct rela-
tion between excess and negation, identifying a void in being itself, the
consciousness of which is a distinctive feature of a modern temperament.
On two occasions in On the Study of Celtic Literature, Arnold writes
of the Celt’s ‘nervous exaltation’ as expressing its ‘feminine’ character
and its gift of rendering ‘the magical charm of nature’.32 While consid-
erable attention has been given to the obvious gendering of ethnicity at
work in this statement, of equal interest is the manner in which it antici-
pates what Regenia Gagnier observes as an emphasis upon nerves, rather
than the more ‘Romantic-Victorian Senses’, as a feature of late nineteenth
century decadence.33 We see this transition from sensibility to nervous-
ness through Wilde’s reformulation of Arnold’s ‘nervous exaltation’ to
an almost existential condition of modern anxiety in the face of the inex-
pressible (one that predisposed the Celt of antiquity to magical beliefs and
practices). As with the inexpressible dimension of Cuculain’s ríastrad, the
Celtic predisposition to imaginative excess registers a dimension of nullity
in existence itself. In the form of modernized Celticism, Wilde’s object
‘as it really is not’ signifies the presence of a void within the object as it is
encountered, a void that generates a sense of crisis. Just as Arnold asso-
ciates the nervous sentimentality that he attributes to the Celtic tempera-
ment with a long history of inevitable failure, likewise there is an extensive
list of modernist authors who came to literature from personal traumas
that left them susceptible to a nervous disorder.34 Indeed the imprison-
ment and death of Wilde himself conjoins this history of defeated Celts
with the collapses of the modernist and proto-modernist Décadents. If the
nineteenth century was so very British, the twentieth was wildly Irish.
My discussion of twentieth-century Irish literature in Excess in Mod-
ern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus develops in terms of an intersection
between the idea of excess as a characteristic of the Celtic temperament
and excess as a constitutive feature of modern thought. I consider excess
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 9

in the work of a broad range of influential thinkers from the nineteenth to

the late twentieth century when discussing drama, fiction and poetry by
Irish-born authors across the twentieth century. These include contempo-
rary thinkers who present excess under different aspects. Foremost among
these is Alain Badiou, particularly with regard to his mathematical set the-
ory account of being for which the notions of excess and the void are fun-
damental. Badiou’s ideas on excess are particularly intriguing in challeng-
ing the view that modern Irish literature—with the major exceptions of
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett—is generally recalcitrant to mathemat-
ical logic interpretation. My study draws upon Badiou’s notions on set
theory as they relate to his ideas of the void and the point of excess when
examining excess in works by Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Joyce, Louis MacNeice,
Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. Along
with Slavoj Žižek, another important thinker of recent times for whom
the role of excess is central is Peter Sloterdijk. Of particular significance
to this study in Sloterdijk’s theory of the spherical are his ideas of the
body exceeding itself through absorption of (or penetration) by external
elements and the importance that he attributes to artificial objects form-
ing part of the human body, thereby extending the ‘natural’ body into
the ‘artificial’. This is particularly relevant to the presence of excess in the
form of artificial body parts in works by Sean O’Casey, Beckett and Roddy
Doyle.
Examining works by Yeats in Part I of Excess in Modern Irish Writing:
Spirit and Surplus, I discuss the ways in which the influence of Nietzsche
on Yeats’s thought (mediated by Yeats’s dedicated study of William Blake)
accounts in significant measure for Yeats’s image of the Irish temperament
as excessive in nature. What Arnold had identified as a specifically Celtic
phenomenon is, in Yeats’s work, a universal condition such as Nietzsche
identifies it in his writing on Dionysian excess: a condition that may never-
theless appear in Irish culture in a pronounced fashion. In his 1897 essay,
‘The Celtic Element in Celtic Literature’, Yeats revises Arnold’s belief that
‘natural magic’ was a distinctively Celtic belief and practice. Instead, Yeats
regards the pagan nature-worship of the Celts as ‘the ancient religion of
the world, the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before
her’.35 However much Yeats’s argument can be contested, still it shows
that even in one as pre-occupied with Ireland as he, there is an under-
standing of Irish experience as part of world experience.
Sinéad Garrigan Mattar has persuasively argued for the influence of
general anthropological notions of animism in Yeats’s writings on Irish
10 M. MCATEER

folklore during the 1880s–1890s, writings that perceived in accounts

of Irish supernatural experience the same animistic features that Yeats
detected in the Ainu tribes of Siberia as described by B. Douglas Howard,
for example.36 Garrigan Mattar’s regards animism in so-called primitive
societies through contemporary anthropological thought as a radical form
of ‘being-in-the-world’ rather than a long-gone set of primitive beliefs.
Likewise, when we recognize the consonance between Nietzsche’s idea
of Dionysian excess in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music
and this ‘troubled ecstasy’ before nature that Yeats identifies in the Celt,
we can see how his attitude to pagan Celtic religion anticipates in vari-
ous ways the place of excess in modern thought. Significant in relation
to this is Nietzsche’s acquaintance during the 1860s with the German
scholar Ernst Windisch at the University of Leipzig. Celticist, philologist
and Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Linguistics, Windisch worked
on old Irish manuscripts with Whiteley Stokes and taught Kuno Meyer
at Leipzig. Meyer would become one of the most important philological
scholars for the study of the Irish language and of old Irish manuscripts
during the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth century.37
In addition to Yeats’s play Where There Is Nothing and the so-called
epiphany scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Part I
of Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus considers excess in
the following works: Wilde’s Salomé and The Importance of Being Ernest ;
Yeats’s ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’; Louis MacNeice’s Indian poems
‘Didymus’ and ‘Letter from India’. Considering the role of excess within
Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, my discussion identifies an impor-
tant Irish dimension in relation to the view of Celtic excess as Oriental in
nature or origin. This Orientalist form of excess is examined in relation
to the idea and the function of excess within the modern philosophical
writing of Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida.
I conclude Part I with a consideration of sacrificial excess in three
plays from the twentieth century: Patrick Pearse’s The Master, Yeats’s
Purgatory and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats … The modern criti-
cal understanding of excess in sacrificial violence can be traced back to
Søren Kierkegaard’s famous reflection on the call of Yahweh to Abraham
to kill his son Isaac. In his 1843 work, Fear and Trembling , Kierkegaard
conceptualizes one of the most important ideas for modern philosophy
in terms of this biblical narrative. Taking Abraham’s circumstance as his
model, Kierkegaard argues for the need to take decisive action as the basis
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 11

of authentic self-realization, without any prior ethical calculation regard-

ing the value of the action or its consequences. Kierkegaard’s argument
is an important precedent for Bataille’s radical ideas on sacrificial violence
in works written during the 1920s and the 1930s. In Chapter 4, ‘Trans-
gressive Sacrifice: Pearse, Yeats, Carr’, I address sacrifice as presented in
the plays by Pearse, Yeats and Carr in terms of the excessive nature of
Kierkegaard’s notion of sacrifice in Fear and Trembling , thereby propos-
ing a new understanding of the politics of Pearse’s personal sacrifice as
leader of the 1916 Irish rebellion. In the process, I draw attention to
the relation between sacrifice as excess in the thought of Kierkegaard and
Bataille. I also consider these Irish theatrical representations of sacrifice in
terms of the modern interpretation of guilt that Heidegger proposes as
a constitutive dimension of Dasein in its primordial orientation towards
death.
Recognizing that the presence of excess is no more unique to mod-
ern Irish experience than to that of any other modern society, it is still
important to acknowledge some of the distinctive ways in which excess
is addressed in works by authors from Ireland. Indeed, when consider-
ing excess in its material aspect, the case of modern Irish writing might
be regarded as exemplary to some degree. Part II of Excess in Modern
Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus addresses this material aspect in two
senses: (1) the relation between the kind of emotional excess that Arnold
attributed to the Celtic personality and such economic forms of excess
as debt and inflation; (2) excess in the form of the waste product that is
generated in the process of material production. An obvious point of ref-
erence here is the impact of the Great Famine in the 1840s that rendered a
large section of the Irish population as surplus to economic requirements.
Excess in the form of human beings as waste product was made strik-
ingly apparent on one occasion in this context when the British Liberal
prime minister John Russell described the Irish destitute who were emi-
grating to North America during the years of the Famine as ‘the rubbish
of the home population’.38 My approach to these economic and political
aspects of excess in Irish contexts draws in the first instance upon the role
of excess in the forms of surplus value and waste product that appear in
Marx’s economic writings. In addressing the relationship between emo-
tional and economic inflation, I consider the ways in which Marx’s idea of
profit as a measure of the time that a worker spends working for nothing
is internalized existentially in Kierkegaard’s reflections on the desire for
self-annihilation.
12 M. MCATEER

The intimate connection between economic and emotional excess

appears strikingly under the aspect of marriage in Irish writing. In
Chapter 5, ‘Money and Melodrama: Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw’, I consider
seminal dramatic works by Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde and George
Bernard Shaw in terms of the affective and financial issues relating to
marriage. In so doing, I identify how the presence of a void in these
plays marks a critical point of intersection between emotional excess, the
threat of bankruptcy and the recycling of leftover culture. This analysis is
extended in Chapter 6, ‘Disposable Living: O’Casey, Beckett, Doyle’, to
consider how—as leftover objects—human agents live off leftover equip-
ment in such a way as to survive in the realm of excess produce. Looking
at works by Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett and Roddy Doyle, my inter-
est is in the transformation of human agents in this process, particularly
when leftover equipment (such as a wooden leg) becomes effectively inte-
grated into the body. I discuss the representation of human body parts
in the work of these Dublin-born writers in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s
consideration of a contemporary relationship between the human body
and technology.39 Assessing this in relation to characters like O’Casey’s
Captain Boyle, Beckett’s Molloy and Doyle’s Henry Smart, I contextual-
ize Sloterdijk’s perspective in relation to Heidegger’s post-war concept of
human agents reduced to the condition of a ‘standing-reserve’: a surplus
maintained and ready to be put into motion at any time for the generation
of energy.40
Part II of Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus concludes
with a discussion of violence and material excess in works of fiction and
drama from Northern Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s. I examine
the extent to which Northern Irish writing reflects a situation of excess in
the political sense: a state formation that has existed beyond the relative
civic order of the Great Britain since the 1920s, and one that has perpet-
ually remained threateningly beyond the administrative authority of the
Republic of Ireland. Over the course of the twentieth century, Northern
Ireland has elicited contradictory impulses from British and Irish Govern-
ments to assimilate or to repel, a testament to its political condition as
exceeding the sovereign integrity of the neighbouring nation-states. The
crisis that the Irish border has presented to the British and Irish Gov-
ernments since the British Brexit referendum of 2016 is just the latest
example of a long-drawn confusion since the border first came into oper-
ation in the early 1920s. Drawing on Derrida’s idea of excess in the form
of the parasite when discussing Glenn Patterson’s 1988 novel Burning
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 13

Your Own and Belfast plays from 1986 and 1996 by Christina Reid, I
consider how George Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalist notion of revolutionary
violence—with its concepts of myth and infinity exceeding all norms of
statehood—presents a new form of understanding sectarian, paramilitary
and state violence in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s.
Part 3 of Excess in Modern Irish Writing: Spirit and Surplus addresses
excess in modern Irish literature in terms of myth, focusing on the ques-
tion of language in the process. Beginning with a discussion of the mythic
and linguistic aspects of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, I consider how Joyce
inflates Irish mythology to an infinite degree through his exploration of
associations with eastern civilizations: linguistic, historical and geograph-
ical. Drawing on Badiou’s set theory account of the relation between
excess and the void, I consider how Finnegans Wake presents origina-
tion itself—both in the sense of the earliest and of the new—as an act
of violence through writing. In the process, I situate Badiou’s concept of
the event in relation to Sorel’s idea of the mythic stature of a revolution-
ary situation. In the process, excess in Finnegans Wake is contextualized
in relation to the violence that followed the 1916 rebellion in Ireland as
it in turn connected to the wider circumstances of political violence in
Europe in the early twentieth century.
I develop this evaluation of mythic and linguistic aspects of excess in
Irish writing by turning to Elizabeth Bowen’s London war-time novel,
The Heat of the Day, as it relates to Beckett’s trilogy of the 1950s. At issue
here is language itself as a form of excess. A relation between infinity and
the absolute minimum appears in these works, pointing to that feature of
the event as Badiou defines it, by which something emerges from nothing.
I consider the multitudinous references that the narrative voice of The
Unnamable makes to ‘nothing’ in describing the figure of Worm.41 The
sheer magnitude of nothingness that Louie Lewis feels in The Heat of the
Day is also brought into consideration, as is the sense that Robert Kelway
feels in Bowen’s novel of he and Stella Rodney existing in a complete
void.42 Addressing these features in terms of the idea of nothingness as it
appears in the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, I also evaluate Beckett
and Bowen’s novels in the light of Badiou’s contention that the void can
only be identified in excess of the situation to which it is connected.43
The final Chapter 10, ‘Here Beyond: Heaney, Longley, Muldoon,
McGuckian’, examines varieties of excess in some key poems that emerged
from Northern Ireland since the outbreak of political violence at the end
14 M. MCATEER

of the 1960s. I consider Heaney’s poem from the early 1970s, ‘What-
ever You Say Say Nothing’, in terms of Badiou’s ideas on belonging and
inclusion, excess and the void. I discuss Michael Longley’s poem on polit-
ical violence in 1980s Belfast, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’, in connection with
Bataille’s association of delicacy and death in his theory of nature as an
endless expenditure. Furthermore, I consider the formal reticence that
marks both poems in responding to violence. Heidegger argues that reti-
cence is the most appropriate form of response to the shock of the event,
triggered by the manner in which the event suddenly exceeds meaning.
It is through this idea of Heidegger’s that I assess the poetic formality of
‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ and ‘The Ice-Cream Man’.
One of the most interesting poems on the political situation in North-
ern Ireland during the Troubles is Paul Muldoon’s ‘The More a Man
Has the More a Man Wants’ from his 1983 collection, Quoof. I discuss
excess in this poem in terms of Badiou’s description of the limit ordinal
number: a number that guarantees the succession of a sequence but that
always occupies the place of the Other to the entire sequence itself.44
Reading the central figure of Gallogly in this poem as an instance of the
limit ordinal number in operation, I illustrate the poem’s congruence
with the associative technique of Finnegans Wake. It thereby becomes
evident that Muldoon’s use of myth generates the excess of the poem
over the various contexts to which it alludes. A similar pattern is evident
in myth as it appears in the poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Instead of
bringing disparate circumstances under the umbrella of a central mythic
order, McGuckian employs mythic allusion to exceed such order. By way
of examples, I consider the manner through which she interweaves the
Irish legend of the absconding lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne in her 1988
poem, ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’, with the love affair of Olga Ivinskaya and
Boris Pasternak in Stalinist-era Russia. I also discuss the various associated
layers of ‘The Dream-Language of Fergus’ from the same collection, On
Ballycastle Beach. I draw attention to the excess that is created through
a specific process of doubling in both poems, a process evident in Mul-
doon’s poem also and one that can be traced back to the notion ‘Dyou-
blong’, from Finnegans Wake. Doubling in these poems exemplifies the
excess that is generated in the procedure of ‘the counting of the count’, a
notion that Badiou draws from mathematical set theory.45 This procedure
is in turn analogous with the original doubling that Peter Sloterdijk iden-
tifies in ancient cults of the magic vulva, a notion of special significance
to the topic of birth in McGuckian’s ‘The Dream-language of Fergus’.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 15

In this way, the centrality of excess to the poetic responses of Muldoon

and McGuckian to circumstances in Ulster during the 1970s and 1980s
is brought to light.

Notes
1. David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000: The
Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 1.
2. ‘What We Do’, Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. https://www.
pioneerassociation.ie.
3. Diarmuid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (London: Profile,
2004), 57.
4. Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in
Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 16.
5. Mary Luckhurst, ‘Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore: Selling
(-Out) to the English’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14/4 (2004), 34–
41 (35).
6. Victor Merriman, Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s (Dublin,
Carysfort Press, 2011), 212.
7. Helen O’Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 184–85.
8. Ibid., 195.
9. Bourke, Bernadette. ‘Carr’s “Cut-Throats and Gargiyles”: Grotesque and
Carnivalesque Elements in By the Bog of Cats ’, in Cathy Leeney and Anna
McMullan, eds., The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”
(Bern: Peter Lang), 128–45 (130).
10. Mária Kurdi, ‘Contesting and Reversing Gender Stereotypes in Three
Plays by Contemporary Irish Women Writers’, in Ciaran Ross, ed., Sub-
versions: Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish Literature (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2010), 265–86 (285).
11. Michael Mays, ‘Yeats and the Economics of “Excess”’, Colby Quarterly,
33/4 (1997), 295–304 (302).
12. Flore Coulouma, ‘Transgressive and Subversive: Flann O’Brien’s Tales of
the In-Between’, in Ciaran Ross, ed., Sub-versions: Trans-National Read-
ings of Modern Irish Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 65–86 (65).
13. Merriman, Because We Are Poor, 213.
14. Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921:
Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University
Press, 1994), 256–57.
15. Patrick Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and
Speeches (Dublin: The Phoenix Publishing Company, 1917), 25.
16 M. MCATEER

16. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (1933) (London: Picador, 1990),
204.
17. See, for example, Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern
Irish Literature (London: Faber, 1985), 25–27; David Cairns and
Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 44–51; W. J. McCor-
mack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Liter-
ary History, 2nd ed. (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 228–31; Declan
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1995), 30–32; Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Irish Lit-
erature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 7–10.
18. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder
& Co., 1867), 106, 108.
19. Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Táin: From the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailgne,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 150–53.
20. Arnold, On the Study, 102.
21. Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–
1922 (Chicago IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 14.
22. Arnold, On the Study, 107.
23. Valente, The Myth of Manliness, 144.
24. Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism as the Present Time’, in
Essays in Criticism, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1875), 1–47 (5–6).
25. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Intentions (New York: Brentano’s,
1905), 93–218 (144).
26. ‘It is not in the outward and visible world of material life that the Celtic
genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is
in the inward world of thought and science. What it has been, what it has
done, let it ask us to attend to that, as a matter of science and history;
not to what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics’ (Arnold,
On the Study, 15).
27. Sos Eltis, ‘Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault and the Pragmatics of Being
Irish: Fashioning a New Brand of the Modern Irish Celt’, English Litera-
ture in Transition, 1880–1920, 60/3 (2017), 267–93 (284).
28. Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
29. Gregory Dobbins, Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural
Politics of Idleness (Dublin: Field Day, in association with the Keough-
Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame,
2010), 38.
30. Ibid., 38.
31. Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.
32. Arnold, On the Study, 90, 132.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF EXCESS 17

33. Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the

Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2010), 92.
34. Arnold opens On the Study of Celtic Literature with the following line
from Ossian: ‘They went forth to the war, but they always fell’ (qtd. in
Arnold, On the Study, xix). The quotation points to a circular form of
reasoning in the book: the Celts as sentimentally extravagant from a long
history of perpetual defeat arising in large measure from the sentimen-
tal character of the Celts. With regarding to modernist anxiety by way
of comparison: Chris Baldick names an extensive list of British modernist
writers who suffered personal trauma. This includes Dorothy Richardson,
whose mother committed suicide; John Masefield, whose father became
clinically insane; Virginia Woolf, who was sexually abused in childhood;
Graham Greene, who tried to kill himself when a teenager. Chris Baldick,
The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 10: 1910–1940: The Modern
Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 40.
35. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, in Essays and Introductions
(London: Macmillan, 1955), 173–88 (176).
36. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, ‘Yeats, Fairies, and the New Animism’, New Lit-
erary History, 43/1 (2012), 137–57 (141–42).
37. Wayne Borody observes that Nietzsche himself returned to a Celtic past
when he took up residence at Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps after he become
a Professor at the University of Basel. This area was an important Celtic
settlement in ancient times, an area where stone dolmens are common,
once sacred sites of worship and burial for the Celtic druids several thou-
sand years before Christianity. ‘Nietzsche on the Cross: The Defence of
Personal Freedom in The Birth of Tragedy’, Humanitas, 16/2 (2003),
76–93 (91–92).
38. ‘Colonisation for Ireland’, The Examiner, June 6, 1847: 361–362 (362).
In the previous sitting of the Westminster parliament, Russell urged the
need to subject England to expense in order to prevent Ireland ‘from sink-
ing into a state which he could not contemplate without horror’ ‘Destitute
Poor (Ireland) Bill’, The Examiner, June 6, 1847: 360–61 (361).
39. Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun nor Death, with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs,
trans. Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 135
40. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), trans.
William Lovitt (1977), in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings, new ed.
(London: Routledge, 1993), 267–306.
41. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable (London: Calder
Publications, 1959), 349.
42. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948; repr., New York: Anchor
Books, 2002), 227, 207.
18 M. MCATEER

43. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 109.
44. Ibid., 155.
45. Ibid., 94.
 PART I

Mystical Excess
 CHAPTER 2

Excess as Spiritual Ecstasy: Yeats and Joyce

The Incomprehensible
A number of books published over the past ten years indicate a discreet
theological turn in recent Irish cultural and literary criticism. Siobhán
Garrigan’s The Real Peace Process (2010) examines Christian religious
practices in everyday society of Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (a name
invested with profound Christian symbolism that, rather strangely, few
people have publicly contested).1 In Violence, Politics and Textual Inter-
ventions in Northern Ireland (2010), Peter Mahon presents some incisive
new readings of Northern Irish texts in terms of René Girard’s interpre-
tation of Christian sacrifice.2 Gail McConnell moves beyond assumptions
about religious cultural identities in Northern Irish Poetry and Theology
(2014) when exploring theological questions of iconography, iconoclasm
and religious language within the Catholic, Anglican and Calvinist influ-
ences in the Northern Irish poetry of Seamus Heaney, Michael Long-
ley and Derek Mahon.3 In Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play,
Alexandra Poulain presents a long-overdue critical reading of the influ-
ence of Christian passion narrative in twentieth-century Irish drama from
the Irish Revival to contemporary times.4 In Revolutionary Damnation
(2017), Sheldon Brivic engages the thought of Alain Badiou when explor-
ing the religious concept of damnation across a range of Irish literary
works from Joyce to Anne Enright.5 Beginning with the present chapter,

© The Author(s) 2020 21

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_2
22 M. MCATEER

Part I of this study advances this body of theologically inflected criti-

cism further by addressing in philosophical terms the presence of excess
in diverse spiritual aspects within twentieth-century Irish writing.
What Alain Badiou terms ‘the point of excess’ carries an ontotheologi-
cal dimension in Badiou’s theory of the event, one that is disclosed in his
reading of the seventeenth-century mathematical and theologian, Blaise
Pascal. According to Badiou, Pascal was consistent in his idea that faith in
the divinity of Jesus Christ could only rest on a belief in miracles. Badiou
argues that the miracle accentuates the idea that, more than a fulfilment
of prophecies, the life and death of Christ appear as an intervention in
human history, standing in excess of the circumstances within which they
occur and appearing incomprehensible as a consequence. Badiou inter-
prets the function of the miracle as ‘to be in excess of proof’. Further-
more, this function ‘pinpoints and factualizes the ground from which
there originates […] the possibility of believing in truth’.6 Yet this sub-
scription to the excess of the miraculous occurrence can only come about
through acknowledgement that the event in question is the death of God,
the essence of which is not found upon an original divine unity, but rather
upon the figure of two: the division of God into Father and Son.7 The
absolute singularity of the event in history—the death of God—is further
underwritten by the figure of two in the fact that it is only by sustaining
a belief that it is God who has died on the cross that the truth con-
tent of the event is possible. Badiou regards St. Paul’s focus upon God
as Son in his Epistles as the expression of a ‘conviction that “Christian
discourse” is absolutely new. The formula according to which God sent
us his Son signifies primarily an intervention within History, one through
which it is, as Nietzsche will put it, “broken in two,” rather than governed
by a transcendent reckoning in conformity with the laws of an epoch’.8
What is ultimately in question within this radical rupture—through which
Christianity is inaugurated—is Pascal’s wager: there is either nothing or
infinity.9 In Badiou’s terms, the wager forces one to choose either libertar-
ian nihilism or militant fidelity.10 Such fidelity is always ‘in non-existent
excess over its being’.11 In other words, as ‘undecidable’, belief in the
divinity of Jesus must always appear in relation to a void into which it
risks disappearing. In this sense, such faith opens to human consciousness
the very void that it sets itself against.
Badiou’s concept of religious belief as excessive in nature derives from
Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God. Nietzsche held Pascal in great
esteem as one of the ‘higher types’ although he was of the opinion that
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 23

Pascal’s Christian belief in the folly of intellectual pride was a depraved

influence on Pascal’s thought.12 In the famous section 124 of the third
book of The Gay Science, the reader encounters the story of a madman
who enters a marketplace looking for God. In response to the mocking
taunts of those present who have no religious belief, the madman declares
that he and they have killed God. Consistent with Pascal’s wager that
there must be either nothing or infinity, the madman goes on to say that
this ‘murder’ of God leaves human beings without any direction, ‘con-
tinually falling’ and ‘straying as though through an infinite nothing’.13
Presenting the death of God in this way, Nietzsche proposes that the
idea is as incomprehensible to human beings as the idea of God itself.
The death of God (and by extension the conventional atheism that fol-
lows from it) is thus essentially a religious idea, one that presents itself
in its excess. Standing in excess of the situation into which he enters, the
madman disturbs and silences the traders in the marketplace with his pro-
nouncement. Indeed, by expressing the notion through metaphor only,
Nietzsche postulates that it cannot be presented as a formal proposition
because it violates the relation between the particular and the universal.14
The dimension of excess and its relation to a void (the madman’s ‘in-
finite nothing’ of The Gay Science) that characterizes the ‘death of God’
idea from works by Nietzsche first published in the mid-1880s, signifies
an important relation to his first major work from 1872, The Birth of
Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. While this book is heavily influenced
by the metaphysical pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, a perspective that
Nietzsche largely rejects in his later work, its interpretation of excess in
the ancient Greek cult of Dionysius enables Nietzsche to develop the con-
cept of the death of God subsequently. Despite the occasionally damning
criticism that Nietzsche himself directed against his first major work, the
extent of the connection that he observed between The Birth of Tragedy
and his later thought is evident in the fact that he published a new edi-
tion of the book in 1886, the same year as the publication of Beyond
Good and Evil . This was less than one year after the publication of the
final book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the year before the publica-
tion of On the Genealogy of Morals .15 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
identifies the Dionysian spirit as excess in its ‘intoxication’, a drunkenness
that involves a complete forgetting of oneself.16 This intoxication antic-
ipates the imagery that the madman uses in the The Gay Science for the
killers of God: falling ‘backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions’,
24 M. MCATEER

having drunk up the sea.17 In the earlier work, Nietzsche expresses self-
abandonment in the drunkenness of the Dionysian spirit as the individual
becoming one with all other human beings, ‘as if the veil of Maya had
been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness’.18
It is the very opposite to the spirit of Apollo as Nietzsche describes it in
The Birth of Tragedy. Considering Apollo to represent moderation and
self-knowledge, he regards ‘hubris and excess’ as spirits hostile to that of
Apollo, arising from ‘the age of Titans’ and ‘the world of the barbarians’.
Consequently, the spirit of Apollo could only imagine Oedipus being ‘cast
into a bewildering vortex of crimes’ for his ‘“excessive wisdom” in solving
the riddle of the sphinx’.19

All as Nothing
While W. B. Yeats’s interest in the writing of Nietzsche has been stud-
ied extensively since the 1960s, the predominant emphasis has been upon
Nietzsche as a model for Yeats’s ideas of aristocratic cultivation. The sig-
nificance of excess as an idea in Nietzsche’s writing for Yeats’s work as
poet and playwright in Ireland is still, however, unclear. Yeats was made
aware of Nietzsche’s writings through Arthur Symons’s essays on Niet-
zsche in the 1890s, but he only begins to read Nietzsche seriously in
the early 1900s.20 By this stage it is evident that Yeats is already inter-
ested in notions of excess. This is most clearly stated in his 1897 essay,
‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ when he quotes from Samuel Palmer
(a painter-devotee of William Blake), that the artist should ‘always seek
to make excess more abundantly excessive’.21 In the ‘Proverbs of Hell’
section of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (1790), a work with which
Yeats was well familiar, William Blake writes that ‘[t]he road of excess
leads to the palace of wisdom’ and ‘Excess of sorrow laughs; excess of
joy weeps’.22 After reading Nietzsche’s work, Yeats described him as a
modernizer of Blake in a letter written to John Quinn, dated February
6, 1903.23 Quinn had seen a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
during a visit to George Moore’s residence at Ely Place in Dublin. Sus-
pecting that this was the trigger for Moore to develop a ‘new messiah’
motive in his writing, Quinn sent Yeats a copy of Zarathustra, along with
a three-volume edition of Nietzsche’s writing.
Reading Nietzsche was to have a profound effect on Yeats’s Celtic
folkloric, mythic and mystical pre-occupations. This comes through in
a number of compositions for performance that Yeats wrote between
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 25

1900 and December 1904, when On Baile’s Strand, his first play on the
Gaelic mythical hero Cuchulain, was produced along with Lady Augusta
Gregory’s Spreading the News for the opening of Dublin’s new Abbey
Theatre. Of Yeats’s plays during this period, none represents mystical
experience as wildly excessive more explicitly than Where There Is Nothing .
Yeats composed this work in an uneasy collaboration with Augusta Gre-
gory and Douglas Hyde under the influence of Yeats’s reading of Niet-
zsche from 1902, following a major row with George Moore over own-
ership of the idea for the play.24 This dispute had far-reaching effects, as
Adrian Frazier has shown. Moore threatened an injunction should Yeats
develop it on his own, though in fact the idea had originated neither from
Moore nor from Yeats, but from George Russell: the poet, painter and
theosophist A. E. Yeats wrote up the play quickly in collaboration with
Gregory, with help from Hyde and Quinn; a version was then published
in Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, The United Irishman, on November 1,
1902. A New York Irish-American lawyer, Quinn offered Yeats free legal
counsel should the dispute go to court. As for Moore, he was later to
take a degree of vengeance in characterizing Yeats himself as the figure
of the histrionic mystic in Moore’s Hail and Farewell! 25 Despite the row
over intellectual property rights, Yeats was optimistic that the Stage Soci-
ety in London, who had already put on a number of G. B. Shaw’s works,
would play Where There Is Nothing in January or February of 1903. Yeats
even claimed to have heard it suggested that his painter-brother Jack B.
Yeats should play the role of Itinerant character Paddy Cockfight in the
performance. In a letter to Lady Gregory written in November 1902, he
presumed that this idea had been put out by Pamela Colman Smith, an
American brought up in Jamaica with whom Yeats became acquainted in
1899.26 Eventually, the Stage Society put on three performances in late
June 1904 under the direction of H. Granville Barker.27
Richard Cave points out that Where There Is Nothing was originally
based on a report that a devout Catholic friend of George Russell was
believed to have gone mad because he determined to live fully accord-
ing to the teachings of Jesus, giving away everything that he owned.28
In a subsequent letter to John Quinn in 1903, Yeats claimed to have had
the English utopian socialist William Morris in mind when creating the
figure of Paul Ruttledge, the revolutionary mystic in the play.29 What-
ever his source, Ruttledge is strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s madman
entering the marketplace to announce the death of God: a figure that
shows the disturbing impact of visionary ecstasy in communities where
26 M. MCATEER

religious orthodoxy has become one with social convention.30 At first we

encounter Paul Ruttledge in the play as a country gentleman among mag-
istrates who are regular acquaintances at his mother’s residence. His clos-
est friend is a monk named Jerome; the conversation among other guests
invited to the house is tedious to Paul Ruttledge. At the appearance on
the estate of an Irish Itinerant, Charlie Ward, Ruttledge shocks the other
dignitaries when he asks Ward if he might be allowed to join their Itin-
erant community. Living with the Itinerants, Paul marries Sabina Silver
in a ceremony that Jerome regards as blasphemous. After being beaten
for subjecting the magistrates to a mock trial—exposing their religious
insincerities—when they come to persuade him to return to his previ-
ous life, Paul is delivered by Charlie Ward to the steps of a monastery.
There he enters a state of visionary trance at the foot of the altar and is
later expelled from the community for preaching a sermon that the abbot
denounces as heresy. Two monks named Colman and Aloysius follow Paul
into the countryside, but in the end he is beaten to death by a mob that
believes their presence as heretics is bringing bad luck to the area.
Paul’s inner quest for absolute experience, culminating in the sermon
that he delivers following his trance, is presented in the play as that state
of being which Heidegger terms ‘not-being-at-home’.31 This is evident
in Paul abandoning the comfortable upper-class environment of a coun-
try gentleman to live the wandering life of the Itinerants. It also appears
in the disturbance that Paul’s presence brings to the monastic community
that he joins later, and the small breakaway sect that he creates. These
features of the plot express Paul’s condition of being as propelled by a
search for being, in which he is continually in excess of who he is. In this
aspect, he conveys the restless Dionysian spirit that Nietzsche expresses
most extremely in the figure of Zarathustra. In a state of ecstatic intoxica-
tion in the last section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it appears to his follow-
ers that the soul of Zarathustra ‘fell back and fled before him and was in
remote distances and as if “upon a high ridge”, as it is written, “wander-
ing like a heavy cloud between past and future”’.32 Heidegger develops
an understanding of the profound restlessness within this image into the
idea that the most fundamental meaning of ‘to be’ is to be beyond one-
self at any moment: directed towards its ‘ownmost potentiality-for-Being’,
Dasein is in every instant ‘already ahead of itself in its Being’.33
Tommy the Song thinks that Paul will not survive the hardship of the
Itinerant way of life: ‘You were not born like us with wandering in the
heart’.34 Paul refutes this, speaking of how sick he has become of the
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 27

‘lighted rooms’ of his country house, feeling a need for darkness: ‘The
dark, where there is nothing that is anything, and nobody that is any-
body; one can be free there, where there is nothing’.35 In this respect,
Where There Is Nothing is part of the movement in Irish drama of the
1900s in which, as Mary Burke points out, the way of life of the ‘tinker’
is presented as ‘the antithesis of the expanding Irish bourgeoisie’.36 Burke
also notes, however, that Where This Is Nothing is the only Irish work of
its time that is informed by Gypsylorist scholarship: in 1901 Yeats wrote
to the Gypsylorist John Sampson for information on the Irish Itinerant
way of life.37 Whether or not Paul’s desire for darkness marks a point
of intersection in the play between beliefs and customs that Sampson
identified with Irish Itinerant communities and Yeats’s own interests in
esoteric magic is a matter of conjecture. In William Bulfin’s Rambles in
Eirinn (1907), the author claims to have met an Irish Itinerant who had
heard about Yeats’s play and dismissed it, asserting that nobody would
ever know the secrets of the ‘tinkers’ except the Itinerants themselves.38
The way in which Paul describes the ‘place’ of darkness—‘where there
is nothing that is anything, and nobody that is anybody’—certainly indi-
cates the attraction that Nietzsche’s idea held for Yeats of Dionysian magic
as the breakdown of all barriers, leading one person not just to become at
one with another: further, to actually become that other person.39 Dark-
ness is the condition for this sheer excess of being: Zarathustra describes
‘the midnight hour’ as an ‘intoxicated poet […] that has overdrunk its
drunkenness’.40 This relationship between darkness and excess in the spir-
itual ecstasy that Paul experiences in Where There Is Nothing identifies a
relation between nothingness and infinity that Badiou observes at the core
of Pascal’s understanding of miracles and his concept of the wager. The
place ‘where there is nothing’ in Yeats’s play is also the place where there
is infinite divinity. It is important, however, to acknowledge that Badiou’s
interpretation of Pascal is based in the first instance on his numerical
account of being as sheer multiplicity and his mathematical set theory
account of being as event. Badiou points out that ‘nothing’ has a specific
numerical value—zero. He notes that zero counts as a single numerical
set, containing only itself and represented as follows: {ø}.41 Calling this
‘the null set’, Badiou observes that, numerically, it generates two mathe-
matical sets from nothing. These are the set {ø} that counts zero as its sole
member, and the set that contains this null set as a subset of itself, rep-
resented as {{ø}}. Present within every numerical set, this identifies the
point of excess within every situation as presented in numerical terms,
28 M. MCATEER

commencing ‘the unlimited production of new multiples’ that are each

‘drawn from the void’.42
The relation between the void and infinity that Badiou identifies in the
null set as the point of excess appears in Where There Is Nothing through
nothingness as drunken ecstasy in Paul Ruttledge’s mystical experience.
When Charlie Ward finds Tommy the Song kneeling in prayer, Sabina
Ward tells Charlie that Paul was preaching to Tommy. Paul explains that
he was telling Tommy how Heaven would be ‘a sort of drunkenness,
a sort of ecstasy’. At this point in Where There Is Nothing, Paul quotes
a Latin verse from scripture: ‘“Et calyx meus inebrians quam praeclarus
est”’. In modern biblical versions, this is numbered as Psalm 23 and trans-
lated simply as ‘my cup brims over’.43 The line identifies a biblical pretext
for William Blake’s famous maxim on excess in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell that Paul cites, responding to the magistrates’ complaint that he
encourages drunken idleness among the poor by providing free drink in
the public houses: ‘Some poet has written that exuberance is beauty, and
that the roadway of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’.44 Although
critical of the literal and awkward ways in which Yeats incorporates the
world-view of Blake in Where There Is Nothing, still Harold Bloom had
no doubt that it was Yeats’s ‘most Blakean work’, a judgement that still
stands.45 Linking drunkenness to mystical ecstasy, Paul conflates diver-
gent teachings on physical and spiritual drunkenness in Old Testament
and Pauline writings (the First Letter to the Thessalonians in the Epistles
of St. Paul concludes with an injunction against drunken licence). Rut-
tledge’s essential point, however, is that spiritual ecstasy is an entry into
the darkness of the void out of which infinite multiplicity unfolds: a mys-
tical idea that yet corresponds to Badiou’s set-theory account of being.
Lying prostrate on the steps of the monastery altar in a state of trance,
Paul is encircled by monks performing a dance, the first and second
dancer singing consecutively the following Latin passages from the origi-
nal Psalm 23:

Nam, et si ambulavero in medio umbrae mortis, Non timebo mala, quo-

niam tu mecem es [For though I should walk in the valley of darkness, no
evil will I fear]; Virga tua, et baculus tuus, Ipsa me consolata sunt [You are
there with your rod and your staff to comfort me]; Parasti in conspectu
meo mensam / Adversus eos qui tribulant me [You have prepared a table
before me, against them that afflict me]. Impinguasti in oleo caput meum
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 29

/ Et calix meus inebrians quam praeclarus est [You have anointed my head
with oil and my chalice which inebriateth me, how goodly it is].46

Paul had previously spoken of the need to overcome ‘law and number’.47
The psalm that the monks sing in their strange dance at night in the
chapel combines nothingness (the valley of darkness) and excess (the chal-
ice of drunkenness) as the features of mystical ecstasy. Most immediately,
we can attribute the scene to ‘the intoxicated song’, near the end of Thus
Spake Zarathustra, in which the prophet speaks of ‘a scent and odour of
eternity […] a brown, golden wine odour of ancient happiness, of intoxi-
cated midnight’s dying happiness’.48 The images of spiritual overflow also
align Paul’s mystical state with the negation of quantity and measurement
itself that Hegel identifies in the dialectical movement of spirit. Contend-
ing that the principles of mathematical knowledge are inert ideas of space
and number that are purely external in nature, Hegel sees these reach their
limit in ‘the Notion, something infinite that eludes mathematical deter-
mination’. Consequently, he asserts that the ‘principle of magnitude, of
difference not determined by the Notion, and the principle of equality,
of abstract lifeless unity, cannot cope with the sheer unrest of life and its
absolute distinction’.49
Emerging from his state of trance, Paul preaches a sermon of spiritual
annihilation, calling for the destruction of all laws, all towns, the Church
and, finally, the world itself: ‘We must destroy the World; we must destroy
everything that has law and number, for where there is nothing, there
is God’.50 This seems fundamentally at odds with the mathematical set-
theory framework within which Badiou develops his idea of the point of
excess. However, earlier in the play, Paul instructs the friars to fix their
minds on a single thought through which they can get ‘out of time into
eternity’.51 This concentration on one idea only relates to the numeric
one from which the point of excess derives. Badiou inaugurates his set-
theory account of being by returning to Plato’s assertion near the end
of the Parmenides discourse that if the one is not, then there cannot
be multiplicity: ‘But since unity is not among the others, the others are
neither many nor one’.52 Badiou transcribes Plato’s statement as follows:
‘if the one is not, what occurs in the place of the “many” is the pure name
of the void, insofar as it alone subsists as being ’.53 As Paul reaches the
climax of his sermon in Where There Is Nothing by announcing the need
to get rid ‘of everything which is not measureless eternal life’, he repeats
symbolically for the fourth time the gesture of quenching a candle.54 Paul
30 M. MCATEER

declares that darkness and excess are conditions for divine experience as
measureless and eternal. His teaching corresponds to Terry Eagleton’s
idea that ‘to be prodigal, ecstatic, overbrimming’ is in the very nature
of what is meant by God, ‘one for whom excess is no more than the
norm’.55 Yet there is a counting procedure involved in Paul’s gesture
through which he discloses this idea of divine excess. The ecstasy of the
void in which everything is to be destroyed retains the numerical value of
a single thought—the thought of one—upon which Paul fixes his mind
during the four moments of his sermon. Thus a complex dialectic of the
one and the many informs Paul’s anarchist call for the destruction of ‘Law
and Number’. Unsurprisingly, the Superior of the monastery expels him
as a heretic at the conclusion of the sermon.

Away with the Birds

As Yeats was contemplating how Where There Is Nothing might be taken
to production, James Joyce appeared on the scene, staying with Yeats for
a day. Yeats introduced him to Arthur Symons and tried to get him some
work on the Academy and Speaker.56 Ellmann notes how Symons was
to be as important to Joyce in getting his earlier work published as Ezra
Pound was to be for later publications.57 Earlier in 1902, George Russell
had written to Augusta Gregory that he was ‘not going to touch Little’
in apparent consideration of the person who might play Paul Ruttledge in
Where There Is Nothing, as the hostility between Yeats and Moore over the
play was glaring.58 ‘Little’ was Philip Francis Little; in his address to the
thirteenth annual dinner of the Irish Historical Society, Russell remem-
bers meeting him when Russell himself was about eighteen or nineteen
years old. In this 1928 address, he described Little as ‘rather mystical
like myself’, but ‘a Catholic mystic, a man most determined to make the
Christianity of his inner life correspond with his outer life’. He went on
to tell the story of his family’s surprise at Little leaving home one day
in a new suit of clothes, only to return later that evening in rags, having
exchanged his garments for those of a beggar that he had encountered.
The comparison with the eccentricity of Paul in Where There Is Nothing is
strong. According to Little himself, his family paid him to live apart from
them. Little had once denounced Russell for something he said to shock
him, ‘and he raised his arms above his head and denounced me as Jonah
might have denounced Ninevah’.59 Having dismissed Little in his 1902
letter to Gregory as an option for the role of Ruttledge in Where There
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 31

Is Nothing, Russell speculates on trying out another young man ‘looking

for a Messiah’. R. F. Foster remarks that this was none other than James
Joyce, ‘embarking on an odyssey which would echo in many ways Paul
Ruttledge’s determination to tear down the veil of the temple’.60
This momentary possibility that a twenty-year-old Joyce, an artist as a
young man, might have played Paul Ruttledge in Where There Is Nothing
lends a twist to the famous epiphany that Stephen Dedalus undergoes
towards the end of chapter four in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, set around the time of the beginning of the Irish Literary Revival
in the 1898–1903 period. His novel completed in Zurich in 1914, an
enormous breadth of time and change separates Joyce as author from the
young man that he represents in A Portrait coming to a moment of artis-
tic self-realization. Still, it is significant that the woman whom Stephen
Dedalus encounters standing at the edge of the waves becomes an image
of mystical ecstasy in the awakening of his new consciousness of life in
all its frailty and possibility. At this moment, Stephen is redolent of Paul
Ruttledge’s wild immersion in visionary experience, the epiphany infused
with the same spiritual excess that we encounter in Where There Is Noth-
ing. Stephen speaks of ‘the holy silence of his ecstasy’ as he looks at the
figure on the strand. She appears to him as a ‘wild angel’, one who opens
for him ‘in an instant of ecstasy’ the doors leading on and on along all
the pathways of ‘error and glory’.61 The experience is expressed as the
overflow of consciousness itself: that transcendence by consciousness of
its own limits through which Hegel identifies the movement of spirit in
the Phenomenology of Spirit. Jaurretche sees the passage as Joyce’s evoca-
tion of ‘the ecstasy of the body and mind’ reaching ‘a mystical unity with
untranscendent transcendence’.62
In its mystery, Stephen’s experience raises the question of time itself, as
he hovers between contemplation and action. The figure’s image passes
into his soul ‘for ever’ and in ‘holy silence’ but stirs his resolve to ‘live, to
err, to fall, to triumph’. Heidegger designates the fundamental orientation
of Dasein [Being-there] as already in the present of its immediate envi-
ronment and already directed towards its own future. This demonstrates
that the fundamental structure of Being-there is temporal in nature. How-
ever, in this condition Dasein is outside of itself—encountering its past in
a present instant that is already directed towards its future—in and for
its very essence. Heidegger thus describes the past, present and future
of Dasein as ‘the “ecstases ” of temporality’.63 Considered in this way,
32 M. MCATEER

Stephen’s vision is a momentary apprehension of time itself as the condi-

tion of his being in the world. Heidegger describes the moment of vision
as an ecstasis: ‘the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to
whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation’.
While he writes that nothing can occur in this moment of vision, still it
allows us ‘to encounter for the first time what can be “in a time” as ready-
to-hand or present-at-hand’.64
Heidegger’s temporal ecstases and Dedalus’s ‘instant of ecstasy’ do not
quite coincide, however. Stephen describes the experience as a visitation
of a ‘wild angel’. This is usually understood as a metaphor for the beauty
of the woman in the waves that he beholds, linking to the larger metaphor
of flight that informs the novel and particularly its conclusion. In keeping
with the idea of religious ecstasy as a condition of excess, it may be that
Joyce had intended it as Stephen actually having a vision of an angel.65
This would relate the passage back directly to Paul Ruttledge’s state of
visionary ecstasy in Where There Is Nothing, supporting an observation
that Louis MacNeice made in 1941, that Yeats and Joyce ‘probably had
more in common than either of them would have admitted’.66 After Paul
Ruttledge emerges from his trance on the steps of the altar in Act IV of
Where There is Nothing, he tells Jerome that he had a vision of many white
angels riding on white unicorns, the angels imploring him to preach while
laughing aloud and the unicorns trampling the ground as if the world
was already collapsing.67 Harold Bloom notes how Paul’s declaration to
the monk Aloysius in Act V of Where There Is Nothing brings Joyce to
mind. Here Paul says that the world cannot be destroyed by armies but
‘it must be consumed in a moment inside our minds’.68 Bloom describes
this rather judgementally as Ruttledge’s ‘only epiphany’, a forerunner to
Joyce’s Stephen tapping his brow in Ulysses ‘and saying it is there he must
kill the priest and the king’.69
The angel as an apocalyptic figure in writing by Irish authors of the era
extends back further to the invisible beating of wings that Herod takes as
an omen in Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play Salomé: ‘Why can I not see this bird?
The beat of its wings is terrible’.70 The significance of this precedent is
underscored when account is taken of Regenia Garnier’s observation of
a direct connection in the play not only between the bird imagery in
Salomé and the dove as an image of the Holy Spirit in the bible, but
also between this imagery and the fateful erotic dance of Herod’s daugh-
ter. Garnier misquotes Herodias’s line from the play, ‘My daughter has
done well’ as ‘I am well pleased with my daughter’ in order to make the
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 33

sentence appear as a direct reference to a phrase from the twenty-second

verse of the third chapter of the gospel of Luke in the King James Bible,
uttered by a voice from Heaven upon the occasion of the baptism of
Jesus: ‘Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased’.71 Nonethe-
less, Garnier insightfully relates the image of the dove as it appears in the
gospel account to that of Salomé’s dance. Just as the Holy Spirit takes the
form of a dove when descending at the moment of baptism in the bible
passage, so Herod hears the beating of wings and imagines that Salomé
will dance with feet ‘like white doves’.72 Just as Salomé’s dance charges
the mystical symbolism of Wilde’s play with sexual energy, so also is the
spiritual power of the woman’s bird-like image that Stephen Dedalus sees
in A Portrait radiant with erotic feeling. He sees in her the likeness of ‘a
strange and beautiful sea-bird’.73 On the morning after his walk on the
strand in A Portrait, Stephen considers her as the word made flesh in
the womb of his imagination. The phrases that he uses are taken directly
from the Catholic prayer the ‘Hail Mary’, based upon the gospel pas-
sage describing the angel Gabriel’s visitation to Mary to reveal that she
was pregnant with Jesus.74 Any suggestion that Stephen had indeed seen
an angel, however, is literally deflated later in chapter five when Dixon
asks another student, Goggins, if an angel had just spoken when Goggins
farts.75
To understand the nature of the Stephen’s experience that Joyce
describes, it is worth observing his thoughts in the last chapter as he looks
upon a flock of birds from the steps of the National Library in Dublin. He
tries to count them, wondering if they were odd or even in number. He
finds their ‘unhuman clamour’ soothing to ears, still hearing his mother’s
‘sobs and reproaches’, the sight of their ‘dark frail quivering bodies wheel-
ing and fluttering and swerving’, an image calming to eyes still seeing his
mother’s face.76 After leaving medical studies in Paris, Joyce had returned
to Dublin in April 1903 at news that his mother had cancer.77 In a letter
to Lady Gregory from late April, 1903, Yeats wrote that he had recently
met Joyce in Dublin and Joyce told him that it was uncertain whether or
not she would die: ‘He added “but these things really don’t matter”’.78
In spite of this disavowal, the presence of his dying mother in Stephen’s
mind grants the image of birds in flight a transcendental symbolic signifi-
cance. Stephen wonders if the image is an omen of good or evil. A phrase
from Cornelius Agrippa—the late-medieval German magician, occultist
and theologian—comes into his mind, as well as scattered thoughts from
Immanuel Swedenborg about the correspondence of birds to ‘things of
34 M. MCATEER

the intellect’.79 Stephen’s attempt to count the birds in this instance is a

forerunner to the image of Yeats himself counting the swans on the lake
at the beginning of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.80
At this point in A Portrait, Stephen’s mind moves explicitly into mys-
tical esotericism, one that may be located within a tradition of nega-
tive mysticism as identified by Colleen Jaurretche in relation to Joyce’s
writing.81 The colonnade of the National Library on Molesworth Street
makes him think of ‘an ancient temple’ and his ashplant stick on which
he leans, ‘the curved stick of an augur’. A fear of the unknown swells
up in him, particularly of ‘the hawk-like man whose name he bore soar-
ing out of his captivity on osier-woven wings’, and of ‘Thoth, the god
of writers’.82 The allusion to Swedenborg is of considerable significance
in observing a correspondence between the mysticism of Joyce and that
of Yeats. When he was sharing a residence at Stone Cottage with Ezra
Pound in 1914, Yeats composed his essay ‘Swedenborg, Mediums, Des-
olate Places’, published after the First World War in 1920. It was Pound
who pushed through the serialization of A Portrait in 1915; Yeats first
told Pound about Joyce in 1914.83 As Yeats was collating Augusta Grego-
ry’s folklore materials with other stories and mythologies from esoteric lit-
erature, Pound was busy translating Japanese Noh plays. From this work,
Yeats’s Swedenborg essay arose as well as his first Noh play, At the Hawk’s
Well , performed in April 1916.84
Three aspects of Swedenborg’s writings on angels seem particularly rel-
evant to the ecstasy that Stephen experiences upon seeing the girl stand-
ing among the waves at the sea’s edge. First is Swedenborg’s claim that
angels are completely human in their form.85 Second is his belief that
people who have voluntarily wrapped themselves up in religious matters
are prone to false visions, relevant to Stephen’s rejection of religious dog-
matism.86 Third is his assertion that the language and writing closest on
earth to that spoken and written in Heaven is Hebrew.87 This is of par-
ticular relevance to the character of Leopold Bloom that Joyce would
develop from 1914 in composing Ulysses . Most significant, perhaps, is
Swedenborg’s contention that ‘in heaven, all the directions are deter-
mined on the basis of the east’.88 Stephen faces eastward as he gazes upon
the young woman. Observing the birds in flight outside the National
Library, the ancient Egyptian God of writing comes to his mind, from the
past but also from the east. Stephen senses the folly of his musings when
realizing that the name of this God—Thoth—came into his head simply
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 35

because it sounded like an Irish pronunciation of ‘the oath’ (th’oth), the

hieroglyph of the God putting him in mind of ‘a bottle-nosed judge in a
wig, putting commas into a document which he held at arm’s length’.89
The irony has the deflating effect that he will employ so extensively later
in Ulysses .
Even in its note of disappointment, however, Joyce still intimates
here that correspondence between the Celts and Oriental civilization that
had influenced Wilde and to which Yeats continued to defer. As Maria
Tymoczko shows, Joyce was familiar with the medieval pseudo-history
of Ireland, The Book of Invasions, in which the Nemedian, Fir Bolg, and
Tuatha De Danann tribes were said to come from Scythian-Greek stock.90
Stephen’s slip from an Irish ‘oath’ to the Egyptian ‘Thoth’ also anticipates
how the excess of writing itself (of which Thoth is the god) in Finnegan’s
Wake decades later draws upon this connection of the Celtic and the Ori-
ental; ‘Finnegan’ (from Finn MacCumhaill) who is like ‘Haroun Childeric
Eggeberth’ as he would ‘caligulate by multiplicables the altitude and
malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ‘twas
born’, the twins in question being Shem and Shaun.91 Haroun recalls the
historical Babylonian figure of Harun Al-Rashid who appears in Stephen’s
dream in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses and who is the subject of a nar-
rative poem by Yeats in 1923.92
Stephen’s attempt to count the birds in flight brings into consideration
again the matter of numeracy and being that arises in Paul Ruttledge’s
sermon in Where There Is Nothing. Trying to discern whether they were
‘odd or even’ in number, Stephen wonders if their appearance is a sym-
pathetic or malignant portent. Of course this characterizes the esoteric
nature of the situation, but it also brings to light what Badiou describes
as the ‘absolute excess of the situation itself’. Counted as one set in itself,
the total number of the subsets of the multiple of a situation—in this
case, the flock of birds that Stephen apprehends—exceeds that same mul-
tiple, and it is impossible to measure the extent by which it does so.93
From this perspective, the visionary power of what Stephen sees in the
sky above derives from the relationship between the void and infinity that
Badiou explores throughout Being and Event. In absolute excess of its
constituent members, the flock of darting, swerving birds release in the
young man’s consciousness the unmeasurable dimension of the encounter
itself, amplifying the sense of ecstatic flight that he has already felt in the
vision of the woman standing in the waves. In this way, Stephen’s attempt
to count these birds in the aftermath of his encounter with the figure on
36 M. MCATEER

the strand ratifies that encounter as ‘an event of humanity’, as Sheldon

Brivic terms it.94 Following Badiou, Brivic describes the event as a break
in the chain of causality, a break that appears under the aspect of a math-
ematical excess that ‘calls out a truth that reaches beyond the constraints
of the situation’.95
The form of mystical excess in Where There Is Nothing and in A Por-
trait diverges in several important respects. Where There Is Nothing brings
the intellectual terror of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra into an isolated Irish
world of Itinerant and monastic communities, heralding a radical new
faith; Joyce creates in Stephen Dedalus a sensitive individual who tests
the boundaries of Catholic Irish society as he discovers his artistic voca-
tion in A Portrait. Consciously or not, both of these works carry the
trace of Matthew Arnold’s idea of the Celtic spirit as always in excess of
itself in its continual creative imagining. Beyond this ethnological aspect,
Yeats and Joyce bequeath a form of religious ecstasy in performance and
narrative that brings into relief—through the self-annihilating excess of its
visionary power—Hegel’s idea in Phenomenology of Spirit of negation as
the fundamental operation of consciousness, Heidegger’s ‘not yet’ as the
condition of Being-there in the world and the relation of zero to infinity
in Badiou’s set-theory of account of the situation. In this manner, the
esoteric dimension of mystical experience in Where There Is Nothing and
A Portrait marks a point of intersection between Celtic mysticism and
the place of excess in the ontology of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Badiou.

Notes
1. Siobhán Garrigan, The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of
Sectarianism (New York: Routledge, 2010).
2. Peter Mahon, Violence, Politics and Textual Interventions in Northern Ire-
land (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
3. Gail McConnell, Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2014).
4. Alexandra Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
5. Sheldon Brivic, Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from
Joyce to Enright (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017).
6. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 216.
7. Badiou, Being and Event, 213.
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 37

8. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray

Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 43.
9. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (1670), trans. W. F. Trotter, introd. T. S.
Eliot (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 65–69.
10. Badiou, Being and Event, 220–21.
11. Ibid., 235.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale, new ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), 129.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120.
14. The assertion is again voiced by Zarathustra following his conversation
with the saint in section two of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and repeated in his
preaching the doctrine of the Superman to people assembled in a market
square in section three. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and
No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), 41–42.
15. See Bernard Williams’s discussion of the chronology of Nietzsche’s pub-
lications in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), vii–xxii.
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans.
Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (London: Penguin, 1993), 17.
17. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 120.
18. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 17.
19. Ibid., 26.
20. For extensive discussion of Nietzsche’s influence on Yeats, see the fol-
lowing works: Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche: An Exploration of
Major Nietzschean Echoes in the Writings of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmil-
lan Press, 1982); Patrick J. Keane, Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition
(Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1987); John Burt Foster,
Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). See also David Dwan, The
Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Field
Day in Association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Stud-
ies, University of Notre Dame IN, 2008), 121–36, 180–88, 195–98;
Eric Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1988), 127–40; Karen Dorn, Players and Painted Stage:
The Theatre of W.B. Yeats (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), 15; R. F. Foster,
W.B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 159, 213.
21. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, in Essays and Introductions
(London: Macmillan, 1955), 173–88 (184).
22. Duncan Wu, Romanticism: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 87.
38 M. MCATEER

23. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds., The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats,
vol. 3, 1901–1904 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 313.
24. For discussion of the influence of Nietzsche’s ideas on the play, see George
Mills Harper, ‘The Creator as Destroyer: Nietzschean Morality in Yeats’s
Where There Is Nothing ’, Colby Quarterly, 15/2 (1979): 114–25.
25. Adrian Frazier, George Moore, 1852–1933 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 321–33. In volume one of Hail and Farewell!, Moore
describes Yeats’s mind as subtle and metaphysical, rare in a European but
Oriental in nature, recollecting the character of an Indian man that Moore
had once met. He also recalls a visitor to Moore’s west of Ireland resi-
dence, Tillyra, who believed Yeats to be a ‘Finnish sorcerer’ who had
disturbed his dreams at night, having some Finnish ancestor from ‘a thou-
sand years ago’. George Moore, Hail and Farewell!, vol. 1, Ave (1911),
ed. Richard Allen Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), 189.
26. Yeats to Lady Gregory, November 27, 1902, in Allan Wade, ed., The
Letters of W. B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 383 n1. In
early December, Yeats wrote again to Gregory of the eagerness of Shaw’s
wife Charlotte to have the play staged, though Shaw himself worried about
the expense involved and whether it would be better played by Irish actors.
Kelly and Schuchard, eds., The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 3, 267.
27. Wade, The Letters, 382–83 n3.
28. Moore, Hail and Farewell!, 19–20.
29. Yeats to John Quinn, February 6, 1903, in Kelly and Schuchard, eds., The
Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 3, 312.
30. Leonard Nathan faults the play for leaving it unclear to audiences whether
Ruttledge was indeed ‘a saintly martyr for his unorthodox belief’ or a
madman. The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats: Figures in a Dance
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 100. The criticism takes no
account of Nietzsche’s madman as a pretext for the character of Ruttledge.
31. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 233.
32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 327.
33. Heidegger, Being and Time, 236.
34. W. B. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing : Plays for an Irish Theatre, vol. 1
(London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), 34.
35. Ibid., 34.
36. Mary Burke, ‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 106.
37. Ibid., 94–95.
38. William Bulfin, Rambles in Eirinn (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1907), 298. Burke
suggests that Bulfin almost certainly invented the Itinerant man whom he
cites, in order to prove that someone of his traditional Irish nationalist
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 39

background would have a stronger contact with the Irish Traveller com-
munities than someone from Yeats’s Anglo-Irish Protestant background
(Burke, ‘Tinkers ’, 125). This is ironic if we accept Donald Torchiana’s
view that the opening scenes of Where There Is Nothing are ‘an out-
right attack on the Protestant and Unionist Ireland of the day’. Torchiana
asserts further that Lady Gregory’s rewriting of the play as The Unicorn
from the Stars ‘gives virtually no offence to Protestant Ireland’. W.B. Yeats
and Georgian Ireland, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America Press, 1992), 283.
39. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 17.
40. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 330–31.
41. Badiou, Being and Event, 87–89.
42. Ibid., 92.
43. Henry Wansbrough, gen. ed., The New Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton,
Longman and Todd, 1985), 836. This Latin version is taken from the
older Vulgate translation of the bible, carried out largely by St. Jerome
in the late fourth century, reprinted in later centuries with extensive com-
mentary: ‘My chalice which inebriatheth me, how goodly it is!’ D. Petri
Sabatier, ed., Bibliorum Sacrorum: Latinæ Versiones Antiquæ (Reginaldum
Florentin: Remus, 1763), 47.
44. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing , 62.
45. Harold Bloom, Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 146.
46. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing, 81–82; Petri Sabatier, ed., Bibliorum Sacro-
rum, 46.
47. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing, 81.
48. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 329–30.
49. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 26–27.
50. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing , 163.
51. Ibid., 80.
52. Plato, Parmenides, Dialogues of Plato, vol. 4, trans. R. E. Allen, revised
ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 64.
53. Badiou, Being and Event, 359.
54. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing , 97–98.
55. Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice (New York: Yale University Press, 2018),
114.
56. Yeats to Lady Gregory, December 4, 1902, in Kelly and Schuchard, eds.,
The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 3, 268.
57. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), 111.
58. Cited in Foster, W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, 270.
59. G. W. Russell – A.E., Writings on Literature and Art, Collected Works,
Part 4, ed. Peter Kuch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2011), 124–25.
40 M. MCATEER

60. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1, 270.

61. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (London:
Penguin, 1992), 186.
62. Colleen Jaurretche, The Sensual Philosophy: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mys-
ticism (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 78.
63. Heidegger, Being and Time, 377.
64. Ibid., 387–88.
65. F. L. Radford and Anthony Roche identify Stephen’s vision with an Irish
sovereignty tradition that relates to motifs common in the literature of
the Irish Revival. Radford, ‘Dedalus and the Bird Girl: Classical Text and
Celtic Subtext in A Portrait ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 24/3 (1987), 253–
74; Roche, ‘“The Strange Light of Some New World”: Stephen’s Vision in
A Portrait ’, James Joyce Quarterly 25/3 (1988), 323–32. Gregory Castle
rejects these readings on the basis that Stephen is about to take flight
from the very Ireland in which the revival of Irish legend is the dominant
influence on poetry and drama. Doing so, however, Castle overlooks exile
as the central element to the legend of the Children of Lir and to ‘the
wild geese’: the term used to describe the Irish Jacobite army who left
Ireland for France under the terms of the Treaty of Limerick in October
1691, concluding the Williamite Wars in Ireland. Modernism and Celtic
Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 200.
66. Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941) (London: Faber, 1967),
39.
67. Yeats, Where There Is Nothing , 87–88.
68. Ibid., 121–22.
69. Bloom, Yeats, 147. See, James Joyce, Ulysses , Bodley Head ed. (1960;
repr., London: Penguin, 1992), 688. L. H. Platt acknowledges William
Blake as the general influence for Stephen’s remark but asserts that the
more certain and immediate source was Martin Hearne from The Unicorn
From the Stars that Yeats wrote in collaboration with Lady Gregory. Platt
does not mention, however, that this play was a reworking of Where There
Is Nothing . L. H. Platt, ‘Ulysses 15 and the Irish Literary Theatre’, in
Andrew Gibson, ed., Reading Joyce’s “Circe” (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994),
57.
70. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1988), 404.
71. Luke 3: 22, King James Bible Online, https://www.
kingjamesbibleonline.org.
72. Wilde, The Complete, 404–5. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace:
Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1986), 168–69.
73. Joyce, A Portrait, 185.
74. Ibid., 236.
75. Ibid., 250.
 2 EXCESS AS SPIRITUAL ECSTASY: YEATS AND JOYCE 41

76. Ibid., 243.

77. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), 128–29.
78. Yeats to Lady Gregory, May 1, 1903, in Kelly and Schuchard, eds., The
Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 3, 353.
79. Joyce, A Portrait, 244. For detailed discussion of the associations of bird
imagery in A Portrait with fear early on and with freedom later in the
novel, see, Weldon Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce’s Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994),
137–45.
80. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed. (London:
Papermac, 1991), 233. Nicholas Grene provides an excellent summary of
bird imagery in Yeats’s poetry and the variety of their symbolic meanings.
Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 109–28.
81. Jaurretche, The Sensual Philosophy, 8–37.
82. Joyce, A Portrait, 244.
83. James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 43.
84. Ibid., 47.
85. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, trans. George F. Dole (West
Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2000), 124.
86. Ibid., 212–13.
87. Ibid., 206, 218.
88. Ibid., 163.
89. Joyce, A Portrait, 244.
90. Maria Tymoczko, The Irish Ulysses (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997), 25–36.
91. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1939) (London: Penguin, 2000), 4.
92. See, Joyce, Ulysses , 58–59; Yeats, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, in Nor-
man Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 335–40.
93. Badiou, Being and Event, 84.
94. Brivic, Revolutionary Damnation, 50.
95. Ibid., 46.
 CHAPTER 3

Oriental Excess: Wilde, Yeats, MacNeice

The Wilde East

The Orientalist aspect of excess appears in several literary works by Irish
writers that address the subject of religious experience. As Joseph Lennon
shows in Irish Orientalism, the belief in ancient connections between
Celtic civilization and the East has a long history stretching back over
several hundred years. During the period of the Literary Revival in Ire-
land from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, this idea
gained renewed impetus through the writings of Yeats, A.E. (George Rus-
sell), James Stephens and Joyce. The imprint of Nietzsche’s admiration
for Dionysian excess on Yeats’s Where There Is Nothing acquires a signif-
icance beyond that of der Übermensch when we take account of Edward
Said’s remarks on the Dionysian theme in the Attic drama of Euripides.
Said regards The Bacchae as ‘the most Asiatic of all the Attic dramas’, one
in which the Asian origins of Dionysus are accentuated and ‘the strangely
threatening excesses of Oriental mysteries’.1 Reading The Bacchae in this
way, Said notes Geoffrey Kirk’s assertion that the Dionysian religion of
Athenian society came under the influence of ‘foreign ecstatic religions’
from Asia Minor and the Levant during the Peloponnesian War, includ-
ing the cults of Bendis, Adonis, and Isis.2 Taking Aeschylus’s plays The
Persians and Euripides’s The Bacchae as points of origin for a conception
of the West and the East as separate civilizations, Said observes in ancient

© The Author(s) 2020 43

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_3
44 M. MCATEER

Greek drama the idea of the Orient as dangerous: threatening rational

order with ‘Eastern excesses’.3
The Oriental character of excess that Said identifies is evident not only
in Paul Ruttledge as the Christian-Dionysian priest of Where There Is
Nothing, but also in the connection to the East that is implied through
his marriage into an Itinerant community in Ireland. Yeats was interested
in Gypsylorist writings of John Sampson when composing the part of the
Itinerants for the play, as Mary Burke has noted. Burke illustrates a pro-
cess through which myths of origin concerning the Irish so-called tinkers
fell under the influence of the Orientalizing at work during the Euro-
pean Enlightenment within theories of the Indian origins of continental
European gypsies. She points to the significant influence that this Orien-
talizing exerted upon representations of the Irish Itinerant in the drama
of Synge in particular.4 In Joyce’s A Portrait, the fear of the unknown
that comes over Stephen Dedalus on the steps of the National Library is
another example of the Oriental excess that Said describes; particularly in
the image of Thoth, the Egyptian God of writing, that comes to Stephen’s
mind as he attempts to count the birds circling in the air above him.
Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is an important precedent for the Orientalist
aspect of mystical excess that we encounter in Where There Is Nothing
and the scene outside the National Library in A Portait. The wildly apoc-
alyptic language of John the Baptist from Wilde’s play anticipates that of
Ruttledge in Where There Is Nothing. Jarlath Killeen traces it to an asso-
ciation of Catholicism with apocalypse and degeneracy within Protestant
preaching during the course of the Evangelical Revival of the 1850s in an
Ireland that was still struggling to come to terms with the catastrophe of
the Great Famine.5 Herod’s sense of foreboding in hearing the flapping
of invisible wings in Salomé is a foretaste of the winged figures in A Por-
trait that bring to Stephen’s mind the image ‘of the hawk-like man whose
name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings’. In com-
bination with the incestuous desire between king Herod and Salomé that
is manifested in the dance of the seven veils, these aspects of Wilde’s play
are influenced by European perceptions of Arabic and Asiatic civilization
as exotic, sensual and excessive. Based on a passage from Frank Harris’s
biography of Wilde, in which Wilde is remembered as having expressed
to the author his disgust at heterosexual passion, Joseph Donoghue offers
the view that Wilde may have intended a critical depiction of Salomé her-
self, ‘tempting Herod to an excess of sexual arousal that precipitates a dis-
gust whose ultimate issue is Herod’s condemnation of her to death’.6 Said
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 45

identifies in the treatment of the figures like Salomé and Isis in the writing
of Gautier, Huysmans and Flaubert ‘a fascination with the macabre, with
the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism’.7 Said is partic-
ularly interested in Flaubert’s visits to Egypt for the impact that they had
on Flaubert’s representation of the Oriental feminine figure of Salomé,
as it appeared in his story ‘Herodias’ from Three Tails (1877), through
Flaubert’s encounter in Wadi Halfa with a famous Egyptian dancer and
courtesan, Kuchuk Hanem.8 Wilde was familiar with Flaubert’s story, but
Huysmans’ Au Rebours had a stronger influence, in particular through its
treatment of Gustave Moreau’s painting ‘Salome Dancing Before Herod’
(1876).
As an Irishman drawn to the writing of Flaubert, Wilde fell under the
influence of the Orientalism that Said describes. Lennon demonstrates
the complex history of identifications between the Irish, Celtic and Asi-
atic civilization in Irish myths of origin from the twelfth century to the
twentieth. How far we might read the influence of a Scythian-Celtic iden-
tification into Salomé is a matter of conjecture (Lennon mentions the play
only once in passing).9 Wilde’s stories in the fairy-tale medium, testament
to the influence of his mother’s publications on Irish folklore, his praise
for Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889) and Yeats’s public admira-
tion of ‘The Decay of Lying’ all point to Wilde’s keen interest in the sub-
ject of Celtic folklore that was to be a vital influence to the Irish literary
movement. Responding in February 1891 to Grant Allen’s admiration of
his essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Wilde brings together his
trademark wit and his London society position in proposing a Celtic din-
ner. Wilde writes to Allen of how he had recently met some Scottish and
Welsh MPs while dining at the House of Commons, men who expressed
to Wilde their admiration for Allen’s article, ‘The Celt in English Art’. He
tells Allen that he proposed inaugurating a Celtic Dinner to these Mem-
bers of Parliament in order that ‘all of us who are Celts, Welsh, Scotch and
Irish’ would thereby show ‘these tedious Angles or Teutons what a race
we are, and how proud we are to belong to that race’.10 Written a year
before the composition of Salomé in French, the sentiment is evidence of
Wilde’s sympathies for all things Celtic. It points to the influence of the
idea of the excessive nature of the Celtic temperament on the theme of
excess in Salomé, an idea promulgated most famously by Matthew Arnold
in On the Study of Celtic Literature.
46 M. MCATEER

Yeats had published a short Oriental verse-play entitled Mosada five

years before Wilde completed the first version of Salomé. This piece hav-
ing first been published in The Dublin University Review in June 1886,
Wilde would have been familiar with it. A young ‘Moorish lady’ as Yeats
describes her, Mosada speaks to a lame boy named Cola of summon-
ing a beautiful ghost, ‘robed all in raiment moony white’: this spirit, she
tells him, sat and sang in a ‘lily-blanchèd place’ while she ‘wove around
her head / White lilies’. Her song ‘flew forth afar’ across the sea from
the distant island where she dwelt, luring all those men who heard it
into sleep and even death.11 In the same imagery of moonlight, sea and
lilies in Wilde’s Salomé, the daughter of Herod speaks to John the Bap-
tist of his body as white like ‘the lilies of the field’; whiter in her eyes
than the ‘roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia’, ‘the breast of the
moon when she lies on the breast of the sea’.12 Noreen Doody presents
an interesting case for a London performance of Salomé exerting a deep
impact on Yeats after he attended it in 1905. Despite Yeats’s dismissal of
the play, Doody argues that it prompted him to revise versions of his own
plays that Yeats had regarded as complete before he saw Salomé in Lon-
don: The Shadowy Waters, On Baile’s Strand and Deirdre. Drawing upon
Yeats’s manuscript materials, Doody’s argument has much to commend
it but is not entirely convincing. Her view that Yeats grants the female
figures in these plays greater sexual power under the influence of Salomé
indeed carries weight for the 1906 version of Deirdre, as she ably demon-
strates. However, there is little of Salomé’s provocative sexual presence
about the character of Dectora from The Shadowy Waters or the female
chorus in On Baile’s Strand.13 More importantly, Doody takes no con-
sideration of Yeats’s Mosada as a source for Wilde’s Salomé, even though
she acknowledges the Oriental quality of Wilde’s play that was evident in
the influence of Flaubert, an influence that Yeats himself observed.14
Edward Larrissey argues that through Mosada’s Arabic knowledge
of magic that condemns her to death under the judgement of Spanish
Inquisitors, Yeats is addressing a conflict between mystical Celtic spiritu-
ality and the religious orthodoxy of Irish Catholicism.15 Indeed, there is
a direct reference to Ireland in the second scene of Mosada when one of
the monks refers to another monk named Peter as digging his cabbages,
prompting him to compose a song of a Munster saint who, after a long
fast, sees a ‘vision of Peter and the burning gate’.16 While no such ref-
erence occurs in Wilde’s Salomé, the sensuality and the exoticism of lan-
guage in the play may be attributed in some measure to a sense of Celtic
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 47

magic with Orientalist overtones that Wilde imbibed from his mother in
her preoccupation with Irish fairy and folklore legends. In the preface to
her 1887 volume, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of
Ireland, Lady Wilde considers the ‘strange and mystical superstitions’ of
native Irish people as having been brought to Ireland ‘thousands of years
ago from their Aryan home’.17

Arabian Yeats
Orientalism in Yeats’s writings appears in eclectic forms: Arabian, Egyp-
tian, Indian and Japanese. In considering Orientalism as a form of mys-
tical excess in Yeats’s poetry, one of the most important examples is a
poem that he first published in 1923, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’.
The poem conveys the notion of the Orient as excess through the influ-
ence of the One Thousand and One Nights or, as it has come to be known
in English, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. This is a work in which
narrative itself appears as a form of excess in the abundance of stories
relayed by the woman Sheherazade to King Shahriyār: the interwoven
intricacies of the plots, the continual descriptions of magical spells being
cast, and the appearance of varieties of spirit-beings. This narrative abun-
dance is reflected in ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ in its double-narrative
structure: a story told within a letter, as Susan Bazargan notes, rendering
densely intricate the poem’s meanings.18 ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ is
quite evidently a hymn to Yeats’s wife George, whom he married in 1917.
It is also a testament to the significance of the automatic writing for the
couple’s marriage, writing that George began in apparent states of trance
soon after their wedding, with its layering of symbol upon symbol. From
this perspective, it anticipates a sense of becoming overwhelmed by Ori-
ental difference while allowing the opulence of that difference to suffuse
the voice of the poet. Mazen Naous claims that ‘The Gift of Harun Al-
Rashid’ should be read as an example of Irish Orientalism, participating
in yet challenging English Orientalism: marking points of identification
between Celt and Arabian even as these at times distort or exoticize in
the manner of Imperial discourses of the Oriental.19
The excess of ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ appears first of all as
the author’s loss of control in rendering the intricacy and magnitude of
Oriental civilization. Brenda Maddox wittily observes that the automatic
writing that George began soon after her marriage to Yeats was one of
the most ingenious ways ever thought up by a newly wed to distract her
48 M. MCATEER

husband from the thought of other women. Maddox also sees it, how-
ever, as ‘an act of desperation’, in which, like Scheherazade from the One
Thousand and One Nights, Georgie Yeats ‘staved off her fate by capti-
vating her master but at the price of being unable to stop’.20 This rather
devalues the personality of George herself, the depth and sophistication of
which both Ann Saddlemeyer and Margaret Mills Harper have unfolded
at length. Nonetheless, Maddox brings to surface the sense of both hus-
band and wife falling under Arabian spells that the Yeatses themselves
had cast in the automatic writing experiment. Saddlemeyer in particu-
lar captures the extravagant quality of the milieu from which ‘The Gift of
Harun Al-Rashid’ emerged. Having known the Arabian Nights tales from
childhood, the couple had their interests revived through new versions
produced by Edmund Dulac and Laurence Houseman. George had read
extensively on magic and astrology in Syrian religion; both she and her
husband attended lectures on Arabian alchemy by F. P. Sturm delivered to
the London Theosophical Society. Then there was W. S. Blunt—former
love interest of Lady Gregory and champion of all things Egyptian—who
‘entertained his guests dressed in flowing Arab robes, and his wife Lady
Ann had published The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates ’.21 These illustrate
the influences under which, as Jon Stallworthy claims, Yeats had read the
entire volumes of Powys Mathers English translation of The Book of a
Thousand Nights and One Night that was published in 1923.22
From the outset, the reader is caught in a densely woven web of script
in ‘The Gift of Haroun Al-Rashid’. In this aspect excess appears in Yeats’s
poem in an esoteric form as deferral and substitution, what Derrida iden-
tifies as supplementarity, particularly as it relates to Derrida’s notion of an
infinite chain of signifiers in his theory of writing. One who announces
himself as Kusta Ben Luka instructs a messenger to deliver his letter to
the Caliph’s treasurer, Al Abd-Rabban. First considering that the letter
be left in the Treasury library at ‘the great book of Sappho’s song’, Ben
Luka decides instead that it should be placed beside the treatise of Par-
menides, a work that the Caliphs are duty-bound to preserve until the
end of time.23 Ben Luka anticipates that the mystery of the parchment
will one day be found by some wise man. Otherwise, it will fall unto the
ears of ‘the wild bedouin’ who, as desert wanderers, will lose the mystery
to ‘a bird’s wit’ (recollecting the esoteric significance of bird imagery not
only in Yeats’s poetry, but also in Joyce’s A Portait ). In the form of a
message, the letter is presented to the reader as a supplement: the aspect
that Derrida considers to encapsulate the nature of writing itself.
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 49

In ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ the message is the complete presence

of the poem’s mystery and, at the same time, the scripted medium that
substitutes for the event that it presents.24 In its relation to the Arabian
influences in the first edition of Yeats’s A Vision, Warwick Gould cor-
rectly observes a feature fundamental to the Arabian Nights : the stories
told by Scheherazade as the means by which she defers her fate.25 Defer-
ral appears primarily in the form of magical substitution within the tales
of the Arabian Nights and, between the tales, in the manner through
which one tale prompts another. The Oriental character of excess in this
manner of perpetual deferral corresponds to Derrida’s notion of supple-
mentarity. Supplementarity develops at the level of writing a feature of
Dasein that Heidegger first articulates in Being and Time: being ‘what is
not yet’ in being there.26 Anticipation is a fundamental orientation in this
state of Dasein being ‘what is not yet’ as Heidegger considers it: antici-
pation as surrender to the movement towards its own death as the sole
means through which the ultimate possibilities of Dasein are realisable.27
Anticipating that one day a wise man will read his letter, Kusta Ben Luka
surrenders his secret to a movement that opens future possibilities but
only in terms of the anticipation of his own death. Yet in exceeding the
limits of its origin, the script itself comes to life in ‘The Gift of Harun
Al-Rashid’. The prospect of death inaugurates life through writing, as
Derrida observes.28
Speaking of messages in ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, the question
arises as to who is speaking. There is the voice of Kusta Ben Luka, ‘the
least considered of his courtiers’ in conversation with the Caliph and
later recalling this conversation in his letter. There is also the voice of
the woman who has overheard this conversation and who speaks to the
philosopher of human love. As Elizabeth Butler Cullingford observes, this
woman represents a break from ‘the silent heroines of the epithalamium,
and love poetry in general’: she is valued not because of her looks, but
because of her voice.29 Beyond this, there are the words rumoured to
have been spoken by the Caliph when announcing without explanation
that his minister of state, his Vizir Jaffer, was to be executed.30 Reflect-
ing this layering of voices in the poem, the conversation itself reveals that
the humble courtier Ben Luka remains unwedded in ‘the jasmine season’
because he has chosen the ‘Byzantine faith’ that would seem unnatural
to ‘Arabian minds’.31 The Byzantine theme later reaches its height in
Yeats’s Byzantium poems from his 1928 collection, The Tower, and his
1933 collection, The Winding Stair and Other Poems. In ‘The Gift of
50 M. MCATEER

Harun Al-Rashid’, it appears as a form of Eastern Christianity that flows in

and out of Arabian mysticism. Writing by candlelight in a position grant-
ing him full view of the woman sleeping as he does so, Ben Luka turns
upon hearing her voice as he is fixing a screen to prevent the candlelight
disturb her. In the most dramatic example of the gap opened in the poem
between speaker and speech, he suddenly wonders if it is the voice of the
woman herself or ‘some great Djinn’: he declares it the latter.32
The final section of ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ provokes one of
the most contested matters for readers of Yeats’s poetry and drama since
George began automatic writing soon after the couple’s marriage in 1917.
Are the written messages and symbols inscriptions of energy existing in an
unconscious level, or are they communications from spirits transmitting
metaphors for poetry through her, as Yeats contends in the first edition of
A Vision? In ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ Ben Luka hears the voice as
he is writing, and so there is understandable confusion as to whether it is
the woman or a spirit speaking through her: ‘she seemed the learned man
and I the child’.33 Margaret Mills Harper notes the significance of the
gender switch here in terms of tensions within the Yeatses marriage that
variations in George’s gender identity during the automatic writing exper-
iments may have generated for the couple.34 This switching of genders
reflects more widely the play of gender identities through which Celtic
and Oriental fashions were explored among Yeats’s friends and acquain-
tances. These included William Sharp as Fiona MacLeod, George Russell
as the androgynous figure A.E., and Eva Gore-Booth, in the homoerotic
undercurrents of plays like The Egyptian Pillar (1907) and The Buried
Life of Deirdre (1930). The gender ambiguity near the end of ‘The Gift
of Harun Al-Rashid’ anticipates Yeats’s own feelings of androgyny follow-
ing his Steinach operation in 1934.
There is, however, a more fundamental issue at stake here in relation
to excess and the void. This is the sudden apprehension of one’s utmost
potential for being in the instant that Dasein is confronted with what
Heidegger describes as the ‘“nothing” of the possible impossibility of its
existence’.35 He regards this as a call of conscience: an experience that
cannot be voluntarily undertaken, exceeding oneself even as it emerges
from oneself: ‘The call comes from me and yet from beyond me’.36 Near
the conclusion of ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, Ben Luka concedes that
the abstract geometrical symbols and systems with which he has been
obsessed were ultimately the expression of the woman’s body, drunk as
Ben Luka was on ‘the bitter sweetness of her youth’. At this point, he
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 51

is forced to admit that his ‘utmost mystery is out’.37 Maddox suggests a

meeting of Araby and Freud here.38 Heidegger’s idea of the call points
to something more primordial: an encounter with the absolute limits of
one’s existential possibility, coming from within and yet beyond oneself.
In ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ this appears in the multitude of masks
and voices that the poet adopts in stretching his creative potential to its
limit, coupled with the voice of wisdom that comes from beyond him and
through which Yeats, as Ben Luka, is brought into confrontation with that
‘utmost mystery’ of himself.
Considering the question of who speaks in ‘The Gift of Harun Al-
Rashid’ in terms of Heidegger’s voice of conscience, excess appears in
the poem as the point of connection between nothing and infinity, such
as we have already seen in Where There Is Nothing. The spiritual nature
of this excess takes a mathematical form. While the ultimate knowledge
that Kusta Ben Luka pursues in ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ may reside
in human love, he is still compelled to travel along a journey of abstract
learning that involves grasping the meaning of those geometric symbols
that Yeats develops into the astrological system of A Vision. Including
the poem in the 1925 edition of A Vision, he amended its title to ‘Desert
Geometry, or The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’. It is no coincidence that Ben
Luka instructs the messenger to leave his letter beside the Parmenides in
the poem, the Platonic dialogue that is most concerned with numbers.
In the poem, Ben Luka’s letter is addressed to the Caliph’s treasurer: by
its conclusion, the reader discovers that the wisdom that the treasurer
believed to have been derived from the Parmenides was an expression of
the body of the woman whom Ben Luka has loved. To read into this
aspect of the poem a triumph of the physical over mathematical abstrac-
tion is to miss the fact that Ben Luka has fallen in love with the woman
precisely for the wisdom that she communicated in her unconscious state,
a wisdom that indeed reflects the deepest insights of the Parmenides, at
least in the mind of the courtier. Physical love and philosophical wis-
dom illuminated in the mathematical are intimately interwoven in Yeats’s
poem. If Ben Luka’s ultimate mystery is the woman’s body, it is because
she has conveyed abstract wisdom to him.39
This implies a conjunction of mathematical wisdom and human love,
an idea that may be comprehended through Badiou’s interpretation of
Heidegger, and the specifically numerical concept of excess that Badiou
first develops from his reading of the Parmenides. Badiou revises Hei-
degger’s notion of care (to which Dasein is called) as the ‘anxiety of the
52 M. MCATEER

void’. This arises from a feature in Badiou’s mathematical interpretation

of ontology: any given numerical set must be counted a second time in
order to be verified as a single (one) set. In this second count, Badiou
sees the oneness of a single numerical set being brought ‘into being with
the un-encounterable danger of the void’.40 The unity of any such set in
its singularity is threatened by the doubling of the second count through
which it must be ratified. On this basis, Badiou identifies numerical excess
as a theorem for understanding a set, particularly a set that constitutes a
situation: ‘there are always sub-multiples which, despite being included
in a situation as compositions of multiplicities, cannot be counted in that
situation as terms, and which therefore do not exist’.41
This mathematical set theory account of ‘the anxiety of the void’ is
present in the complex narrative structure of ‘The Gift of Harun Al-
Rashid’ as a reflection of the geometrical abstractions with which Kusta
Ben Luka wrestles in search of wisdom. There is the set of terms that make
up the narrative of Yeats’s poem—the characters and the poetic devices
through which the two interwoven stories of the poem are relayed—and
there are the messages of wisdom conveyed to Ben Luka by the woman,
but which cannot be counted as terms in the narrative. Imparted in a
state of trance, these messages stand in absolute excess of the circum-
stances that arise within the narrative of the poem. Extending to a point
of infinity in the symbolic correspondences that they generate, to enu-
merate them would be to collapse the narrative structure of the poem
itself. Furthermore, the messages—‘the wisdom of the desert Djinns’—
exceed the love between Ben Luka and the woman. Although they are
the source of that love, they cannot be contained within it without risk-
ing its destruction. This danger is evident in Ben Luka’s uncertainty as to
whether he loves the woman for the wisdom that she speaks in sleep or
for the quality of her voice, and the reassurance he needs that she has not
read his books.42 Whatever its biographical significance for the early years
of Yeats’s marriage to George, therefore, excess in ‘The Gift of Harun
Al-Rashid’ presents itself as unpresentable in both numerical and affective
senses.

MacNeice’s India
Among the generation of Irish poets to succeed Yeats in the 1930s, none
was more troubled yet more engaged than Louis MacNeice by those pre-
occupations with Oriental mysticism in the poetry of his Irish Protestant
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 53

predecessor. Yeats was an enormous influence for MacNeice in what he

had achieved through a distinctive combination of Irishness and esoteri-
cism over several decades as poet and dramatist. Yet MacNeice is usu-
ally considered to have shared W. H. Auden’s disdain for Yeats’s Ori-
ental mystical interests: the ‘deplorable spectacle of a grown man occu-
pied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India’.43 This
is evident, for example, in MacNeice’s letters to his second wife, Hedli
Anderson, sent during his visit to India in August 1947 as part of a BBC
team reporting on India gaining its independence from Britain. MacNe-
ice writes in a tone of mockery at the Hindu belief in the sacredness of
the cow that was reflected in a movement to ban cattle-slaughter in the
new nation-state.44 MacNeice’s resistance to the Oriental mysticism that
Yeats absorbed also appears in ‘Autumn Journal’ from 1939, in which
he worries about ‘an Indian aquiescence’ that simply amounts to accept-
ing things as they are. Added to this is MacNeice’s satirical comment on
Shree Purowhit Swami in his 1941 book, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, Swami
a guru and friend to the ageing poet in the 1930s. MacNeice writes that
an Indian writer friend told him that the Swami was not typically Indian,
and the whole Indian spirituality thing was a myth ‘built up by retired,
sentimental Anglo-Indians’.45 In this study, MacNeice goes further than
the elder Yeats who himself had judged the poems from one of his ear-
liest collections, The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), not to be truly Irish.
MacNeice adds, ‘no more Irish than the Indian poems are Indian’, in ref-
erence to the poems ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’, ‘The Indian upon God’, and
‘The Indian to His Love’ from that collection.46
Despite these attitudes, Oriental influences appear in MacNeice’s
poetry. ‘Birmingham’ contains one of the finest surrealist images in Mac-
Neice’s early work: that of the city’s trams moving on their lines ‘like
vast sarcophagi’ into the sky.47 The magnitude and the perpetual motion
of the modern industrial city is expressed in these lines through an
image that suggests the vastness of Oriental antiquity as reflected in the
labyrinthine design of the burial casket that the ancient Greeks adopted
from an earlier Egyptian civilization. Capturing the movement of the
city’s trams in this particular association with death, MacNeice is not sim-
ply responding to the deadening impact of modern technology on the
quality of human life, but to modern urban living itself as a condition
of sheer excess. The dense intricacies of the sarcophagi’s Oriental design
prove as difficult to disentangle as the network of tram lines criss-crossing
Birmingham city. An image such as this indicates why Yeats, despite his
54 M. MCATEER

reservations about English poetry of the 1930s, still held some hope in
his 1937 preface to The Ten Principal Upanishads that Cecil Day Lewis,
W. H. Auden, Laura Riding or Louis MacNeice might one day produce
some ‘new Upanishad, some half-Asiatic masterpiece’, as Tom Walker
notes. Walker proposes that the publication of MacNeice’s Autumn Jour-
nal in May 1939 show how misguided Yeats’s aspiration was but the
poems that MacNeice published on India after the Second World War
question this judgement.48 Edna Longley notes that ‘Symbolism sur-
vives’ in ‘Birmingham’ and sees the poem as expressing ‘city life as sense-
experience, mobile experience, a stream of consciousness’. This is also a
tacit admission of the undercurrent influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s
idea on MacNeice of nature as Heraclitean flux, even in the circumstance
of industrial Birmingham.49
MacNeice’s sense of becoming dwarfed, by urban sprawl in the case
of ‘Birmingham’, resurfaces in the late 1940s in the entirely different
setting of India. A poem taking the form of a letter to his then-wife
Hedli Anderson, it captures MacNeice’s bewilderment at the mystique
and strangeness of the vast country in which he finds himself as a BBC
reporter. For all the beauties that he encounters in ‘Buddhist stupa’, in
the tombs of the Moghul dynasty (with their mix of Persian, Islamic
and India styles), in perpetual movements like the flicking of hands and
the folding of saris, in the chanting from sacred books that is intended
to illuminate the ‘soul’s long night’, still the poet finds himself in this
dizzying environment unable to find any room for ‘our short night in
this miasma’.50 Telling in the poem is MacNeice’s delayed rhyming of
‘stupa’—a domed edifice for Buddhist relics—with ‘miasma’, an atmo-
sphere fouled with the smell of rotting matter. Immediately we are
reminded of Mr. Kurtz near the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ‘as
good as buried’, in Marlowe’s judgement, within ‘the smell of the damp
earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an
impenetrable night’.51 The excess of India being ‘too much to take in’
for MacNeice, Walker sees ‘Letter from India’ ‘restage’ Heart of Darkness,
echoing Ashok Bery’s view that the poem ‘seems to show him flounder-
ing and overwhelmed by his experiences in the sub-continent’.52 Bery
sees one line in MacNeice’s poem refer directly to ‘the horror’ that Mar-
low hears as Kurtz’s last exclamation in Conrad’s novel: ‘This was the
horror – it is deep’.53
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 55

The scent of death is not the only disturbing feature in the poem. A
concatenation of symbol, script and gesture denies the poet any capac-
ity to grasp his circumstance. The situation is characterized by void
and overflow, in which MacNeice cannot find the space to express that
which he names to Hedli as ‘our short night’. This might be considered
the old Heraclitean dilemma that preoccupies MacNeice throughout his
life. Equally, it evokes that idea of excess in terms of perpetual deferral
that Yeats’s ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ presents. Derrida locates this
ephemerality in the nature of language itself: ‘We are dispossessed of the
longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to
seize it’.54 A compelling instance of the wandering signifier, ‘Letter from
India’ is testament to MacNeice’s desire for communion with Hedli, the
distance that makes it impossible, and this distance itself as the condition
for that desire.
Kit Fryatt shows that Ireland was much on MacNeice’s mind as he was
putting together his radio programmes on India, particularly with regard
to the figures of Mother Ireland—Cathleen ni Houlihan—and Mother
India. In India at First Sight, his first radio feature on India that was
broadcast in 1948, MacNeice has an Englishman quote from the preface
to Shaw’s Irish play, John Bull’s Other Island, to refute the claim made by
an Indian that Shaw was a nationalist.55 It is ironic that MacNeice forgot
Peter Keegan, the defrocked Catholic priest in John Bull’s Other Island
who lives on the edge of a west of Ireland village, claiming to have been
converted to the Hindu doctrine of re-incarnation following an experi-
ence while working as a missionary in Africa.56 In any case, the influence
of MacNeice’s Irish background in his response to India during the course
of his 1947 visit to the country is an indication that the Orientalizing of
Irish mythology in several of Yeats’s poems and plays are significant to
understanding MacNeice’s poems on India.
MacNeice adapts the imagery of continual metamorphosis that the
reader finds in early Yeats poems like ‘An Indian Upon God’ or ‘Fer-
gus and the Druid’ to his finest poem on India, ‘Didymus’. The theme
of shape-changing in those early Yeats poems is heavily influenced by the
idea that the ancient Celts shared the Hindu belief in the transmigration
of the soul. This view was widely held among classical Roman writers on
the Celts, as T. W. Rolleston points out.57 ‘Didymus’ adopts the voice
of the doubting apostle Thomas. Through the story of his mission jour-
ney into India, MacNeice explores his own scepticism as a prompting to
56 M. MCATEER

belief, in the process of feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the

civilization in which he finds himself.
From the outset of the poem, image follows upon image in a tumult of
sensual and spiritual stimuli: roses, sandalwood, ‘phosphorescent waves’,
‘Caparisoned elephants’, ‘sacred bulls’, ‘Dazzling and jangling dancers,
dazzling lepers’.58 Edna Longley understandably criticises ‘an attack of
wordiness’ in MacNeice’s poetry from the period in which he wrote
‘Didymus’ yet this abundance of language is part of the point. In India, he
is overwhelmed by an excess of new sensations in a world that is ancient
and unknown to him.59 Ashok Bery observes in that abundance of images
inaugurating ‘Didymus’ a reminder of MacNeice’s ‘detailing’ of Ireland
in ‘Valediction’ from back in 1935: ‘the horse’s feet like bells of hair’,
‘the beer-brown spring’ that is ‘guzzling’ the heather, ‘the green gush’
of the Irish spring season. This latter image is also a reminder of Dylan
Thomas’s ‘green fuse’ from ‘The force that through the green fuse’ in 18
Poems, published in 1934, the year before the publication of ‘Valediction’
in MacNeice’s Poems.60
In a fashion not entirely removed from the linguistic superabundance
of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the proliferation of images and ideas in Mac-
Neice’s poems on his visit to India are indicative of excess as the sup-
plementarity of writing itself. ‘Something promises itself as it escapes’
Derrida writes, ‘gives itself as it moves away, and strictly speaking it can-
not even be called presence. Such is the constraint of the supplement,
such, exceeding all the language of metaphysics, is this structure “almost
inconceivable to reason”’.61 The movement of images in the opening to
‘Didymus’ enacts this perpetual movement of supplementarity, in which
nothing is quite present to the occasion that the wild range of sensations
evokes, exceeding the very occasion itself. If the cacophony of India awak-
ened in this tumult of images repeats a figure of the Orient as excess, it
likewise frustrates a sought-after presence to oneself: thus propelling the
poet to travel further along this journey. In this sense, the poem marks
the intersection of Oriental multitude and the absolute inflation of Der-
rida’s deconstructive procedure, encapsulating a metaphysical rupture in
European thought during the mid-twentieth century.
In its movement, MacNeice’s ‘Didymus’ recalls an early Yeats poem
that MacNeice would have been inclined to dismiss prior to his time spent
in India. ‘Fergus and the Druid’ draws upon old Irish mythology to cre-
ate a poetic dialogue of a warrior and a priest-magician, but the reader
is given an outline of the cyclic pattern of reincarnation characteristic of
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 57

Hindu philosophy, a pattern that Yeats would develop fully in A Vision in

later life. Having taken the Druid’s potions, his ‘little bag of dreams’, Fer-
gus finds himself flowing like a river ‘from change to change’. He believes
himself to have been everything from a flash of light on a sword to ‘a fir-
tree on a hill’; from a slave to a king.62 Such an image of continuous
flux would have great appeal for MacNeice, if not its acquiescence to the
divine mystery of an eternal cycle. Responding to a late Yeats poem about
his memory of a friend of earlier times, Mohini Chatterjee, MacNeice
picks up on his sympathy for the idea of reincarnation as an explanation
for the poet’s ‘quarrel with himself’ in later years, a quarrel that produces
this mystical excess. In that later body of Yeats’s work, MacNeice observes
a rage born from a pride to be ‘part of the world’ confronted with the
recognition that the poet is ‘such a small part of it’. In MacNeice’s view,
Yeats falls to the temptation to glaze over this ‘through a mysticism which
allows the individual to overflow himself’.63
Yet overflow is also apparent in MacNeice’s ‘Didymus’, in which the
perpetual change of form that the reader encounters in Yeats’s ‘Fergus and
the Druid’ appears with a much greater degree of disorientation. Faces
and lives melt into one another in an image of individuality swamped by
amorphous superabundance. MacNeice contemplates ‘Lives upon lives’
as ‘bubbles of jewelled scum’ that are born ‘every second and reborn
regardless’.64 This language typifies Said’s accounts of British Imperial-
ist perspectives of the Orient as a great dumping ground of everything
filthy and exotic. In particular, ‘jewelled scum’ smacks of hauteur. Is the
reader expected to take the phrase as a reference to a decadent opulence
of India’s elite just as the country becomes independent, or as conveying
the image of an entire country in which ornamentation and dirt are inter-
mixed? Perhaps MacNeice shares his distaste with the imagined figure of
the early Christian apostle, encountering a land in which religion takes
the form of material excess in such an unabashed fashion.
Writing in France as MacNeice comes on the English literary scene
in the 1930s, Georges Bataille relishes the sexual rhythm of perpetual
reincarnation in the mystical traditions borrowed by Gnosticism: ‘Beings
only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order
to enter them’.65 This speaks closely to MacNeice’s image of a contin-
ual rebirth of the Indian masses. Bataille finds in the ‘deviant’ forms of
esoteric mysticism—the mixing of animal and human, for example, or
58 M. MCATEER

the surplus breasts and arms of Buddhist Gods that preoccupy MacNe-
ice in ‘Didymus’—a religious expression of animal sexual wildness. Mac-
Neice himself picks up on this animalistic aspect in the esotericism of
the Rose motif from early Yeats poems like ‘The Rose of the World’ and
‘The Secret Rose’. He notes how, as a symbol of ideal love and beauty,
the rose ‘was eaten by the Golden Ass of Apuleis in order to regain his
human shape’.66 Bataille identifies the ‘solar ass’ with a ‘monstrous taste
for the obscene in Gnostic tradition, considering its ‘comic and desperate
braying’ a ‘shameless revolt’ against idealism. Sexual intercourse between
the priestess Attracta and her servant Corney fails to stop the reincarna-
tion of Congal (the king of Connacht) as a donkey at the end of Yeats’s
1938 play The Herne’s Egg . The play offers a powerful and disturbing
demonstration of the type of materialistic excess that Bataille observes in
the esoteric cults of Gnosticism.67 It also carries the memory of Aubrey
Beardsley’s illustration, ‘The Toilette of Salome’, for the 1894 publication
of the English edition of Wilde’s Salomé. Apuleis’s book, The Golden Ass
is one of the censored works that appears on the bookshelf in Beardsley’s
drawing.68
Surrender is also at issue in the representation of eastern civilization
as excess in MacNeice’s ‘Didymus’. Indeed, the poet’s steadfast determi-
nation to resist the all-engulfing spiritual sensationalism of India carries a
trace of the ‘No Surrender’ disposition. The slogan was deeply embedded
into the identity of the Ulster Protestant community into which Mac-
Neice was born, since it was reputedly used by Williamite Loyalists dur-
ing the Siege of Derry in April 1689. The figure of the apostle Thomas
can well be conceived as the Christian disciple who has wandered into
India still beset with doubt, in stark contrast to Peter who, the voice in
‘Didymus’ believes, ‘would have talked big’ and Paul, who would have
matched Hindu philosophical abstractions with his own.69 Doubt may
have cast his mission in a cloud of uncertainty, but through it he also
withholds from surrender to the superabundance of Hindu mystery and
magic: those Indian Gods who could make all the hands they wanted
to appear in a single moment.70 Peter McDonald remarks that doubt-
ing Thomas in ‘Didymus’ serves MacNeice ‘as a foil to the transcendent
claims of mysticism, yet his religious mission contradicts also the flux-like
variety of Hinduism’.71
Asserting the Christian humility of having only two hands to work
with, Thomas nevertheless feels compelled to clasp them in re-assurance
that they were indeed ‘only Two’.72 Doubt in this instance reveals itself
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 59

in ‘Didymus’ not in the possibility that Christ was only human, but that
material reality might be illusion, simply emanation of divinity, a notion
that troubles the apostle because of the wild multitude of shapes fantas-
tical and grotesque that it unfurls. Through the figure of Thomas, Mac-
Neice reflects upon the vast population of Hindu India as people moving
like ants gathering and carrying the crumbs from the table of the deity
Shiva whose foot dances above them, their lives nothing more than the
moment between one step in this dance and the next.73 The perpetual
reincarnation of human souls is presented as excess, both in the vastness
of humanity reduced to scurrying ants and in the surplus of leftovers as
crumbs that fall from the table of the deity.
Once more, MacNeice imagines India’s mystical allure and its material
deprivation in one. The prospect of his Protestant sense of Christ some-
how redeeming individuality in this vast sway is immediately upturned by
Protestant doubt, since Thomas’s gospel ‘is only by proxy’ because the
doubting Thomas was, in MacNeice’s eyes, simply ‘hawking’ the Chris-
tian religion to the Hindu people whom he might have encountered.74
If the Indian masses appear to live off crumbs, so too does Thomas. This
may be MacNeice’s judgement upon himself, a poet set adrift between an
Ireland turned inwardly Protestant and Catholic at once, and an England
wherein he has retained some aspect of an outsider. Whatever the truth in
this—after Yeats, MacNeice thought much of Ireland in terms of Asia—
the poem’s imagery bears out Derrida’s presentation of the supplement as
exorbitant.75 The inflation of India into an infinite cosmic process shrinks
people to the level of insects living off the leftovers of the divinities. The
Christian message, through which individuality might be rescued from the
perpetual chain, is already a substitute for the event that it transmits, a
supplement intruding as the honest scepticism that haunts the apostle.
The conjuncture of numerical excess and uncertain love that the reader
encounters in Yeats’s ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ is also evident in
MacNeice’s ‘Letter from India’, a poem, like Yeats’s, that is epistolary.
In the fourteenth verse of ‘Letter from India’, the speaker considers it
unsurprising that in the ‘maelstrom’ of India, his love letter should seem
so insignificant, or indeed that he might think as illusory the ‘chartered
speed’ of the aircraft carrying this letter among its cargo.76 Counting
is a recurrent source of reflection in MacNeice’s poetry. He full-rhymes
‘counts’, ‘amounts’ and ‘mounts’ in this verse, almost to double-underline
the significance of counting. India is that place where ‘no person counts’,
mixing ideas of Hindu measurelessness and mysticism with his sense of
60 M. MCATEER

the insignificance of individual lives in such a densely populated country.

By contrast he sees his own expression of love in this letter-poem as care-
fully, even dully, measured.77 The verse, however, is much more than a
trite polarization of Western rational individuality against Eastern mystical
vastness. As in Yeats’s poetry on the East, not only is numeracy at issue
in a ‘Letter from India’, but so too is place and displacement. Indeed,
counting and displacement are intertwined in both Yeats’s ‘The Gift of
Harun Al-Rashid’ and MacNeice’s ‘Letter from India’.
To grasp the nature of Oriental excess in terms of counting and dis-
placement in ‘Letter from India’, a particular aspect of the idea of excess
as it arises in Badiou’s set theory account of being is instructive. This
is Badiou’s argument that a number exists that is a limit of an infinite
numerical sequence. Badiou’s describes this unique number as an ordinal,
a multiple of the type such that all that is included within it also belongs to
it. Badiou puts it succinctly when he says that, for ordinals (‘natural multi-
plicities’)—because everything is both included and belongs—then every-
thing belongs to everything: except that there is no everything, no total-
ity within which everything is contained. A completely natural sequence
extends to infinity and, therefore, cannot be said to be natural.78 There is,
however, one instance in which the infinite sequence of an ordinal meets
a limit. This is what Badiou terms ‘the limit ordinal’: ‘In the limit ordinal,
the place of alterity (all the terms of the sequence belong to the ordinal)
and the point of the Other […] are fused together’.79 In effect, Badiou
identifies the numerical paradox of an infinite sequence. The limit ordinal
lies outside all the members of the sequence belonging to it: it is a unique
point of complete displacement.
‘Letter from India’ describes India as ‘measureless’, a sequence with-
out end. The poet apprehends this through the sense of displacement
that he feels in the magnitude of the distance over which his poem is to
be carried back to Hedli in England. As the expression of personal love
that the speaker has measured carefully and mundanely, the poem itself
is a finite thing, frail before the turbulent confusion of India in its first
months of independence. The poem incorporates the infinity from which
it is removed; doing so in a situation of displacement. Describing a per-
petual process within which the letter itself is carried away, ‘Letter from
India’ somehow fuses the displacement of each member within an infi-
nite sequence—the alterity of the sequence, in Badiou’s words—with that
entire sequence itself. MacNeice expresses this exactly in the final line of
the poem when he writes of the East as that which is ‘east and west and
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 61

neither’.80 The poem constructs India as a particular geography of place-

lessness wherein infinity is encapsulated through a measured love poem
that flies away on an airplane.81 In this way ‘Letter from India’ names
what Badiou identifies as a limit ordinal.
The role of displacement in Badiou’s identification of the point at
which infinity and finitude intersect is an important aspect of his the-
ory of the point of excess. Considering the relation between counting
and displacement in Yeats’s ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ and MacNe-
ice’s poems on India, the complexity of excess in spiritual, material and
numerical terms becomes apparent. This also illustrates the important role
that Ireland occupies in both Yeats’s and MacNeice’s modes of represent-
ing the East in poetry, since Ireland is equally a site of belonging and of
displacement for both writers. In his 1941 study, MacNeice is understand-
ably sneering at Yeats’s histrionic claim that the Irish country people had
‘lived in Asia until the Battle of the Boyne’.82 The context for this bald
assertion should be noted. Introducing the published version of his 1924
play, The Cat and the Moon, Yeats was referring to the idea of Toyohiko
Kagawa, Japanese labour leader and Christian evangelical, of early civi-
lization as one in which everything is prescribed, ‘as buried under dream
and myth’.83 Yeats saw in the endurance of this sense of duty in rural
Ireland a remnant of Asian civilization. This is important to our recep-
tion of Yeats’s great poems on Eastern themes from later life: ‘Sailing to
Byzantium’; ‘Byzantium’; ‘Lapis Lazuli’. Apparent flights into a world of
art from the vicissitudes of history and ‘bodily decrepitude’, these poems
take the reader to specific locations in the East, but locations wherein
one’s sense of place itself literally unravels.
In contrasting styles, Yeats and MacNeice associate spiritual and polit-
ical unravelling with Ireland. A significant element in this is their sense
of Ireland as a place of displacement, fomenting through its mythology
a feeling of perpetual movement in Yeats’s mind from which his sense
of the culture as Asiatic grew. MacNeice’s Ireland is much more acutely
a place of bitterness and pretence, yet a landscape from which his feel-
ing for the perpetual motion of life in its Eastern magnitude draws much
of its force. ‘Variation on Heraclitus’ is a magnificent poem of Orien-
tal invasion, where all that is solid melts to air. The carpet in the room
keeps ‘flying away to Arabia’ and ‘that standard lamp’ dances away down
‘an unbridgeable Ganges where nothing is standard’.84 This owes every-
thing to MacNeice’s time in India, but also to the receptiveness of a mind
62 M. MCATEER

sensitive to the wanderlust of Irish spirituality, as in the figure of Bren-

dan, the early Christian missionary, from ‘Western Landscape’. Not unlike
Didymus, MacNeice imagines him as a ‘spindrift hermit’ who binds the
Atlantic horizon round his waist, undoing time itself ‘in quintessential
West’.85 In their perpetual propensity to exceed the present time and
place, Yeats and MacNeice explore Celtic and Oriental sympathies from
Irish and Asiatic perspectives. In the process, they evoke forms of poetic
mysticism that are intimately sensitive to modern forms of existential anx-
iety. This is manifested most strikingly through displacement-within-place
in poems like ‘The Gift of Haroun Al-Rashid’ and ‘Didymus’, poems in
which spiritual discovery lies in the ways of excess.

Notes
1. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977), 56.
2. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. Geoffrey S. Kirk; cited in Said, Orientalism,
56–57.
3. Said, Orientalism, 57.
4. Mary Burke, ‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20–57.
5. Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland
(Houndmills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 70–74.
6. Joseph Donoghue, ‘Distance, Death and Desire in Salome’, in Peter Raby,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 128.
7. Said, Orientalism, 181.
8. Ibid., 187.
9. Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 262.
10. Merlin Holland, ed., Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (London: Fourth
Estate, 2003), 135.
11. Edward Larrissy, The First Yeats: Poems by W.B. Yeats 1889–1939 (Manch-
ester: Carcanet Press, 2010), 60–61.
12. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 1988), 390.
13. Noreen Doody, The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W. B. Yeats: “An Echo of
Someone Else’s Music” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 207–19.
14. Doody cites a letter of thanks that Yeats wrote to René Francis in 1911
after he sent Yeats a copy of Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine. In
this letter Yeats mentions Wilde’s play as an example of Flaubert’s impact
in Yeats’s generation. Doody, The Influence, 184.
15. Edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (London: Rout-
ledge, 1994), 28–30.
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 63

16. Larrissy, The First Yeats, 63.

17. Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and
Superstitions of Ireland (Boston: Tricknor, 1887), vi.
18. Susan Bazargan, ‘W. B. Yeats: Autobiography and Colonialism’, Yeats: An
Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 13 (1995), 201–24 (209).
19. Mazen Naous, ‘The Turn of the Gyres: Alterity in ‘The Gift of Haroun Al-
Rashid’ and A Thousand and One Nights ’, in Tatiana Kontou and Sarah
Willburn, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century
Spiritualism and the Occult (London: Ashgate, 2012), 197–220 (198).
20. Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats (London:
HarperCollins, 1999), 75.
21. Ann Saddlemeyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 307.
22. The Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night, rendered into English from
the literal and complete French translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus by Powys
Mathers (1923), 4 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
See, Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1963), 63–64; Neil Mann, ‘A Vision (1925): A Review Essay’, in War-
wick Gould, ed., Yeats Annual 18: A Special Issue: Essays in Memory of
A. Norman Jeffares (London: Open Book Publishers, 2013), 265–96
(279–80).
23. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed. (London:
Papermac, 1991), 336.
24. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1976), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 144–
45.
25. Warwick Gould, ‘A Lesson for the Circumspect: W.B. Yeats’s Two Ver-
sions of A Vision and the Arabian Nights ’, in Peter L. Caracciolo, ed., The
Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of The Thou-
sand and One Nights into British Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988),
244–80.
26. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 287.
27. Ibid., 308.
28. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 143.
29. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113.
30. Norman Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 336.
31. Ibid., 338.
32. Ibid., 339.
33. Ibid., 339.
34. Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Col-
laboration of George and W.B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 139.
64 M. MCATEER

35. Heidegger, Being and Time, 310.

36. Ibid., 320.
37. Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 341.
38. Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, 239.
39. Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 340–41.
40. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 94.
41. Ibid., 97.
42. Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 340.
43. W. H. Auden, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr. W. B. Yeats’, Partisan Review
(Spring, 1939), 46–51 (46).
44. Jonathan Allison, ed., Letters of Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 2010),
475.
45. This was the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, whom MacNeice first met in Lon-
don in 1939. See, Louis MacNeice, The Strings Are False: An Unfinished
Autobiography, ed. E. R. Dodds (London: Faber, 1965), 209; Kit Fry-
att, ‘“Banyan Riot of Dialectic”: Louis MacNeice’s India’, in Tadhg Foley
and Maureen O’Connor, eds., Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and
Empire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 140.
46. Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941) (London: Faber, 1967),
63.
47. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 23.
48. Tom Walker, Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of His Time (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 39–40.
49. Edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2013), 173–74.
50. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 296.
51. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902) (London: Penguin, 1994), 89.
52. Walker, Louis MacNeice, 91; Ashok Bery, Cultural Translation and Post-
colonial Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 90.
53. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 296; Bery, Cultural Translation, 91.
54. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 141.
55. Fryatt, ‘“Banyan Riot of Dialectic”’, 146–47.
56. Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1930), rev. ed., ed. Dan H. Lau-
rence (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 140.
57. T. W. Rolleston, Celtic Myths and Legends, 2nd ed. (1917) (New York:
Dover, 1990), 80–81.
58. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 332.
59. Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Study (London: Faber, 1988), 114–15.
60. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 8; Ashok Bery, Cultural Translation, 93;
Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953 (London: J. M. Dent, 1988),
13.
61. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 154.
 3 ORIENTAL EXCESS: WILDE, YEATS, MACNEICE 65

62. Norman Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 18.

63. MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 116.
64. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 332.
65. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 –1939, ed. Allan
Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (1985;
repr., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 7.
66. MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 66.
67. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 48; W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays, 2nd ed. (1952)
(London: Papermac, 1982), 677–78. Writing in October 1947 to Hedli,
MacNeice describes the temples at Mahabalipuram, mentioning those ded-
icated to Shiva, who always has a phallic emblem in his inner shrine. He
expresses his surprise to Hedli at his own feeling that the temples were
‘truly religious.’ Allison, ed., Letters of Louis MacNeice, 506.
68. Susan Owens, ‘Aubrey Beardsley and Salome’, in Kerry Powell and Peter
Raby, eds., Oscar Wilde in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 121.
69. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 334.
70. Ibid., 334.
71. Peter McDonald, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), 144–45.
72. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 334.
73. Ibid., 336.
74. Ibid., 336.
75. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 163.
76. MacNeice posted his first draft of the poem to Hedli and she sent it to T.
S. Eliot for inclusion in his next collection. Eliot wrote back to Hedli that
it would need to be redrafted, offering that he would discuss the matter
fully with Louis when he returned from India. The final version appeared
in his 1948 collection, Holes in the Sky. See, Allison, ed., Letters of Louis
MacNeice, 502.
77. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 297.
78. Badiou, Being and Event, 141.
79. Ibid., 156.
80. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 298.
81. Criticising the concluding lines of the poem as an ‘unconvincing reso-
lution’, Ashok Bery regards them as ‘simultaneously and contradictorily’
asserting a bounded European identity and of a merger between East
and West, ‘of boundaries being crossed’. Cultural Translation, 92. This,
however, misreads the conclusion as a resolution, since MacNeice is fully
conscious that the Europe, indeed the England that he has left for India
in 1947 could never be the same again after the calamities of the Second
World War.
66 M. MCATEER

82. MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 133–34; Russell K. Alspach, The Var-
iorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1966), 806.
83. Alspach, The Variorum Edition of the Plays, 806.
84. MacNeice, Collected Poems, 560.
85. Ibid., 266.
 CHAPTER 4

Transgressive Sacrifice: Pearse, Yeats, Carr

The Angel of Death

Religious sacrifice has prompted two distinct yet related ideas on excess
in modern thought after Hegel. The first arises in Kierkegaard’s famous
reflection in Fear and Trembling on the story of God’s injunction to
Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. The other appears in Bataille’s idea of
sacrifice for its own sake, an idea that demonstrates the powerful influence
on Bataille of Nietzsche’s writing on the cult of Dionysius in The Birth of
Tragedy. In Bataille’s understanding, cultic sacrifice is the most extreme
point of the human person who takes possession of her/himself through
an act of violent self-abandonment. Yet the idea of sacrifice as a basis for
philosophical understanding has met with significant criticism. We find
this in the writing of Nietzsche and in the major work of the Frank-
furt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in 1944 against
the backdrop of catastrophe in Europe. In their critique of Enlighten-
ment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer assert that religious sacri-
fice is always deception, since it involves an offering being made to Gods
for the purpose of a human aspiration, in the process submitting divine
will to human will.1 Later in the 1970s, René Girard published one of
the most influential works on sacrifice in modern times, Violence and the
Sacred. Girard argues that ultimately, sacrifice is founded upon violence
and barbaric scapegoating, no matter how sacred the sacrificial act might
be judged.2

© The Author(s) 2020 67

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_4
68 M. MCATEER

The excessive aspect of sacrifice is sustained over a wide range of mod-

ern Irish texts. It is encapsulated most powerfully in Yeats’s poem on
the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland. Reflecting on the long history of
Irishmen and Irishwomen who fought and died for political sovereignty
since the early sixteenth century, the poet wonders if a point will ever be
reached when such sacrifices are no longer needed. He senses the danger
of men and women turned to stone through a sacrifice that has been too
long, keenly aware of how a cult of sacrifice could kill human affections.
Yeats links this possibility to an excess rather than a deficiency of human
emotions when he considers whether the Irish rebel leaders were driven
to their wild actions by an ‘excess of love’.3 In his 1926 play The Plough
and the Stars Sean O’Casey shows the deep emotions that rebel leader
Patrick Pearse stirs among Dublin men in his public speeches. The wild
emotions that he arouses have the added and ironical effect of leaving the
men brutally unfeeling towards those most dear to them:

Clitheroe: You have a mother, Langon.

Lieut. Langon: Ireland is greater than a mother.
Capt. Brennan: You have a wife, Clitheroe.
Clitheroe: Ireland is greater than a wife.4

For both Yeats and O’Casey, the sacrifice of Easter 1916 arouses powerful
emotions that overwhelm the affections of men and women for the people
they love.
With Patrick Pearse’s death by execution, we are left only with his liter-
ary and prose writings to apprehend his motives for engaging in political
insurrection and the ways in which he understood the nature of the sac-
rifice that he was about to make, convinced as he was that he would not
emerge alive.5 First performed in 1915 and published posthumously in
1917, Pearse’s The Master brings to surface the tensions around sacrifice
as an act of faith, the outcome of which cannot be confirmed in advance.
It illustrates the necessity of Pearse acknowledging the absurdity of the
sacrificial act as the only means through which it might become redemp-
tive, precisely the position that is outlined by Kierkegaard in Fear and
Trembling . At the same time, it opens the possibility that Bataille devel-
ops from Nietzsche: sacrifice as a primary violent act in which the subject
grasps himself through this very violence.
Pearse’s play is tied into his move towards revolutionary violence in
quite literal ways. The Master was the first play that he had composed
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 69

after he joined the Irish Republic Brotherhood in December 1913.6 Joost

Augusteijn sees the play as expressing a view that ‘at some point practical
considerations, intellectual arguments and personal soul-searching must
give way to commitment, based on an unquestioning faith’, quoting a
phrase that Pearse uttered in late 1915, ‘that they “must have a sacri-
fice”’.7 James Moran identifies the connection between the performance
of The Master at the Irish Theatre in Dublin’s Hardwicke Street and the
military parade of Dublin Volunteers that Pearse organized for Limer-
ick on the same week. The theatre had been founded in 1915 by fellow
Republican revolutionaries, Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh.
On the last night of performances, Pearse warned the schoolboys who
had acted the roles that the Dublin Castle authorities were planning an
attack on them at the Limerick march the following day ‘and instructed
everyone to carry fifty rounds of ammunition’.8 Seán Farrell Moran sees
The Master as Pearse’s strongest expression not only of the ideal of sac-
rifice, but of the need for violence to achieve both national freedom and
‘individual deliverance’.9
Although couched in affected style in its English-language version, The
Master is a play deceptive in its simplicity. It anticipates Yeats’s sense of
early Christianity as a radical disruption of traditional culture in ancient
times, evident in Kusta Ben Luka’s turn to the new Byzantine faith in
‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ as we have already seen. Founder of the
monastery of Clonmacnoise in the centre of Ireland, the monk Ciaran is
considered to be overturning ‘the ancient law of the people’ according
to one of his students named Cealleach in The Master.10 The echo of
Paul Ruttledge is audible here, the radical Christian who will ‘unmake’
the law in Yeats’s Where There Is Nothing . Typical of Pearse’s plays, one
student stands out as the teacher’s favourite. Here it is Iolann Beag (little
Iolann), whom the other boys consider feminine in his beauty yet strong
in his boyishness.11 This raises the question of physical male desire in
the play, both among the boys and between master and student. Draw-
ing on the ideas of Abigail Solomon-Godeau in Male Trouble (1997),
Elaine Sisson emphasises the need to distinguish the ‘feminized masculin-
ity’ of Iolann Beag from effeminacy.12 Susan Cannon Harris presents an
observant reading of The Master that links a religious idea of political
self-sacrifice to a struggle with homosexual desire.13
The Master depicts the new Christian religion through the small com-
munity that Ciaran has founded in Clonmacnoise in an area of Ireland
later to become known as County Offaly (officially named King’s County
70 M. MCATEER

from the early sixteenth century to the foundation of the Irish Free State).
This community presents a threat to the pagan Celtic order of the druids.
Daire, the King of Ireland, arrives to lay siege on it, outlaw the religion,
and force Ciaran to accept his authority. In the dialogue between Cia-
ran and Daire, it seems at first that the King admonishes the saint in
the manner of Nietzsche’s denunciations of Christianity as hatred of life
and instinct. On the question of sacrifice, it is significant that for Niet-
zsche the origin of Christianity is foremost a matter of sacrifice: ‘sacri-
fice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit, at the same
time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation’.14 The relationship
between Ciaran and Daire suggests something rather less clear-cut. We
learn that Ciaran and Daire were rivals from childhood; it was Ciaran,
now the monk, who originally excelled at physical sports, and Daire, now
the King, who excelled at learning. Having travelled to foreign lands and
learnt different languages in order to become ‘master’ over Daire, Ciaran
returns eventually to Ireland to find that Daire has become King and is
revered by the people.15
When Daire enters the play, the reverence that Nietzsche observes in
mighty leaders of past times towards the saint comes into view. Ciaran
observes that he speaks ‘gently’ and ‘wisely’ to him, noting that he was
‘always wise’.16 Nietzsche contends that the powerful of times past sensed
in the ascetic and his complete denial of nature ‘a new power, a strange
enemy as yet unsubdued’.17 The Master seems to bear out Nietzsche’s
point in a particularly striking fashion, since at the end, what is at stake
is the mastery of the one over the other, Daire challenging Ciaran to
make evident before them the new God for whom he sacrifices all the
pleasures of life. In Nietzschean terms, it appears that as a monk, Ciaran
hates Daire out of jealousy for his power. Daire sees anyone like Ciaran
who has renounced ‘power, and victory, and life, and men, and women,
and the gracious sun’ as having ‘given his all for nothing’.18 ‘From pow-
erlessness’, writes Nietzsche, the hatred of the priest towards the powerful
‘grows to take on a monstrous and sinister shape, the most cerebral and
poisonous form’.19
Kierkegaard writes of Abraham as one whose power lay in his impo-
tence and whose love in self-hatred.20 This is precisely the basis of Niet-
zsche’s attack on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Kierkegaard’s reading of
Abraham, however, identifies a fundamental connection of sacrifice to
excess of which Nietzsche’s critique does not take sufficient account.
This connection appears in three aspects in Pearse’s The Master. There
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 71

is the accusation that Daire poses against Ciaran that his fidelity to the
asceticism of the new Christian religion is actually pride born of a life-
long rivalry with Daire. There is Ciaran’s willingness to risk King Daire
killing Iolann, the student whom he loves most. Finally, there is Ciaran’s
fidelity to his ideal in a situation the outcome of which he cannot know
in advance. When King Daire reveals that all of Ciaran’s students have
deserted him, he offers Ciaran the place of second man in his kingdom.
In the tone of scorn and anger with which Ciaran repeats the phrase,
‘the second man’, Daire hears once more the ‘old self’ of Ciaran speak.21
While this may justify Nietzsche’s view of Christian asceticism as a subli-
mated will to power, it casts in doubt his distinction between the pride
of the strong and the humility of the weak. The religious man Ciaran is
susceptible to the pride that distinguishes pagan nobility in Nietzsche’s
thought.
All of his other students having left him, the test of Ciaran’s faith in
the face of Daire’s power rests on the young Iolann Beag. Demanding
that his God bring an angel before them, Daire sets himself as an equal
to God. Ciaran has already offered Daire his own life, but at this order he
is confounded, responding that ‘Omnipotence’ would not display itself
for someone as poor as Ciaran himself.22 At this point, Daire turns to
the boy; what is at stake now is Ciaran’s soul ‘and this little boys, and
the souls of all this nation, born and unborn’.23 This obviously situates
the play in terms of the political rebellion that Pearse is anticipating in
September 1915. It does so, however, in terms of sacrificial excess. Cia-
ran is confronted with an absolute choice here: should he retain faith in
God silently and allow Daire to kill Iolann, or should he speak to save the
boy’s life, abandoning his Christian faith in so doing? To allow Iolann
to die, Ciaran may well be considered an accomplice to murder, since he
only needs to speak in order to save him. In this sense, retaining his Chris-
tian faith in silence, Ciaran risks equating Christianity itself with killing,
and Christian sacrifice as a pure drive to violence. The legacy of Wilde’s
Salomé is present here, however faintly. As Regenia Gagnier has noted,
Herod faces a double-bind in the play. If he has Iokanaan killed, his fear
of the Baptist’s prophecies risk fulfilment; if Herod does not order his
execution, however, the king’s authority over his people will be fatally
undermined.24
This dilemma that Ciaran faces in The Master is precisely that which
Kierkegaard attributes to Abraham, who, before the result of Yahweh’s
injunction to sacrifice Isaac became known, occupies an absolutely radical
72 M. MCATEER

situation. Either this ‘father of faith’ is a murderer, or he is someone who

confronts us with a paradox that cannot be brought under the movements
of consciousness, movements by which Hegel interprets the tragic heroic
sacrifices of the ancient Greeks.25 Kierkegaard points out that, from a
strict ethical perspective, Abraham hates Isaac at the moment that he is
ready to sacrifice him. Yet he can only make the sacrifice on the con-
dition that Abraham loves his son completely: ‘for in fact it is this love
for Isaac which, by its paradoxical opposition to his love for God, makes
his act a sacrifice’.26 At the moment when Ciaran remains silent upon
King Daire’s command to speak as he raises his sword over Iolann, love
becomes indistinguishable from killing. It comes as no surprise that in this
instant Ciaran repeats the words of Christ to himself at the moment of
ultimate test of faith on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou for-
saken me?’27 Alexandra Poulain argues that because it is Ciaran and not
the child who dies at the end of the play, it sustains a moral economy by
which the teacher educates through his role as sacrificial victim, and the
child, returned from danger to safety, stands to inherit a redeemed Irish
future. Convincing as this interpretation may at first appear, it glosses over
the moral crisis through which the play arrives at its outcome.28
Kierkegaard’s account of religious sacrifice is thereby marked by cru-
elty and excess, as Peter Sloterdijk observes: ‘Kierkegaard very rightly
remarked that there is a sort of unparalleled cruelty at the heart of the
Christian message – the absolute, relative to which we are always and
infinitely wrong, places an unfathomable excessive demand on man’.29 It
is precisely the excess of this demand that overwhelms Ciaran at the end
of Pearse’s play. This same excess also complicates the sexual meaning of
the sacrifice that is risked. If the sacrifice of the young Iolann is to be con-
templated as a code for Pearse’s desire to overcome his personal homo-
sexual feelings, it still transgresses the Christian ethical injunction against
killing. In response to the attention that Susan Cannon Harris draws to
this aspect of the play, it may well be argued that the moment at which
Ciaran considers permitting Daire to killing Iolann is also the moment
in which homosexual desire appears, since this is the point of excess in
the play.30 Alexandra Poulain argues that Ciaran dies at the end of the
play not to prove the superiority of his Christianity over the Paganism of
Daire but to demonstrate ‘the necessity and legitimacy of revolution, and
of physical force as a means of justifying it’. If this is true, however, the
case for the superiority of Christianity over Paganism is by no means a
settled one in the play, as Poulain’s reading implies.31
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 73

The Master concludes with the intervention of the archangel Michael

preventing the sacrifice of Iolann Beag at the last moment—but also with
the death of Ciaran. This salvation of the boy through the death of the
monk upon the appearance of the angel reflects Pearse’s ideas on a future
Irish rebellion: his death will guarantee the salvation of a future Ireland
under the sign of God. The matter is by no means so straightforward,
however. The appearance of the angel as a figure of redemption shows
the influence of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, first performed in Dublin
in 1899. Yeats’s play raised a dilemma that was certainly a concern to his
devout Catholic friend Edward Martyn, triggering public hostility when
performed at the Antient Concert Rooms that Joyce remembers with
derision through the figure of Stephen Dedalus attending a performance
of the play near the end of A Portrait.32 The Countess offers her soul to
demons in exchange for the salvation of the souls of the local people who
are starving on her estate. Her willingness to sacrifice not only her life but
her immortal soul for these people actually has the effect of guaranteeing
her own salvation. Immediately upon her death, an angel appears to tell
them that she has been taken to Heaven.33 The question raised by this
conclusion is simple and yet profoundly unsettling, particularly in a society
where secular values had not supplanted institutional religious influence,
as in the Ireland of Yeats’s and Pearse’s time: is it permissible to violate
a fundamental moral principle for a sacred end? Cathleen sells her soul
to demons and Ciaran does not speak to stop Daire prepare to kill the
innocent Iolann. In Yeats’s case, Cathleen’s motive is to save the spiritual
lives of the people who are threatened with starvation; in Pearse’s, it is
Ciaran’s refusal to renounce his Christian faith as commanded by Daire.
This fundamental moral and existential predicament is defined by
Kierkegaard in a famous phrase: the teleological suspension of the eth-
ical. In selling her soul to the demons, does Cathleen not submit to evil
in The Countess Cathleen? In permitting Daire to prepare to kill Iolann,
does Ciaran not do likewise in The Master? Can such acts be justifiable
on the basis that to act otherwise—to allow the demons take possession
of the souls of the starving poor, or to allow Daire break up the Chris-
tian community that Ciaran has founded—would deny the possibility of
miraculous intervention? This intervention occurs both in Yeats’s play and
in Pearse’s play in the form of the appearance of an angel: what Badiou
would consider an avant-garde presentation of truth (Ciaran’s monasti-
cism being a completely new idea in pagan Ireland) such as we encounter
in Wassily Kandinsky’s artwork Angel of the Last Judgement (1911) and
74 M. MCATEER

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920).34 It may seem strange to attribute

such a radical interpretation to a play by Pearse, a man who was devoutly
religious and who seems to have been orthodox in his Catholic religious
faith. It is less so, however, in the light of the argument for the beginning
of Christianity as an avant-garde event in Badiou’s reading of St. Paul, an
argument of significance to a play dealing with the beginning of Chris-
tianity in Ireland.35 Furthermore, the view that Pearse was conventional
in his Catholicism is by no means self-evident. The Jesuit Francis Shaw
regarded as ‘aggressively unorthodox’ the alignment in Pearse’s thought
between Irish nationalism and the teachings and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
While Shaw does not go so far as to denounce Pearse’s thought as hereti-
cal paganism, he sets Pearse’s ‘Messianic view of nationalism’ categorically
in opposition to Catholic moral teaching. Shaw rejects as un-Christian
the ‘glorification of blood-shedding and war’ in Pearse’s outlook.36 As
a Jesuit, Shaw would certainly regard as entirely contrary to Christian
doctrine the following observation that Poulain makes about The Master.
This is her idea that while the appearance of the angel in Pearse’s play is
intended to grant Irish revolution a divine sanction, it ‘cannot be allowed
to thwart the strategically indispensable spectacle of sacrifice’, one that
Poulain regards as a blending of the deaths of Christ and Cuchulain.37
Such an interpretation of The Master indicates its subversion of moral
authority through sacrificial excess.
Especially when The Master is regarded under the light of The Count-
ess Cathleen, the play returns us to Wilde’s Salomé. This claim may seem
far-fetched, given the flagrantly sexual nature of Salomé’s dance of the
seven veils before Herod that is the pivotal moment of the play, in con-
trast to the pious setting and masculine character of Pearse’s play. Regenia
Gagnier argues convincingly that Wilde’s play is primarily concerned with
sexual desire, even to the extent of involving the audience by arousing
sexual feelings through the dance, the performance of which left most
men in the New York audience for a 1907 Strauss opera production of
Salomé feeling awkward and embarrassed, apparently. Gagnier observes
the subversion of divine and secular law in the process, precisely because
the topic of the play is biblical in nature.38 Convincing as this reading
may be, Gagnier still overlooks one crucial aspect of Wilde’s play. How-
ever sexually powerful and transgressive the nature of her dance and her
kiss of Iokanaan’s severed head may be, Salomé’s symbolic actions are
still preconditions for the subsequent appearance of Christ as the Mes-
siah figure in biblical narrative beyond the events that are depicted in the
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 75

play. Regarded from this angle, it is evident that Wilde’s play from the
mid-1890s, a play that encapsulates the spirit of decadence within liter-
ary and artistic circles during that period, expresses the profound paradox
of transgressing moral conventions as a necessary step towards spiritual
redemption or fulfilment. Even in the intentionally ‘sinful’ character of
Salomé’s dance and kiss, there is the virtue of revelation as conceived
within the context of Christian messianism. In terms of the transgression
of ethical rules in the realization of religious destiny, the thematic prox-
imity of Salomé to The Master is very close indeed.

The Repeated Offence

Yeats’s 1938 play Purgatory tests the teleological suspension of the ethical
to its limits, unveiling extreme sacrificial violence in the process. Stand-
ing before the ruin of a once-grand aristocratic house in a remote part of
Ireland, an old man reminisces before his teenage son on his family con-
nection to the house’s history. Through him, we learn that his mother
was from a noble family and married a stable groom who worked at the
Curragh in County Kildare (celebrated for its equestrian tradition) where
she had kept a horse. The old man reveals that his grandmother never
spoke to her after she made this marriage to a commoner: quite rightly,
in his view. Indifferent to his teenage son’s intermittent responses to the
story, this old man tells of how his own mother died upon giving birth to
him, and of how his father was a gambler and a drunkard. The old man
discloses how his father had once the burnt house down while drunk and
how he stabbed this father to death during the course of the fire.39
The play reflects Yeats’s acute consciousness of his Irish Protestant
inheritance in his final years and the rapid decline of its power follow-
ing the creation of the independent Irish Free State in 1921, particularly
through the impact of IRA attacks on several old aristocratic houses dur-
ing the civil war that followed political independence. The weight of his-
tory is felt here in the quality of men who had resided at the house at one
time or another; men who had fought in the critical battles during the
1690 war in Ireland that produced a decisive victory for Protestantism
under the leadership of King William of Orange. These were men who
had fought in the battles of Aughrim and of the Boyne; colonels and
magistrates who had returned from abroad to die; men who served the
Imperial government in London or in India and who had come back each
spring to see the may-blossom.40 The old man’s recollection of these men
76 M. MCATEER

in the play sounds like a direct response to the Irish Constitution drafted
by Taoiseach Éamon De Valera that became law the year previous to Pur-
gatory, 1937; specifically to the Preamble in its reference to the Chris-
tian faith that sustained ‘our fathers through centuries of trial’.41 Victor
Merriman reads the play as ‘a bitter reflection on a neo-colonial state
cemented by De Valera’s constitution’.42 If indeed this is the case, it only
serves to underline further the complex manner in which historical guilt
is articulated in Purgatory. Any notion that Yeats was simply berating De
Valera in the play is immediately undermined by the discrepancy between
the elevated quality of the house’s Anglo-Irish inheritance that the old
man describes so eloquently, against the vicious, brutal and futile man-
ner through which he attempts to redeem it. This being the case, guilt is
important to understanding the play as a study of sacrificial violence in a
pure form, exceeding even its own purpose.
In Purgatory the ghostly figures of the old man’s parents appear in a
window of the ruined house before him and his son; the night is the
anniversary of the original marriage between his parents, the night in
which he was conceived.43 In this aspect, the play betrays aspects of the
Japanese Noh tradition that Yeats engaged in several of his later plays,
in which the spirit of a dead person appears before someone at the spot
where they died, the person issuing a prayer to Buddha to release the spirit
from the place. Guilt is present in two interlinked aspects: the woman’s
betrayal of her noble ancestry in marrying a stable groom: the old man’s
life a consequence of her death when giving birth to him. In the final
lines of the play, he calls on God to relieve ‘the misery of the living and
the remorse of the dead’.44 Attempting to release the soul of his dead
mother from entrapment in her transgression, the old man also seeks to
unburden his life from the debt that he owes to her. The manner in which
he does so, however, first killing his drunken father and finally killing his
son—‘[a] bastard that a pedlar got/Upon a tinker’s daughter in a ditch’—
leaves him alone at the end without any ancestral lineage, neither past nor
future.
Before considering the sacrificial excess through which these killings
might be regarded, we should observe a new radical form that guilt takes
in Purgatory. Rather than the feeling that arises from indebtedness to
another, the play shows the old man in a state of guilt as a primary con-
dition of his existence. Heidegger characterizes this form of guilt as a
reversal of the ordinary understanding of the term in relation to debt:
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 77

indebtedness itself is only possible on the basis of a primordial condi-

tion of ‘Being-guilty’.45 Guilt in this sense is the call of one’s being back
to oneself from its distraction in the everyday and the preoccupations of
public life. This call, however, is by no means placatory. Heidegger char-
acterizes guilt essentially in terms of nothingness; the foundation of a
nullity. Guilt is all to do with a primary ‘not’.46
The old man’s disclosure that he had killed his father is not just a
question of vengeance for his father having destroyed the family home.
It is also a sacrificial act to God, literally the old man’s father as a ‘burnt
offering’ that the old man offers to the Father. Through this, the old
man has sought to appease the desecration that has been brought upon
the noble line and release the soul of his mother from the consequences
to follow her treacherous marital choice (in the old man’s eyes) in life.
Yet it remains a murder carried out furtively and about which the old
man has kept secret until this moment late in his life, speaking of it to
his own son. In this instance, Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the
ethical is strained even more than in Pearse’s The Master. The old man in
Purgatory is faithful to his mother’s memory and to the ancestral dignity
of the house that had been burnt down in a fire caused by his father in
a state of drunkenness. This fidelity motivates his killing his father. Still it
is an act of unbridled hatred that is devoid of any redeeming purpose. In
this sense, the old man’s murder of his father in his youth is much less a
teleological suspension of the ethical than a deceitful act of the type that
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer attribute to all cultic sacrifices.47
Upon the appearance of the ghosts of his mother and father at a win-
dow of the ruined house in Purgatory, the old man stabs his son to death
with the same knife that he had used to kill his father when he was young.
In terms of ancestral inheritance, this second murder is not only a sym-
bolic refusal of the future owned by the new Irish Catholic middle-class
farmers, traders and state employees who have come to inherit the power
once held by the mainly Protestant Irish gentry. It is also a final termi-
nation of the ancestral line of this later caste; a form of race suicide. The
old man repeats a murderous act at the moment of the appearance of
the ghosts of his parents at the window in the old ruin where the noble
house once stood. The singularity of the event around which the play is
composed is thereby exceeded through it being a repetition. This single
instant of stabbing the boy is exceeded by the doubly murderous aspect
in which it casts the old man at the end of the play, throwing the act itself
into uncertainty as to its meaning and outcome.
78 M. MCATEER

In this sense, Purgatory confronts its audience with the unpresentable

dimension of the murder as a sacrificial event, because the essence of
the event, its uniquely singular aspect (Badiou’s ‘ultra-one’) is actually
the two, pinning the event to the unpresentable as the excess-of-one.48
The nature of the son’s murder as a second killing, in other words, pro-
vides the necessary condition for apprehending it as a unique occurrence,
even as it disturbs the oneness of that singularity by naming it within a
numerical sequence. The connection that Badiou draws between event,
the void and the excess-of-one as two is encapsulated in the old man’s
cry of despair following the killing: ‘Twice a murderer and all for noth-
ing’.49 The horse-beats that he hears indicate that the soul of his mother
remains trapped in Purgatory even after the killing of the son.
By situating the play in relation to spectral appearance, Yeats tests the
relation of sacrifice to murder in Purgatory. Having killed both father
and son, it appears that the old man confirms sacrifice as a pure egotism
presenting itself as self-annihilation. Viewed in this way, the play comes
close to endorsing Žižek’s case for the proximity of sacrifice not to love
in many cases but to evil: renunciation not for liberation of others, but
for their deprivation: ‘Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice,
evil […] emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice, ready to ignore one’s own
well-being – if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of his enjoy-
ment’.50 Murder and sacrifice in Purgatory, however, are inseparable from
the supernatural form of the play, in which dream and reality are brought
into contest as the violent history of the house’s destruction is disclosed.
It thus remains a question of how to interpret the violence as an open-
ing unto the supernatural; a play in which a man guilty of murdering his
father and his son prays to God at the very end.51
In considering the moment of sacrificial killing as one in which the
individual grasps the divine nature of truly being who one is, Bataille
describes an experience that reflects the intensity and the immediacy of
Yeats’s Purgatory. Sharing Heidegger’s idea of Being-towards-death as
the fundamental orientation of Dasein, Bataille yet expresses this notion
quite differently as liberation through horror, most emphatically captured
in the lamma sabachtani of the crucifixion.52 The last line of Yeats’s
1920 play, Calvary, ends with Christ uttering these words: ‘My Father,
why hast Thou forsaken Me?’53 In his drama, Yeats does not express
Bataille’s belief that the full experience of humanity as divine is realized in
a moment of violent killing that occurs beyond God and beyond nothing-
ness. However, the excessive nature of the old man’s killing in Purgatory
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 79

accords to Bataille’s idea of religious sacrifice in one vital respect. The vio-
lence of the act releases the old man from all ancestral attachment, past
and future, through which he might unleash what Bataille terms ‘the pure
avidity to be me’.54 In both of these aspects—failing to resolve a ‘higher’
purpose and grasping an absolute singularity of being oneself—the violent
murder of the son in Purgatory appears as violence for its own sake that
yet has a supernatural character. David and Rosalind Clark observe that
it is as if everything happens in a ‘timeless instant’ in which the old man
sticks the knife into his son. This coalescence involves the conception of
the child who will grow into the old man himself, the burning down of
the ancestral house, the murder of the father by his son who is now the
old man: this same old man murdering his own son.55 In this respect, it
epitomizes sacrificial violence as pure excess.

The Bog Offering

In the final decade of the twentieth century the question of sacrificial
excess in Irish drama re-emerges in the work of Marina Carr, most pow-
erfully in her 1998 work, By the Bog of Cats …. Recent work by feminist
critics has emphasized the manner in which Carr works through some
foundational tropes of gender and nationhood evoked in the plays of
Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge at the beginning of the Irish National
Theatre in the 1900s.56 This is significant in bringing to light the scope
of Carr’s drama against the backdrop of a history of the virtual silence
of Irish women dramatists since the 1930s within the conservative frame-
work of the independent Irish State.
Important aspects of Carr’s drama have still not received the atten-
tion that they deserve, however. In keeping ‘a gun in the tabernacle’ and
wearing ear-plugs during confessions, the priest in By the Bog of Cats …
subverts the Catholic sacraments of the eucharist and confession through
mockery in the manner of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, accord-
ing to Bernadette Bourke.57 The claim is valid to a point, although it
underplays the obvious influence on Carr’s representation of Fr. Willow
in By the Bog of Cats … of the Father Ted comedy television series that
was first screened on Britain’s Channel 4 television station in the 1990s.
More importantly, it misses the significance of Carr’s upbringing in the
Irish midlands county of Offaly in the 1980s. In October 1983, the main
Roman Catholic Church in Tullamore, the capital town of the county, was
destroyed completely by fire in a drunken arson attack.58 In July 1985, a
80 M. MCATEER

Catholic priest, Fr. Niall Molloy, was beaten and murdered in the town of
Clara in the north of the county while staying with friends for a glamour
wedding occasion, another important event that plays into Carr’s trans-
gressive representation of the wedding in By the Bog of Cats ….59 In May
2009, the report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was
published in Ireland, chaired by Mr. Justice Seán Ryan. The report found
evidence of serious physical abuse of young offenders at St. Conleth’s
Reformatory School in Daingean, County Offaly, a village close to the
setting of By the Bog of Cats …. The School was run by the Catholic reli-
gious order, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, until it closed in 1973. There
were also cases of sexual abuse of boys by adult members of the Order
and ritual beatings, as well as the sexual abuse of boys by other boys in
the Reformatory School.60
These circumstances in a county affected by violent conflict between
the Itinerant and the sedentary communities during the 1970s and 1980s
offered Carr material for something more complicated than the subver-
sion of patriarchal norms in rural Ireland, norms that were already appear-
ing increasingly dysfunctional in any case, as news of Catholic clerical
molestation and rape of minors and young adults in Ireland began to
become public in the late 1990s. What Bourke identifies as the carniva-
lesque transgression of By the Bog of Cats … actually takes us into the same
territory that is explored by Pearse and Yeats at moments of violence and
radical change in Irish society. Attentive to the intersection of religion and
violence in the county where she grew up, Carr tackles the relationship of
sacrificial violence and the supernatural in By the Bog of Cats … to produce
one of the most accomplished Irish plays of the twentieth century.
The setting of the play in County Offaly takes us back to that for
Pearse’s The Master at the beginning of the Christian era in Ireland. As
founder of the monastery at Clonmacnoise in the county, Ciaran threatens
the pagan order over which King Daire presides by introducing a new reli-
gion condemned by the druids. Pearse selects the inconspicuous found-
ing of a school at Clonmacnoise because of the fame that the monastery
had won in the early medieval period as a centre for learning and culture
that was to play an important role in the Re-Christianization of Europe
following the destruction of Christian sites throughout the continent as
the Roman Empire came apart.61 Besides Carr’s distinctive rendering of
the midlands dialect in By the Bog of Cats … that marks it off sharply from
the antiquated type of stylistic mannerism in Pearse’s The Master, it seems
that the central characters in both plays bear little in common apart from
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 81

inhabiting the same region in the country. Evidently reflecting the ide-
als of his educational experiment at Rathfarnham, Pearse’s Ciaran stands
for learning and discipline. He endeavours to cultivate a new generation
through the new Christian faith, within an exclusively male community.
Hester Swane, by contrast, draws upon beliefs and customs that have been
regarded as important to traditional Itinerant communities in Ireland, in
particular the power of curse and prophecy. Carr’s play also deals with
womanhood, a concern entirely absent in Pearse’s The Master.
Having regard to these obvious points of difference, it is nonethe-
less significant that both Ciaran and Hester are natives to the localities
in which the two plays are set, while both refuse to accept the state of
affairs that those holding power seek to impose upon them. Determined
to remain where they are, Pearse’s Ciaran and Carr’s Hester are con-
fronted with offers of appeasement and threats of violence. Both remain
steadfast in the face of these attempts to assimilate them or to banish
them from the area.62 Róisin O’Gorman proposes that Hester is cursed
to die because she cannot leave the Bog of Cats.63 This comes danger-
ously close to legitimizing the bullying attempts to remove her. Both Cia-
ran and Hester define themselves primarily in relation to the young of an
emerging generation. In The Master, this is the figure of Iolann Beag, as
we have already seen. In By the Bog of Cats …, it is Hester’s daughter,
Josie Kilbride, whose life she will take at the play’s end. While it is true
that the life of Iolann Beag is rescued with the appearance of the archangel
Michael at the end of The Master, still Ciaran risks Daire slaughtering the
boy. Ciaran’s own death at the end of the play upon the appearance of
the angel reflects the weight of contradiction that proves too powerful for
him to sustain: permitting the sacrificial killing of the one that he loves
most in order to sustain the code of value that this same love is supposed
to express. This trace of Pearse’s play in By the Bog of Cats … calls seri-
ously into question Victor Merriman’s critical judgement of Carr’s play
as a species of contemporary neo-colonial Irish drama that panders in
a simplistic fashion to long-held prejudices against a marginalized Irish
Traveller community.64
The teleological suspension of the ethical recurs at the end of By the
Bog of Cats …. Driven to the point where her daughter is about to be
taken from her following her burning the new house and livestock that
have been built near the bog by which she grew up, Hester murders her
daughter Josie in a desperate act to save her from the mendacity of a
debased future of respectability disguising brutality and the prospect of
82 M. MCATEER

sexual molestation.65 As with Ciaran’s sudden death at the end of Pearse’s

play, Hester is likewise unable to sustain the contradiction of love express-
ing itself in sacrificial killing of the loved one. In identifying Josie as ulti-
mately a ‘Swane’ and not a ‘Kilbride’, Róisin O’Gorman observes in Josie
the figure of the swan, and with it the metamorphosis of child into swan
that is the substance of the Irish legend of the children of Lir.66 In this
aspect, we see how vividly the figure of Iolann Beag is reflected in that of
Hester Swane’s daughter.
As soon as Hester murders Josie, the Ghost Fancier reappears from the
opening scene of By the Bog of Cats … as fulfilment of the Catwoman’s
prophecy that her destiny was bound up with that of the black swan that
Hester buries in the opening scene, the Swan’s death a premonition of
her own.67 Bruce Stewart gnomically calls the Catwoman ‘a zoophagus
Kathleen ní Houlihan’, underlining the link back not just to the drama of
Pearse, but also to that of Yeats.68 Partaking in the dance of death with
the Ghost Fancier, Hester draws back, with the same knife that she used to
cut her daughter’s throat now plunged into her heart, her heart now ‘lyin’
there on top of her chest like some dark feathered bird’.69 The Ghost
Fancier is, like the archangel Michael in Pearse’s The Master, an Angel of
Death. At the end of By the Bog of Cats … Hester uses the same knife
to kill herself and her daughter that she had previously used to kill her
brother in By the Bog of Cats … In this respect, the play not only relates
back to Pearse, but even more directly to Yeats’s Purgatory through the
old man who uses the same knife to kill his son as that which he had used
in his teenage years to kill his father, as Richard Russell notes.70
Along with that of the black swan, the symbol of the exposed heart
that is cut from the breast in the ritual of the dance is another sign of
Yeats’s profound influence on Carr’s work; on By the Bog of Cats … in
particular. Heart, dance and bird imagery suffuse Yeats’s later poetry and
drama. We need only think of such lines as those from ‘Sailing to Byzan-
tium’ in which the poet calls for his heart to be consumed ‘away’: being
‘sick with desire’, it ‘knows not what it is’, Yeats’s line a gloss on Christ’s
words on the cross as written in the Gospel of Luke, ‘they know not what
they do’.71 Less well known but equally significant is Yeats’s dance play,
A Full Moon in March, first performed in 1934 with Ninette de Valois
performing the dance of the severed head of the swineherd. During the
dance, the Second Attendant sings the following lines:
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 83

Jack had a hollow heart, for Jill

Had hung his heart on high;
The moon shone brightly;
Had hung his heart beyond the hill,
A-twinkle in the sky.72

A Full Moon in March mediates historical trauma through esoteric sym-

bolism in a highly ritualized theatrical form. By contrast, Purgatory con-
fronts history directly while retaining its form as a spirit play. In this
respect, it is the most significant Yeatsian precedent to the violence and
supernatural features of By the Bog of Cats ….
Cathy Leeney is right in pointing out that in Purgatory Yeats opened
the way for later dramatists like Carr in confronting death directly without
the framework of myth and legend; ‘death as something we do, killing as
the ultimate performance’.73 Equally important is the fact that this direct
confrontation with death carries with it symbolic, ritualistic and super-
natural dimensions. While it is true that the murders of Purgatory carry
none of the mythic heroism of Cuchulain in his furious defence of the
ancient kingdom of Ulster, they are still forms of sacrificial violence con-
nected to the presence of a supernatural vision. By no means idealistic
and certainly not ethical, they are yet acts of religious violence. Distin-
guishing Carr’s work from that of Yeats as a feminist re-appraisal of tra-
ditions that the male author inhabited, Leeney underplays features of By
the Bog of Cats … that betray the influence of Purgatory quite explicitly.
It is misleading, for example, to suggest that the guilt placed upon the
dead mother’s soul in Purgatory is disposed of in Carr’s play. In Act One,
Catwoman is explicit on the matter, asserting to Hester that Hester has
‘the gift of seein’ things as they are’. This Catwoman herself has long
thought that ‘there’s some fierce wrong ya done that’s caught up with
ya’ and that everyone knows the consequence of wrongdoing: ‘You do
and it’s the best thing about ya’.74 Whatever about the work of Teresa
Deevy, Leeney’s claim that Carr’s work resists ‘images of defeat’ in the
form of suicide is certainly not borne out in the conclusion to By the Bog
of Cats …. Whether or not Hester has killed herself or been killed by the
Ghost Fancier is open to interpretation, but in any case she ends up with
her heart torn from her chest, the organ lying on her dead body.75
Purgatory imprints itself more deeply on By the Bog of Cats… than the
early plays of the Irish Theatre Movement in the 1900s like Yeats and
Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan or Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding. Carr
84 M. MCATEER

takes up the motif of the house-burning from Yeats’s 1938 play, likewise
linking it to drunkenness and murder. She also develops more expansively
the question raised in Yeats’s play of the Itinerant people of rural Ire-
land and their relation to the sedentary communities. The old man of
Yeats’s play reveals himself as a pedlar who, before the end, says that he
will gather his dead son’s money and leave for a distant place to tell ‘my
old jokes among new men’.76 In the spiteful argument that follows the
appearance of Hester at the wedding banquet of Carthage Kilbride and
Caroline Cassidy in Act Two of By the Bog of Cats …, the groom’s mother
defends herself against the accusation that she herself had so-called tinker
blood by stating that her grandfather was ‘a wanderin’ tinsmith’. Hes-
ter’s old neighbour Monica Murray replies to this in a manner significant
to the influence on Carr’s play of Yeats’s old man as a wandering pedlar
in Purgatory: ‘And what’s that but a tinker with notions!’77 In Purga-
tory the old man insults his own son as ‘a bastard’ begot by ‘a tinker’s
daughter’ in a ditch. Contrasting this with the admiration for the Itiner-
ant way of life in Yeats’s Where There is Nothing from 35 years earlier,
Mary Burke sees this exemplify a shift in representing ‘tinkers’ in Irish
writing after the Irish Literary Revival from ‘elevated symbol of noncon-
formity to degraded Other’.78 The same vicious insult by an elder towards
a younger in Purgatory recurs in By the Bog of Cats …. Before her own
granddaughter Josie, Mrs Kilbride laments the fact that her son Carthage
never once thanked her for the support that she gave him because he was
‘too busy bringin’ little bastards like yourself into the world’.79
The themes of tinker bloodline and the Itinerant community in both
plays are linked to desires to eradicate past and future. Yeats’s old man
tries to eradicate the future by murdering his son, so as not to have
‘passed pollution on’.80 Hester Swane sees Carthage’s marriage into the
new middle-class represented by the Cassidy family as his attempt to eradi-
cate the embarrassing past of his relationship with an Itinerant: ‘The truth
is you want to eradicate me, make out I never existed’.81 Hester’s mur-
der of her daughter may well be a gesture of resistance to any further
degradation of the Itinerant way of life in Ireland into one of middle-
class monotony. From this perspective, it could well be claimed that rather
than coming to terms with the ghosts of the past, as Paula Murphy sug-
gests, the play obliterates both past and future in the nihilistic fashion of
Purgatory.82 It appears that the old man of Purgatory and Hester Swane
of By the Bog of Cats … stand at opposite ends of the spectrum in the
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 85

value that they lay upon social class, the old man wanting rid of his Itin-
erant offspring, Hester resisting the forces gathered to get rid of her and
her caravan. Yet both the old man and Hester share a fidelity to ways
of life that are being destroyed not by the Itinerant community but by
the advancement of the lower middle-class into positions of influence.
Both the old man’s father and Hester have burnt down houses in states
of drunkenness. In Purgatory, the house was that of an old Anglo-Irish
family, whereas in By the Bog of Cats… it is the new house that Caroline
Cassidy’s father has built for the newly married couple.
Despite been classified as a so-called tinker—and proudly considering
herself to be so—Hester Swane is one of the characters most attached in
Carr’s play to the boglands where she grew up, as Leeney observes.83 In
an eco-critical reading of the play sensitive to the extensive boglands for
which the County Offaly setting is well known, Derek Gladwin suggests
that Hester embodies the bog itself as a mobile landscape that hovers
between natural and supernatural dimensions.84 For all the magnitude of
difference between the historical status of the Anglo-Irish Big House and
the ancient customs of the Itinerant people in Ireland, both Purgatory
and By the Bog of Cats … identify between them a fidelity to traditions
disappearing under the pressure of new commercial orders. The facade
of a pedlar lamenting the aristocratic nobility of his ancestral lineage in
Purgatory and of Mrs Kilbride photographing her expensive new shoes
on the occasion of her son’s wedding in By the Bog of Cats… testify to
the fragmentation of these traditions from which the ritual violence of
both plays arises.
The most important point of connection between Yeats’s 1938 and
Carr’s 1998 plays lies in the murders of the offspring as repeated offences.
The old man’s murder of his son in Purgatory and Hester’s murder of
her daughter in By the Bog of Cats … repeat filial murders from earlier in
life. The old man had already murdered his father during the burning of
the ancestral house in Purgatory and Hester had already murdered her
brother on a boat trip when she was young. These killings are linked to
shame, guilt and loss. The old man killed his father out of shame and the
heightened feeling of abandonment that was triggered by the death of his
mother, a feeling compounded by his belief that she had committed an act
of betrayal in marrying into a life unworthy of her. Hester murdered her
brother out of shame at his taunts about her mother having abandoned
her.85 This is underlined by the striking concordance between Purgatory
86 M. MCATEER

and By the Bog of Cats … that Russell observes.86 The old man in Pur-
gatory kills his son when he is the same age as the old man was when
he killed his father. Likewise, Hester kills Josie when her daughter has
reached the same age that Hester was when her mother left her.
However tied up with family relations, guilt in these instances illumi-
nates the primordial guilt of Heidegger’s Dasein, the calling of Being-
there to itself as ‘Guilty!’87 It manifests ‘nothing which might be talked
about’ and arises ‘from uncanniness’, abandonment in the thrownness
of Being-in-the-world.88 It is unsurprising that the murders link so inti-
mately to the supernaturalism of the spectral; the ghosts of the dead par-
ents appearing in the ruins of the house destroyed in Purgatory and the
ghost of Hester’s brother Joseph appearing in the flames of the house
that Hester burns in By the Bog of Cats …. These presences manifest the
experience of disorientation to accompany the call of Dasein to itself from
its own separation from itself. In Purgatory, the old man’s parents appear
before him yet equally arise from his deepest point of origin within him-
self, the moment of his conception. Joseph appears before Hester as the
memory of the original loss of her mother from which her calamitous
existence unfolds in By the Bog of Cats….
The singularity of the murders that conclude both plays is ruptured by
the fact that, in repeating earlier crimes, they introduce multiplicity. At
the same time, as singular events, they detach themselves from the situa-
tions in which they occur. The killings stand in excess, not only in view
of their nature as filial murders, but equally in consideration of the fact
that they provide no unifying order to the total action of both plays. The
murder of the boy in Purgatory fails as an act of restorative order, and
while everything points to Hester committing suicide at the end of By
the Bog of Cats…, little anticipates her killing her daughter Josie.89 Iden-
tifiable as parts of sequences that form the narratives of the plays, both
killings are yet removed from them in their singularity. They open a void
that they simultaneously withhold. They become radically undecidable in
relation to the situations in which they occur, undecidability magnified by
the threat of extermination—whether of the Anglo-Irish caste or of the
Irish Itinerant community—that the killings project.90 This undecidable
aspect thereby conveys how these killings disclose a primordial void while
simultaneously interposing themselves between the situations in which
they occur and this void. In this sense, the killings accord with Badiou’s
account of the appearance of the void in mathematical set theory.91 Fur-
thermore, they take on the characteristic of pure sacrificial excess that
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 87

Bataille identifies in ecstatic vision, ‘at the limit of death on the cross and
of the blindly lived lamma sabachtani […] the object finally unveiled as
catastrophe in a chaos of light and shadow’, the object that love demands
‘in order to let out the scream of lacerated existence’.92

Notes
1. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
2nd ed. (1969), trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder,
1972; London: Verso, 1997), 50. Citations refer to the Verso edition.
2. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore,
MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
3. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed. (London:
Papermac, 1991), 288.
4. Sean O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, new ed. (London: Faber, 1998), 200–
1.
5. Building on previous scholarship, most notably that of Ruth Dudley
Edwards, Joost Augustin provides the most extensive examination in
recent times of Pearse’s experiences, development, attitudes and values.
See, Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
6. Elaine Sisson, Pearse’s Patriots: St. Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood (Cork:
Cork University Press, 2004), 74.
7. Augustin, Patrick Pearse, 289.
8. James Moran, ed., Four Irish Rebel Plays (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
2007), 13.
9. Seán Farrell Moran, Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption: The
Mind of the Easter Rising, 1916 (Washington, DC: The Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1994), 151.
10. Moran, ed., Four Irish Rebel Plays, 85.
11. Ibid., 84. Seán Farrell Moran traces this aspect to a dream that Pearse
described as having sometime in 1909. In this dream, one of Pearse’s
students appears ‘standing alone on a platform above a mighty sea of peo-
ple’. In taking the young pupil that Pearse describes and the exhilaration
that Pearse expresses upon seeing him as ‘a psychic expression of Pearse
himself’, Farrell Moran disregards the homoerotic nature of the dream
and the significance of this to Pearse’s sacrificial and revolutionary ideas.
Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption, 151.
12. Sisson, Pearse’s Patriots, 149.
13. Susan Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 153–59.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , trans. R. J. Hollingdale, rev.
ed. (London: Penguin, 1990), 75.
88 M. MCATEER

15. Moran, ed., Four Irish Rebel Plays, 92–93.

16. Ibid., 96.
17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , 79.
18. Moran, ed., Four Irish Rebel Plays, 97.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals , trans. Douglas Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19.
20. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843), trans. Alastair Hannay
(London: Penguin, 1985), 13.
21. Moran, ed., Four Irish Rebel Plays, 96–97.
22. Ibid., 99.
23. Ibid., 100.
24. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian
Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 168.
25. In his preface to Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard decries Hegel’s system-
atic philosophy. Fear and Trembling , 5–6. He criticises Hegel for lack-
ing the courage to follow his own moral logic consistently and condemn
Abraham, the ‘Father of Faith’, as someone ‘who ought to be prosecuted
and convicted of murder’. Fear and Trembling, 42. Kierkegaard consid-
ers the tragic hero that was central to ancient Greek drama as some-
one whose experience points beyond him/herself to a universal idea of
morality, thereby remaining within the realm of the ethical. Abraham, by
contrast, steps outside the boundary of ethics itself, and so Hegel’s move-
ments of consciousness cannot apply to him as Kierkegaard’s sees it. Fear
and Trembling , 46.
26. Ibid., 56.
27. Ibid., 100.
28. Alexandra Poulain, Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play (Hound-
mills and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 43.
29. Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs,
trans. Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 310.
30. Cannon Harris, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, 154.
31. Poulain, Irish Drama, 45.
32. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (London:
Penguin, 1992), 245.
33. W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays, 2nd ed. (1952) (London: Papermac, 1982),
50.
34. By this is meant Badiou’s interpretation of the centrality that Pascal
accords to miracles in his understanding of faith; being ‘in excess of proof’
by definition, they ‘identify the ground upon which there is the possibility
for believing in truth’. Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham
(London: Continuum, 2005), 216. Miracles are thus a dangerous neces-
sity to historical Christianity, since they leave the diverse range of its insti-
tutional structures vulnerable to reasoned atheism.
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 89

35. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray
Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
36. Francis Shaw, S. J., ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, An Irish
Century: Studies, 1912–2012, ed. Bryan Fanning (Dublin: UCD Press,
2012), 64–65. My thanks to former member of the Irish Seanad and
former Professor at the National University of Ireland Galway, Dr. Jim
Doolan, for drawing my attention to Shaw’s article, originally published
in a commemorative issue of the Jesuit journal Studies to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the 1916 Rising in 1966.
37. Poulain, Irish Drama, 45.
38. Gagnier, Idylls, 168–70.
39. Yeats, Collected Plays, 683–84.
40. Ibid., 683.
41. ‘Preamble’, Bunreacht na hÉireann/Constitution of Ireland (1937)
(Dublin: Government Publications, 2015), 2.
42. Victor Merriman, Because We Are Poor: Irish Theatre in the 1990s (Dublin:
Carysfort Press, 2011, 88.
43. Yeats, Collected Plays, 685.
44. Ibid., 689.
45. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 329.
46. Ibid., 329.
47. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 50.
48. Badiou, Being and Event, 206.
49. Yeats, Collected Plays, 689.
50. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008), 78–79.
51. Yeats, Collected Plays, 689.
52. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 –1939, ed. Allan
Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (1985,
repr., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 134. For
Heidegger on the primary dimension of Being-towards-Death in his the-
ory of the temporal nature of Being-there, see in particular, Part One of
the Second Division of Being and Time, 274–311.
53. Yeats, Collected Plays, 456.
54. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 132.
55. David R. Clark with Rosalind Clarke, W. B. Yeats and the Theatre of Deso-
late Reality, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of Amer-
ica Press, 1993), 244.
56. Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan, eds., The Theatre of Marina Carr:
“Before Rules Was Made” (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003); Rhona Trench,
Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2010). For a reading of Carr’s drama against that of the
Mother-Ireland figure in Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, see
90 M. MCATEER

in particular, Melissa Sihra, ‘A Cautionary Tale: Marina Carr’s By the Bog

of Cats …’, in Eamonn Jordan, ed., Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Con-
temporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), 257–58.
57. Bernadette Bourke, Carr’s ‘Cut-Throats and Gargiyles’: Grotesque and
Carnivalesque Elements in By the Bog of Cats ’, in Cathy Leeney and Anna
McMulan, eds., The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 128–45 (142–43).
58. ‘Fire Destroys Church’, The Irish Times, Monday, October 31, 1983: 8.
59. ‘Pathologist Examines Priest’s Body’, The Irish Times , Tuesday, July 9,
1985: 1. For a record of the extensive media coverage that the Molloy
murder case received in Ireland between 1985 and 2015, see ‘The Fr.
Molloy Case’, https://frniallmolloy.com/tag/rte/.
60. ‘Floggings and Sadistic Cruelty’, The Irish Times, Thursday, May 21, 2009:
12.
61. Although he does not mention Clonmacnoise specifically, it is clear that
its influence as a centre of monastic learning matches those other Irish
centres named in John Henry Newman’s celebrated essay ‘The Tradition
of Civilisation: Isles of the North’ in ‘The Rise and Progress of Universi-
ties’, in Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (1856) (London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1909), 116–29. See also in this volume, ‘Northmen and
Normans in England and Ireland’, 267–87.
62. Melissa Shira reads the threat of removal that confronts Hester in By the
Bog of Cats … as a ‘geopathic crisis’, a term coined by drama theorist Una
Chaudhuri with reference to anxieties deriving from ideologies of home
and of dispossession. ‘The House of Woman and the Plays of Marina
Carr’, in Melissa Shira, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Author-
ship and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 212.
63. Róisín O’Gorman, ‘Caught in the Liminal: Dorothy Cross’s Udder Series
and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats …’, in Irene Gilsenan Nordin and
Elin Holmsten, eds., Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 103–30 (121).
64. Merriman, Because We Are Poor, 197.
65. Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1998),
78–81.
66. O’Gorman, ‘Caught in the Liminal’, 117.
67. Carr, By the Bog, 22.
68. Bruce Stewart, ‘At the Heart of Irish Atavism: “A Fatal Excess”’, in
IASIL Newsletter 5/1 (1999), http://www.iasil.org/archive/newsletter/
archive/newsletter1999/index.html/.
69. Ibid., 81.
70. Richard Russell, ‘Talking with Ghosts of Irish Playwrights: Marina Carr’s
By the Bog of Cats …’, Comparative Drama 40/2 (2006), 149–68 (158).
 4 TRANSGRESSIVE SACRIFICE: PEARSE, YEATS, CARR 91

71. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed. (London:
Papermac, 1991), 301.
72. Yeats, Collected Plays, 629.
73. Cathy Leeney, ‘Ireland’s “Exiled” Women Playwrights: Teresa Deevy and
Marina Carr’, in Shaun Richards, ed., The Cambridge Companion to
Twentieth-Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 157.
74. Carr, By the Bog, 21.
75. Leeney, ‘Ireland’s “Exiled” Women Playwrights’, 161.
76. Yeats, Collected Plays, 689.
77. Carr, By the Bog, 56.
78. Mary Burke, ‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Trav-
eller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 143. Chris Morash and
Shaun Richards assert that ‘Irish Travellers have long had a strong pres-
ence on the Irish realist stage’ from Synge to Carr, in contrast to smallness
of the Irish Traveller community as a percentage of the overall popula-
tion of the Republic of Ireland that was recorded in the 2011 census.
In making this judgement, they make no reference to the denigrating
depictions of Irish Itinerants that Burke identifies in Irish plays, instead
reading the stage-representation of Irish Travellers ‘as a kind of roman-
tic apotheosis’. Chris Morash and Shaun Richards, Mapping Irish The-
atre: Theories of Space and Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 136–37. In a marked contrast, Vic Merriman objects that Carr’s
depiction of Itinerant people through the figure of Hester Swane in
By the Bog of Cats is ultimately racist: ‘Carr specifically grounds Hester
Swane’s predilections for violence, deceit and unnatural urges in her iden-
tity as a traveller.’ ‘Staging contemporary Ireland: heartsickness and hopes
deferred’ in Shaun Richards, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth
Century Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
244–57 (255). See also Merriman’s criticism of the plays of Carr and
Martin McDonagh as ‘Tiger trash’, the product of a ‘neocolonial society
in the throes of globalisation’. ‘Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre
of Tiger Trash’, Irish University Review, 29/2 (1999), 305–17 (316).
79. Carr, By the Bog, 26.
80. Yeats, Collected Plays, 688.
81. Carr, By the Bog, 56.
82. Paula Murphy, ‘Staging Histories in Marina Carr’s Midland Plays’, Irish
University Review, 36/2 (2006), 389–402 (400).
83. Leeney, ‘Ireland’s “Exiled” Women Playwrights’, 161.
84. Derek Gladwin, ‘Staging the Trauma of the Bog in Marina Carr’s By the
Bog of Cats …’, Irish Studies Review, 19/4 (2011), 387–400 (390–91,
394). For the centrality of Hester Swane’s relation to the bog, see, Emily
L. Kader, ‘The Anti-Exile in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats …’, Nordic
92 M. MCATEER

Irish Studies, 4 (2005), 167–87. Lisa Fitzpatrick proposes that Carr com-
plicates the canonical literary and mythic sources upon which she develops
her protagonists by imbuing them with ‘a passionate emotional identifi-
cation with features of the natural landscape that they inhabit’. ‘Disrupt-
ing Metanarratives: Anne Devlin, Christina Reid, Marina Carr, and the
Irish Dramatic Repertory’, Irish University Review, 35/2 (2005), 320–33
(332). See also Enrica Cerquoni’s important consideration of the spa-
tial representation of the bog on stage in Carr’s play. ‘‘One Bog, Many
Bogs’: Theatrical Space, Visual Image, and Meaning in Some Produc-
tions of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats …’, in Cathy Leeney and Anna
McMullan, eds., The Theatre of Marina Carr: “Before Rules Was Made”
(Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), 172–99.
85. Carr, By the Bog, 61. In an observation which underlines how profoundly
the influence of Purgatory runs in Carr’s tragedies, Claire Wallace draws
attention to how deeply they depend on repetition for dramatic impact,
noting how Carr’s characters are driven by a ‘compulsion to return, to
repeat the past, a compulsion which ultimately relates to a desire to control
and order their destines’. ‘Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s
The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats …’, Irish University
Review, 32/2 (2001), 431–49 (440).
86. Russell, ‘Talking with Ghosts’, 158.
87. Heidegger, Being and Time, 326.
88. Ibid., 325.
89. Derek Gladwin’s reads Hester ‘sacrificing’ her daughter and then her-
self upon the bog in By the Bog of Cats …’ as ‘completing the cycle of
existence’ through the ‘return to the dark matter from which they came’.
‘Staging the trauma’, 392. This eco-critical perspective overlooks the erad-
ication of kinship through the killings.
90. While Burke reads Purgatory too literally, she is still correct to bring the
Nazi attempt to exterminate the European gypsies into a consideration of
the old man killing his son in Yeats’s play as a gesture at terminating a
race. ‘Tinkers ’, 143.
91. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 182–83.
92. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 134.
 PART II

Material Excess
 CHAPTER 5

Money and Melodrama: Boucicault, Wilde,

Shaw

Of Surplus Value
Excess exists at the very heart of modern capitalism as Marx analyses it
in his first political economic writings, developed principally from Adam
Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) and David Ricardo’s On the Prin-
ciples of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). This is most clearly evi-
dent in his idea of surplus value that is produced from the organization
of labour specific to an industrial society. Ricardo had already argued that
Adam Smith’s work lacked a labour theory of value, falling back on the
notion of a standard measure of value such as corn or the labour-cost.1
Marx identifies the excess of the total value of a product over the sum
of the values of the various elements that is required to produce it. This
he describes as the excess of capital once it is ‘valorized’ over the value
of capital originally advanced to create a product for sale in the market-
place.2 When ‘dead labour is replaced by living labour’, value is added to
the price of the labour-power that the capitalist investor purchases. The
measure of the value of labour costs, in other words, is exceeded as soon
as workers start putting the process of production in motion.3 Producing
more value than the original nominal measure of the value of their labour-
power, workers generate excess in the form of surplus value for the owner
of the company in which they are employed. What appears to the capital-
ist as the conversion of his investment into profit, to the employee appears
as ‘an excess expenditure of labour-power’.4

© The Author(s) 2020 95

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_5
96 M. MCATEER

The centrality of excess in Marx’s account of capitalist production raises

the question of the relationship between material excess and excess in
spiritual or ontological senses. The Irish example is particularly signifi-
cant, given the economic calamity of mass starvation that the country
underwent in the mid-nineteenth century when considered in relation to
various representations of Irish character as prone to emotional and spiri-
tual excess. The Scottish sociologist John MacKinnon Robertson was one
of the few writers in the nineteenth century to draw a direct relationship
between political economic turbulence in Irish history and the propensi-
ties of the Irish temperament to emotional excess and spiritual excitability.
Instead of attributing this disposition to innate tendencies, he observed
the Irish temperament as the product of 300 years of ‘civil strife or mur-
derous famine’ that denied any Irish generation the freedom ‘to grow up
prosperously and placidly, and to transmit stability of habit to the next’.5
The relation of Marx’s thought to that Hegel is the point of departure
for considering material excess in relation to spiritual excess, given the
presence of excess in the process that Hegel identifies as the movements
of Spirit. Marx’s relation to Hegel has been extensively documented and
revised in twentieth century philosophy, most significantly in the writ-
ing of György Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno.6 How-
ever widely Marx moved away from what he regarded as the idealism
of Hegel, his early writings on alienation and reification show just how
deeply Hegel’s concepts had influenced him. Marx’s economic theory of
capital owes a significant debt to Hegel’s concept of consciousness as that
which is perpetually in excess of itself. Significantly, Hegel chooses the
metaphor of drunken revelry to describe the movement of consciousness.
Rejecting as unscientific the idea of knowledge as stable certainty, instead,
he proposes that the nature of truth lies in the perpetual dynamism of
consciousness: truth that externalizes itself in the form of material objects
before it negates this form. In a significant antecedent to the excess of
Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Zarathustran revelry that impacts profoundly
upon Yeats’s Where There is Nothing , Hegel considers truth in this sense
as a form of drunkenness: ‘The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in
which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as
soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple
repose’.7
While Hegel’s influence on Marx has received extensive consideration,
Marx has never been assessed in relation to Kierkegaard to any signifi-
cant extent. In many respects, this is surprising. While Kierkegaard had
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 97

no interest in economic questions and was averse to the kind of grand

systematic theory that Marx would develop in Capital, both Kierkegaard
and Marx began writing in reaction to Hegel’s thought and the major
influence that it was exerting in Europe in the 1830s. Both writers sought
to return thought to the living experience of men and women, identifying
as they did a disconnection from experience in the idealism of Hegel.
However forbidding the differences in what Kierkegaard and Marx
actually meant by living experience, it is significant that Marx calls it ‘suf-
fering’ in his early writings; of relevance to the notion of anxiety that
Kierkegaard observes at the core of human experience: ‘To be sentient
is to suffer. Man as an objective, sentient being is therefore a suffering
being, and, since he is a being who feels his sufferings, a passionate being.
Passion is man’s faculties energetically striving after their object’.8 This
assertion of human suffering bears a significant relation to the idea of
despair that Kierkegaard characterizes as the sign of one’s consciousness
of the nature of one’s existence. On this basis, Kierkegaard’s theory of
human anxiety in terms of absolute individual choice concerning one’s
existence, not supported by any system of reasoning, relates to the excess
that Marx identifies in the capitalist economic formation, however sys-
tematic and materialist Marx’s writings appear in stark contrast to those
of Kierkegaard.

Boucicault’s Debt
Dion Boucault’s 1860 melodrama The Colleen Bawn stands out as one of
the most glaring representations in the nineteenth century of Irish char-
acter as emotionally excessive. Boucicault’s melodramas exerted a major
influence on the two Irish dramatists who achieved international fame
subsequent to him, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Particularly
in Shaw’s greatest theatrical success up to 1904, John Bull’s Other Island,
the legacy of Boucicault’s Irish melodrama is evident. Nicholas Grene
observes that Shaw’s play was motivated in part by a desire to destroy the
trope of the Stage Irishman that featured in plays like Boucicault’s The
Shaughraun. Grene’s view is shared by Brad Kent, who draws attention
to Shaw’s judgement on Boucicault’s ‘blarneying’ of the British public in
an 1896 production of The Colleen Bawn.9 However, the line that Grene
quotes from Shaw’s 1896 review of a performance of The Colleen Bawn
(six years after Boucicault’s death in 1890) shows that while Shaw cer-
tainly hoped that the Stage Irishman would soon disappear from English
98 M. MCATEER

theatre, he still admired the performance for the potential that it revealed:
‘I have lived to see The Colleen Bawn with real water in it; and perhaps
I shall live to see it one day with real Irishmen’.10 In stark contrast to
Kent, Martin Meisel contends that not only did Shaw relish the lavish
1896 revival of the play at the Princess’s Theatre, his review was ‘laying
out the program’ for the first 1904 production of his own John Bull’s
Other Island.11
There is no escaping the sheer excess of feeling in the language and
pathos of Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn. The devotion of the poor uned-
ucated Irish characters Danny Mann and Eily O’Connor to Hardress Cre-
gan goes beyond all boundaries of self-concern. Cregan inherits a landed
estate in the west of Ireland while Mann and O’Connor live in frugal
cottages. Hardress himself is torn between devotion to his mother and
the enchantment of Eily O’Connor’s beauty. A public marriage to Eily,
however, threatens to reduce the Cregan family to a pauper state. Passion
constantly presses against decorum, overspilling more dramatically as the
plot of The Colleen Bawn unfolds. Fixated upon a marriage between her
son Hardress and the inheritor of a wealthy estate, Anne Chute, Mrs. Cre-
gan despises the advances of the land agent Mr. Corrigan. She considers
his marriage proposal to her as the impudence of a low-born aspirant to
social status. When Mrs. Cregan’s son is arrested on the mistaken pretext
that he has killed Eily, a burst of curses breaks loose from Mrs. Cregan,
shocking those present: ‘Dark bloodhound, have you found him? May
the tongue that tells me so be withered from its roots, and the eye that
first detected him be darkened in its socket!’12
One of the most dramatic instances of passion breaking through social
constraint is the sudden outburst from Anne Chute in dialogue with Kyrle
Daly. It is surprising because Anne is the person of wealth and education
upon whom Mrs. Cregan rests her hope of clearing her debts through
a marriage between Anne and her son. That Anne herself should revert
to a local Irish brogue in a moment of impending economic crisis illus-
trates the intimate connection between a language of emotional excess
and the excess of living beyond one’s financial means. Her gesture, and
the context within which she makes it, corroborates Sos Eltis’s claim that
Boucicault’s Irish dramas hinge on the ‘transition from a society of inher-
ited status to one ruled by modern imperatives of contract and com-
merce’.13 The basis of the entire plot of The Colleen Bawn is alluded
to in a single passing moment, when Mrs. Cregan tells Kyrle Daly how
‘the extravagance of my husband left this estate deeply involved’.14 The
‘extravagance’ of affection for Hardress to which Anne Chute gives vent
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 99

reflects this same spirit of financial recklessness as much as it expresses an

admirable spirit of unconditional affection:

Anne: Doesn’t he [Hardress] think that I wouldn’t sell the last rood o’
land – the gown off my back and the hair off my head before that boy
that protected and loved me, the child, years ago, should come to a
hap’orth of harrum.
Kyrle: Miss Chute!
Anne: Well I can’t help it! When I am angry the Irish brogue comes
out, and my Irish heart would burst through manners, and graces, and
twenty stay-laces.15

This verbal slippage of the upper-class Anne adds a twist to the plot, since
the poverty of Eily O’Connor is signified most clearly by her local accent,
an uncomfortable reminder to Hardress that his marriage to her entertains
the prospect of falling off the social ladder. Willing to jeopardize her own
financial standing to rescue Hardress, Anne seems liable to repeat the
imprudence that Hardress himself has demonstrated in his relationship to
Eily.
While the native accent is the most striking indication of emotional
excess in these instances, their more revealing aspect lies not in the ques-
tion of racial temperament, but in the relation between economic crisis
and emotional exuberance that they bring to the surface. However far
removed The Colleen Bawn may have been from the commercial centres
of London and New York, the hyperbole of its melodrama appealed to
mass theatre audiences there because such a dramatization of Ireland gave
a powerful expression of economic and emotional turbulence. Through
his globalization of Irish culture in 1860 with the huge success of The
Colleen Bawn, first in New York and then in London, Boucicault him-
self acquired massive wealth with this, the blockbuster sensation of its
day. Following a topsy-turvy career since locating to the United States in
1853, this major breakthrough allowed him into the Manhattan property
market, taking up residence at 39 East 15th Street while buying another
house at Astor Place as an investment.16 As Sos Eltis notes, Boucicault’s
success in negotiating a percentage cut of the box-office receipts rather
than a flat fee for his plays showed his commercial awareness. He was
a model that Oscar Wilde followed when Wilde rejected the offer of a
flat fee from George Alexander for the production of Lady Windemere’s
Fan.17
100 M. MCATEER

The Colleen Bawn generated Boucicault a huge percentage of surplus

value over his capital investment in the writing and the production of the
play, making Boucicault a brand-name in the 1860s and the 1870s. The
extravagance of her deceased husband’s gambling that has left Mrs. Cre-
gan’s estate on the brink of bankruptcy, the endearing folly of Hardress
Cregan’s love for Eily O’Connor, the unbridled passion of Eily’s love
for Hardress, the absurd levels of Danny Mann’s devotion to him, the
melodramatic excess of the entire plot: these all combine to reflect not so
much the Irish world that the play depicts, as the excess of the economic
system within which the play is produced and overproduced. The over-
flow of emotion in Boucicault’s melodrama is a symptom of the material
overproduction of his plays in general during the 1860s and 1870s, The
Colleen Bawn in particular.18
Two aspects of Marx’s Capital, coming to the fore just as Boucicault’s
career was reaching its height, are directly relevant to Boucicault’s play:
the relation of surplus labour to surplus value: capital accumulation
as a process prone constantly to crisis. In essence, Marx identifies in
surplus labour the formal measure of the time spent by a worker working
essentially for nothing; nothing other than the maximization of the
value of a product over and above the cost of producing it.19 The other
element concerns financial debt. Marx identifies an economic crisis as the
appearance of the contradiction between money as a nominal measure of
the balance of payments and money as the actual amount that must be
paid for a commodity; money as hard cash, ‘the individual incarnation of
social labour, the independent presence of exchange-value, the universal
commodity’.20 This describes the first crisis of The Colleen Bawn; now
that Mrs. Cregan’s husband is dead, Myles Corrigan, his former agent,
finds himself in a position to take possession of the Cregan estate either
through the law or through marriage to Mrs. Cregan because he has
hard cash available. The ‘balance of payments’ between the deceased
Mr. Cregan and his creditors is now converted through Corrigan into
hard cash: the actual value of the estate.

Economic Passion
Early in John Bull’s Other Island, this same link between melodrama and
money is evident in the character of Larry Doyle, the Irish native of a
small townland in county Roscommon who has realized great success
through his partnership with English gentleman Timothy Broadbent in
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 101

a firm of engineers with London headquarters. At first it appears to the

audience as if Doyle has left behind any trace of emotional hyperbole
associated with the natives of Boucicault’s Irish plays. He immediately
identifies as sheer pretence the sentimental and jaunty display that Tim-
othy Haffigan puts on to the delight of Broadbent, wringing money for
drink from him in the process.21 Yet Doyle himself quickly goes off into
‘a passionate dream’ in which he laments how ‘the Irishman’s imagina-
tion never leaves him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him’.22
Through Larry Doyle in this instance, Shaw disparages the melodra-
matic excess of those stage representations of Irish character typical of
Boucicault’s Irish plays, yet with intensity every bit as excessive as that
of Boucicault.
In the very title, The Importance of Being Earnest casts in a differ-
ent light the paradox of integrity represented through excess of feeling
that The Colleen Bawn indulges and John Bull’s Other Island contests.
Boucicault’s Eily O’Connor is such an ‘earnest’ character: overflowing
with love for Hardress, and unable to adopt the pretences of upper-class
civil decorum. Larry Doyle is ‘earnest’ by contrast in determining to leave
the Irish blarney behind him, facing the world instead as a man of busi-
ness in his partnership with Broadbent. In Wilde’s brilliant comedy of
manners, Earnest is a byword for pretence: to be ‘Earnest’ is, like Alger-
non, to be acting. Everything in Wilde’s play is snobbish and mannered
to the point of excess: the point at which decorum itself is put to ridicule.
At the same time, the whole charade of polite society in England is placed
in an economic context. Just as Mrs. Cregan has found herself burdened
with her late husband’s debts in The Colleen Bawn, we learn from Lady
Bracknell in the final act of The Importance of Being Earnest that Alger-
non has ‘nothing but his debts to depend upon’. Indeed, Lady Bracknell
herself admits that when she married Lord Bracknell she had no fortune
at all: ‘But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my
way’.23
The theatricality of human feeling presents authentic existence in a
state of anxiety in The Colleen Bawn, The Importance of Being Earnest and
John Bull’s Other Island, however wide the contrast in tone is between
the three plays. This anxiety draws the economic form of excess that Marx
identifies in Capital into the spiritual condition of excess that Kierkegaard
elaborates in his reflections on the predicament of human existence. Sig-
nificant to this connection is a desire to be dead that we find in all
three plays. Early into The Colleen Bawn, we encounter Danny Mann
102 M. MCATEER

together with his master Hardress Cregan and Hardress’s friend Kyrle
Daly. Hardress explains to Kyrle that he has a duty of care to Danny after
causing him permanent injury in boyhood, when he flung him over a
cliff during a scuffle. Rather than harbour any resentment, Danny loudly
expresses his willingness to die for Hardress, and his delight at the injury
suffered for binding him more closely to Cregan. Far from becoming poi-
soned with resentment, Danny’s affection for Hardress deepens even as
his injury worsens, progressively reducing him to the condition of a crip-
ple.24 Likewise, when it appears that Hardress has entertained the possi-
bility of having Eily O’Connor killed (so as to leave him available to marry
Anne Chute) the response of the Colleen Bawn is excessively forgiving,
even to the point of envisaging her willing death. Wildly declaring to Fr.
Tom that her life belongs to Hardress, she says that she would gladly
throw herself into the lake to make him happy.25
Famously, Algernon has invented a permanent invalid in The Impor-
tance of Being Earnest, Bunbury, who comes in handy as an excuse to
escape social occasions in a London that he finds tiresome. There is a
striking echo here of the real cripple Danny Mann in The Colleen Bawn
who proves convenient to Hardress in all sorts of ways and who, like
the fictional Bunbury, must eventually be killed off to make the way for
financially secure marriages. Two of Lady Bracknell’s most memorable
pronouncements in the play concern illness and death. Of Bunbury’s per-
sistent illness that takes Algernon away from London, she is decidedly
inconsiderate. This Bunbury fellow must make up his mind whether he
is going to live or die, and cease his ‘shilly-shallying’ about the busi-
ness, judging morbid as she does the ‘modern sympathy with invalids’,
a point that she persistently re-iterates to her ailment-ridden husband.26
Then there is the matter of Jack losing both parents. Losing one, Lady
Bracknell considers unfortunate; losing both ‘carelessness’.27 These pro-
nouncements are comic simply in Lady Bracknell taking social graces to
their extreme in response to circumstances that themselves appear extrav-
agantly tragic. To be ill is acceptable only to a point, beyond which, it
becomes simply rude; to suffer bereavement is to be worthy of sympa-
thy, so long as the extent of bereavement is within the bounds of what is
deemed respectable. In this way, the rules of polite society, as Lady Brack-
nell observes them, become absurdly finicky. What is more, the strategies
themselves by which these rules are circumvented become equally farcical.
By the end of the week, Jack plans to have killed off his fictitious Ernest
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 103

by saying that he has died in Paris of apoplexy. When Algernon points out
that this is a hereditary illness, Jack opts instead for ‘a severe chill’ as the
source of the sudden fictional filial death.28
Wilde’s play being a comedy ‘for serious people’, the humour in this
instance brings into view the idea of human anxiety as expressing a rela-
tion between the surplus and the superficial in The Importance of Being
Earnest. Mention of death by apoplexy calls to mind the case of Mary
Anne Walkley that Marx discusses in ‘The Working Day’ chapter of Cap-
ital, volume one. In June 1863 news of her death at the age of twenty
‘from simple over-work’ made it into the press, when it was discovered
that she had worked as a milliner for twenty-six hours uninterrupted in an
upmarket dressmaking establishment to complete dresses for noble ladies
‘invited to the ball in honour of the new imported Princess of Wales’.
Despite consultant physician Dr. Letheby’s condemnation of the horrific
conditions under which Walkley was forced to work, the coroner’s jury
conveniently returned a verdict of death by apoplexy, strangely prescient
of Jack’s plan to dispose of Ernest opportunistically with the same illness
over thirty years later in Wilde’s play.29
The case of Mary Anne Walkley to which Marx draws attention is
uncomfortably close to a passage in the manuscript of The Importance
of Being Earnest that was omitted from the published edition. In this,
Dr. Chausable comments that Cecily must know all about the relations
between capital and labour, after Miss Prism orders her to study political
economy while she takes a stroll with the vicar. Cecily responds to Dr.
Chausable that she only knows about the relation between capital and
idleness, and that from mere observation, which, she supposes, makes it
untrue. This prompts Miss Prism to warn Cecily that her comment sounds
dangerously like socialism. Cecily replies cheekily that socialism leads to
rational dress and the rational treatment of women in consequence—a
prospect that Cecily, in her world of romantic fantasy—regards as humil-
iating.30
In this brief exchange, Wilde’s play goes beyond comedy into Shavian
critical social commentary, explaining why this passage was not retained.
Vicky Mahaffey regards the exchange as one in which Cecily opens the
possibility of her own movement from romantic whimsy to rational pro-
priety, eventually ending up acting and dressing as prim and proper as
Miss Prism.31 This may be so, but it doesn’t explain why the passage
was not retained. The exchange is shadowed by the dead female dress-
maker Mary Anne Walkey. A movement towards rational dress might
104 M. MCATEER

have allowed Ms. Walkley to live rather than die from exhaustion in the
manufacturing of sumptuous dresses for the leisured entertainment of the
nobility. Cecily Cardrew’s observational knowledge of relations between
capital and leisure are not in themselves fictional as she suggests, but
rather a clear-sighted view of the fictional nature of the invented world
of leisure that she inhabits among the propertied classes.
Marx introduces the report of Walkley’s death not in pious sympathy
but rather as part of his analysis of the relations between excess labour,
overproduction and surplus value. Considering surplus value (profit) a
direct correlate of the average hours of labour expended in excess of
the value of the capital investment in a commodity production (wages,
machinery, building costs and expenses), it comes as no surprise that profit
margins are extended by overwork, even to the point of death. In his
1867 volume, Marx notes that in London’s Marylebone, less than ten
minutes by foot from the posh Belgrave Square where Jack owns a prop-
erty in Wilde’s play, blacksmiths were dying at the rate of thirty-one per
thousand each year, eleven above the national average: ‘by mere excess
of work’, he observes, this old skilled-labour had become ‘a destroyer
of man’.32 The comic ease with which Jack kills off his fictional brother
Ernest, followed later by the ease with which Algernon dispatches his fic-
tional invalid uncle Bunbury, are reflective of these social circumstances
governed by excess.
Excess in The Importance of Being Earnest has two senses. First, there is
too much of everything: wit, manners, money, property and debt. Peter
Raby points to the gluttony in the play. He notes how Algernon and
Jack have drunk all the tea before Lady Bracknell arrives, having already
gorged crumpets, and take to the sherry decanter when she leaves; how
Cecily stuffs Gwendolen with cake and sugared tea and how Algernon
eats muffins against Jack’s orders ‘while off-stage the champagne disap-
pears at a brisk rate’.33 Second, characters are surplus to social and eco-
nomic requirements. By this account, superficiality expresses capitalism as
a perpetual production of surplus value in which people themselves are
as expendable as fictional creations in a play or a novel. The nonsense of
the play indicates an economics of excess, the farcically over-polite char-
acter of social engagements raising weighty questions of purposeless and
death in their very frivolity. In response to Jack’s reprimand that he never
speaks ‘anything but nonsense’, Algernon remarks that ‘[n]obody ever
does’.34 The rebuke might lend justification to Shaw’s criticism of The
Importance of Being Earnest as Wilde’s only truly ‘heartless’ play.35 As
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 105

Peter Raby asserts, however, such heartlessness can well be regarded as

‘a sense of void’ that Wilde felt in the world around him.36 Considered
from this perspective, the play demonstrates a relationship between excess
and nothingness that carries economic and ontological significance. Shaw
had lauded Wilde’s An Ideal Husband for showing Wilde as ‘our only
thorough playwright’, one who ‘plays with everything: with wit, with phi-
losophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre’.37
It may be that the astounding success of The Importance of Being Earnest
disguised to Shaw the degree to which it continued in the same vein as
An Ideal Husband.

World Capital in Connacht

In its evocation of a polite economy of excess, The Importance of Being
Earnest maintains itself on the level of leisure throughout, avoiding
direct confrontation with the question of excess labour. In contrast, Shaw
addresses this matter in John Bull’s Other Island, granting it a certain colo-
nial characterization as he represents Irish-English relations at the start of
the twentieth century. In the opening scene, the audience is confronted
with two images of the Irishman in England. The first is that of Tim
Haffigan who portrays indolence through his sentimental performance of
the loveable Irish rogue. The second is that of Larry Doyle, a man of
sober industry who appears intelligent and professional in his position as
an engineer. Doyle is the person who refutes the easy association that
Broadbent draws between Irishness and indolence in Act III of the play,
soon after the partners have arrived in Roscullen in the west of Ireland
with a view to starting a new business venture. To Broabent’s surprise
that Doyle’s aunt Judy would describe a local Irishman Matt Haffigan
as ‘industrious’, Doyle responds vehemently that the problem with Irish
people was not laziness, but the compulsion to overwork. Whereas the
Englishman may have sense about working within reason, Doyle regards
the typical Irishman as a person who ‘will work as if he’d die the moment
he stopped’.38 This image of working oneself almost to death reflects
a general process of labour intensification that John Bull’s Other Island
addresses in terms of colonial economics as described later by Nikolai
Bukharin during the years of the First World War, just over a decade after
the first run of Shaw’s play in London.39
The surplus form of labour in John Bull’s Other Island comes through
in the triangular relationship between Larry Doyle, Nora Reilly and Tom
106 M. MCATEER

Broadbent that reaches its denouement in Act IV. Clumsily failing to fulfil
Nora’s expectation that he would propose to her, Larry is unable to artic-
ulate the confusion between his fondness for her and the extent to which
the differences between his life in London and Nora’s life in Roscullen
complicate the terms upon which marriage between them could bring
happiness. Nora accepts Tom Broadbent’s marriage proposal soon after
Larry’s abject failure to grasp the moment. Larry himself approves of the
marriage to Nora in a cynically cruel fashion: ‘Play your part well and
there will be no more neglect, no more loneliness, no more idle regret-
ting and vain-hopings in the evenings by the Round Tower, but real life
and real work and real cares and real joys among real people: solid English
life in London, the very centre of the world’.40
Excess in these circumstances takes the form of the surplus in two ways
that reflect one another inversely. First there is the waste of Nora’s life
in Roscullen as Larry sees it: neglect, loneliness, regret and unfulfilled
desires. Second there is the performance that is required of Nora to bring
her into contact with ‘real life and real work’ in London; a pretence that
functions as the Derridean supplement to the real world of industry, soci-
ety and commerce that marriage to Broadbent offers her. The deep irony
in this is that the very qualities of Roscullen that Larry regards as useless
Broadbent embraces exuberantly, drunk as he is on the sentimental fantasy
that the landscape, its people and their dialect induce in him. These are
the solitude, remoteness, antiquity and dreamy melancholy of the locality.
This difference in attitude has already become clear in Act III of the
play, when Nora and Broadbent encounter each other at the Round
Tower near Roscullen under the light of the moon. Intoxicated with
the ‘magic of this Irish scene’, Broadbent declares that ‘all the harps
of Ireland’ are in her voice. When Nora breaks into laughter at this, he
protests his seriousness: ‘I am in earnest: in English earnest’.41 Immedi-
ately, Wilde’s play comes to mind, and ‘earnest’ as a code for dissembling.
However virulently Shaw criticized The Importance of Being Earnest as
out of date when it was first performed in 1895, Broadbent’s words to
Nora show the endurance of its influence.42 The pretence, however, is
not that of Broadbent, but of the scene itself in its theatricality: the lonely
Round Tower, the moon, the Irishwoman and her endearing brogue, the
Englishman and his sentimental affection. All of these aspects suggest a
scene plucked straight from the drama of Boucicault, a scene of sentimen-
tal fantasy in which the Irish landscape takes on magical qualities.
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 107

In Broadbent’s attraction to Nora, fantasy overtakes reality; in Doyle’s

rejection of Nora, reality confounds fantasy. Through the manner in
which Broadbent’s marriage to Nora enables him to acquire political sta-
tus in Roscullen—paving the way for the transformation of the locality
into a tourist destination—Broadbent is able to convert his fantasy into
an economically productive resource. Larry, by contrast cannot do this
because the stagnant life of Roscullen was precisely that from which he
sought escape in London. Tourism is the most appropriate form of indus-
try for Broadbent to develop, since it reconciles his business acumen with
his romantic sentimentality. He recognizes how Ireland could be, as Sea-
mus Deane puts it, ‘an exotic product […] that could be popularized as
a consumer good’. Combining venture capital with sentimental excess,
Roscullen in Broadbent’s vision is what Deane calls ‘really unreal, in the
sense that the construction of its “real” status and that of its consumer
fantasy are inseparable activities’.43 Gerry Smyth reads this process in
colonial terms, whereby the relationship between a native landscape and a
privileged tourist gaze may ultimately derive from a colonized–colonizer
relationship that has been internalized within Irish identity itself.44
Valid as these readings are, Shaw’s play suggests that Irish tourism
derives ultimately from an economics of excess. Tourism as anticipated at
the end of John Bull’s Other Island is purely a question of surplus. Broad-
bent intends to convert into viable commodities the remnants of a bygone
age in Roscullen and the pathetic remains of a culture destroyed by mod-
ern processes of capital expansion and state consolidation in Britain since
the seventeenth century.45 He moves into Roscullen from a London in
which competition has exhausted itself. Under the guise of an English lib-
eral patriot sympathetic to the traditional values of Ireland, Broadbent’s
tourism enterprise exemplifies Bukharin’s thesis of the constant tendency
of capitalism to expand its range into new territories in search of new mar-
kets and new commodities.46 The conversion of the west of Ireland into
a consumable fantasy (through which a once-backward locality becomes
integrated into the global market) is simply another instance of surplus
value having no object other than its own accumulation. From this per-
spective, the melodramatic excess of Broadbent’s sentimentality towards
Nora and the townland of Roscullen is perfectly at one with his plans to
build a hotel and a golf-course there with the assistance of a cartel of
financial investors in London.47 Through Broadbent’s marriage to Nora,
the play acts out emotional and economic inflation, in which a remote
Irish locality triggers operatic displays of feeling, and Nora’s respectable
108 M. MCATEER

savings in Roscullen are reduced below the measure of ‘a cook’s wages in

London’ by the sheer magnitude of the capital resources to which Broad-
bent has access.48
John Bull’s Other Island draws a connection between surplus value and
the remainders of a colonial history within which labour resources have
been absorbed from localities like Roscullen into industrial centres such as
Glasgow and London through waves of emigration. Through his capital
investment, Broadbent will convert the historical leftovers of Roscullen
into a tourist fantasy of ancient mystery (the Round Tower) combined
with contemporary leisure (the golf-course) or as Kathleen Ochshorn puts
it, ‘into mummification as a tourist trap’.49 Considered in these terms, the
relevance of the play to twenty-first-century Irish society is striking, par-
ticularly to the economics of excess that was evident in the era of the
Celtic Tiger.50 The inflation of Broadbent’s sentimentality in Roscullen
that raises the melodramatic element of the play is an obvious point of
connection between exaggerated emotion and surplus value as an eco-
nomic form of excess.
The case of Larry Doyle, however, is less clear-cut. Larry resists the
Irish hyperbole that takes Broadbent in and that Broadbent deliberately
engages in Roscullen in the act of furthering his plan to become the new
political representative of the district. Doyle’s personality conveys that
condition of despair through which excess appears in Kierkegaard’s reflec-
tions on human existence. Returning to Roscullen after eighteen years
absence developing his professional career in London, the past no longer
holds any reality for Larry. For all his insistence upon facing facts in an
unsentimental way, Larry has no living relation to the environment that
shaped him in his childhood and youth, so he can only regard it as a lost
cause. In this way, he fulfils one of the criteria for Kierkegaard’s definition
of the unhappiest man: one for whom the past that he remembers no
longer holds any reality. This is most clear as he whistles the old tune Let
Erin Remember in the final act of the play, when he and Nora are alone
together at last. Instead of re-connecting to his past, Larry slips into an
air from Offenbach’s Whitington at that point, removing him emotionally
from Nora and the environment of his youth to which he has returned
inadvertently.51 As for his hope for the future, Larry realizes its impossi-
bility: to reconcile his love for Nora with the life that he has created for
himself in London with Broadbent. Thus he fulfils Kierkegaard’s second
criterion for the unhappiest man: the individual who yearns for a future
that he knows can never become reality.52
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 109

Larry Doyle’s despair in Shaw’s play derives from the fact that he has
never chosen his existence in a committed way. By his own admission
in Act I, the professional quality that he has acquired in life is entirely
down to Broadbent’s influence.53 Later in Act III, we learn from Bar-
ney Doran that Larry was once a Fenian.54 The play clearly shows how
completely he has relinquished all sympathy for militant Irish political self-
determination. While it may appear to be the case that Larry’s unwilling-
ness to propose marriage to Nora is consistent with his cynical attitude
to the Irish townland that he has long left behind, his first words to her
when they meet again convey his profound unhappiness and sense of inad-
equacy. He admits to Nora that he could not articulate what it was that
he wanted to say during that fated first encounter of the couple alone
together. Though Nora is again outraged at his admission that he wanted
to advise her to marry Tim Broadbent, he concedes to her that he did
not have the ability to seize that moment as Broadbent does: ‘Nora, dear,
dont you understand that I’m an Irishman and he’s an Englishman. He
wants you; and he grabs you. I want you; and I quarrel with you and
have to go on wanting you’.55 From this perspective, Larry’s partnership
with Broadbent by the end of the play is tantamount to self-eradication.
The locality from which he sought escape is now going to re-enter his life
permanently as a business venture and as the perpetual reminder of the
marriage prospect that he let slip in the figure of Nora, soon-to-be wife of
Broadbent. Larry’s life has become a waste of time. All that faces him is
the prospect of sharing in the profits of an enterprise exploiting the very
blarney that he has loathed, and standing in as best man to the husband
and wife that have been brought together through Larry’s failure of will.
Larry’s Kierkegaardian despair is also a form of migrant melancholy
that Peter Gahan observes both in Larry and in Peter Keegan, a symp-
tom in John Bull’s Other Island of the colonial aspects of Irish-English
relations in the global framework of the British Empire.56 Larry’s is a
despair that finds its mirror opposite in Keegan, the eccentric who lives
alone on the edge of Roscullen and who, like Larry, left the district, but
for spiritual rather than material aspirations. No longer in the Catholic
priesthood, Keegan once served as a missionary in Africa. Converted to
a belief in mystical pantheism and re-incarnation following an encounter
with a Hindu who approached his own death devoid of any fear, Keegan
no longer fits within the bounds of institutional religion. Keegan regards
the world as Hell, a place where he and others find themselves to expiate
sins committed in a previous existence.57 From the first moment that we
110 M. MCATEER

encounter him talking to a grasshopper, Keegan serves as a counterpoint

to the economic and colonial dynamics of the play. The spiritual con-
cept of infinity that he introduces lends an alternative perspective to the
absolute surplus value that these dynamics generate: the maximization of
profit through an Irish tourism fantasy.
Rather than remaining exclusively a question of excess as the form of
capital exploitation in a colonial context, however, Peter Keegan’s mysti-
cism is directed towards a reflection on human individuality and human
relationships in their cosmological context. He is far from otherworldly in
so doing, observing as he does that the golf links and hotels that Broad-
bent and Doyle envisage will ‘bring idlers to a country which workers have
left in millions because it is a hungry land, an ignorant and oppressed
land’.58 Keegan’s is the dream of a world in which life is humane and
humanity is divine. Admitting this at the end of the play to be ‘the dream
of a madman’, Keegan is not just pointing out how impossible it is to
be fully human in a modern world of economic exploitation. He is also
reflecting the madness of perpetual overproduction through the radically
utopian idea that he poses against it.59 Brad Kent is too hasty in judging
that Keegan himself is commodified when Broadbent considers that he
may prove to be a tourist attraction in a future Rosscullen.60 To grant a
local madman the aura of tourist charm risks disclosing the pathological
nature of tourism itself. And if we concur with Harold Ferrar and Lynn
Ramert that the person who represents Shaw in John Bull’s Other Island
most closely is Peter Keegan, then the nature of his eccentricity reflects
on the entire play.61

Marital Crises
Marriage is the point at which spiritual anxiety comes into closest con-
tact with economic forces in The Colleen Bawn, The Importance of Being
Earnest and John Bull’s Other Island, underlining Claire Connolly’s
observation that love and marriage ‘form a shared repertoire of meanings,
in which intimate relations and their codification within society speak a set
of abstract political problems’.62 Perhaps this insight could be reformu-
lated as ‘a set of abstract political-economic problems that arise ontolog-
ically’. In The Colleen Bawn, Hardress Cregan marries Eily O’Connor,
seeks to have the marriage erased in order to marry Anne Chute and
eventually marries Eily again at the end of the play. In The Importance of
Being Earnest, Gwendolen and Cecily are in love with Jack and Algernon
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 111

because each believes mistakenly that both men are named Ernest. There
are the additional farces of Gwendolen’s insistence that Jack propose to
her precisely in the manner of a romance, despite her already conceding
her intention to accept his offer, and Lady Bracknell’s approval of Jack
knowing nothing as a suitable qualification for marriage to her daugh-
ter.63 In John Bull’s Other Island, Tim Broadbent’s marriage to Nora
Reilly is a doubly staged affair from the start, even if Broadbent himself
has come to believe his own fantasy as real. Political and romantic theatre
merge when Broadbent implores Nora to be his wife for the purpose of
winning political support of the local community in a fashion that gives
audiences a familiar melodrama representation of marriage. Theirs will
be a marriage that extends beyond what Tracy Davis observes as Shaw’s
habit of ‘inviting comparisons between the state of marital bonding and
the utterly unnatural coupling of ruler and colony’.64 In Mr. Timothy
and Mrs. Nora Broadbent, Shaw presents an embodiment rather than an
allegory of the marital/colonial relation.
In Either/ Or, Kierkegaard surreptitiously conveys the attitude of a
seducer in contrast to that of a married man. The book as a whole may
be read as an affirmation of choice itself beyond a defence of the life of
aesthetic pleasure against the claims of marital responsibility. In any case,
it is evident that Kierkegaard equates sensual love with finitude in his
fictional diary of the seducer in Either/Or and marital love with infinity
in the anonymous letters on the aesthetic validity of marriage. In both
instances choosing one’s existence is at issue. For the seducer, the art of
seduction itself derives its pleasure from a refined play of subtleties that
extend over the void of love exhausted in the moment of its erotic con-
summation. For the married one, by contrast, what distinguishes marital
love is the absolute nature of the choice involved, setting it apart from
the variety with which the seducer plays. Even as it transcends the sensual
life of the aesthete in Kierkegaard’s thought, authentic marriage recovers
the richness of aesthetic experience to the extent to which it is ultimately
an individual choosing to be who s/he is.65 In so doing, there is a move-
ment from finitude to infinity, but only if it is not a ‘marriage of reason’ in
which eroticism has been neutralized by calculation, a development that
the writer judges a state of despair, ‘as immoral as it is unaesthetic’.66
It is misleading to believe that The Colleen Bawn, The Importance of
Being Earnest or John Bull’s Other Island present their audiences with
such marriages of reason, in the purest sense of that phrase. Hardress Cre-
gan and Eily O’Connor clearly have passionate feelings for one another;
112 M. MCATEER

Jack and Algernon will bring the sparkle of wit and aestheticism to their
marriages to Gwendolen and Cecily. Broadbent desires Nora, however
much that desire is a form of romanticism delusional in its dependence
upon the west of Ireland environment that Broadbent finds so exhilarat-
ing. To the extent to which economic priorities and social standing exert
decisive influences on these marriages, however, they are fatally compro-
mised. It thus appears that the transition from finitude to infinity that
Kierkegaard’s diary of ‘B’ credits to a marriage in which eroticism and
duty intertwine, is not possible in the economic circumstances of these
plays; circumstances characterized by the constant drive to maximize and
consolidate capital investment.
Thus economic circumstances deny the possibility of these marriages
achieving existential fulfilment for the partners in question in The Colleen
Bawn, The Importance of Being Earnest and John Bull’s Other Island. This
indicates a direct relation between the dimension of nullity as a numeric
value and nothingness as an ontological condition in these plays. In vol-
ume one of Capital, Marx makes a rather odd assertion that ‘objectified
labour’ has no value. He has in mind here a purely numerical economic
formula, namely, that ‘objectified labour’ is a portion of ‘constant cap-
ital’ and that any capital investment can only realize its profit-creating
potential when it is converted by ‘living labour’ into surplus value. Strictly
speaking, constant capital in itself has a pure value of zero in Marx’s polit-
ical economic theory.67 The irony in this claim is that while the energy of
actual labour converts this zero into a quantitative value, manual work-
ers who perform this labour take on the aspect of the living dead in the
process. Furthermore, the process of production pushes this quantitative
value to the limit: the absolute maximization of profit.
Certain famous comments by Marx in ‘The Working Day’ chapter
make this process patently clear. The drive towards a twenty-four-hour day
of productive activity ‘only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the liv-
ing blood of labour’, while the constant excess of the human population
beyond that at any time required to transform capital into profit through
work is ‘a throng of people […] made up of generations of stunted, short-
lived and rapidly replaced human beings, plucked, so to speak, before they
were ripe’.68 The numerical transformation of zero into the greatest sum
possible through the mechanism of labour-production is at the same time
one of existential annihilation that takes its ultimate form in the person
who is worked to death. In this manner, Marx’s critique of the capital
process touches upon the human experience of nothingness from which
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 113

Kierkegaard develops his account of human existence as a condition of

perpetual anxiety.
Eily O’Connor exemplifies the relation between the quantitative sign
zero and the ontological condition of nothingness in The Colleen Bawn.
The play does not present her being worked to death. However, Eily’s
low-status as a cottage worker requires that Hardress Cregan keep his
marriage to her secret. It prompts Danny Mann to propose killing her
so that Hardress is left free to marry Anne Chute, thereby securing the
financial standing of the Cregan family. Considered economically, Eily lit-
erally does not count; hers is a zero measure. This numeric zero exists in
dialectical relation to the vacuous nature of the life of the leisured class
to which Hardress Cregan belongs. In the hope of reaching a standard of
etiquette appropriate for the wife of a landowner, Eily tells Fr. Tom that
she is ‘gettin’ clane of the brogue, and learnin’ to do nothing’.69
The example of Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest includes a sim-
ilar relation between numeric and existential notions of nothingness. Lady
Bracknell is attracted to Jack as a suitor for her daughter not only because
of his wealth, but because he admits to knowing ‘nothing’.70 Towards the
end of the play we discover through Miss Prism that Jack’s ancestral lin-
eage is the equivalent of a lost handbag. There is also the example of Nora
Reilly in John Bull’s Other Island. Perhaps not intending to, Larry Doyle
reduces her sense of importance and dignity in Roscullen to something
that simply does not count in the context of the huge industrial and impe-
rial complex with which he is involved in the London business world. On
the first occasion in which they are alone together, Larry simply has noth-
ing to say, suggesting that Nora counts for little his eyes. He scoffs at the
notion that Broadbent might have proposed to her on the grounds of her
considerable dowry, a sum that carries no value when considered against
the huge cartel investments that Doyle and Broadbent deal with in their
London business.71 At the same time, Larry knows that the prospect of
‘real life and real work’ for Nora in London will arise if she plays her ‘new
part’ well as Mrs. Tom Broadbent. Shaw clearly recognizes the pretence
required of Nora to enter into the upper echelons of English society.72
This future life of pretence will not assuage the pointless yearning of her
life in the remote village of Roscullen.
In these seminal plays by Boucicault, Wilde and Shaw, the excess of
emotional hyperbole is directly in consequence of a quantitative and exis-
tential void. Kierkegaard identifies a relation to infinity as foundational to
the anxiety upon which an individual confronts his/her existence. This
114 M. MCATEER

relation appears in the obliteration of selfhood with which Boucicault’s

Eily, Wilde’s Jack and Shaw’s Nora are threatened. It is important to
observe that this threat arises specifically at a moment of economic cri-
sis in all three plays.73 As one of absolute inflation, this crisis extends
beyond the interpretative framework of Marx. This inflation is evident
most strikingly, not in those characters that risk the malaise of nothing-
ness or endure humiliating disposal in the plays, but in those figures that
do not appear on stage at all. In The Colleen Bawn, it is Mr. Cregan, the
dead husband who ran up debts through gambling; in The Importance of
Being Earnest, it is the unknown mother who abandoned Jack as a baby;
in John Bull’s Other Island, it is the Hindu whose death triggered Kee-
gan’s apparent madness and his understanding of all that is happening in
the play.
Mrs. Cregan’s dead husband, Jack’s unknown mother and the dying
Hindu whom Keegan had once encountered in Africa are critical to these
plays, yet they don’t actually belong to any of them. Badiou presents an
axiom that explains what this means in terms of excess as both a quan-
titative and an existential condition: ‘[F]or every set, there exists the set
of the elements of the elements of that set’.74 Those unnamed characters
are such elements of elements. They are characters who do not feature in
the plays but who have impacted profoundly on the lives of those charac-
ters that we do encounter on stage. Surplus to the plays themselves, they
extend the orbit of the situations with which the characters are confronted
to infinity, since they too include within them as elements all those char-
acters who have shaped what they had themselves become. This is most
obvious economically in the case of the deceased Mr. Cregan, referred to
at the start of The Colleen Bawn, since he involves all those to whom he
was in debt; most obvious spiritually in the Hindu of John Bull’s Other
Island, whose pantheism has no limit. Badiou’s mathematical theory of
ontological excess observes that while the finite may be primary in terms
of existence, it is secondary in terms of concept. As soon as it has been
decided that infinite natural multiples exist, then ‘the finite is qualified as
a region of being, a minor form of the latter’s presence’.75 Through their
absence, those extraneous characters open the situations presented in the
plays to the realm of absolute yet countable infinity. In this way, economic
inflation and the inflation of the emotions in these plays take on the aspect
of numeric excess as the ground of financial crisis and existential anxiety,
Badiou’s ‘danger of the void’.
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 115

Notes
1. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(1817), 3rd ed. (1821) (Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 10.
2. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Pelican,
1976), 317.
3. Ibid., 322.
4. Ibid., 342.
5. John MacKinnon Robertson, The Saxon and the Celt: A Study in Sociology
(London: University Press, 1897), 173.
6. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialec-
tics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: The Merlin Press, 1971): this
provides the most complete assessment of the relation of Marx’s thought
to that of Hegel. See also, Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Rea-
son, Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles (1960), ed. Alan Rée, trans.
Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004); Theodor W. Adorno, Nega-
tive Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 197–202,
320–26, 354–58.
7. G. W. F., Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 27.
8. Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, Karl Marx:
Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 104–5.
9. Brad Kent, ‘“Shaw’s Everyday Emergency”, Commodification and John
Bull’s Other Island’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 26
(2006), 162–79 (166).
10. Quoted in Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context
from Boucicault to Friel, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 22.
11. Martin Meisel, ‘“Dear Harp of My Country”; or Shaw, and Boucicault’,
SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 30 (2010), 43–62 (44, 61).
John Harrington makes the amusing observation that while New York
theatre critics showed little interest in the ideas that Shaw sought to impart
in the October 1905 production of John Bull’s Other Island at the Garrick
Theatre, there was ‘general critical delight over the scenery, especially the
full moon behind the round tower’, the very Boucicaultian characteristics
that Shaw was attempting to disparage, or at least query. The Irish Play on
the New York Stage, 1874–1966 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1997), 41.
12. Dion Boucicault, Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987),
247.
13. Sos Eltis, ‘Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault and the Pragmatics of Being
Irish: Fashioning a New Brand of the Modern Irish Celt’, English Litera-
ture in Transition, 1880–1920, 60/3 (2017), 267–93 (276).
116 M. MCATEER

14. Boucicault, Selected Plays, 194.

15. Ibid., 216.
16. Richard Fawkes, Dion Boucicault: A Biography (1979) (London: Quartet
Books, 2011), 118.
17. Eltis, ‘Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault’, 271.
18. As Richard Fawkes points out, Boucicault was still trying to trot out his
big Irish successes, The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun, in the 1880s
to stay financially afloat, when they were long past their sell-by date. Dion
Boucicault, 216–22.
19. Marx, Capital, 339.
20. Ibid., 235.
21. Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, rev. ed. (1930), ed. Dan H. Lau-
rence (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 71–78.
22. Ibid., 81–82.
23. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899 ed. (London: Dover,
1990), 47.
24. Boucicault, Selected Plays, 194.
25. Ibid., 241.
26. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899 ed., 9.
27. Ibid., 14.
28. Ibid., 16.
29. Marx, Capital, 364–65.
30. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson (Lon-
don: Bloomsbury, 2015), 118.
31. Vicki Mahaffey, States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experi-
ment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15.
32. Marx, Capital, 366.
33. Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
127.
34. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899 ed., 19.
35. David J. Gordon points out that Shaw’s judgement of what he considered
to be the ‘heartless’ nature of The Importance of Being Earnest appeared
twenty years after Shaw’s first damning review of the play in 1895, in
which he criticized it as ‘inhuman’ and ‘mechanical’ (Gordon, ‘Shavian’,
125).
36. Raby, Oscar Wilde, 131.
37. Quoted in, Charles A. Berst, ‘New Theatres for Old’, in Christopher
Innes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–75 (67–68).
38. Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1930), rev. ed., ed. Dan H. Lau-
rence (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 111.
39. Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, Introd. John Rees
(London: Bookmarks, 2003).
 5 MONEY AND MELODRAMA: BOUCICAULT, WILDE, SHAW 117

40. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 154.

41. Ibid., 103–4.
42. For Shaw’s criticism of The Importance of Being Earnest, see Kerry Powell,
Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1990), 118–19.
43. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writ-
ing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 148–49.
44. Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2001), 31–32. Smyth develops his reading in relation to
Barbara O’Connor’s analysis in ‘Myths and Mirrors: Tourist Images and
National Identity’, in Barbara O’Connor and Mike Cronin, eds., Tourism
in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), 68–
85.
45. By the time Shaw had first published the play in 1904, this remainder
would also include that of the Anglo-Irish landowning gentry, for whom
the Wyndham Land Act of 1903 spelt the end of the monopoly of prop-
erty that they had enjoyed in Ireland since the seventeenth century. David
Clare identifies this aspect in Broadbent’s eviction of the Anglo-Irish
gentleman Nick Lestrange in John Bull’s Other Island. ‘Landlord-Tenant
(Non)Relations in the Work of Bernard Shaw’, SHAW: The Journal of
Bernard Shaw Studies, 36/1 (2016), 124–41 (132).
46. Bukharin, Imperialism, 13.
47. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 152.
48. Ibid., 154.
49. Kathleen Ochshorn, ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a
New Empire: John Bull’s Other Island’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard
Shaw Studies, 26 (2006), 180–93 (182).
50. Brad Kent rightly rejects the idea of the play as ‘dated’, and is proba-
bly correct in suspecting an aversion to the socialist undercurrents of the
play as a reason for the disinterest in reviving John Bull’s Other Island
in contemporary times. ‘Missing Links: Bernard Shaw and the Discussion
Play’, in Nicholas Grene and Chris Morash, eds., The Oxford Handbook
of Modern Irish Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 138–
151 (143). In her essay published just two years before the Celtic Tiger
boom-economy collapsed in 2008, Kathleen Ochshorn remarks on how
‘remarkably resonant’ Shaw’s play is for contemporary Ireland. By 2004,
Ireland had become the number one golf destination in the world, indica-
tive of the prescience of Broadbent’s plan in John Bull’s Other Island for a
golf course in Roscullen (Ochshorn, ‘Colonialism, Postcolonialism’, 180).
For a consideration of tourism in Shaw’s play as a form of cultural com-
modification, see also, Kent, ‘Shaw’s Everyday Emergency’, 174.
51. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 144–45.
118 M. MCATEER

52. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or: A Fragment of Life (1843), ed. Victoria
Eremita, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992), 215.
53. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 83.
54. Ibid., 118.
55. Ibid., 153.
56. Peter Gahan, ‘Colonial Locations of Contested Space and John Bull’s
Other Island’, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 26 (2006),
202–29 (207).
57. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 140.
58. Ibid., 161.
59. Ibid., 163.
60. Kent, ‘Shaw’s Everyday Emergency’, 175.
61. Harold Ferrar, ‘The Caterpillar and the Grasshopper: Bernard Shaw’s
John Bull’s Other Island’, Éire-Ireland, 15/1 (1980), 25–45 (29); Lynn
Ramert, ‘Lessons from the Land: Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island’, New
Hibernia Review, 16/3 (2012), 43–59 (48).
62. Claire Connolly, A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85.
63. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899 ed., 11–12.
64. Tracy C. Davis, ‘Shaw’s Interstices of Empire: Decolonizing at Home and
Abroad’, in Christopher Innes, ed., The Cambridge Companion to George
Bernard Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218–39
(219).
65. Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, 491.
66. Ibid., 396–97.
67. Marx, Capital, 322–23.
68. Ibid., 367, 380.
69. Boucicault, Selected Plays, 207.
70. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899 ed., 12.
71. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 146, 154.
72. Ibid., 154.
73. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological
Exposition for Edification and Awakening (1849), trans. Alastair Hannay
(London: Penguin, 1989), 43–51.
74. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 64.
75. Ibid., 159.
 CHAPTER 6

Disposable Living: O’Casey, Beckett, Doyle

Leftovers
The material aspect of excess as disposable surplus becomes critical in
the later twentieth century as the scale of industrial production increases
and expands globally. The issue concerns not just the nature of human
experience in an economic system driven by the absolute maximization
of surplus value, but also that of excess as the leftover produce of large-
scale production processes, generating the ecological crisis of the present
era. While Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism as an economic
system was the most advanced of the nineteenth century, he overlooked
the direct relation between the surplus material leftover of commodity
production on an industrial scale and the surplus value that commodity
production is intended to generate: the relation between waste product
and profit. In volume one of Capital, Marx notes as an example how
the scraps of cotton produced during the yarn-making process are used
as stuffing in making pillows and mattresses. He asserts that the value of
this cotton includes not only the value of the yarn produced, but also the
value of these other products made from the cotton leftovers.1 However,
if the value of the raw material for a product like yarn includes the cot-
ton leftovers as they are used for a different product like bedding, then
recycled waste product has a double value. This is its value in relation to
the market product from which it emerges as waste, and its value in rela-
tion to other products for which it serves as raw material. Furthermore,

© The Author(s) 2020 119

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_6
120 M. MCATEER

if the production of commodities always produces waste product, then

the value of these leftovers is a constant factor in the measure of universal
monetary value. This raises a singular possibility for a theory of capitalism
as excess: the maximization of profit derives not just from the industrial
scale of commodity production but from the associated production of
waste material.
Either as an abandoned piece of scrap or second-hand material that is
recycled, the material leftover is strikingly recurrent in Irish writing of the
twentieth century. J. M. Synge’s Michael Byrne carries on a tradition of
working with scrap-metal in The Tinker’s Wedding, fashioning a wedding
ring for Sarah Casey from a tin can. Throwaway is the name of the horse
running in the Gold Cup for which Bantam Lyons searches in the newspa-
per that Leopold Bloom has given him in Joyce’s Ulysses , because Bloom
was just about to ‘throw it away’. Yeats writes in garbage recycling man-
ner of the ‘foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ in ‘The Circus Animal’s
Desertion’; one of Derek Mahon’s finest poems is set in ‘A Disused Shed
in County Wexford’.2 The most significant representations of material
leftovers through which excess takes the form of human characters them-
selves as leftover surplus are found in the writing of Sean O’Casey and
Samuel Beckett. In the ramshackle environment of the Dublin tenements
at the start of the twentieth century where borrowing is a way of life,
O’Casey pickles his plays with figures who are out of work, disabled from
war, pronounce opinions based upon scraps of learning picked up here
and there or are killed needlessly in political violence that seems point-
less to their social needs. Beckett’s fiction and drama are full of worn-
out characters and equipment: Vladimir and Estragon; Hamm and Clov,
Nagg and Nell; Molloy, Moran, Malone; botched boots, buckled bicy-
cles, punctured car horns. In the crocked state of almost everything that
Beckett presents to readers and audiences, a vision of human existence as
leftover garbage emerges as one of the most far-reaching achievements in
modern literature and drama.

Wooden Legs and Bicycles

Moving beyond the mostly jokey tone of his early writing on urban
Dublin, Roddy Doyle develops motifs from O’Casey in particular to
capture a revolutionary period in Irish history specifically in terms of
the material leftover recycled in human form.3 A Star Called Henry
explores the tenement world of working-class Dublin leading up to the
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 121

1916 Rising from the perspective of Henry Smart, a young man armed
with his dead father’s wooden leg who finds himself in Dublin’s General
Post Office on Easter Monday, 1916, as part of James Connolly’s Irish
Citizen’s Army. The first encounter between Henry Smart’s parents inau-
gurates the recurrent motif of the novel: the artificial leg. One-legged,
Henry Smart senior is taken home drunk by Melody Nash, Smart using
an abandoned shovel as a second leg. It was a story that Melody Nash
recalled to her children with a smile many years later ‘on the steps of
the tenements we were thrown into and out of’.4 Doyle brings together
the labour captured in the image of the working man’s instrument, this
same instrument as a leftover object and the particular character of human
experience in circumstances where the relationship with leftover objects
is intimate. Doyle thereby shifts the perspective on Marx’s central idea
of labour as the epitome of human life, by turning the shovel—instru-
ment of production—into a leftover object that becomes in turn a new
instrument, a crutch.
A Star Called Henry is firstly concerned with national narratives
around the political independence of the Republic of Ireland. Derek
Hand criticizes the novel for the stereotypical images of the leaders of the
1916 Rising that it presents and for what he sees as its image of Ireland’s
past as a disaster to be ‘jettisoned and abandoned’.5 The deep irony of this
reading is that, by faulting the novel for its revisionism as a repudiation of
Ireland’s past, Hand inadvertently chastises Doyle for repeating the mis-
take of Irish republicanism in its founding period. Kevin Whelan observes
that ‘conscious of the French Revolution’s claim to have annihilated the
past’, the United Irishmen ‘subscribed to the revolutionary orthodoxy of
repudiating the past, and specifically the Irish past’.6 Whelan identifies this
as one of the key factors in the failure of the United Irishmen rebellion of
1798 (despite the revolutionary successes in the American colonies and in
France in the preceding decades), in a country where tradition counted
for so much.
In broader contemporary terms, A Star Called Henry wrestles with a
general problem of waste production as the immediate context for human
living, and the possibility of human life itself as surplus waste product.
Theodor Adorno considers the idea of humanity as already debased to a
vague image of production in an era of mass-industrialization, and the
possibility of industrial technology absorbing all traces of human life,
leaving only ‘the monstrosity of absolute production’.7 Writing not only
against the backdrop of the labour camps of the Nazi and the Stalinist
122 M. MCATEER

era but also in his observation of the unprecedented scale of commodity

production and consumption in all spheres of life in the United States,
Adorno envisages a scenario where every distinction between human-ness
and technologies of production disappears, leaving the notion of human-
ity itself redundant even as the culture industry continues to trade on it.
Doyle’s image of the shovel as a human leg through which Henry
Smart senior first ‘walks out’ with Melody Nash raises for consideration
this diminution of human life in an immediate social environment con-
ditioned by the demands of industrial production on a global scale. The
impact of this shovel/leg image on Henry Smart’s son, seen as a substi-
tute for his brother who died in childhood and psychologically attached
in early adulthood to his father’s wooden leg, deepens this intimacy of
the human subject with the functional object throughout A Star Called
Henry. There is a precedent for this in Waiting for Godot . Beckett’s play
opens with Estragon struggling to take off one of his boots, Vladimir
reminding him that boots need to be taken off every day.8 At the start
of Act II, the boots appear on the centre stage and Estragon enters bare-
foot, later telling Vladimir that he threw away his boots because they were
hurting him.9 Having become so attached to his boots that he never took
them off, Estragon now finds them inhibiting rather than enabling move-
ment: the boots defy the purpose for which they were designed, becom-
ing leftover surplus in consequence. At the same time, the boots render
Estragon himself a human leftover. If he cannot walk with them, still he
cannot walk without them, damaged as his feet now are from constantly
wearing them. Apart from waiting for Mr. Godot, this is one rather obvi-
ous reason why Vladimir and Estragon cannot leave the spot in which
they find themselves in the play. Estragon detaches himself from his boots
at the price of acknowledging his inability to depart without them except
in the circumstance of Vladimir acting as a human crutch. In this sense,
Estragon’s existence depends upon boots that yet offer only the prospect
of movement accompanied by torturous physical pain.
In this image of Estragon’s boots and its accompanying theme of inhib-
ited movement, Beckett draws on the drama of Sean O’Casey, in par-
ticular the character of Captain Boyle from Juno and the Paycock, the
premiere of which Beckett had seen at the Abbey Theatre in March 1924
when he was 17 years old.10 In Act I, Jerry Devine approaches the unem-
ployed Boyle with an offer of work. Rather than welcome the prospect of
gainful employment, Boyle asks if it will be ‘a climbin’ up job? How d’ye
expect me to be able to go up a ladder with these legs? An’, if I get up
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 123

aself, how am I goin’ to get down agen’.11 Boyle’s complaint that nobody
‘but meself knows the sufferin’ I’m goin’ through with the pains in these
legs o’ mine’, is recollected in Vladimir’s angry and sarcastic rebuke to
Estragon at the beginning of Waiting for Godot when the latter complains
of the pain in his foot as he struggles with one of his boots: ‘No one ever
suffers but you’.12 In the light of Boyle’s boozy comradeship with Joxer
Daly it is easy to receive his excuse for not working as O’Casey’s satire
on layabout alcoholics among the Dublin tenement residents, dependent
on women to sustain family households. It is more accurate, however, to
regard Boyle as an example of the human surplus generated from a vicious
circle of long-term unemployment, inducing alcoholic addiction and pre-
cipitating bodily ailments every bit as damaging as repetitious intensive
manual labour. Comic as Boyle’s excuse sounds, it points to a habit of
mind in which human limbs are considered primarily as instruments of
work, no different in kind from such objects as ladders, hammers or
trowels.
If Boyle’s legs are indeed a source of pain that leave him unfit for
climbing ladders, then a further premonition of Beckett comes sharply
into view: Hamm’s enquiry into the state of Clov’s legs in Endgame:

Hamm: How are your legs?

Clov: Bad.
Hamm: But you can move.
Clov: Yes.
Hamm: [Violently] Then move!

A short time later, when Hamm commands Clov to sit on the lid of the
bin in which Nagg is fixed, Clov reminds him that he can’t sit. Hamm
recognizes that he himself can’t stand.13 Drawing on his familiarity with
O’Casey’s drama to present on stage two characters, one whose legs don’t
work (in both senses) and another whose legs torture him, Beckett’s play
carries over O’Casey’s representation of the reduction of human body
parts to instruments of labour in the process of industrial production.14
Beckett thereby raises the possibility of human body parts as objects every
bit as disposable as other instruments of labour. The trade in human
organs in some of the slums of modern-day India and Egypt to which
Mike Davis draws attention in Planet of Slums bear out Beckett’s repre-
sentation of human life at the edge of extinction in Endgame.15 O’Casey’s
124 M. MCATEER

familiarity with tenement life in Dublin at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury is relevant here, and its significance for later Dublin writers such as
Beckett and Doyle. Drawing on the work of Emmet Larkin, Davis asserts
that ‘most cities of the Southern Hemisphere today resemble Victorian
Dublin, whose slums were more a product of de-industrialization rather
than industrialization between 1800-1850’.16
The contrasting ways in which O’Casey, Beckett and Doyle represent
missing limbs bring this issue of the human surplus to the fore in terms of
the relationship between the human subject and the technical object. In
Juno and the Paycock, the Boyles’ son Johnny cannot work since losing his
arm as a teenage volunteer during the 1916 Rebellion. When he boasts
to his mother that he would do it all again for the principle involved, her
response not only laments his nationalist idealism, it concedes that human
limbs are only important as instruments of manual labour:

Mrs Boyle: Ah, you lost your best principle, me boy, when you lost your
arm; them’s the only sort o’ principles that’s any good to a workin’
man.17

Ronan McDonald takes issue with George Watson’s dismissal of Johnny

Boyle as ‘a fool’ in politics because McDonald sees Watson’s reading
as taking Juno’s despairing view of her son too willingly, such as we
find here.18 Indeed, McDonald goes so far as to assert that Johnny is
‘the figure who most represents the Ireland of which, and from which,
O’Casey writes’.19 Like his father, Johnny Boyle sustains himself on an
idea of nobility that is both set in contrast to, and at the same time under-
mined, by his inability to work. It transpires that Johnny had facilitated
the ambush in which Irish Free State soldiers shot Mrs Tancred’s son, a
neighbour in the tenement who had fought on the side of Republicans
opposed to the Treaty settlement with the British Government in 1921.
After this is disclosed his proud assertions of principle from Act I seem
hollow. In the end, Johnny is executed in reprisal by anti-Treaty Repub-
licans, and it ultimately appears that, missing a limb, Johnny was indeed
a disposable surplus.
This stands in marked contrast to Henry Smart senior in Doyle’s A
Star Called Henry, a work looking back from the end of the twentieth
century to the Dublin of 1916 and after. Instead of a drawback, Smart’s
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 125

missing limb proves an advantage in securing employment as a bouncer,

particularly since the artificial limb with which he has replaced it serves
both as a support and as a weapon:

Compensation for the missing leg, his body had a sharpness that was
quickly understood […] Rat-arsed aldermen stopped boasting when they
saw Henry’s eyebrow lift. Bankers stared at his chest and knew that he was
incorruptible. Others just knew him; they knew about him. In one neat
hop he’d have the leg off and their heads open and the leg back on before
they hit the ground. He was a good bouncer, the king of the bullies.20

Johnny Boyle’s missing arm in Juno and the Paycock prevents him from
working. Henry Smart’s missing leg enables him to find work. The dif-
ference is that Henry has integrated his wooden leg into his body as an
instrument of productive activity, whereas Johnny holds on to an idea of
himself as distinct from objects of labour. His missing arm remains for
Johnny the sign of an ideal of national liberation placed above the neces-
sities of material life. By contrast, Henry Smart’s wooden leg crosses the
threshold that separates the human subject from the material object. Soon
after Henry junior is born, his father takes off his leg and throws it at the
fireplace in frustration as the baby Henry screams: ‘It bounced back out
like a skittle and rolled along the floor and stopped at his foot, like a dog
wanting to be petted’.21 The image is compelling in giving life to the
artificial leg as a dog that comes crawling back to his master.
The trace of Beckett is discernible through the artificial dog that makes
its appearance towards the conclusion of Endgame. When Hamm asks
Clov if his dog is ready for his walk, Clov responds that he still ‘lacks a
leg’. At Hamm’s insistence that he bring him the dog in spite of this,
Clov does so. As Hamm feels the wooden dog in his hands, he shouts at
Clov that he has forgotten to put on the sex part. Clov responds that the
dog isn’t yet ‘finished’: ‘The sex goes on at the end’.22 The missing leg in
this case is the ‘sex’, the double-entendre being that the sex part is the last
to be assembled on the toy dog and also that the sex drive continues to
the very end of life. The life-creating power of the sex drive is conceived
in terms of an artificial sex part on a toy dog. Hamm’s toy dog is almost
a sex-toy.
Doyle makes a similar identification between the sex drive and an
artificial limb in A Star Called Henry. Setting up with the one-legged
Henry Smart, Melody Nash hears the warnings of other women in the
126 M. MCATEER

Dublin tenements: ‘He’ll never be off you, you mark my words. With the leg
made of wood there the blood needs somewhere else to go’.23 Indeed, Doyle’s
novel identifies a probable influence on Beckett’s idea of the toy dog in
Endgame, Irish tenor Count John McCormack (of whom James Joyce
was a big fan), singing ‘The little toy dog is covered with dust but sturdy
and staunch he stands’. During the months that Henry Smart junior
spends in Summerhill with his lover Annie following the 1916 rebellion,
he plays this song repeatedly on the gramophone.24 As Charlotte Jacklein
puts it, the gramophone that Henry steals after the rebellion ‘effectively
provides a soundtrack of John McCormack songs for Annie and Henry’s
relationship’.25
Apart from O’Casey and Beckett, the wooden leg in A Star Called
Henry recalls Flann O’Brien’s (Brian Ó Nualláin) 1940 novel, The Third
Policeman, published posthumously in 1967. The protagonist is without
a name and depicts himself at the start of the novel as assisting in the
murder by John Divney of an old man named Phillip Mathers. Early on
the reader learns that this nameless narrator has a wooden leg. When
returning after the murder to the house of Mathers to retrieve a box, he
encounters Mathers there, seemingly alive. A man named Martin Finnu-
cane is the first person that the nameless man meets after he eventually
steals away from Mathers’s house. Finnucane regards life in a literal way
as having no value: ‘It is a great mistake and a thing better done without,
like bed-jars and foreign bacon’.26 Holding this outlook, Finnucane at
first tells the nameless man that he will take his ‘little life’. He changes his
mind, however, when the man discloses to him that ‘part of me is made
of wood and has no life in it at all’.27 Finnucane reveals that his own left
leg is also wooden and that he is ‘the captain of all the one-leggèdmen
in the country’.28 Consequently Finnucane promises the nameless man
that he will ‘rip the bellies’ of all those who may wish to do him harm.29
Having a wooden leg proves a life-saving advantage rather than a debili-
tation for the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman, foreshadowing
Henry Smart senior and the advantages that he gains from his wooden
leg in Doyle’s novel from sixty years’ later.
In different ways, Juno and the Paycock, Endgame and A Star Called
Henry present us with human leftovers who manage to survive in circum-
stances where everything appears reduced to trash. Rather than placing
the characters and circumstances of these works on the margins, however,
it is instructive to consider them as emblematic of a certain normalization
of excess as the leftover in contemporary civilization. Hamm’s attachment
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 127

to a toy dog in Endgame, for example, bears no more pathology than any
human attachment to a living pet animal, in the sense that all pets are
accessories. Furthermore, in this attachment, human beings increasingly
come to imitate the pets that they own.30 To this extent, Hamm simply
exemplifies a pattern already established in the peace-time environment
of European city life that Beckett knew before the war. As for the squalor
of early twentieth century tenement life in O’Casey’s Dublin, Adorno’s
observation is pertinent, namely, that all housing in the modern Europe
has become disposable rubbish:

The house is past. The bombing of European cities, as well as the labour
and concentration camps, merely proceed as executors, with what the
immanent development of technology had long decided was to be the
fate for houses. These are now good only to be thrown away like old food
cans.31

In this respect, the norm of the house-dwelling—against which the

decrepit, abandoned and collapsing surroundings are set in the writing
of O’Casey, Beckett and Doyle—is part of the excess of the surplus prod-
uct and human living in an environment of disposable objects. All modern
lifestyle, by this account, is a variant on slum-living.
These works by O’Casey, Beckett and Doyle raise a critical question
for the understanding of human nature in the context of material excess
in modern society. Living in an environment of disposable surplus objects
appears to reduce the human subject to disposable by-product. However
it also calls for a concept of the human that stretches over the historical
opposition of the natural to the technical. Considering Beckett’s Hamm
as the image of his pet toy dog or Henry Smart as a character enlivened by
his wooden leg, Peter Sloterdijk’s comments on the relationship between
nature and technology in the contemporary era are pertinent. In the form
of what he terms ‘allotechnology’, technology in general was considered
in opposition to nature because it appeared to involve principles that did
not exist in nature. Sloterdijk observes in the present epoch, however, a
movement from ‘allotechnology’ to ‘homeotechnology’: a threshold has
been reached at which technology becomes akin to nature.32
Although the reader of A Star Called Henry encounters a landscape
well before and far removed from the cybernetic technology to which Slo-
terdijk refers, there are examples of how blurred distinctions have already
become between the organic human body and the manufactured object.
128 M. MCATEER

In hiding as the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising are taking
place, Henry Smart and Annie have sexual intercourse constantly, while
the wooden leg sits on the mantelpiece. It turns out that Henry went
back into the rubble of Sackville Street in the aftermath of the bombard-
ment in search of it.33 Later on, while roaming the country on bicycle
during the Irish War of Independence, he wakes up in a bed in Roscom-
mon, unable to see out of one eye. He is met with the voice of an old
woman who happens to be the mother of the schoolteacher who was kind
to Henry in childhood after his father died. In a moment of Beckettian
comic absurdity, the dialogue jumbles together a weapon, body parts and
an artificial limb:

– Your gun is under the pillow. With the leg.

– What about my eye?34

Considering legs as technical instruments of labour, Beckett himself

advances further than this in a joke that both satirizes Descartes’ math-
ematical reduction of the body to the cogito in his Meditations, while
conceiving thought itself as a form of technology: ‘The pains in my legs!
It’s unbelievable! Soon I won’t be able to think anymore’.35 Pre-empting
Doyle’s wooden-legged Smart by almost fifty years, Beckett’s Molloy is
also a cripple who adopts his body effectively to an artificial instrument.
Molloy claims to cycle by placing his stiff leg on the bar of the bicy-
cle while pedalling with the other, having fastened his crutches to the
crossbar.36
Molloy’s bicycle appears in the published versions of Beckett’s novel in
French and English during the 1950s. This is between the completion of
Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman in 1940 and its first publication in
1967, the year after O’Brien’s death in April 1966. The Third Policeman
presents readers with the most advanced state of homeotechnology as Slo-
terdijk identifies it, in contemplating Irish people becoming so attached to
their bicycles as to become part-bicycle in nature. Sergeant Pluck explains
to the nameless narrator that in the parish where he is based, some peo-
ple spend so much time riding bicycles that they become part-bicycle.
In a partly retrospective, partly anticipatory allusion in Beckett’s novel to
the mechanical oddity of Molloy pedalling his bicycle with one leg while
resting his stiff leg on the crossbar, Sergeant Pluck in The Third Police-
man speaks of local men who have become at least half-bicycle in nature.
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 129

They cannot be seen much as they spend a lot of their time, like bicy-
cles, ‘leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at
kerbstones’.37 Responding to the nameless narrator’s scepticism regard-
ing ‘the humanity of the bicycle’, the Sergeant asserts that the local post-
man is seventy-one per cent bicycle, so regularly does he cycle the roads
when delivering the post. The condition is evident in his being unable to
sit down; unable to walk slowly without toppling over; unable to go to
bed but instead leaning against the kitchen wall all night: ‘“This is the
unfortunate state that the postman has cycled himself into, and I do not
think that he will ever cycle himself out of it”’.38 This is but one instance
of what Mark Byron regards as the ubiquitous presence of the modernist
bicycle throughout The Third Policeman, a novel that he describes as ‘an
apotheosis of the cyclist as tormented male human agent’.39

The Standing-Reserve
Sloterdijk’s view of the relation of nature and technology today is
indebted to Heidegger. In the years after the Second World War, Hei-
degger observes that although the technologies of nuclear power and
hydraulic power come later than the machine-power technology of the
eighteenth century, twentieth century technology comes earlier ‘under
the aspect of the essence holding sway within it’.40 By this, Heidegger has
in mind the proximity of technology today to an original Greek sense of
the kinship of techné and poesis; technology not simply as a body of instru-
ments of production but as a mode of revealing.41 Heidegger sees this as
taking the forms of unlocking, transforming, distributing and switching
energy. It is characterized by order and regulation, in which all natural
resources that are available are placed on standby as ‘standing-reserve’.
Although engineered through human agency, the process already submits
human activity to itself, such that the possibility arises of human beings
themselves taking on the character of ‘standing-reserve’.42
Heidegger names the technological mode of revealing to which human
beings are subject even as they activate it as enframing: ‘Enframing means
the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e.,
challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as
standing-reserve’.43 In the light of his own complicity with Nazism in the
1930s and the mass extermination that unfolds in the Second World War
in Europe and Japan, Heidegger acknowledges the fundamental danger
in the mode of revelation that he is describing. In risking the reduction of
130 M. MCATEER

human beings to standing-reserve, this mode also opens up the ways in

which the nature of the human relation to the technology comes to light
in terms of the excess of surplus resources. In this context, the relationship
of the human subject to the disposable object takes on great significance
for understanding excess in its aspect as material surplus.
Heidegger’s assertions open up the ways in which human beings exer-
cise an intimate relation to technology that is based around the particular
relation between the excess of surplus resources available for exploita-
tion and the excess of leftover equipment, either waste by-product or
instruments discarded because of wear and tear. In Juno and the Paycock,
Captain Boyle brings together these two distinct aspects of excess in Hei-
degger’s notion of the standing-reserve. As an unemployed labourer, who
(in his wife’s eyes at least) is technically available for work, Captain Boyle
is an example of a human subject who is standing-reserve, a captain in
the standing-army of the unemployed that Frederick Engels saw as fun-
damental to the labour market in nineteenth-century industrial Britain,
part of the mode of regulating wages. In the 1840s Engels asserted
that the English manufacturing industry constantly required ‘a reserve
army of unemployed workers’ that could be drawn upon if market con-
ditions required. Directly invoking an idea of human excess, he describes
this ‘army’ as ‘the “surplus population”’ of England that sustained itself
‘by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing hand-
carts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs’.44
Marx develops this notion when he writes in Capital of ‘enforced idle-
ness’ in the working day, driving ‘young men to the taverns’ and ‘young
girls to the brothels’.45
Of particular relevance to Captain Boyle as an Irish working-class char-
acter is Engel’s crucial assertion in 1845 that almost the entire Irish pop-
ulation was then a standing-reserve, a surplus population without which
the ‘rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place’.46
Catherine Airth sees O’Casey represent Boyle as a man who is ‘ineffectual
and superficial’ in Juno and the Paycock.47 This takes no account of how
Boyle’s farcical pretensions to authority in the domestic family household
relate to the social position that he occupies: part of the reserve army
of the unemployed that Marx identifies as a structural feature of indus-
trial capitalism. Airth’s reading is insightful on O’Casey’s recognition of
the ideological force of fatherhood in Irish nationalism during the era in
which his first plays were performed. However, it is still symptomatic of
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 131

the disinterest in O’Casey’s militant socialist politics within academic eval-

uations that Bernice Schrank has observed.48 For example, Paul Murphy
asserts that O’Casey ‘is slow to engage in a serious analysis of class poli-
tics in his plays’, preferring instead to present the social representations in
his Irish plays as critiques of both British colonialism and Irish national-
ism.49 Following Nicholas Grene, Murphy rejects the idea that O’Casey’s
Dublin plays gave a working-class understanding of Irish social experience
because O’Casey did not grow up in circumstances of impoverishment.
By this logic, Marx and Engels’s analysis of social conditions in indus-
trial England is fundamentally compromised because neither worked in a
factory. Murphy asserts that O’Casey presents Boyle and his companion
Joxer Daly as the authors of their own demise.50 This view decontextu-
alizes both characters from the circumstances in which O’Casey presents
them: circumstances congenial to the comic farce of the London under-
class world in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the major inspiration for
Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.
A source of the problem in Murphy’s reading can indeed be attributed
to the gap between critique and experience in Marx’s work and the body
of writing that developed under its influence. Heidegger’s concept of the
standing-reserve transforms Marx’s political economic understanding of
human populations as standing-reserve by naming an existential mode of
being that relates directly to the economic function of unemployment as
Engels and Marx understood it. When Captain Boyle is offered work, he
presents himself as surplus to the labour-production process, his body a
leftover instrument that lies in excess of the economic production cycle.
However, if O’Casey’s audience accepts Mrs. Boyle’s view of her husband
as true—a drunkard who avoids work rather than a disabled man who can-
not—then Boyle coverts the provisional condition of ‘standing-reserve’ to
a permanent state of being. In the ambiguous position that Boyle occu-
pies between his unwillingness and his inability to work, he withholds the
mobilization of the standing-reserve. So doing, he suspends in perpetuity
the labour process through which his energy can be exhausted and dis-
posed. This allows Boyle a considerably more complex character than that
of a lazy drunken Irish layabout.

Borrowing Beyond One’s Means

Apprehended as standing-reserve but withholding its mobilization,
Boyle’s life takes on the character of living continually beyond the means
immediately available. The form of excess here is that of borrowing in
132 M. MCATEER

Juno and the Paycock. Informed by the dubious schoolteacher Charles

Bentham that he is to be the financial beneficiary of a will left by
a deceased relative, Boyle immediately purchases new furniture and a
gramophone on the promise of payment when the money from the will
comes to him. This spontaneous, extravagant acquisition of goods on
credit anticipates what Mike Davis observes as a general pattern among
the poor in the slums of latter-day megacities. This is the turn of the poor
‘to a “third economy” of urban subsistence, including gambling, pyramid
schemes, lotteries, and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropria-
tion’.51 Boyle’s acquisitions fall under this pattern. Tailor Nugent’s dis-
closure to Joxer Daly at the start of Act III that the will was faulty and
that the Boyles would get no money from it, confirms the folly of Boyle’s
self-aggrandizement in the tenement.52 However O’Casey also reminds
us that the plays of Wilde and Boucicault are tied up with borrowing. It
comes as no surprise that in his drunken destitution at the very end of the
play, Captain Boyle remembers The Colleen Bawn, Boucicault’s play that
centres on a debt crisis in the household of an Anglo-Irish gentry family
that was triggered by the extravagance of Mrs Cregan’s late husband.53
The excess of living beyond one’s means is certainly part of the poverty
of life in Dublin’s tenements. However O’Casey’s play goes beyond this
to present the audience with a vision of wastefulness that reworks those
same themes as we encounter them in Boucicault’s and Wilde’s depictions
of gentry in Ireland and England. However impoverished his family cir-
cumstances are in Juno and the Paycock, Captain Boyle’s indolence and
carefree acquisition of what he cannot afford has something of an aris-
tocratic quality. Most acutely in his drunken state in the final scene with
Joxer Daly in the room that has been stripped bare, his behaviour through
the course of the play exemplifies Bataille’s idea that the ‘true luxury and
the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the
individual who lies down and scoffs’.54
The opening of O’Casey’s 1942 play Red Roses for Me, offers another
example of this aristocracy in the slums. Set in 1913, the year of the
Dublin Docker’s strike, the audience is presented with the character of
Ayamonn practising a part before his mother from Shakespeare’s Henry
VI, Part III, wearing the costume of a nobleman from the waist up and
the clothes of a workman from the waist down. The part recited is that
of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, immediately following his stabbing the
king to death. In Shakespeare’s original, the Duke stabs the dead king
again. Typical of O’Casey’s wit, Ayamonn performs this by stabbing the
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 133

floorboards, in fury at their being disturbed by a neighbour below. Aya-

monn considers borrowing a chair with armrests, and painting on the
back of it a ‘cunning design’ of the red rose of the House of Lancaster.55
Ayamonn’s workman’s trousers makes his Elizabethan upper body cos-
tume appear silly while it in turn shows up his corduroys as the mark
of his working-class background.56 Writing in the early 1960s, Katharine
Worth saw Ayamonn’s Shakespearean costume symbolize his ‘transcend-
ing of this environment [of material poverty] through spirit and imagina-
tion’.57 Yet Ayamonn’s pretensions to regality in this opening scene are
undone by his need to borrow a chair from a temperance hall and dis-
guise it as a throne. Red Roses for Me gives the audience not so much a
flash of Shakespeare in the tenements, as a borrowing of Shakespeare that
becomes itself a throwaway object lost among the debris of an environ-
ment fractured by class, national and religious divisions.
Describing the scene in Dublin’s General Post Office on the morning
of Easter Monday, 1916, Roddy Doyle stresses the improvisation of the
Irish rebellion as the volunteers barricade themselves in. Borrowing is the
modus operandi of the rebels, Doyle reviving O’Casey’s representation of
borrowing as a way of life in the Dublin tenements:

Men in uniforms of the Volunteers and Citizen Army, and most in bits and
pieces or no uniform at all, were carrying bags of sand on their shoulders,
and tables, chairs, ledgers, mailbags, sacks of coal and piling them into
defensive walls at the main and side doors and all the windows.58

These ‘bits and pieces’ of uniform appear in marked contrast to the uni-
form that Peter Flynn wears in Act One of O’Casey’s 1926 play on the
1916 Rising, The Plough and the Stars . O’Casey describes Flynn in the
full uniform of the Irish National Foresters: ‘green coat, gold braided;
white breeches, top boots, frilled shirt. He carries the slouch hat, with the
white ostrich plume, and the sword in his hands’.59 By placing this osten-
tatious display of military colour in a tenement room, however, O’Casey
sets Flynn up for ridicule. This concerns not only the vanity of his appear-
ance before the other labouring men present, but also the deflation of his
military pretensions by his domesticated dependence on his wife, prepar-
ing his dinner. Ayamonn’s outfit at the start of Red Roses for Me—the
incomplete costume of a Shakespearian Duke revealing the working man’s
trousers and boots—recalls the irony that courses through The Plough and
the Stars as it tackles the Irish rebellion and its aftermath. O’Casey’s plays
134 M. MCATEER

thereby anticipate the conditions under which globalization appears sub-

sequently in the form of pretensions to superiority among those living
and working with rubbish, as evident in Jan Breman and Arvind Das’s
description of the informal economy of Surat in India, once home of the
largest diamond cutting and polishing industry in the world.60
For Beckett’s Molloy, everything is borrowed. Molloy keeps objects in
his pockets that he has gathered on his journey to his mother: a worn-out
bicycle horn, his hand-mirror, and his vegetable knife. When he speaks of
going down the road to fetch his bicycle for the journey to his mother,
he adds that he didn’t know that he even had a bicycle.61 In the system
of knocking on her skull that he devises as a means of communicating
with his senile mother, it is evident that the primary motive is to borrow
money, four knocks meant to indicate the same.62 Molloy’s own recol-
lections may very well be borrowed, but all indications in his narrative
suggest that he is living off surplus discarded equipment. The one occa-
sion in which he may have experienced true love was with a woman whom
he met in a rubbish dump. Even here, he cannot be sure of the woman’s
name—‘Ruth’ or maybe ‘Edith’—while the only sexual position that she
could assume was from the rear, because of her rheumatism and her lum-
bago.63
In later life, Molloy wonders if this woman was the same as she to
whom he gave the name Lousse; a woman who took him in after he
had killed her pet dog accidentally with his bicycle as she was taking
it to a veterinary surgeon to have it terminated. Molloy later helps this
woman to bury the dog in her garden. Of this Lousse, with whom he
stays for an extended time, the flatness of her figure causes him to won-
der if she was even male ‘or at least an androgyne’.64 Yet Molloy, with
a hopelessly unreliable memory, a stiffened leg that prevents him from
sitting, the other leg stiffening and missing toes, lacking any teeth and
dependent on crutches, still enjoys the service of valet while residing at
Lousse’s home. Living a life so wretched that he considers it no more
than a state of decomposition, Molloy nonetheless demands with hau-
teur that the valet return to him his clothes, his crutches and his bicycle,
intending as he does to depart from the comfort of Lousse’s abode, with
its room ‘chock-full of pouffes and easy chairs’ and its garden blossom-
ing with spiked lavender.65 Molloy considers an Itinerant lifestyle to be
loftier in its misery than the domestic leisure of the home into which he
has been invited.66 This may indeed by a rejection of Wilde’s individual-
ist cult of style, yet it still advances an intimate relation between the pose
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 135

of individual superiority and the conditions of economic inflation that

generate the excess of leftover objects. And however bereft Molloy is of
any of the spiritual zeal that enflames the character of Paul Ruttledge in
Yeats’s play, Where There Is Nothing , his departure from Lousse’s dwelling
echoes Ruttledge’s flight from the comforts of his upper-class home to
live an Itinerant life in the countryside. There may even be an echo of
Beckett’s early departure from Trinity College Dublin, a place that had
grown ‘slothful’ in the 1920s and 1930s, according to historian F. S.
L. Lyons.67 Commenting on this judgement, Gregory Dobbins remarks
that in rejecting Trinity sloth when he resigned from the Faculty, Beck-
ett sought out ‘alternative forms of laziness’.68 Likewise Molloy rejects
the indulgent pillows of Lousse’s rooms for idle meandering on country
roads and sleeping in ditches.

Surplus Humanity
Beckett’s Molloy thus chooses misery, filth and broken objects over the
serenity and decorum of Lousse’s home, doing so with pompous irrita-
tion at the presumption of Lousse’s valet in considering his things to be
mere dirt. His borrowed existence is another example of how a human
being may not only survive as potentially disposable trash, but even lend
this condition a negative virtue through inverse snobbery. Hamm puts
this well in Endgame, when he asks if there could be misery loftier than
his.69 In the figures of Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell, however, Beckett
presents the biggest challenge to this tenuously affirmative view of human
characters that live off leftovers with damaged bodies that are barely dis-
tinguishable from technical machinery in their dependence on crutches
or artificial limbs. Nagg and Nell are confined to rubbish bins with only
stumps for legs. In keeping with Beckett’s pre-occupation with cycling,
Nagg recalls himself and Nell having crashed their bicycle-for-two and
‘lost their shanks’ on the road to Sedan in Northern France, scene of a
battle in May 1940 that allowed Nazi Germany take control of the coun-
try.70 Now confined to bins with only sawdust or sand beneath them to
carry their faeces and urine, these ‘stumps of parents’ as Adorno describes
them, survive on the meagre food that Hamm can afford to give them,
‘pap’ or ‘a biscuit’.71 These abject human conditions lend sympathy to
Adorno’s well-known adage that all ‘post-Auschwitz culture, including
its urgent critique, is garbage’.72
136 M. MCATEER

Even in the utterly destitute circumstances of Endgame the precise

mode of being in a condition of material surplus remains up for consider-
ation. It is not clear, for example, that Hamm allows his parents to starve,
as Adorno assumes. The paucity of material resources that are available
to all four characters in the play is undeniable. Hamm wants to keep his
father alive long enough at least to listen to his story.73 Hamm actually
exemplifies a dutiful son: in spite of his own blindness and his inability
to walk, he tries to sustain his parents, both elderly amputees, as best
as he can in an environment where almost nothing is left. Confined in
their bins, Nagg and Nell still talk to each other like an old couple who
share a lifelong companionship, with all its bickering, regrets and affec-
tion. Having spent their honeymoon rowing on Lake Como, a destination
associated with wealth and sophistication, Nagg and Nell also disclose a
trace of that tension between self-aggrandizement and debasement that
Beckett reworks from O’Casey.74
In their bins without lower legs and completely dependent on the ser-
vant of a blind, disabled son for the food required to stay alive, Nagg and
Nell represent human life at the barest minimum. Their circumstances
have become so destitute that Nell loses the ability to cry. When Clov
checks her bin at Hamm’s command, he cannot be sure if she (like Erwin
Schrödinger’s cat) is alive or dead.75 In her condition, it has become
difficult to distinguish one state from another. In reducing human cir-
cumstances to their barest level of survival, pronounced qualities of being
human—empathy, exasperation, loneliness and companionship—require
an absolute value. Entering into circumstances in which human beings
become material surplus in the form of disposable rubbish, Beckett’s play
captures the extent to which this minimum state of being human actu-
ally takes on the magnitude of an excess of emotion, so critical does each
gesture between Nagg and Nell become.
If Nagg and Nell are indeed to be considered the discarded equip-
ment of an environment in which everything, including human beings,
has been reduced to standing-reserve, cognizance ought to be taken of
the fact that this comes by way of enumeration. Heidegger makes clear the
derivation of nature (including human nature) as standing-reserve from
a prior ontological disclosure of being as mathematical in his later essays
on mathematics, physics and technology. He designates mathematics as
the mode of understanding objects that derives not from those objects
themselves but from the learning–teaching experience through which we
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 137

acquire knowledge of numbers and calculation.76 In ‘The Question Con-

cerning Technology’, he writes of modern physics setting nature up as ‘a
coherence of forces calculable in advance’. In the same essay, he considers
humanity ‘continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursu-
ing and promulgating nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of
deriving all his standards on this basis’.77
Beckett’s representation of such characters as Nagg and Nell brings
Heidegger’s ambiguity towards mathematical calculation to the fore,
when we consider the pair in terms of human nature as standing-reserve
on the basis of the disposable surplus aspect of their rubbish-bin existence.
The reduction of these characters to a quantitative minimum—their ges-
tures restricted to a paltry few, their daily food allowance barely enough—
unveils a mathematical essence of being that otherwise remains hidden. It
is equally possible, however, to observe in Nagg and Nell’s circumstances
a danger that Heidegger warns against in human beings becoming noth-
ing but ‘the ordering of standing-reserve’.78 Nagg and Nell may thus be
regarded as nothing other than numbers, their humanity having disap-
peared, a possibility that Beckett develops to its most extreme in his 1982
piece, Quad, and his 1983 piece, What Where.
Considered as the absolute minimum in this numerical sense, Nagg and
Nell verge on nothingness in their state as disposable surplus in Endgame.
While this may be said of all four characters in the play, Hamm and Clov
have at least the capacity to co-ordinate movement, extend dialogue and
fetch objects, however futile these might seem. Hamm and Clov belong
to the situation of the play that includes them; Nell and Nagg do not.
Endgame can continue along merrily without the parents. In this sense
at least, Nell and Nagg do not count. Included in a situation to which
they are surplus, they identify what Badiou terms its ‘excrescent’; a term
that is included in a situation to which it does not belong.79 Not belong-
ing to the situation in which it is included, the excrescent ‘touches on
excess’.80 Verging on nothingness in the destitution of their condition as
garbage, Nell and Nagg represent what cannot be made present in the sit-
uation of Endgame, yet, without which, the situation could not exist—the
‘proper name’ of being: the void.81 Taken together as the human min-
imum below which there is no longer anything human, Nell and Nagg
count as one, but only in the sense that the number one is an opera-
tion of counting. As that which is just more than zero, the numerical one
of Nell and Nagg (as a single pair) signals the nothingness into which
they decompose. Numerically, however, this zero state actually triggers
138 M. MCATEER

numerical infinity according to Badiou’s account of set theory, as noted

above.82 The minimal existence of Nell and Nagg that discloses the void
encroaching upon the play at the same time projects an infinite surplus of
waste product of which the two figures are but particular scraps. Thus the
immeasurable excess of disposed commodities and their component parts
become encapsulated in the minimal nature of Nagg’s and Nell’s gestures
before their disappearance.

Notes
1. Karl Marx, Capital (1867), vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Pelican,
1976), 313.
2. J. M. Synge, The Complete Plays (1981) (London: Methuen, 2001), 109–
110; James Joyce, Ulysses (1960), ed. Bodley Head (London: Penguin,
1992), 106; Jeffares A. Norman, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed.
(London: Papermac, 1991), 472; Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (London:
Penguin in association with The Gallery Press, 1993), 62.
3. Dermot McCarthy refers to the undoubted influence of James Plunkett’s
historical novel of 1969, Strumpet City, but also notes that Doyle wrote an
undergraduate essay on O’Casey while a student of English at University
College Dublin in the late 1970s. Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade
(Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003), 192.
4. Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (London: Vintage, 2000), 7.
5. Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 269.
6. Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Con-
struction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press in asso-
ciation with Field Day, 1996), 59.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), 80–81.
8. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986),
11.
9. Ibid., 62–63.
10. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, ed., The Letters of
Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), 3.
11. Sean O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, new ed. (London: Faber, 1998), 80.
12. O’Casey, Three Dublin, 80; Beckett, The Complete, 12.
13. Beckett, The Complete, 97.
14. Considering O’Casey’s influence on Beckett’s drama, the terms of Joe
Cleary’s important reading of O’Casey might actually be reversed, when
Cleary reads O’Casey as a naturalist dramatist. Instead of viewing Beckett’s
post-war work as the final collapse of O’Casey’s naturalism, Juno and the
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 139

Paycock is a play that already involves some of the anti-naturalist elements

that the Parisian audience (including Yeats) encountered in Alfred Jarry’s
Surrealist farce, Ubu Roi, in 1896. O’Casey’s drama of impoverishment,
in other words, is a forerunner of Beckett’s more explicitly late-Surrealist
drama of impoverishment. For Cleary’s criticism of O’Casey, see, Outra-
geous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, 2nd ed. (Dublin:
Field Day Publications, 2007), 155–56. Significant to this question is the
claim of Vincent de Baun from 1961 that the turn to Expressionism in
O’Casey’s drama precedes that of The Silver Tassie. ‘Sean O’Casey and
the Road to Expressionism’, Modern Drama, 4/3 (Fall, 1961): 254–59.
Arguments of this nature have been sparse subsequently yet do appear, if
somewhat tentatively, within readings of O’Casey’s 1920s plays by Ber-
nice Schrank and Christopher Innes. See, Schrank, ‘The Naturalism in
O’Casey’s Early Plays’, Sean O’Casey Review, 4 (1977): 41–48; Innes,
‘The Essential Continuity of Sean O’Casey’, Modern Drama 33 (1990):
419–33. Ronan McDonald commends the Brechtian approach taken by
Gary Hynes to a 1991 production of The Plough and the Stars , thereby
breaking with naturalist conventions in staging the play. Tragedy and
Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2002), 189.
15. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 190.
16. Ibid., 16.
17. O’Casey, Three Dublin, 93.
18. George Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, 2nd ed. (Wash-
ington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 263.
19. Ronan McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature, 103.
20. Doyle, A Star, 15.
21. Ibid., 37.
22. Beckett, The Complete, 111.
23. Doyle, A Star, 10.
24. Ibid., 158.
25. Charlotte Jacklein, ‘Rebel Songs and Hero Pawns: Music in A Star Called
Henry’, New Hibernia Review, 9/4 (2005): 129–43 (140).
26. Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (1967) (London: Harper Perennial,
2006), 46.
27. Ibid., 49.
28. Ibid., 49.
29. Ibid., 50.
30. Early in Molloy, the speaker recalls observing a man walking, followed by
a pomeranian (as far as he can remember), whose movements suggested
constipation, constipation being ‘a sign of good health in pomeranians’.
This prompts the speaker to comment on one of those stray dogs, ‘the
first mangy cur you meet’, that he becomes desperate to pick up and
love—before throwing it away. A dog of this kind is an image of Molloy
140 M. MCATEER

himself. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable (London:

Calder Publications, 1959), 12. This is confirmed when Molloy considers
that he has been taken into the home of the woman whose dog he had
killed accidentally, in order that he would replace the dog as her pet, just
as the dog took the place of a child for the woman. Beckett, Molloy, 47.
31. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life,
trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974; London: Verso,
2005), 39. Citations refer to the Verso edition.
32. Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun Nor Death, with Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs,
trans. Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 135.
33. Doyle, A Star, 143.
34. Ibid., 200.
35. Beckett, The Complete, 115.
36. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 16.
37. O’Brien, The Third Policeman, 89–90.
38. Ibid., 92.
39. Mark Byron, ‘Modernist Wheelmen’, in Julian Murphet, Rónán McDon-
ald, and Sascha Morrell, eds., Flann O’Brien and Modernism (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014), 213–32 (223).
40. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), in
David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings, new ed. (London: Routledge,
1993), 307–41 (327).
41. Ibid., 318–19.
42. Ibid., 322–25.
43. Ibid., 325.
44. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845),
Marx & Engels: Collected Works, 1844–45, vol. 4 (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 2010), 295–596 (384). Marx develops this later in Capital to a
consideration of how capitalism requires a ‘constant excess’ of population.
Capital, 380.
45. Marx, Capital, 403.
46. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class, 389.
47. Cathy Airth, ‘Making the Least of Masculine Authority’, Sean O’Casey’s
Paycock and The Plough and the Stars ’, The Canadian Journal of Irish
Studies, 32/2 (2006), 42–47 (43).
48. Bernice Schrank, ‘The Naturalism in O’Casey’s Early Plays’, Sean O’Casey
Review, 4 (1977): 41–48 (41). A striking example is the relative brevity
of Terry Eagleton’s discussion of O’Casey’s work in his major Marxist-
inflected studies of modern Irish Literature, Heathcliff and the Great
Hunger and Crazy John and the Bishop. Another is Ronan McDonald’s
description of O’Casey’s later unabashedly socialist The Star Turns Red
and Red Roses for Me as 1940s plays in which action often ‘coarsens’
 6 DISPOSABLE LIVING: O’CASEY, BECKETT, DOYLE 141

into agitprop. Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett (Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 136. Michael Pierse attempts to rec-
tify the poor consideration of O’Casey’s socialist politics in critical eval-
uations of his plays. Pierse looks at the relation between O’Casey’s work
and that of others who wrote on Irish working-class experience from the
1900s to the 1920s. ‘The Shadow of Seán: O’Casey, Commitment and
Writing Dublin’s Working Class’, Saothar, 35 (2010): 69–85.
49. Paul Murphy, Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949 (Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 71.
50. Ibid., 75.
51. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 183.
52. O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, 126.
53. Ibid., 147.
54. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (1967), vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), 76.
55. Sean O’Casey, Plays 1 (London: Faber, 1998), 218–19.
56. This conflicting aspect of Ayamonn’s attire also links Red Roses for Me all
the way back to Edmund Spenser and the discussion between Eudoxus
and Iranæus in A View of the State of Ireland (1596; 1633) of dress
customs in Ireland, particularly the mixture of English and Gaelic Irish
dress among the Old English that Iranæus laments as ‘contagion’ and
degeneration ‘from their auncient dignities’. A View of the State of Ireland
(1633), ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willey Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997),
70, 72–74.
57. Katharine Worth, ‘O’Casey’s Dramatic Symbolism’, Modern Drama, 4/3
(Fall, 1961): 260–67 (262).
58. Doyle, A Star, 87.
59. O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, 169.
60. Breman and Das highlight a scene that represents the excess of personal
status acquired through borrowing in relation to the surplus of trash. In so
doing, the possibility arises of excess in this form as a paradigm for living
within a globalized economy. In this high-intensity manufacturing city
within the Gujarat state of India, they observe the ‘gentlemanly’ owner of
a garbage shop, who sits in well-ironed clothes by a ‘gleaming’ motorcycle,
‘amidst the piles of waste that the rag-pickers have painfully sorted out
for him to profit from’. Jan Breman and Arvind Das, Down and Out:
Labouring Under Global Capitalism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2000), 56.
61. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 16.
62. Ibid., 18.
63. Ibid., 56–57.
64. Ibid., 56.
65. Ibid., 38–48. From this perspective, Molloy is an important model for
the protagonist in Belfast novelist Robin MacLiam Wilson’s debut novel
142 M. MCATEER

of 1994, Ripley Bogle. See Caroline Magennis’s Kristevan discussion of the

bodily disintegration of the vagabond Bogle in ‘“What Does Not Respect
Borders”: The Troubled Body and the “Peace” Process in Northern Irish
Fiction’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 36/1 (2010), 97–104.
66. Magennis’s description of MacLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle as ‘a principled
tramp’ is an apt description for Beckett’s Molloy from the novel published
over thirty years’ prior to Ripley Bogle. ‘What Does Not Respect Borders’,
98.
67. F. S. L. Lyons, ‘The Minority Problem in the 26 Counties’, in Francis
McManus, ed., The Years of the Great Test (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967),
99.
68. Gregory Dobbins, Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural
Politics of Idleness (Dublin: Field Day, in assocation with the Keough-
Naughton Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame,
2010), 153–54.
69. Beckett, The Complete, 72. Mary Bryden traces the utterance to verse
1: 2 of the Book of Lamentations. Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God
(London: Macmillan, 1998), 107. While the echo is faintly audible, there
is no reference specifically to loftiness in that verse, one which can simply
be interpreted as the speaker claiming that his sorrow is worse than that
felt by anyone else.
70. Beckett, The Complete, 100.
71. Adorno, The Adorno Reader, 336.
72. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London:
Routledge, 1973), 367.
73. Beckett, The Complete, 115.
74. Ibid., 102.
75. Ibid., 122.
76. Martin Heidegger, ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’
(1967), trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch, in David Farrell Krell,
ed., Basic Writings, new ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 267–306 (275–
78).
77. Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954),
trans. William Lovitt (1977), in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings,
new ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 307–341 (326, 331).
78. Ibid., 332.
79. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Contin-
uum, 2005), 99–100.
80. Ibid., 507.
81. Ibid., 52–59.
82. For a full elaboration of the mathematical logic that is involved here, see
Badiou, Being and Event, 86–92.
 CHAPTER 7

Trashing Ulster: Patterson and Reid

Garbage
The representation of human lives in conditions of rubbish and waste
product such as we encounter in Nell and Nagg from Beckett’s Endgame
or in Beckett’s trilogy reappears in one of the most significant novels
addressing the beginnings of political conflict in Northern Ireland at the
end of the 1960s, Glenn Patterson’s 1994 work, Burning Your Own. Set
mostly in a new housing estate called Larkview that was built as part of
a new suburban expansion of Belfast city during the 1960s and an over-
grown waste-ground in close vicinity, the novel explores an environment
of rubbish that is a breeding ground for parasites. By situating the inti-
mate friendship that develops between two young males in this context,
Patterson alters the predominant view of the political conflict as an out-
come of historical colonialism to cast it instead in terms of the excess
of human waste, the parasite and the politics of hygiene. A teenage boy
Francy Hagan from an impoverished Catholic family background occu-
pies a secret dwelling hidden in the centre of a dump, a dwelling that he
has built from discarded objects. Francy Hagan does not belong to the
community of Larkview estate and yet he is part of it too, living among
its refuse. In this sense, he marks the point of excess that Badiou iden-
tifies in terms of set theory for the circumstances that are addressed in
Patterson’s novel: the emergence of a new community in Larkview estate
that is Protestant and British Loyalist in profile. Francie Hagan thus exists

© The Author(s) 2020 143

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_7
144 M. MCATEER

within a situation to which he does not belong. In one sense Francy is a

parasite who lives off the garbage that this community produces: but only
in the sense that the parasite precedes that upon which it is judged to be
parasitic. Francy has occupied the dump before the houses of Larkview
estate were completed and families moved into the area. If Lacan is right
in observing that every civilization first needs a waste disposal system, it
is equally true that every new building site immediately requires a dump:
‘“In the beginning,” said Francy, “was the dump”’.1
Material excess in the form of the parasite is explored in Burning Your
Own in terms of garbage, defecation and rats. In taking a discarded toilet
seat as his throne in the fortress that he has built for himself among the
debris, Francy recalls the iconoclastic figure of Père Ubu from Alfred Jar-
ry’s scandalous play of almost a century earlier, Ubu Roi, the king who
feeds Captain Bordure and his followers excrement on a toilet brush at
a stately feast.2 Mal Martin is the son of a Protestant couple who have
come to live in Larkview estate, just as he is moving into his adolescent
years. Sensitive to the crisis in his parent’s marriage as his father seeks
secure employment, Mal Martin is drawn into a secret friendship with the
outsider Francy. The excess of Francy’s life on the dump lies not in the
sheer nausea of excrement and rubbish but in the possibility of that life
spilling over beyond structures of waste disposal that are inaugurated as
the housing estate nears its completion. The dump itself testifies to those
structures, most notably the state-service of rubbish collection, already
being exceeded:

At this end of the dump, the refuse was mainly the overflow from house-
hold bins, plastic bags and cartons filled too early or too late for collection
by the council trucks. The boxes had been upset and holes chewed in the
sides of the bags, so that the ground was cluttered with eggshells, potato
peelings and blackened cabbage stalks. There were magazines, corrugated
by damp and now dried brittle, stained with tea leaves, and a smell like
dirty nappies drifted back and forth in the breeze.3

The environment is conducive for rats and the opening altercation of

novel, in which Francie rescues a rat as a rubbish collector attempts to
kill it, conveys the violence that the presence of the parasite generates.
Any rat is a threat to residents of Larkview becoming overrun with rats,
and it is this prospect of the excess of rats, an open testament to the over-
flow of their own rubbish, that most unsettles the Larkview residents.4
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 145

By contrast to the residents of Larkview, Francy willingly lives among

rats in the dump. Indeed he feeds them, asserting that the rats were there
before he was: the waste-ground was theirs, not his.5 This presents the
figure of the parasite as anterior to that of which it is perceived to be
parasitic. In the world of the dump, Francy considers himself to be living
off the rats, regarding himself as ‘renting’ from the rats. Derrida writes of
‘parasitology’ as ‘the matrix of all I have done since I began writing’, and
describes the ontology of the parasite as unique in being ‘neither alive nor
dead’.6 Maud Ellmann draws a comparison between rats and Derrida’s
idea of the supplement, the rat implying that ‘civilization is founded on
that which it excludes: on excess, excrement, exteriority’.7 The association
of rats with ‘parasitology’ as Derrida defines it seems refuted in the raw
physical presence of rats in the dump on the edge of Larkview estate in
Burning Your Own. Yet the sight of Francy Hagan feeding rats, some of
them crawling over his trousers and tumbling over each other to a loaf of
bread that he has thrown unto a broken-down pram, as well as the small
rat that Francy feeds in his hand, makes Mal Martin feel like vomiting.8
The rats test Mal’s limits of what he can visually apprehend. While they
may indeed be physically present, these rats cannot be absorbed into the
order of perception through which Mal’s teenage consciousness of the
world is being formed.
In his connection to rats, there is in Roddy Doyle’s Henry Smart a
trace of Patterson’s Francy Hagan, Burning Your Own having been first
published ten years before A Star Called Henry. In his boyhood, Henry
Smart lures rats into captivity by stealing baby rats from their nests and
boiling them, Victor and he rubbing the resultant ‘soup’ onto their hands
that would make the parent rats frantic and easy to capture. They would
then take the bag of screaming rats to ‘the betting men around the pit’,
men who ‘loved’ Victor and Henry’s rats.9 While this sadistic manner of
collecting rats for rat-baiting is far removed from Francy Hagan’s love
of rats in Burning Your Own, still it is telling that Henry Smart has no
interest in staying to watch the betting among the men or the dogs killing
the rats in A Star Called Henry. Once he and Victor are paid for the rats,
they depart. Henry will grow up to find himself fighting alongside the
Irish rebels in the General Post Office in Easter 1916 before moving on
to become a ruthless and efficient IRA killer on the run during the course
of the Irish War of Independence. In a strange way Henry identifies in his
boyhood with the rats that he traps by killing their children (particularly in
view of the rat-like nature of his movements through the Dublin sewers).
146 M. MCATEER

This form of identification from the early years of the twentieth-century

foreshadows the more openly empathetic relation with rats that Francy
Hagan evinces on the edge of a new housing estate on the outskirts of
Belfast in the 1960s.
Towards the end of Burning Your Own, before the dump is eventu-
ally burnt down with Francy Hagan in it, Mal Martin returns there and
thinks of the huge number of rats buried all around him, possibly thou-
sands. At the same time, he is reminded of Francy’s observation that there
was always a surplus of rats on the dump. This prompts in Mal an idea
corresponding to Derrida’s concept of the ontological form of the par-
asite as neither dead nor alive: ‘Dead and not dead. Like Bobo, Sadie’s
pekinese’.10 Bobo is a dog in the story that Mal’s father recounts to him
early in the novel. In this tale, a man named Sammy believes that he has
accidentally killed a pet dog named Bobo when he put too much mus-
tard into the dog’s food, causing him to collapse. Sammy buries the dog
in the garden in a panic to avoid his wife Sadie discovering that he had
killed him. Sometime later Sadie’s parents call to the couple’s home for a
visit. Observing that a spot in the garden of the house has been freshly
dug up, Sadie’s father assumes that his son-in-law Sammy was preparing
to sow vegetables. With Sammy not around at the time of her parents’
visit, Sadie’s father takes it upon himself to continue digging the garden in
Sammy’s absence. When he digs into the ground just as Sammy is return-
ing, he bursts the bin-bag into which Sammy had put the dog, and Bobo
jumps out. In the version of this story that Mal Martin’s father tells his
son, the pekinese had not died, but merely passed out.11 The importance
of this story to understanding the novel as a whole is indicated in the
fact that throughout the course of composing the novel, Patterson always
gave Dogbag as its title; it was a last-minute decision to change this to
Burning Your Own.12
The story recalls Molloy’s account in Beckett’s novel of Lousse’s dog
that he kills accidentally and that she buries in her garden with Molloy
present, acting as chief mourner. Here too, there is an indelicate ambi-
guity between states of living and of being dead: ‘It was Lousse dug the
hole while I held the dog in my arms. He was already heavy and cold,
but he had not yet begun to stink. He smelt bad, if you like, but bad like
an old dog, not like a dead dog. He too had dug holes, perhaps this very
spot’.13 This anticipates Jacques Moran’s narrative later in Molloy when
he sends his son to a place called ‘Hole’ to buy a bicycle.14 The hole that
Sammy digs in Mr. Martin’s story or the hole that the rats dig under the
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 147

dump in Burning Your Own may develop this motif in relation to a locat-
able environment of suburban Belfast, but its impetus is fundamentally at
one with Beckett’s narrative: a hole is a void, a specific location that is,
strictly speaking, not there. To name it as anything other than ‘hole’ is to
fill it in, and hence, erase its character as empty space. This is one of the
ways in which Badiou defines excess: ‘any unreasonable hole within the
tissue of language’ truth being, on this basis, approximate to excess since
‘a truth is always that which makes a hole in a knowledge’.15
In granting rats and the waste-ground of the dump a subversive aspect
in relation to the order of sectarian geography in a newly emerging sub-
urban Belfast in Burning Your Own, the novel is open to the objection
of conferring value on conditions of dilapidation among Catholics in the
city, as well as in Derry. The Catholic estates’ name of Derrybeg in the
novel bears obvious reference to Derry, and the nickname ‘Derrybeggars’
alludes to the substandard conditions in which many Catholics there lived
at the time in which the novel is set. Following a Loyalist rally in 1969,
the Unionist politician Ian Paisley was reported as saying that if Catholics
had poor housing conditions it was because they ‘breed like rabbits and
multiply like vermin’.16 Burning Your Own is not completely removed
from the rhetoric of social hygiene that lay behind Rev. Paisley’s extreme
pronouncement. Patterson’s sympathetic treatment of Francy Hagan in
the novel certainly rebukes the vitriolic sectarianism of Paisley’s ‘vermin’
charge against underprivileged Catholics in Ulster in the provocative ways
that Burning Your Own tackles the notion of the parasite. Patterson him-
self directs stinging satire at Paisley as ‘Reverend Nevernevernever’ who
becomes ‘Pastor Notjustyet’ after his volte face in entering Government
with Sinn Féin in 2007 following decades of virulently denouncing Irish
republicanism.17 Still, it is difficult to imagine Mal Martin, from a Protes-
tant lower middle-class background, swapping roles with Francy Hagan
at the time in which Burning Your Own is set in the late 1960s. As the
novel shows, Mal finds the dump to be a place of escape from the domes-
tic social pressures of the Larkview estate, yet he struggles at first to over-
come sensations of disgust among the rats and debris of the dump in
which Francy Hagan feels so at home. In Mal’s contradictory feelings
of attraction to the mystery of Francy in his hidden kingdom and his
repulsion at the waste upon which it is built, we are reminded of Louis
MacNeice, the Belfast-born author, in his attitude to India as discussed
in Chapter 3, ‘Oriental Excess: Yeats and MacNeice’. This identification
of Francy Hagan’s dump-kingdom in Patterson’s novel with perceptions
148 M. MCATEER

of India in the writing of his Belfast predecessor is strengthened through

Patterson’s disclosure that he was influenced by Salman Rushdie’s Mid-
night’s Children when composing Burning Your Own. Patterson discloses
that ‘there is a grain of Saleem Sinai, Midnight’s Children’s mythopoetic
narrator, in the voice of my own Francy Hagan’.18 In this light, R. F. Fos-
ter’s sense—that ‘Henry’s status [in Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry]
as child of his century owes something to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Chil-
dren’—points to another connection between Burning Your Own and
Doyle’s historical novel.19

Dirty Protest
Christina Reid’s 1986 Belfast drama, Joyriders , considers how excess in
the form of the parasite can be understood in terms of Northern Irish
politics. Like Patterson’s novel, Reid’s play revolves around the world
of teenagers, although they inhabit a very different environment to that
of Mal Martin’s Larkview estate. Mostly young offenders on a Govern-
ment training programme, they come from the Divis Flats in West Belfast
close to the city centre, an area heavily fortified by the British Army from
the 1970s to the 1990s, and once notorious for its dilapidated condi-
tions. The Divis Flats district of the city was a Republican paramilitary
stronghold where shootings and bomb attacks were frequent. Being killed
or injured by the IRA, the RUC or British Army are not the only haz-
ards that the residents face, as one of the young offenders called Sandra
complains:

Who cares about the Army smashin’ up the windows and the doors in
Divis Flats. The bloody place is fallin’ to bits anyway. Walls streamin’ with
water, toilets overflowin’, rubbish chutes that don’t work. If the rats an’
the bugs don’t get ye, the asbestos will […] or the police, or the Army, or
the IRA […] who cares?20

As with Francy’s world on the dump in Burning Your Own, excess takes
material form here in the overflow of excrement and the presence of par-
asites. Where Francy considers the world of the dump his kingdom and
the rats his cherished friends in Burning Your Own, Sandra finds noth-
ing welcoming in the destitute condition of the Divis Flats in Joyriders.
Instead she presents to the audience an example of the kind of abject
social conditions that rallied thousands of people to the protests of the
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 149

Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association towards the end of the 1960s.
Unlike Francy Hagan in Burning Your Own, many from disadvantaged
Catholic backgrounds in Ulster were not content to live in dumps. How-
ever Sandra has no interest or faith in projects of social reform or social
revolution towards which the Civil Rights Movement aimed. If nobody
cares about the Divis Flats, neither does she care about the risks involved
in stealing cars and driving them recklessly through this heavily milita-
rized district of Belfast. These risks include killing or crippling herself or
her friends and neighbours; being killed or left crippled in a paramilitary
punishment attack; being killed or left crippled by Army gunfire.
Particularly with respect to excess in the material form of human excre-
ment (and its ‘treatment’), Reid’s play carries a trace of Samuel Beckett’s
writing that was partly suppressed, as Emilie Morin and Adam Winstanley
have shown. The first novel of his Post-War trilogy, Molloy, has a number
of striking references to defecation and excrement. Molloy speaks of ‘shit-
ting and pissing’ in his dead mother’s pot and of having come into the
world ‘through the hole in her arse’ where he acquired the ‘[f]irst taste
of the shit’.21 In his narrative, Moran writes of a mouth that seemed raw
‘from trying to shit its tongue’.22 Most significant is Moran’s disclosure
that he lives in a place called ‘Turdy’, a ‘hub of Turdyba’.23 The name
carries a more-than-implicit reference to faeces in the syllable ‘Turd’ that
is given a specifically Irish twist through the addition of ‘y’ as a qualify-
ing syllable. The number of Irish county names with a ‘y’ syllabic ending
underlines the Gaelicism of ‘Turdy:’ Derry, Kerry, Kilkenny, Offaly and
Tipperary.
This pungent excremental-Gaelic association is underwritten by the
specific comparison that Moran makes between Turdyba and the names
for ‘the Molloy country’ in Beckett’s Molloy: ‘Bally’, ‘Ballyba’ and ‘Bally-
baba’.24 This last term sounds much like a pun on ‘Ali Baba’, thereby
connoting a Gaelic–Arabian connection that is rather bizarrely (for Beck-
ett’s work) continuous with the identifications that Yeats and MacNeice
implicitly or explicitly draw between Celtic and Asian worlds, as consid-
ered in Chapter 3, ‘Oriental Excess: Yeats and MacNeice’. Morin sug-
gests that the ‘Bally’ to which Moran refers is an allusion to Dublin and
its suburbs. In ‘Bally’ she observes a trace of the Irish-language name of
Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath) while also alluding to a more specific refer-
ence to the suburban village of Ballybrack that neighboured the village
of Foxrock where Beckett grew up.25 The number of place-names in Ire-
land that include ‘Bally’ is extensive, ‘Bally’, being the anglicized version
150 M. MCATEER

of the original Irish-language name for ‘town’. These include Ballymote

in County Sligo, Ballybunion in County Kerry, Ballyshannon in County
Donegal and Ballyvourney in County Cork. Beckett may indeed have had
South County Dublin’s Ballybrack in mind, but it is equally plausible that
he was evoking the generic notion of a small Irish town or townland,
rather like Brian Friel’s ‘Baile Beag’ (the Irish-language term for ‘Small
Town’) in his 1979 play, Translations.26
Following Morin’s identification of specifically Irish allusions in early
drafts of Molloy, Adam Winstanley discusses an extended passage from a
French-language draft that was omitted from the final published work,
one that makes an explicit connection between faeces and the Irish locale
of Ballyba. Within this passage, Moran claims that the local residents fer-
tilize the land for the growth of crops with their own faeces, thereby
indirectly consuming what they had originally evacuated.27 While Win-
stanley is primarily interested in this abandoned section with reference to
Beckett’s disdain for the economic protectionism of the Irish Free State
in the 1930s, there are broader questions of material excess involved. In
the first instance, there is the literal excess of the passage that was prob-
ably the main reason for cutting it (thereby becoming a back passage):
Moran’s discussion of the ‘administrative, cultural and societal practices’
that are required to sustain the agricultural economy of Ballyba runs to
over thirteen pages. There is also the question of excess in the material
form of human excrement being used to sustain human life. Winstanley’s
discussion of the discarded passage suggests that the use of human faeces
as fertilizer literally produces an excess of vegetables in Ballyba; not just to
be consumed locally, but also to be exported abroad. On this point, the
omitted passage raises the question of whether or not the use of human
waste product as fertilizer is a viable or a hazardous practice.
In 1911, the agricultural scientist H. F. King wrote of the ‘well-nigh
universal conservation and utilization of all human waste in China, Korea
and Japan, turning it to marvellous account in the maintenance of soil
fertility and in the production of food’.28 By contrast, a recent scien-
tific study draws attention to the connections between the use of human
waste as fertilizer in China and the recurrence of the disease schistosomia-
sis, one caused by parasitic flatworms.29 However inadvertently, Beckett’s
abandoned passage anticipates an eco-sensitive agricultural practice that
might strengthen prospects for human survival in the face of ecological
crises. Yet it is equally a derogatory if telling evocation of Irish Free State
circumstances in the years of the Second World War as parasitic in nature:
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 151

surviving off the body of a hyper-militarized Britain that it was yet in

the process of repelling through the policy of Free State neutrality.30 In
either instance, Ireland appears as material excess in the form of leftover
waste. Turdyba is a place in Ireland that is self-sustaining through its use
of human excrement, and the extended fragment within which Moran
describes at length this economy of human waste is itself a disposed of
piece of text.
The trace of this image of Ireland as the leftover persists from Beckett
to Reid, particularly in the dire circumstances of Republican West Belfast
in the 1980s within which her Joyriders is set, a play full of references to
material leftovers. When Tom asks Arthur what he is doing during the
break-time on the training scheme, he replies that he will be ‘[e]atin’ the
leftovers’.31 Sandra tells the others that every time that there is a riot
in the Divis area, children gather the spent plastic bullets and sell them
to tourists, mostly American, for a pound each.32 The Director of the
Government training scheme, Kate, instructs Arthur to include only left-
overs in the free dinner that he gives to the old woman with lots of stray
cats, a woman who lives next to the building in which the scheme takes
place.33 During a scene at Kate’s middle-class residence to which she has
invited the young people for an evening meal that Arthur has offered to
cook, she mockingly reads out a patronizing passage about foods avail-
able in America from a pamphlet advertizing a scheme through which
young people affected by political violence in Ireland are invited to spend
time in the United States. Arthur responds with sarcasm: ‘My ma says
they usta send food parcels over here during the war. Now they’re tak-
ing kids over there to eat their leftovers’.34 Kate reveals that a senior civil
servant, Jeremy Saunders, who holds responsibility for the administration
of the Government scheme, will be coming over from England to visit
them. Her main concern is that he might cut off the funding needed to
keep the scheme running. Arthur’s main concern is whether or not they
will be allowed to drink ‘the leftovers’ from the wine reception that will
be organized for his visit.35 As with Patterson’s Burning Your Own, we
are reminded again here of Louis MacNeice writing on India, particu-
larly that line from ‘Didymus’ in which he imagines the vast swathes of
India’s poor as ants carrying away crumbs falling from the table of the
God Shiva who hangs above them, dancing.36 Yet in Joyriders Reid takes
this a step further than MacNeice along lines suggested by Terry Eagle-
ton, who regards the Christian deity embodying those leftover crumbs
rather than the splendour of the divine feast. Eagleton writes of Jesus as
152 M. MCATEER

‘the bit of trash or excremental remainder that the symbolic order proves
unable to accommodate and thus expels as so much garbage, but which in
its very abjection exposes that order’s lacunae and limitations’.37 By this
account, the young people in Joyriders might well be considered the liv-
ing incarnation of an abandoned Christ and the Government programme
as a specific social instance of the general symbolic order.
The persistent references to leftovers in Joyriders point to a despair-
ing sense of the Government programme as a waste and a sense that
the young people have of themselves as social leftovers. Tommy puts it
bluntly in Act II. Sandra says that none of them will be able to move out
from the Divis Flats because of the social prejudice that they always meet
in Belfast in coming from that area, so the only option is emigration.
Tommy replies that nobody would have them anywhere.38 The feeling
among these young people of being a social surplus is embodied in the
manner of Maureen’s death, shot by the British Army as she tries to res-
cue her twelve-year-old brother who has stolen a police car for a joyride
on the very day that Saunders is coming to visit the scheme. Pregnant by
a student from Queen’s University at the time, Maureen personifies in her
death the idea of waste that pervades the play as a whole, even implicat-
ing the drama itself. In heartbreak before her dead body, Sandra screams
at her for being ‘a daft stupid bitch’, shaking Maureen as she cries that
death is messy and ugly, not romantic ‘like in stupid friggin plays!’39 First
performed by residents of Divis Flats in London in 1986 when political
violence in the North was into its seventeenth year, Reid herself is con-
scious that, in expressing a sense of waste, the play itself was not likely to
have any meaningful effect on the lives represented. It too may have been
a waste of time.

Collateral Damage
Whatever the immediate political value of staging Joyriders in the mid-
eighties, the context of Maureen’s death brings into focus a general
question of violence in relation to human beings as disposable equip-
ment. This aspect is evident through an intimacy with surplus product,
un-mediated encounters with human excrement and intimacy with par-
asites, designating parasitism as part of these young people’s daily lives.
While not redemptive in any sense, the very pointlessness of Maureen’s
death is subversive in resurrecting a concept of sacrificial killing as pure
excess. Bataille identifies the victim in ceremonial sacrifices of the Aztecs as
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 153

‘consumed profitlessly’, the ‘accursed share’ who is ‘destined for violent

consumption’. This curse, however, tears the victim away from ‘the order
of things’; it grants him or her ‘a recognizable figure, which now radiates
intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings’.40
The Government training scheme in Joyriders exists within a tradition
of Constructive Unionism dating back to the policies of Arthur J. Bal-
four, first as Secretary for Ireland, then as Conservative Prime Minister
from 1892–1902. Most notable among these was the setting up of the
Congested Districts Board, with the purpose of alleviating poverty in the
west of Ireland.41 The foundation of the British Welfare State after the
Second World War, plus the decline of Britain as a global manufactur-
ing power, had altered substantially the conditions under which policies
of social improvement were revived in Northern Ireland when it came
under direct British Government rule in 1972. Under these conditions,
various British Governments were confronted with the problem of social
and economic waste. The visit of the senior civil servant to the centre
in which the young people participate in the training scheme in Joyrid-
ers is one instance of a process by which Governments have invested in
programmes on the basis that they would make so-called wasters socially
useful (or unobtrusive at least). As Tommy says of the project, ‘it is about
keepin’ unemployment figures down and keepin’ the likes of us off the
streets’.42
The context of Maureen’s death—the human surplus as collateral dam-
age—identifies a point of intersection between Bataille’s concept of life
itself as a pure excess of energy that was apprehended in ancient times in
moments of sacrificial violence, and the contemporary issue of social and
economic waste. Directed squarely against the conception of life that we
encounter in Bataille, the bureaucratic administration of life in developed
societies has socially useful and economically beneficial modes of living
as its objective. Yet however much Bataille himself places a great distance
between this modern-day goal-oriented ordering of life and the concept
of pure excess that he elaborates, it is telling that waste itself always re-
emerges; in modern times of administered living, through bureaucratic
waste. Behind the visit of Saunders to the training centre lies a hidden
recognition that it is a needless waste of Government money, requiring
heightened security in a volatile area and conspicuous ratification through
a wine reception. The State wastes money in flying over a senior civil ser-
vant to Belfast from England. The purpose of the visit is to confirm that
154 M. MCATEER

the State investment is not wasted: that ‘wasters’ are made economically
productive.
In its absolute recklessness, the joyride approximates to Bataille’s repre-
sentation of violence as a momentary release from this convoluted order
of things to achieve an ecstatic experience of life itself in its primordial
state as a heedless expenditure of energy. Robbing a police car and driv-
ing it a full speed, Maureen’s younger brother Johnnie ignites chaos. The
Army shoot at the car and young people pour onto the streets, pelting
the Army and police with stones. Looking through the window, Tommy
describes the scene: ‘yer man Saunders has arrived, an’ the Brits are tryin’
to protect him, get his big Mercedes outa the street […] it’s like bed-
lam out there […] I can’t see’.43 Charging between the rioters and the
Army to rescue her brother, Maureen is shot dead. Johnnie’s is an act
of rebellion without any cause, an action that is literally out of control.
In this sense, it bears a deeply ambiguous relation to paramilitary violence
directed against the British state in Ulster during the Troubles. Maureen’s
death at the hands of the Army is open to interpretation as a further
instance of colonial oppression that accounts for Republican paramilitary
violence at the time in which the play is set. The view is weakened by
the fact that Maureen’s death in the play is brought about by a joyrider,
a rebellious act that jeopardizes paramilitary control in the danger zone
between the Divis Flats and the former linen mill building in which the
youth training programme is held. If Johnnie had been caught by the
IRA, it is likely that he would have been shot in the knees as punishment.
Turning to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Slavoj Žižek
draws attention to Benjamin’s distinction between mythic and divine vio-
lence. In doing so, Žižek describes divine violence in terms that are virtu-
ally indistinguishable from Bataille’s concept of sacrificial excess, although
Žižek insists that sacrifice is never involved in Benjamin’s idea: ‘the excess
of life’, its ‘too-muchness’ and its ‘theological’ dimension.44 In Joyrid-
ers, Johnnie’s joyride results in the Army shooting his sister. It is impor-
tant to observe that Johnnie comes from nowhere at the end of the play.
While a few references are made to him during its course, he doesn’t fea-
ture in any significant way. His intervention is purely random. This act of
joyriding is not a form of mythic violence, which Benjamin understands
as ‘law-making’. This ‘law-making’ refers to the violence of rebel groups,
the police and the Army in fighting for state legitimacy within regions
that are contested politically. The joyride is rather an instance of divine
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 155

violence in Benjamin’s sense: an intervention that is ‘law destroying’ in

arriving without any prior indication of its occurrence, nor without any
end beyond itself.45
Considered in this way, the joyride in Joyriders links back to one of W.
B. Yeats’s few poems to address the First World War, a poem that might
be described as an attempt to capture the experience of ‘joyflying’. This
is ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a rather stiff attempt at contem-
plating the exhilaration and terror of Robert Gregory’s mind in its final
moments before meeting his death as a fighter-pilot in the First World
War. The final lines express conspicuous waste as essential to the joyriding
experience, lending it the ecstatic quality of pure excess. The Irish Airman
speaks of both past and future as a ‘waste of breath’ when set against the
exhilaration of the moment that he now experiences as he is just about
to die.46 In Yeats’s own deliberate misreading of Robert Gregory’s death
(Robert clearly felt a duty of loyal service to Britain during the war) the
man is presented as not having any particular grievance towards the Axis
forces against whom he fights, nor any strong loyalty to the Allied forces
for which he fights. Yeats himself viewed the war largely as commercial
in origin—and therefore ignoble. The poem implies that Robert’s death
is a needless waste, redeemed only by the ecstatic manner of the combat
in the air. In ‘Easter 1916’ published just two years later, Yeats speculates
that the deaths of the leaders of the Irish rebellion in 1916 may also have
been a ‘needless’ waste of life.47 While Yeats avoids converting Robert
Gregory’s death into martyrdom of the Irish rebel leaders, it still carries
for him a quality of divine ecstasy.
Apart from the late twentieth-century context of urban decay that dis-
tinguishes Johnnie’s daredevil speeding from Robert Gregory’s daredevil
fighting in the Italian skies of the First World War, Joyriders adds an ele-
ment complicating the distinction between mythic and divine violence. It
is not Johnnie who dies, but his sister Maureen. In the play, Maureen’s
death clearly has a sacrificial character. In sharp contrast to the cynicism of
Sandra, Maureen responds emotionally to the tragic romance of Minnie
Powell’s death from The Shadow of a Gunman, when the group is taken
to a performance of O’Casey’s play. The occasion signals the importance
of O’Casey’s work to Reid’s drama as a whole: Joanna Luft even iden-
tifies in the motif of tea-drinking from Reid’s Tea in a China Cup the
influence of Johnny in Juno and the Paycock, complaining to his mother
that she thinks of nothing but ‘tay’.48 Beginning Joyriders with a scene in
which disadvantaged teenagers attend a performance of The Shadow of a
156 M. MCATEER

Gunman in 1980s Belfast, Reid alerts her audience to the continuing sig-
nificance of O’Casey’s drama in the 1970s and the 1980s in the context
of the brutal violence and militarization of Northern Irish society during
this period. Ronan McDonald draws attention to the revival of O’Casey’s
drama in these decades. He connects this to ‘the complex response’ in
the Republic of Ireland to violence in the North during the 1970s and
1980s.49
Joyriders is a play that demonstrates how this O’Casey revival was not
confined to Republic of Ireland but felt in Northern Ireland itself. Unlike
the others in her group attending the O’Casey production, Maureen is
innocent and idealistic. She dreams of a better life and falls in love with a
student from Queen’s University, leading to her pregnancy. Her death is
as random as her brother’s act of joyriding, but she takes on the character
of the innocent sacrificial lamb in the process. Maureen’s death is a strong
reminder of the death of Minnie Powell in O’Casey’s The Shadow of a
Gunman that Maureen had seen performed in Belfast. Ronan McDonald
compares Minnie Powell’s death in O’Casey’s play to what he describes as
the ‘miserable, haphazard pointlessness’ of a death in a road accident.50
Indeed, Maureen’s death in Joyriders —in a shooting during a riot that was
caused by a car crash—comes even closer to this type of death than that
of Minnie Powell, killed by the explosion of a bomb that she is carrying.
Yet Maureen’s death still carries the undercurrent of a destiny when we
recall the end of the first act of Christina Reid’s play. In conversation
with Kate, she laments her lack of money or opportunity and resents the
seventy thousand pounds compensation that Arthur has been awarded by
the British Army for the head injury he suffered when shot accidentally.
Her closing comment proves to be prophetic: ‘I wonder would the Army
like to shoot me?’51 In her case, the sheer excess of divine violence—
the anarchic recklessness of the joyrider—produces mythic violence: the
sacrificial death of the innocent.
Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Georges Sorel argues for
the necessity of violence in moving from a capitalist to a socialist system
of economic production. He characterizes violence in a very specific way:
a class war, taking the form of a proletarian general strike, ‘a very fine and
very heroic thing’ that might ‘save the world from barbarism’.52 Benjamin
credits Sorel as the first thinker to distinguish the political general strike
from the proletarian general strike.53 The former is directed towards the
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 157

specific end of wrestling power from the state and generates violent con-
flict as a consequence. The latter has no specific end; it is action for its
own sake within which state power is abolished.
In obvious ways, the incident at the end of Reid’s Joyriders is far
removed from Sorel’s idea of violence and the general strike. The joyrider
Johnnie is not a figure of heroism and nobility, but a reckless thrill-seeker
endangering himself and the residents of his neighbourhood. His actions
bring about the circumstances in which his sister Maureen is killed. Far
from showing any remorse in the 1996 sequel to Joyriders , Clowns , John-
nie brazenly replies with ‘Fuck Maureen’ when Arthur offers to help him
for the sake of her memory.54 On the other hand, Johnnie’s action creates
absolute unpredictability, a characteristic that Sorel attributes to socialism
and the fear it awakens in so many people: ‘Socialism has always inspired
terror because of the enormous amount of the unknown which it con-
tains: people feel that a transformation of this kind would permit of no
turning back’.55 Johnnie takes the ultimate risk of robbing a police car,
leaving him an open target for the IRA or the British Army in a district
that was highly militarized in the 1980s, between the Divis Flats and the
former linen mill site (most probably on Victoria street), where the youth
training programme is run.
Whether we see the joyride as reckless lunacy or heroic defiance, it cuts
right across the battle lines upon which the skirmishes between the IRA
and the British security forces were drawn, a battle that had effectively
become stalemate by the time in which Joyriders is set. It has no place
in the romantic tradition of republican resistance to British rule in Ire-
land, nor can it be condemned by the state as an act of terrorism, since
that would de-normalize the genuinely ‘Ordinary Decent Criminal’ as
the equivalent of a political subversive.56 At the same time the joyride,
and the riot that follows it, cannot be separated off from the context
of the conflict itself. Not belonging to any collective action such as we
find in Sorel’s notion of the General Strike, it seems far removed from
anarcho-socialist revolutionary violence as Sorel understood it. Even in
its thoroughly self-centred nature, however, Johnnie’s joyride testifies to
the dimension of individualism that Sorel identifies in situations of mass
revolt, a dimension to which Tudor Balinsteanu draws attention in his
reading of anarchist ideas in Yeats and Joyce.57
In the terms of Badiou’s concept of excess in mathematical set the-
ory, the crisis event in Joyriders is part of a situation to which it does
158 M. MCATEER

not belong. Joyriding does not count as part of the paramilitary cam-
paign of violence directed against the British state in Ulster, yet in this
instance it creates circumstances that were typical of the conflict in the
North during the 1970s and 1980s: a working-class person shot by the
British Army during a riot. Belonging and yet not belong to the Troubles,
it carries the ontological form of the parasite as identified by Derrida: that
which is neither dead nor alive. The graffiti puts it succinctly: ‘Joyriders
live. Joyriders die’.58 Joyriding is living at its most exhilarating precisely
because it risks death. Johnnie stands completely at odds with all republi-
can assertions that their violence is one of political insurgency rather than
criminality (this was precisely the basis for their hunger-strike protest in
1981). Stealing a police car and his sister being shot by the Army in con-
sequence, however, Johnnie fits the republican paramilitary profile quite
easily: defying British state authority and his sister becoming one of its
victims in consequence.
By the end of Joyriders, as Maureen lies dead, Johnnie is both a social
delinquent and a republican local hero at the same time. This is con-
firmed in the sequel Clowns when Arthur says of Johnnie: ‘A local hood-
lum become local hero because the British Army shot his sister’.59 In its
complete indifference to any political objective, the joyride defies both
paramilitary and state violence in their political form. In this instance,
however, it also gives rise to a situation of political violence. As with Fran-
cie Hagan in Patterson’s Burning Your Own, Johnnie precedes that upon
which he is deemed to be socially parasitic in Joyriders. Francie inhabits
the dump at the edge of the new Larkview housing estate before the res-
idents moved in and developed a community. Johnnie instigates the very
situation of political conflict in 1980s Belfast from which his car-thieving
criminality may well be considered an offshoot.
In Reflections on Violence, Sorel emphasizes the transition from capital-
ism to socialism as ‘a catastrophe, the development of which baffles descrip-
tion’.60 Reid’s Joyriders is not an anarchist play in any prescriptive sense.
In many respects, it is a piece of social realism that is heavily indebted
to the drama of O’Casey and also to the form of chorus that was devel-
oped in the plays of Brecht. Nonetheless, Maureen’s death is a defeat for
the very idea of statehood itself and, to this extent at least, points in the
direction of anarchism. Balinisteanu draws attention to the fact that Sorel
understands violence as figured specifically in a language of movement, a
language that springs from a violent dislocation of a subject from a pre-
vailing language that carries the status of social authority.61 Joyriders is a
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 159

play that articulates this language of movement not simply through John-
nie’s joyride, but also in the immediate chaos that it triggers, as Tommy
describes it near the end of the play.
In her position as a social worker from a middle-class background, Kate
identifies in Maureen a desire to better herself and move beyond the Divis
Flats environment. She even understands her shoplifting as a misguided
attempt at social improvement. Maureen, in other words, embodies the
objective of the Government training programme: reduce the Social Wel-
fare budget by directing young people’s energies towards gainful employ-
ment, through which they, in turn, would have an investment in the nor-
malization of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, weaken-
ing the support base for Republican paramilitaries in the process. Shoot-
ing Maureen in the melee that follows Johnnie’s daredevil show, the Army
inadvertently kill the one person whose fortunes might well have been
transformed by the Government programme. Not only is Maureen’s life
taken away, the training scheme itself ends in failure. Rather like the
Army recklessly killing the staunchly Loyalist Bessie Burgess at the end
of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars when her son is fighting for the
Crown in the trenches of the First World War, it is another historical
instance of the British security forces in Ireland shooting themselves in
the foot.

Memory Trash
Reid’s 1996 sequel to Joyriders , Clowns is set on the eve of the first IRA
ceasefire in August 1994, a critical development in creating the political
circumstances from which the Belfast Agreement of 1998 emerged, even-
tually creating a Unionist–Nationalist power-sharing executive for the first
time in Northern Ireland. Life has changed for the young people who
were the original participants on the training scheme in Joyriders, but a
catastrophic transformation of their conditions, of which Sorel wrote, has
not come to pass following Maureen’s death. Nevertheless, there is indeed
a sense in which all the characters are clowns, inhabiting a world which,
if not quite anarchic, is certainly ridiculous. Reid captures this sharply
in opening with Johnnie dancing to 1990s rave-music on his Walkman
music player, his movement appearing idiotic when it continues after the
audience can no longer hear the music.62 While still bearing the scar of
the Army shooting, Arthur has now developed two successful restaurants
and is married with four children. All of this stems from the injury from
160 M. MCATEER

Army gunfire that left him hospitalized for a year and the large finan-
cial compensation that he received as a result. Tommy has moved from
being a teenage communist to a twenty-something socialist crusty, wear-
ing dreadlocks, woolly second-hand clothes and running a little line in
marijuana.
The most significant figure in the sequel is Sandra who moved to Lon-
don after Maureen’s death to forego a life of joyriding for chauffeuring,
some hairdressing and ‘the night job’: a stand-up comedian.63 Return-
ing to Belfast and meeting Arthur after eight years, Sandra maintains a
dialogue with the ghost of Maureen throughout the play. Reid’s sequel
succeeds in achieving a sense of the inevitable absurdity of Belfast’s mod-
ernization as moves towards a more normalized society are well underway
in the 1990s. The old mill factory from the 1930s that housed the youth
training programme in the 1980s is now a shopping centre, with a statue
of mill-worker mother and child at its centre, positioned in a fountain
that is surrounded by plants designed to create a rainbow effect.64 The
ghost of Maureen herself appears in the play as a village-green replica of
the young woman represented in the statue, dressed as she is as ‘a roman-
tic servant girl’.65 Her costume is sharply anachronistic against the latest
fashions worn by other characters in the play. Rather than convey the
impression of Maureen’s presence as absurd, however, it has the effect
of bringing into sharp relief the absurdity of those lives that go on after
her death and the absurd forms that society takes as it fashions its past in
accordance with a desire to leave it behind.
In this aspect Clowns is alert to Aaron Kelly’s observation of how the
Northern Ireland peace process, initiated in the mid-1990s, has come to
replicate the circularity of the political conflict that it was created to end.
Drawing on the work of Richard Kirkland, Kelly notes how, ‘as its own
self-fulfilling tautology’, the Troubles perpetuated itself through a sense
of the inevitable recurrence of the violence by which it was defined, how-
ever incomprehensible or anachronistic this violence appeared.66 Laura
Pelaschiar’s discussion of the circular form evident in fiction that addresses
the Troubles supports this view. Commenting on the pervasiveness of cir-
cular movement in modern Irish literature from Joyce and Yeats to Beck-
ett and Heaney, Pelaschiar argues that the proliferation of the thriller form
in fiction of the Troubles is symptomatic of the fatalism that Kelly iden-
tifies.67 Kelly argues that even as it has succeeded in bringing large-scale
paramilitary violence to an end and in demilitarizing Northern Irish terri-
tory, the peace process replicates the sense of fatalism during the Troubles.
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 161

In the social consensus that is manufactured through finance capital and

pervasive consumerism, Kelly identifies the basis of the Northern Ireland
peace process as self-perpetuating: ‘there is a Peace Process because there
is a Peace Process’.68
A work that has not received critical evaluation in this respect, Reid’s
Clowns is alert to this contradiction at the very earliest stage of the peace
process in the mid-1990s. The ghost of Maureen is the ultimate leftover
in Clowns, a figure who not alone refuses to go silent as the peace process
begins to take hold, but who can become anything that Sandra wants her
to be because she is the creation of Sandra’s mind: a figure of creative sur-
plus. As the voice that never leaves Sandra during her years in London,
Maureen’s ghost takes Sandra over eventually, her spirit prompting her to
take to the stage for the first time and perform a comedy act. Comedy may
be defeat in Clowns (as Adorno notes of Beckett, the jokes of damaged
people are themselves damaged) but Maureen in death lives through San-
dra, who would be dead without her.69 The jokes of Clowns are Northern
Ireland’s cultural rubbish, the discarded refuse of a traumatic collision of
human beings perceived as social waste with the order of state author-
ity producing its own bureaucratic waste of resources through the very
strategies by which it attempts to make such people socially hygienic. The
state’s complex network of social workers and social welfare departments
is itself parasitic upon the social class of unemployed car-thieves and dope-
pedlars that are perceived as social parasites. However tasteless this may
be as a joke, it is Maureen who has the last laugh.
In Patterson’s Burning Your Own and the dramas of Reid, the politi-
cal character of violence in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s bears a
direct relation to the idea of excess in the form of the parasite, literal and
social. Both novelist and dramatist remove violence from legitimation,
since legitimacy itself cannot bear the subversive power of the parasite as
that which is both there and not there. In these circumstances, the vio-
lence of paramilitaries and of state security forces is not only without logic,
it inevitably misses its target. This is not just in terms of mistaken identity
or random murder during the Northern Irish conflict—killings that had
the effect of weakening general popular or official state support for what-
ever organization, legal or banned, to which the perpetrators were affili-
ated. It reaches more deeply into the ontological insight that the figure of
the parasite produces; the Other always exceeds the totality of an order,
such that the Other in itself cannot be killed. In relation to Northern Irish
history, an order of this kind has taken two opposing forms of totality: a
162 M. MCATEER

united All-Ireland Republic versus a permanent settlement of Northern

Ireland as part of the United Kingdom.
Reflecting on the distinction that Levinas draws between totality and
infinity, Derrida observes how the immediate encounter with another in
the form of the human face ‘as speech and glance’ takes place not in the
world, precisely because the face of the other ‘exceeds the totality’: ‘In a
sense murder is always directed against the face, but thereby always misses
it’.70 Francy Hagan may ‘REST IN PIECES’ at the end of Burning Your
Own, but eradicating him and his dump at the end of the novel only
opens the way for a level of violence in the years after 1969 that will
trap Larkview estate and its residents for decades, just at the historical
moment in which it promises to develop as a new suburban community.
Particularly in the burning of the rats on the dump, the reader encounters
a violent enforcement of social hygiene that ultimately damages the very
people whose health is supposed to be protected as a result.71
Drawing on Hans Zinsser’s 1935 work, Rats, Lice and History, Maud
Ellmann asserts that rats ‘congregate wherever there is garbage; that is,
wherever there are people’.72 Exterminate the rats and you exterminate
the people. From this perspective, the burning of the dump and all the
rats in it at the end of Burning Your Own carries a strong echo of the
speaking voice in Beckett’s The Unnamabl e when it declares that a rat
could not survive even for a second in the conditions in which Worm
exists.73 Mary Bryden points out that this is ‘an extreme statement about
its bleakness’.74 Rather than a mark of hygiene, the complete absence of
rats implies an environment on the edge of human extinction, rats almost
always found living in proximity to human beings. The death of Maureen
at the end of Joyriders marks the failure of the British Government to
achieve a measure of consensus in a working-class area of 1980s Belfast
that would divest the Provisional IRA of its claim to be the only legitimate
military force in a region of Ireland that it regarded as part of a sovereign
independent Irish nation, but denied that political recognition. In their
essential form as leftovers, Francy and Maureen express the measureless
nature of the pure surplus that cannot be apprehended in killing them.
Just as Francy cannot ‘get a hold’ of the rats around him, no one can ‘get
a hold’ of Francy: neither his mother, nor his friend Mal, nor the bin-
collectors, nor the teenage gang of Larkview. It is likewise with Maureen:
in death she escapes the environment that traps her and sets it to ridicule
through her friend Sandra, thereby exceeding the putative normality of
the present as an irritatingly persistent voice from the past.75
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 163

Notes
1. Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008),
65; Glenn Patterson, Burning Your Own (London: Chatto & Windus,
1988), 3.
2. Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchainé, Les Paralipoménes d’Ubu, Ques-
tions de Théatre, Les Minutes de Sable Mémorial, César-Antechrist, Poésies,
l’Autre Alceste (Lausanne: Éditions du Grand-Chêne, 1948), 38–40.
3. Patterson, Burning Your Own, 61.
4. In this respect, the novel shows the importance for Patterson of C. E.
B. Brett’s Buildings of Belfast 1700–1914, first published in 1967, with
a new editing appearing in 1985, over 15 years into Troubles. North-
ern Ireland’s leading architectural historian and one-time chairman of the
Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), Brett was a mixture of
a conservationist and a social planner. Burning Your Own captures this
combination through its location within the ambiguous terrain between
a new building development and the fields surrounding it. For an eval-
uation of Brett’s work that successfully manages to avoid any reference
to the controversies surrounding NIHE housing allocation policies in the
1960s (policies that influenced the foundation of the Northern Ireland
Civil Rights Movement), see, Richard Kirkland, ‘Ballygawley, Ballylynn,
Belfast: Writing About Modernity and Settlement in Northern Ireland’,
The Irish Review, 40/41 (2009), 18–32 (25–30).
5. Patterson, Burning Your Own, 257–58.
6. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 95–96.
7. Maud Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf,
James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 15.
8. Patterson, Burning Your Own, 258.
9. Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry (London: Vintage, 2000), 66–67.
10. Patterson, Burning Your Own, 261.
11. Ibid., 34–36.
12. Ibid., 289.
13. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , the Unnamable (London: Calder
Publications, 1959), 36.
14. Ibid., 141.
15. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 294, 327.
16. Quoted in, Brian Dooley, Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in
Northern Ireland and Black America (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 104.
164 M. MCATEER

17. Patterson, Burning Your Own, 291.

18. Ibid., 297.
19. R. F. Foster, ‘Roddy and the Ragged-Trousered Revolutionary’, The
Guardian, August 29, 1999: 3.
20. Christina Reid, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama, 1997), 154.
21. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , the Unnamable, 8, 16.
22. Ibid., 151.
23. Ibid., 134.
24. Ibid., 134.
25. Emilie Morin, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 61–62.
26. Patrick Bixby detects links to a traditional Irish sense of place in the name
‘Bally’, but also its anglicized form (of ‘baile’) as ‘an imperial imposition
extending to the very names of Irish territories’. Indeed, Bixby observes
excess even in the name of Molloy’s home that shows how Beckett’s
language either refuses or cannot recover an original sense of place but
instead produces ‘an excess of alternatives and contradictions’ in the sig-
nifications that ‘Bally’ carries. Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 178.
27. Adam Winstanley,‘“GRÂCE AUX EXCRÊMENTS DES CITOYENS”:
Beckett, Swift and the Coprophagic Economy of Ballyba’, Samuel Beckett
Today / Aujourd’hui: Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and
L’Innommable / The Unnamable, 26/1 (2014), 91–105 (96–97).
28. H. F. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries or a Permanent Agriculture in
China, Korea and Japan (Madison, WI: Mrs. H. F. King, 1911), 193.
29. Elizabeth J. Carlton, Yang Lui, Bo Zhong, Alan Hubbard and Robert
C. Spear, ‘Associations Between Schistosomiasis and the Use of Human
Waste as an Agricultural Fertilizer in China’, PLOS: Neglected Tropi-
cal Diseases, 9/1 (2015): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
PMC4295866/. For further recent discussion of the topic of the use
of human waste in agriculture, see, Natasha Geiling, ‘The Stink About
Human Poop as Fertilizer’, Modern Farmer, July 17, 2014: https://
modernfarmer.com/2014/07/stink-human-poop-fertilizer/; Adrian Hig-
gins, ‘Humans Have Been Using Their Waste as Fertilizer for Centuries.
Now It Might Be Marketable’, The Washington Post, August 23, 2017.
In his famous study of 1978, Histoire de la merde (History of Shit ),
Dominique Laporte draws attention to an edict issued by King François I
of France in November 1539 as a point of origin for a discourse of hygiene
concerning the disposal of excrement (human and animal) as well as offal
in Paris. History of Shit (1978), trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-
Khoury (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 3–7.
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 165

30. Claire Wills discusses at length the Irish Free State interactions with and
resistance to Britain at social and political levels during the Second World
War. That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Sec-
ond World War (London: Faber, 2007).
31. Reid, Plays, 117.
32. Ibid., 119.
33. Ibid., 122.
34. Ibid., 147.
35. Ibid., 165.
36. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber,
2007), 336.
37. Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifice (New York: Yale University Press, 2018),
43.
38. Reid, Plays, 144.
39. Ibid., 170.
40. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Zone Books, 1991), 59.
41. See Catherine Shannon’s seminal study of Balfour’s Irish policy. Arthur J.
Balfour and Ireland: 1874–1922 (Washington, DC: The Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1988), 33–135.
42. Reid, Plays, 114.
43. Ibid., 170.
44. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008), 168.
45. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Marcus Bullock and Michael
W. Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926
(Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996),
282.
46. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed. (London:
Papermac, 1991), 237.
47. Ibid., 288.
48. Joanna Luft, ‘Brechtian Gestus and the Politics of Tea in Christina Reid’s
Tea in a China Cup’, Modern Drama, 42/2 (1999), 214–22 (216).
49. Ronan McDonald, Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 90.
50. Ibid., 98.
51. Reid, Plays, 141.
52. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme (Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 99.
53. Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, 278.
54. Reid, Plays, 297.
55. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 151.
166 M. MCATEER

56. Driving stolen cars just for the fun of it, Johnnie is classifiable as an ‘Or-
dinary Decent Criminal’ as the Northern Irish prison system would have
viewed it, particularly in the aftermath of the IRA/INLA hunger-strikes
of 1981. For further discussion of the category ‘Ordinary Decent Crim-
inal’ in Northern Ireland, see Adrian Guelke, Politics in Deeply Divided
Societies (London: Polity Press, 2012), Part 4; Allen Feldman, Formations
of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern
Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 149.
57. Tudor Balinisteanu, Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats: Sub-
jective Identity and Anarcho-Syndicalist Traditions (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 29.
58. Reid, Plays, 100.
59. Ibid., 217.
60. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 164.
61. Balinisteanu, Violence, Narrative and Myth, 199.
62. Reid, Plays, 281.
63. Ibid., 300.
64. Ibid., 279.
65. Ibid., 285.
66. Aaron Kelly, ‘The Troubles with the Peace Process: Contemporary North-
ern Irish Culture’, The Irish Review, 40/41 (2009), 1–17 (1).
67. Laura Pelaschiar, ‘Terrorists and Freedom Fighters in Northern Irish Fic-
tion’, The Irish University Review, 40/41 (2009), 52–73 (53–54).
68. Kelly, ‘The Troubles’, 2. Kelly’s argument draws on Richard Kirkland’s
critique of what he names as bourgeois ideological forms in novels about
Northern Ireland from the mid-1990s. Richard Kirkland, Identity Parades:
Northern Irish Culture and Dissident Subjects (Liverpool: Liverpool Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 78–124.
69. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Brian O’Con-
nor, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 319–52 (335).
70. Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Alan Bass, trans., Writing
and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), 104.
71. The social entrapment of sectarian polarization has much to do with the
planning strategies (and concomitant state security/paramilitary strategies
of surveillance) upon which new estates like Larkview in Burning Your
Own are based. For an insightful discussion of this polarization in the
light of Michel Foucault’s idea of the carceral, see, Neil Alexander, ‘The
Carceral City and the City of Refuge: Belfast Fiction and Urban Form’,
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 33/2 (2007), 28–38.
72. Ellmann, The Nets of Modernism, 16.
73. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , the Unnamable, 374.
74. Mary Bryden, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (London: Macmillan,
1998), 132.
 7 TRASHING ULSTER: PATTERSON AND REID 167

75. In this respect Reid’s Clowns participates with Patterson’s Burning Your
Own in a Northern Irish process of memory narration that has a disrupted
relation to memorialization within Irish republican and British loyalist tra-
ditions of ritual commemoration in Ulster. Matthew McGuire probes this
feature in the Patterson novel that addresses it most directly: his 2005
novel, That Which Was. ‘The “Troubles” and Modern Memory: Remem-
bering and Forgetting in Glenn Patterson’s That Which Was ’, New Hiber-
nia Review, 19/1 (2015), 60–76.
 PART III

Mythic and Linguistic Excess

 CHAPTER 8

Mythic Excess: Finnegans Wake

Displacing Myth
Nietzsche presents an intimate relation between myth and excess in the
account of the festivals of Dionysus in ancient Greece, describing them
as ‘an extravagant lack of sexual discipline’ and occasions upon which
the ‘most savage beasts of nature were here unleashed, even that repel-
lent mixture of lust and cruelty that I have always held to be a “witches
brew”’.1 Later in The Birth of Tragedy he writes that ‘Dionysiac truth
takes over the whole sphere of myth as a symbolic expression of its own
insights, and gives it voice partly in the public cult of tragedy and partly
in the secret rites of the dramatic mysteries, but always in the old mythic
trappings’.2 In the later twentieth century, Edward Said observes how
Dionysus is directly connected to Asiatic origins in Euripides’s The Bac-
chae, ‘and with the strangely threatening excesses of Oriental mysteries’,
acquiring in this manner the aspect of danger upon which the ‘norm’ of
Greek—and European—measurement (most evident in the God Apollo)
is set in contrast.3 He emphasizes how the Oriental is presented in The
Bacchae as the other through the narrative control of the Athenian author.
The Oriental is excessive, not only in the sense of its role as a surplus to
a particular myth of European origins in ancient Athens, but also in the
sense of the Oriental as excessive by its very nature. In the different ways
in which they regard the festival of Dionysius, both Nietzsche and Said
indicate the relation of myth to excess rather than order.

© The Author(s) 2020 171

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_8
172 M. MCATEER

The political significance of myth as excess appears in Sorel’s Reflections

on Violence, a book in which myth is represented as infinite in nature.
Sorel describes the catastrophic moment of the general strike as a myth
precisely ‘on account of its character as infinity’, asserting that the most
advanced thought in his day emerges from a ‘torment of the infinite’.4
Sorel imagines the whole of society completely broken up in the general
strike, enabling a mythic form of heroism to emerge. He describes worker
violence in this situation of class war as heroic and suggests that even if the
only consequence of the idea of the general strike was to make socialism
more heroic in character, ‘it should on that account alone be looked upon
as having an incalculable value’.5
The political influence of myth arises in a marked fashion in Ireland at
the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.
During this period militant political groups grew in influence, leading to
the foundation of openly militant organizations, The Ulster Volunteers in
1912 and The Irish Volunteers in 1913. This formed the backdrop to the
rebellion for an independent Irish republic in 1916 as the First World War
raged, an event that would set in train a series of developments leading
to the outbreak of a guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland in 1919.6
In the field of literature and drama, works on Celtic mythology started to
proliferate in Ireland from the late 1880s to the 1910s. Of the vast body
of publications on the topic in this period, we can think of the following
works by way of example: Yeats’s long narrative poem, ‘The Wanderings
of Oisin’ of 1889; Standish O’Grady’s Finn and His Companions (1892),
The Coming of Cuchulain (1894), In the Gates of the North (1901); Lady
Gregory’s major compilations of Irish legend in Cuchulain of Muirthemne
(1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904); Eleanor Hull’s The Cuchulain
Saga in Irish Literature (1898); Yeats’s plays on the legend of Cuchulain
and the legend of Deirdre; George Russell’s (AE), J. M. Synge’s and Eva
Gore-Booth’s stage versions of the Deirdre legend.
From the beginning of this new movement in Irish literature, the
sheer abundance and fragmentary nature of the legends threatened to
overwhelm the modern-day authors who attempted to grant them nar-
rative coherence for modern readers. Writers like Yeats, O’Grady, Gre-
gory and Hull hoped that their works would lend Irish society a dignified
sense of its native cultural heritage. Nevertheless, the vast and scattered
nature of the old Irish myths opened the possibility for anarchical literary
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 173

treatment. This is evident strikingly in the use to which Celtic mythol-

ogy and folklore is put in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Considering the pres-
ence of Celtic mythology in Joyce’s monumental work of literary experi-
mentation, this excessive aspect of Celtic myth corresponds to a relation-
ship between mythic totality and excess that Markus Gabriel and Slavoj
Žižek describe as follows: ‘The struggle of the centre of power against the
marginal excesses threatening its stability cannot ever obfuscate the fact
that, once we accomplish a parallactic shift of our view, that the original
excess is that of the central One itself’.7 The ‘narrative excess’ that Mar-
got Norris observes in the multiple plots of Finnegans Wake is actually
symptomatic of this original excess of narrative in the earliest known Irish
myths.8
This excess is evident in Standish O’Grady’s mythological narrative
History of Ireland (1878, 1880, 1881), despite O’Grady’s attempt to
impose epic order on his materials, mostly taken from Eugene O’Curry’s
antiquarian Lectures on Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History
(1861).9 In keeping with a tradition dating back to Leobar Gabala (The
Book of Invasions ) that connected the earliest inhabitants of Ireland to the
Scythian tribes of Phoenicia, O’Grady traces the noble elements that he
distinguishes in Irish legends to what he sees as the mixture of Basque
and Celtic races in the island’s early inhabitants. This derives from his
claim that ‘it was with the Mediterranean and Semitic peoples that civ-
ilizations have had their origin’.10 Seeking to bring forth the earliest
phases of Irish history out of which the mythology arose, he is forced to
admit that there is not a single fact that was ‘not mist […] neither water
nor mire’.11 T. W. Rolleston travels even further in drawing connections
to inhabitants of Ireland from the megalithic era. In a work first published
in 1911, Rolleston argues that the stone carvings on the megalithic burial
site at Newgrange in Ireland were symbols corresponding with those
identified in the tumulus of Locmariaker in Brittany, rock-sculptures in
Hallande and Scania, Sweden, and hieroglyphic symbols as they appear on
painted and sculptured Egyptian sarcophagi held at the British Museum.
In each instance, Rolleston identifies the repetition of the boat and sun-
disk symbol representing a burial site as the passage of the spirit of the
dead to another world.12 By this account, the earliest inhabitants of Ire-
land had some form of contact with the civilization of ancient Egypt.
Particularly in this Egyptian association that he makes with Irish antiq-
uity in Celtic Myths and Legends, Rolleston’s work is a precedent for the
174 M. MCATEER

Egyptian The Book of the Dead as an influence on the night-time setting

of Finnegans Wake, an influence that John Bishop has traced.13
In their writings on Irish mythology and antiquity, therefore, O’Grady
and Rolleston exceed the localizable point of origin for Irish civilization
that their revival of interest in Irish mythology might identify for Ire-
land in modern times. One of Joyce’s most brilliant puns in Finnegans
Wake is alert to this paradox of Celtic origin in excess of itself: ‘Come
big to Iran’.14 The line takes its cue from Claribel’s (Charlotte Alington
Barnard) popular 1868 song, ‘Come Back to Eirinn’ that had become
part of the Irish folk-music repertoire by the time of the Irish Revival.
Associating ‘Eirinn’ phonetically with Iran, the phrase implies that the
call to the exile in Claribel’s song—to return from England to the Irish
homeland—was actually a call to return to a people whose ancestral ori-
gins lay in Persia. ‘Come Back’ thereby inflates to ‘Come big’; a return
westward from England to Ireland that in turn involves a much vaster
journey eastward to Irish origins in Persian antiquity.15 In this way, Ire-
land is not only Orientalized in the manner that Joseph Lennon lays out
in Irish Orientalism. Through the association that Joyce makes, Ireland
exceeds itself through its mythological sources, bringing not the order of
a recovered tradition but the anarchy of dislocation (travelling west from
England in Claribel’s ballad to discover a native civilization with origins
in the Persian east). Joyce expresses this excess in a work that acquires
mythical stature not in spite of the vast, scattered, fragmented state of
Irish mythology, but because of it. ‘Come big to Iran’ names an impor-
tant intersection in Finnegans Wake between the eastern provenance of
Dionysian myth that Said identifies in Orientalism and Sorel’s anarchist
concept of the general strike in terms of myth.16
Joyce’s first explicit association of Ireland with the Orient appears in
a lecture that he delivered in Trieste in Italian to The Italian Irredentist
Movement in April 1907, entitled ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’.
This is less than a year after the first publication of Sorel’s Reflections on
Violence in the journal Mouvement socialiste, and less than a year before
its appearance in book form in 1908. In his talk, Joyce declares that the
Irish language is as different from English as the language spoken in Rome
differs from that spoken in Tehran, capital of Iran. He describes the Irish
language as Oriental in origin, mentioning the claims of philologists that
it could be traced back to the Phoenicians, ‘the originators of trade and
navigation, according to historians’.17
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 175

Elizabeth Butler Cullingford suggests that Joyce may have been unusu-
ally positive about the Irish language in this instance because it was
addressed to a group of Italian irredentists in Trieste, the implication
being that Joyce’s positive view of Irish culture in the face of English
domination could be regarded by the audience as a form of support
for Italian nationalist protests against Austro-Hungarian imperial domina-
tion. Cullingford is certainly correct in arguing that Joyce’s assertion of
Phoenician-Semitic and Egyptian-African origins for the Irish language,
however dubious, was a counterpoint to his well-known dislike of Irish
nationalist insularity. It was also a sign of his instinctive aversion to the
political presumptions of pro-British unionism in Ireland, such as we
encounter in the exchange between Stephen Dedalus and Mr. Deasy in
the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses.18 However, Rome could not simply be
equated with Viennese imperial power for an Italian nationalist audience
in Trieste 1907, given their aspiration to be part of a united Italy. Neither
could the connection that Joyce draws between Irish and Arabic civiliza-
tion be regarded somehow as a model of cultural association that the irre-
dentists in Trieste could embrace. As John McCourt shows, Joyce gave
the lecture upon the invitation of Attilio Tamaro, one of his former stu-
dents and a strident irredentist. McCourt notes that Tamaro criticized the
influence of Germans, Illyrians, Greeks and Jews in Trieste. Tamaro also
accused Austria of dumping Slavic people into the city in order to weaken
Italian national sentiment there.19 McCourt regards the legitimacy that
Joyce grants Irish rebellion against foreign domination at the end of ‘Ire-
land: Island of Saints and Sages’ as consistent with Tamaro’s position. The
difficulty with this, however, is that Joyce draws on a transnational notion
of Irish origins in Persia to lend justification to the country’s right to
enjoy sovereign national independence. This transnational aspect would
not have sat comfortably with Tamaro in his dislike of eastern, Slavic influ-
ences in Trieste.

Infinite Doubling
Joyce’s persistent invention of neologisms throughout Finnegans Wake
is probably the most radical form of European avant-garde experiment in
writing prior to the Second World War, at times appearing to venture into
a type of automatic writing with which André Breton and the Paris sur-
realist circle experimented in the 1920s.20 Much of it makes sense when
considered against the backdrop of the Celtic mythology and folklore that
176 M. MCATEER

was given a new lease of life in the Irish Revival of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. Aspiring not only to awaken knowledge of Irish
legend, language and folklore among English readers, but also among
educated Irish people of Joyce’s youth, the Irish Revival was informed by
a tension between competing perspectives on the country’s oldest legends
and folk beliefs.
Early in the text of Finnegans Wake (or late, if we accept it as a literary
work that begins at the end), Joyce’s alertness to this tension is shown in
an utterance made upon arriving in Dublin: ‘So This Is Dyoublong?’21
Roger McHugh and Patrick O’Neill relate this line to Michael J. Mac-
Manus’s 1927 work, So This Is Dublin, a comic portrayal of the city and of
tourists’ views of it, in keeping with Margot Norris’s sense that the open-
ing of Finnegans Wake ‘sounds so like the narration of a tour guide’.22
The phrase, however, involves more than simply a parody of MacManus’s
book. Deriving the neologism in this instance from the sound corre-
spondence of ‘Dublin’ with the phrase ‘do you belong’ and the word
‘doubling’, Joyce achieves three things at once. He acknowledges the
insider/outsider opposition that was postulated within the reception of
Irish mythology during the Revival as a mode of ordering and distin-
guishing Irish culture. This is presented as a question of whether or not
the speaker belongs in Dublin. He transcends this opposition by eradicat-
ing the semantic coherence of the terms ‘Dublin’ and ‘do you belong’ in
the act of emphasizing the sound association between them so intensely as
to create a new word independent of both. Through a third sound asso-
ciation, ‘doubling’, this new word becomes semantically endless: ‘Dyoub-
long’ doubles itself to infinity, in absolute excess of the order of belonging
that the mythology disseminated in the literature and drama of the Irish
Revival was to supposed to guarantee. It confirms Peter Mahon’s asser-
tion that Finnegans Wake is preoccupied with the motif of doubling from
the very first page.23
The infinite dimension that Joyce unlocks at this point in Finnegans
Wake is achieved linguistically, but it is first and foremost a question of
counting: of who is to be counted in (belonging) and of the double as
the primacy of two. ‘Dyoublong’ enacts the structure of a mathematical
set as Badiou identifies it in his consideration of the absolute excess of the
members of a numerical set over the set itself, a situation that opens the
possibility for a primordial event to occur (the foundation of Dublin with
the first arrival of the Norsemen may be considered such a moment of his-
torical origin). At stake in this is the issue of belonging. One of the most
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 177

important assertions in Badiou’s work is his claim that it is never possible

for all terms included in a set that orders a given situation numerically
to actually belong to that situation. Two counts of all the members of
the set are required for the set-structure of the situation in question to
be properly regarded as singular in nature. Of the second count, Badiou
asserts that ‘every count-as-one be doubled by a count of the count, that
every structure call upon a metastructure’.24 This opens a gap within the
structure of any situation that is singular in nature (in appearing as a sin-
gle numerical set). Badiou proves that it is impossible to measure how far
the number of terms in the first count of a set exceeds that of the second
verifying count of that same set. This is because the second count must
include the set of all the subsets of the original set through which a sit-
uation is determined as singular: ‘the ‘passage’ to the set of subsets is an
operation in absolute excess of the situation itself’.25
Considered in these terms, we see ‘Dyoublong’ as naming a particular
situation as a single set; and the treatment of Irish mythological elements
in Finnegans Wake as a literary evocation of its infinite multitude in the
singularity of this situation. Not counted in ‘Dublin’—as in not belonging
to the place—the formulation is yet included in a Dublin that is thereby
transformed into a place called ‘Dyoublong’. This is achieved through a
second count (Badiou’s ‘counting of the count’) that exceeds the singu-
larity of the first count to an infinite degree, expressed in Joyce’s term
through the perpetual doubling of ‘Dyoublong’ deriving from the sound
association between the two words, ‘Dublin’ and ‘belong’. In this way,
Finnegans Wake is a literary work that is also a singular event, invoking
an idea of the eternal that much Irish literature and drama projected from
the late nineteenth century.
Early into the first volume of History of Ireland from 1878, O’Grady
is very explicit about this eternal character of the Revival (with its Pen-
tecostal undertone) that he seeks, directly invoking the spirits of ancient
Irish bards to guide him in writing down the old legends:

Spirits of the ancient bards, my ancestors, and ye sacred influences that

haunt for ever the soil and air of my country, nameless now and unwor-
shipped, but strong and eternal, be with me and befriend, that in circles
worthy so gloriously singing their praise upon whom nations looked back
as upon their first and best, with a flight unfailing I may rise to regions
where no wing of laborious ollav or chanting shanachie ever yet fanned
that thinner air.26
178 M. MCATEER

The image of flight to the highest regions of narrative creation sharply

anticipates the flight to the highest realm of literary imagination for which
Stephen Dedalus prepares at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. That Stephen looks to the Gods of ancient Greece rather
than to those of ancient Ireland ought not to weaken the significance of
the precedent. O’Grady, after all, first approaches Irish mythology as a
Trinity College graduate (and gold medal winner) in Classics.

Speaking Forover
While acknowledging the precedent of O’Grady, still Joyce breaks the
petrification of the eternal ideal in Finnegans Wake, a malaise that the
Irish Revival threatened to spread in Irish culture through the influence
of its literature at the start of the twentieth century. The most well-known
instance was the 1902 performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan, a play in
which the spirit of ancient Ireland, in the form of a haggard old woman, is
revived through a young man falling into a trance under her gaze, thereby
triggering her transformation into a young girl as he runs offstage to
join the French soldiers who have landed on the west coast of Ireland in
support of a rebellion for a sovereign Irish Republic. At first hesitating
between the old woman’s command and the imploration of his bride-to-
be, Delia, to stay and marry her, Michael is prompted to leave Delia upon
the following utterance of the old woman:

They shall be speaking for ever,

The people shall hear them for ever.27

These lines recall the ‘sacred influences’ that O’Grady hoped to revive,
but in the Yeats/Gregory play they are manifested in a specifically mili-
tant aspect. Apprehending the eternal aspect of Cathleen ni Houlihan’s
call to heroic struggle and sacrifice, Finnegans Wake (a work that is itself
speaking forever) transforms it into boundless, riotous motion: ‘They will
be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pre-
tumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves’.28 Thus
the seemingly eternal struggle for Irish political freedom is transformed
through linguistic excess. The Liffey river of Anna Livia displaces those
Irish rebels struggling forever with voyagers ‘tuggling foriver’, tugging
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 179

the ropes of the boats that had arrived at the mouth of Dublin’s river Lif-
fey from the Viking age and beyond. ‘Listening for ollamhs’ and ‘liken-
ing for ollamhs’: for the ancient wisdom of those who were once bards,
judges and chroniclers of history. This is the wisdom that the people will
hear through the heroic deeds of those who give themselves over to the
cause of Ireland’s freedom in Cathleen ni Houlihan. In Finnegans Wake
this wisdom becomes ‘lichening for allofs’, the lichen a plant grown from
the mix of algae and fungus that flourishes by wet banks of Dublin’s river
Liffey.29 The echo of another utterance (Ireland is described as ‘Echoland’
in Finnegans Wake) of the old woman in Cathleen ni Houlihan—‘They
shall be remembered for ever’—is audible: ‘They will be pretumbling
forover’. Joyce substitutes the fixity of a glorious commemoration of dead
heroes for the anarchy of figures perpetually tumbling over one another.
This transition from the eternity of immortalization in Cathleen ni Houli-
han to the endless motion of Finnegans Wake is encapsulated in the sub-
sequent phrase: ‘The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves’. The harp-
sichord, upon which ollamhs once sung the glories of Gods and heroes
in ancient Ireland in O’Grady’s History of Ireland, produces not the har-
monics of sweet music but polyphonic discord. This is stressed through
the doubling in operation within the very word itself, phonically signalling
its own discord by conflating ‘this chord’ and ‘discord’ in the form of
‘dischord’. So doing, Joyce involves the specific west-of-Ireland dialect
of Hiberno-English (countering the polished metre of Yeats’s lines in the
original Cathleen ni Houlihan) as a testimony to the discordance through
which he articulates the multitudinous excess of Celtic mythology.
In this manoeuvre, Joyce is not simply discarding an ancient Irish
sovereignty myth as the tattered rags of a ‘Sean Bhean Bhocht’ [Poor
Old Woman]. In creating an utterly new form of language and narra-
tive in Finnegans Wake, he asserts his fidelity to the eternity of myth,
but released from the petrification of commemorative honour. Badiou
describes a switch of this nature as that of ‘the Platonic myth, in reverse’.
He takes as an example of this the relation of Picasso’s geometric, stylized
horse-figures in works from the 1940s to the drawings of horses from
almost 30,000 years earlier that were discovered in 1994 in Chauvet-
Pont-d’Arc cave in France, over twenty years after Picasso’s death in
1973.30 Rather than follow Plato in regarding this as an example of dif-
ferent material images reflecting the ideal form (in this case, that of horse-
ness), Badiou asserts that both the cave drawings and the cubist artworks
are singular moments of radically new representation completely removed
180 M. MCATEER

from one another. In their uniqueness and their originality, nonetheless,

they both produce the idea of a horse that persists through the course
of time. Badiou considers the lines in the cave drawings and in Picasso’s
equine paintings from 1945 as signifying the eternity of an invariant ele-
ment within both works. These lines mark a point of separation within
the images themselves: between the specific figures presented in the cave
drawings and the cubist paintings, and the persistent idea that these fig-
ures trigger across time.31
In taking as his example the figure of the horse, Badiou’s argument
speaks also to a specific feature of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Tracing lines
of equine thematic continuity from Ulysses , Vincent Cheng discusses the
horse of King William of Orange in the Museyroom passage of Finnegans
Wake. As Cheng points out, the ‘authorized, essential horseness’ of the
symbolic white horse upon which King Billy is customarily depicted as
subject to mockery in the pun ‘his big white harse’.32 Cheng perceptively
regards the order of imperial authority (also connected to the horse of
the Duke of Wellington in the passage) undermined by the conflation
of ‘horse’ with ‘arse’ in the pun. However, there is an equally signifi-
cant meaning in Joyce’s pun: King Billy’s ‘harse’ as a funeral ‘hearse’ or
his horse as the means of conveying his dead body at his funeral. Par-
ticularly in this aspect, the pun follows the line that Badiou observes by
granting a measure of immortality to the figure of King Billy’s horse,
precisely through the linguistic excess of the pun. The white horse as
‘hearse’ prompts the thought of the last white horses of the apocalypse
as described in chapter 6, line 2, and chapter 19, line 11 in the Book of
Revelation.33
Badiou’s notion of eternity appearing in specific occurrences of new
forms of representation, then, is one that involves an indiscernible point
of separation within such representations between the image that is pre-
sented and the idea that this presentation triggers. This dimension of
excess in the mythic aspect of Finnegans Wake appears in the persistence
of a linguistic surplus within and beyond the polylinguistic forms that
Joyce employs to break up the coherence of the various languages from
which he derives his neologisms. In Chapter Two, for example, H. C.
Earwicker is described as having ‘sapt in careful convertedness a musaic
dispensation about his hearthstone, if you please, (Irish saliva, mawshe dho
hole)’.34 The term ‘sapt’ combines that of ‘sat’ and ‘sept’, the medieval
term for a clan that appears frequently in O’Grady’s History of Ireland. It
also implies ‘spat’, given the occurrence of the phrase ‘Irish saliva’ at the
end of the sentence. The allusion to ancient Irish civilization is evident
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 181

here, following the comic reference some lines earlier to the ‘twattering
of bards in the twitterlitter between Druidia and the Deepsleep sea’. Most
significant, however, is the Irish translation of the phrase ‘with your per-
mission’, that is given in the passage. The precise translation is ‘más é
do thoil é’, whereas Joyce spells it here according to English-language
pronunciation. The practice of spelling Irish words in English-language
literature according to their pronunciation (for most readers who were
unable to read Irish) was widespread during the Irish Revival. This led
to extensive variations of the spelling of names throughout the literature.
In the present case, Joyce appears to ridicule Irish as a bucolic peasant
language through the guttural nature of many of its sounds that literally
generate saliva in the course of their articulation, and through the pun
on the Irish ‘thoil’ as ‘hole’. The phrase ‘Irish saliva’ recalls the Citizen
from Ulysses , the boorish (and pro-Boer) character who uses the Irish lan-
guage most profusely and the one who spits from his gullet in response
to Leopold Bloom’s declaration that Ireland was his nation.35
Yet the Irish-language phrase—mangled in its spelling to facilitate pro-
nunciation in English—is part of the writing process through which Joyce
breaks open the phonetic and the graphic orders of literary English. Far
removed in time and place from a world that pre-dated the emergence
of the English language, the fragmented remnant of Irish in ‘mawshe go
dho hole’ names Badiou’s indiscernible point of separation in Finnegans
Wake. The meaning of the Irish ‘más é do thoil é’ is ‘with your permis-
sion’ (pertinent to a work of which it can be said that all is permitted syn-
tactically). Meshing Irish and English languages together, Joyce’s phrase,
‘mashe dho hole’ exceeds the order both of Irish-language and English-
language spelling and pronunciation. In its uniqueness and originality, it
evokes the idea of licence that is eternally recurrent throughout Finnegans
Wake. The word ‘hole’ at the end of the phrase is not just a phonetic
spelling of the Irish ‘thoil’: it also anticipates another phrase that occurs
during a conversation much later in Finnegans Wake: the ‘Hole affair’, an
obvious pun on the English phrase, the ‘whole affair’.36 Commenting on
this phrase as an indication of nocturnal obscurity throughout Finnegans
Wake, John Bishop makes the important, if obvious, point that a hole
‘unlike a “whole,” has no content’.37 As with the hole in the story of
the dead dog that marks a point of connection between Beckett’s Molloy
and Patterson’s Burning Your Own that I address in Chapter 7, ‘Trash-
ing Ulster: Patterson and Reid’, so this ‘hole’ in Finnegans Wake also
demonstrates the correspondence of the works’ linguistic excess with the
182 M. MCATEER

thought of Badiou. As noted in Chapter 7, Badiou understands excess as

‘an unreasonable hole in the tissue of language’ and a truth as ‘that which
makes a hole in a knowledge’.38 Or as Joyce puts it at different points of
Finnegans Wake: ‘a hole in the ballad’; ‘a hole in his tale’; ‘the hole in
the year’.39 There is a whole lot of ‘hole’ in this great Wake of literature.
Joyce concludes one dense passage as follows in Chapter III of Part I,
a paragraph packed with fragments from a wide variety of languages
(including Dutch, Chinese, Spanish and Romanian): ‘Kocshis, szabad?
Mercy, and you? Gomagh, thak’.40 Drawn from Hungarian, French, Irish,
Danish and English, this momentary dialogue can be translated into con-
ventional English as follows: ‘Driver, free? Thank you, and you? Good,
thanks’. This is a brief exchange between a person coming out of Casacon-
cordia hotel and a coachman. Its reconstruction in conventional English
indicates its semantic coherence despite being an assemblage of phrase-
fragments from different languages. In this sense, the dialogue is just
one instance of what Derek Attridge observes about Finnegans Wake as a
whole. Appearing to readers as a ‘cacophony of different languages […]
in a confusion of noises’, the work may yet be regarded as a kind of ‘to-
tal unification’ that challenges readers still locked in ‘monoglot cultural
prisons’.41
On a more mundane level, the dialogue reflects the fact that coachmen
and hotel staff in Trieste during the years that Joyce lived there would
have at least scatterings of phrases from the major European languages.
After returning to Trieste in 1907 following an unhappy time working in
Rome, Joyce formed a literary friendship with Ettore Schmitz, who went
under the pseudonym Italo Svevo. John McCourt observes that Svevo was
‘Italian in language and politics, Austrian by citizenship, Austro-German
by ancestry and education, Jewish by religion—in short a not untyp-
ical personification of Triestine hybridity’.42 The moment of dialogue
switches on the witty response of the coachman to the question addressed
in the Hungarian language. McCourt points out that Joyce came to know
several Hungarians in Trieste, including the President of ‘The Magyar Cir-
cle’ (‘Il Circolo dei Magiari’) in the city, as well as Teodora Mayer, the
founder and owner of the Italian irredentist nationalist newspapers in the
city, opposed to Austrian rule.43 In the dialogue, the coachman deliber-
ately takes up the meaning of ‘free’ (szabad) in the question addressed to
him as referring not to his coach but to himself: whether he, the coach-
man, is a free person. The coachman’s interrogative reply subverts his
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 183

position as service-provider in relation to the speaker. ‘Mercy, and you?’

can be translated as ‘thank you [yes, I am free]; and you [are you free]?’
The witty subversion of relations between customer and coachman
magnifies this brief slice of dialogue: another instance of licence carry-
ing a mythical stature in Finnegans Wake. This is particularly evident
in the speaker’s response to the coachman’s deliberate confusion of the
initial question: ‘Gomagh, thak’. This can be translated as ‘good’ (‘go
maith’ from the Irish) and ‘thank you’ (from the Danish)’. As with Joyce’s
phrase, ‘mayshe go dho hole’, this dialogue articulates emancipation from
the order of historical languages by deriving a new syntax beyond each of
the individual languages upon which Finnegans Wake is based. In doing
so, however, Joyce’s text is alert to a series of associations that signal
historical freedom struggles. The Hungarian word for free—‘szabad’—
reminds the reader, through the Irish ‘Gomagh’, of Hungary’s political
freedom struggle as a model for Irish political freedom that Arthur Grif-
fith proposed in his 1904 pamphlet, The Resurrection of Hungary. In the
‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses , Martin Cunningham claims that Leopold
Bloom came up with the plans for ‘the Hungarian system’ that Griffith
put forward in his pamphlet.44 McCourt notes several other sources for
this association of Ireland and Hungary in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. These include a letter by Sir Richard Burton sent from
Trieste that was published in The Morning Post in 1886; a reference in
Joyce’s own Stephen Hero to Hungary as an example for Ireland to fol-
low; Isabel Burton’s doubly condescending description of the Hungarian
people as ‘Oriental Paddies’.45
Earlier in this section of Finnegans Wake which concludes with the
dialogue quoted above, the narrator conflates the party that Griffith
founded, Sinn Féin, with Finn MacCumhaill, the mythical Irish war-
rior: ‘seinn fionn, seinn fionn’s araun’, a gloss on ‘Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin
amhain’, a phrase uttered by the Citizen in Ulysses . Joyce’s significant
grasp of the Irish language here is conveyed through ‘araun’ as an angli-
cized conflation of ‘amhrain’ (song), ‘amhain’ (once) and ‘arán’ (bread).
This association directs the reader’s attention to the song that became the
Irish Free State’s national anthem in July 1926, ‘Amhrain na bhFiann’
(the song of the Fianna, or, the Song of the Army of Finn). It also iden-
tifies the Catholic religious ethos that influenced the nationalist move-
ment in Ireland so deeply. ‘Fionn’s araun’ alludes to the Irish word for
wine, ‘fíon’, and to the bread of ‘arán’: hence the wine and bread of the
Catholic sacrament of the eucharist.
184 M. MCATEER

Combining the Danish word ‘thak’ with Joyce’s version of ‘go maith’
in the line concluding this brief exchange between speaker and coach-
man, the fragment anticipates the works’ conclusion (that is also its re-
commencement): ‘Oyes! Oyeses! … Osthern Approaches’.46 ‘Osthern’
combines the German word for Easter—‘Ostern’—with the word used
for the Danish invaders of medieval Ireland: the Ostmen. These signa-
tures of the East, both in terms of the Christian resurrection narrative
and the invaders coming from the East, extends further eastwards in space
and backwards in time through the word ‘Oyeses’. Recalling the ‘yeses’
in Molly Bloom’s monologue through which Joyce concludes Ulysses ,
the word is also a gloss on ‘Osiris’—the buried and resurrected God of
ancient Egyptian mythology—to whom allusion is made on several occa-
sions throughout Finnegans Wake. Joyce combines Molly Bloom’s ‘o yes’
with ‘Osiris’ and the Scandinavian ‘Ostmen’ with the German word for
Easter. The new words violate the internal order of ancient historical nar-
ratives, whether that of Egypt, of Old Norse or of Judeo-Christian. Yet
through the multiplicity of associations that Joyce’s language prompts,
Finnegans Wake produces a form of mythology as excess in the bound-
lessness of its dimensions and the diversity of its narratives.

Counting Out
The relation between this mythic excess and numeric excess in Badiou’s
ontology appears strikingly on another occasion in the work. At the end
of Part I during the gossip between Dublin washerwomen, the following
is uttered: ‘Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plu-
rators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of
eure sanscreed into oure eryan’.47 The ‘thing’ was a Scandinavian name
for a parliament. Viking leaders (Northmen) once held such a ‘thing’ at
the site that is now St. Andrew’s Church on Suffolk street (‘southfolk’s
place’) in Dublin City Centre on the south side of the river Liffey. The
phrase ‘howmulty plurators’ glosses the phrase ‘how many’ in the sense
of ‘what multitude’: hence ‘howmulty’. The word ‘plurators’ performs a
complex semantic function that combines ontological, grammatical and
numerical meanings. The first concerns two questions in onto-theology:
how to get from the singularity of a universal creator to the multiplicity
of creation; and whether there can be more than one creator (a problem
persisting in Christian monotheism through the doctrine of the Trinity).
The second concerns multiplicity as a specifically linguistic issue through
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 185

the plural form in grammar. The third directs attention to the mathemat-
ical operation of counting as a foundation to the Trinity doctrine, both
as the ‘three-in-one’ and as a relation of finitude to infinity.
The creative originality of Joyce’s text is made apparent in this pas-
sage by this ability to present these universal categories of onto-theology,
grammar and mathematics in terms of a myth of origins with specific his-
torical and geographical characteristics. The Irish context is sounded in
the invented word ‘eachone’: manifestly referring to ‘each one’ but also
echoing the old Irish expression for ‘my sorrow’ that one finds in Irish
language poetry of lament, and that is taken up in chorus of wailing at
the wake for Conn the Shaughraun from Dion Boucicault’s The Shaugh-
raun, an important influence on the wake motif in Finnegans Wake. This
is the expression, ‘ochone’. ‘Laving us to sigh! Och hone’ is a phrase
twice recited by the chorus in Boucicault’s play as Conn quietly drinks
from Biddy’s jug of punch laid on for his own wake while he pretends
to be dead.48 ‘Ochón! A Dhonncha’ is the title of a poem by Pádraig
Ó hÉigeartaigh that was composed on the death of his son, a poem that
was published in Patrick Pearse’s newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis, in
1906.49 ‘Ochone’ also appears in the women’s ‘caoineadh’ (the tradi-
tional form of lamentation or ‘keening’ at Irish wakes), for the crucified
Christ near the end of Lady Gregory’s biblical drama, The Story Brought
by Brigit, performed at the Abbey Theatre on Easter Week, 1924. ‘Och,
och, agus ochone O!’ is thrice repeated here.50
Another phrase of interest in the washerwomen’s gossip in Finnegans
Wake is the following: ‘Latin me that, my trinity scholar’. This identi-
fies Latin as the language of learning required for the legal, medical and
ecclesiastical professions in the Dublin of Joyce’s time. These professions
were still predominantly the preserve of Trinity College graduates; St.
Patrick’s College, Maynooth, provided the educational preparation for
the Catholic clergy in the country. The three-in-one conundrum of the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity in scholastic philosophy and theology
is obviously implicated in the phrase ‘my trinity scholard’. Equally, how-
ever, is Trinity College, within a short walking distance from Suffolk street
where the ‘Northmen’s thing’ was once held.
As the passage continues it becomes clear that Joyce has a specific Trin-
ity College scholar in mind when the washerwomen speak of ‘out of your
sanscreed into oure eryan’. Robert Atkinson was a professor of Sanskrit
and comparative philology at Trinity. In 1898, before a Vice-Regal Com-
mission on Intermediate Education, he criticized the ‘silly’ and ‘indecent’
186 M. MCATEER

nature of ancient Irish literature. Coming from such a senior authority in

the field of philology (Atkinson was also a professor of Celtic languages
at the Royal Irish Academy), this stung leading figures in the Irish Revival
movement, particularly the founder of the Irish language Revival organi-
zation, Douglas Hyde, himself a graduate of the faculty at which Professor
Atkinson taught. President of Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League),
Hyde was prompted to write a satirical farce on Atkinson and the indif-
ference of Trinity scholars to the Irish Revival. This was Pleusgadh na
Bulgóide: Or the Bursting of the Bubble set in the Common Room of
‘Coláiste na Bulgóide’ (‘Bubble College’). The title is an obvious refer-
ence to Trinity College and what Hyde regarded as the insularity of its
faculty members in contrast to the efforts of himself, Lady Gregory and
others to create a general interest in ancient Irish mythology, folklore and
the Irish language. It was first performed at the ‘Samhain’ (Autumn) fes-
tival of Cumman na nGaedheal in November 1903.
Philip O’Leary has uncovered the incomplete text of another satire.
The Conspirators: An Irish Tragedy in Five Acts was serialized sporadi-
cally in Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, The United Irishman, in February,
March and June 1901. The author “Shanganagh” also satirized professor
Atkinson in two prose pieces, published in Griffith’s paper in late 1902.
The second would have been particularly juicy for the Joyce of Finnegans
Wake: ‘The Voyage of Atcin, son of Chaos’, reputed to be taken from
Leabhar na hÉireannach Aonthuighthe. The title of the piece is an obvi-
ous parody of the titles of many of the stories from old Irish literature
that were coming into the public domain through English-language pub-
lications by Standish O’Grady and Lady Gregory. No doubt the image
of a Trinity College don, Atkinson (‘Atcin’), as the ‘son of Chaos’ would
have appealed to Joyce. Leabhar na hÉireannach Aonthuighthe (The Book
of the United Irish) is also a parody of the titles of the early medieval
manuscripts where the earliest written versions of the old Irish myths and
legends were inscribed: Leabhar Gabhála (The Book of Invasions); Leab-
har na hUidhre (The Book of Dun Cow).51
In that passage, then, Joyce’s word ‘sanscreed’ implies the figure of
Atkinson as a professor of Sanskrit but also as a sceptic, a figure ‘with-
out faith’ (sans creed) in the myth of Ireland’s Oriental origins. Iden-
tifying a pun on writing as ‘righting’ elsewhere in the third chapter of
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 187

Part III, John Bishop regards ‘sanscreed’ as referring to Anna Livia’s lin-
guistic flux confounding all rules of ‘righting’ that govern the use of lan-
guage in general.52 Considering the passage as voiced by a Dublin wash-
erwoman, however, it is also plausible to identify in this ‘sans creed’ a
more historically specific allusion: the impression of a Protestant Trinity
College professor that was held by an uneducated Irish Catholic woman
of that time. Such a woman would most likely have regarded such a pro-
fessor as one who lacked the ‘creed’: the Apostle’s Creed in the liturgy
of the Roman Catholic mass, with its reference to the ‘one, holy Roman,
Catholic and Apostolic Church’. In this respect, it is yet another instance
of the sectarian tensions within Joyce’s writing dating right back to the
uncertain consciousness of religious difference between the Catholic boy
Stephen and the Protestant girl Eileen early in A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man. Keeping this in mind, the passage inflates dramatically
through the speaker’s juxtaposition of ‘eure sanscreed’ with ‘oure eryan’.
The second phrase blends ‘Aryan’ and ‘Éireann’. This alludes to an issue
that had emerged on several occasions in British, German and French
pseudo-histories, philological and ethnographic writings in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Within this eclectic body of work, theories of
linguistic, cultural and even racial links between European and Indian
peoples—via the ancient civilizations of the Euphrates valley—were put
forward.
As Joseph Lennon illustrates at length in Irish Orientalism, claims for
ancient Irish connections with Egypt, Persia and India persisted from
Roderic O’Flaherty in the seventeenth century through to James Cousins
and James Stephens in the early twentieth century. In his comprehen-
sive account, Lennon nonetheless neglects one of the most explicit claims
made in Joyce’s lifetime for the Aryan character of Irish mythology and
language: Rolleston’s Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. Distinguish-
ing three groups of Celts, Rolleston identifies mountain-dwelling tribes
believed to have first arrived on the east bank of the Rhine in the sixth
century A.D. Speculating that they probably originated in the moun-
tain ranges of the Balkans and the Carpathians, Rolleston describes these
as the most ‘Aryan of Aryans’ who were prevented from developing a
progressive civilization by their submission to druidism.53 Most daringly,
he asserts that an ‘ancient piece of Aryan mythology’ was embedded in
one of the foremost legends of ancient Ireland: the Táin Bó Cuailgne.
By Rolleston’s dubious reckoning, the Brown Bull of this famous story
188 M. MCATEER

was ‘the Celtic counterpart of the Hindu sky-deity, Indra, represented in

Hindu myth as a mighty bull’.54
Conflating Éireann and Aryan, Joyce gives linguistic expression to a
limitless mythology that breaks beyond the processes of ordering and
exclusion at work within the dissemination of Irish mythology as the
preservation of a distinctive native tradition. Doing so, he draws on the
idea of a relation between ancient Irish mythology and the ancient civ-
ilizations of Scythia, Persia and India. At the same time, his language
expresses this relation as a point of excess in Badiou’s sense: the set of all
those elements—included in this instance within the body of native Irish
mythology and that of the Aryan myth—that do not belong to either but
are included in both. This was particularly significant in the 1930s, when
the German National Socialists manipulated the Aryan myth for the pur-
pose of ordering German society in racial terms through mass-murder,
excluding or exterminating all those groups judged not to belong to the
herrenvolk.
Reverberations of the Nazi rise to power were felt in Ireland through
the right-wing Young Ireland Association, otherwise known as the
Blueshirts, banned by the Fianna Fáil Government in December 1933.
Following his accession to power in 1932, Taoiseach Eamon De Valera
sought to strengthen Irish independence from Britain by abolishing the
oath of allegiance to the King, refusing to pay land annuities to the British
Government and downgrading the position of Governor-General to a
point where it was abolished in 1937. In the process, the myth of an
independent Irish race unsullied by external influences grew in its influ-
ence. This was granted symbolic power when Margaret Pearse pressed
the button to start the printing presses for the first trial run of the Irish
Press newspaper in September 1931. The Irish Press was instrumental in
securing popular support for De Valera’s party, Fianna Fáil, during its
greatest period of political dominance from the 1930s to the 1950s. Mar-
garet Pearse was the mother of the leader of the Easter Rising in 1916,
Patrick Pearse, executed along with his brother Willie. As Mark O’Brien
notes, she was regarded by many as a Mother Ireland figure. The strongly
nationalist sentiment of The Irish Press , effectively the media organ of the
Irish Government from 1932, was stressed further in the piece ‘A Message
to the Nation’ that was carried in the newspaper’s first edition. This was
written by Douglas Hyde, urging people to speak the Irish language.55
Peter Mahon argues cogently for Finnegans Wake as a text that ‘both
displaces and exceeds the Platonist order of appearance’.56 However, the
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 189

nature of this displacement and excess is profoundly historical and polit-

ical. Through Joyce’s term ‘eryan’, Joyce contaminates the concept of
Aryan in Nazi German propaganda from the 1930s and of Éireann in
De Valera’s nationalist ideology from that same decade. He does so by
having both words violate one another in the creation of a new word.
In its opposition to and, at the same time, its derivation from ‘san-
screed’, ‘eryan’ contorts both ‘Éireann’ and ‘Aryan’ In this way, the excess
of the term ‘eryan’ over nation-ordering terms in the 1930s—Éireann
and Aryan—corresponds to the excess of anarchist mythical infinity over
ordered mythical totality.
The term ‘eryan’ is thus not just one of linguistic invention, but equally
an act of linguistic violence. Bataille writes of ‘the creative language of vio-
lence’ in the work of Joyce and of Beckett.57 Indeed, it is quite plausible
to regard ‘eryan’ as an instance of what Derrida describes as ‘the unity of
violence and writing’ standing forth.58 The same can be said of the word
‘phoenish’ in Finnegans Wake, deriving from Phoenician and Finnish. As
with Éireann and Aryan, both Phoenician and Finnish are implicated in
the history of speculation around the origins of the Irish language, peo-
ple and mythologies. John Nash has effectively demonstrated the ways in
which Finnegans Wake responds to the Irish Civil War. He discusses this
in terms of its register of the reception of Ulysses upon its first publication
as a violent intervention at a time of violence in a year during which the
Civil War begins, 1922. Nash also observes in Finnegans Wake Joyce’s
own response to Yeats’s image of history as cyclical violence in ‘Leda and
the Swan’, first published in 1924.59 Yet it is still important to recognize
that Finnegans Wake is a work that was prepared for final publication in
the 1930s, during years in which the Blueshirt movement emerged in Ire-
land in response to Fianna Fáil’s electoral victory of 1932, and, far more
disturbingly, against the backdrop of Hitler’s seizure of political power in
Germany in early 1933.
If we concede that Finnegans Wake is a form of writing as violence,
there arises its relation to the contemporary violence that arose through
the mythologies upon which the work draws.60 This relation is as much
mathematical as it is linguistic. In the second chapter of Part II, set in
Chapelizod, Shem and Shaun study upstairs as Earwicker serves customers
in the pub below. The Dublin setting is described as follows: ‘A phantom
city, phaked of philim pholk, bowed and sould for a four of hundreds of
manhood in their three and threescore fylkers for a price partitional of
twenty six by six’.61 The ‘phantom city’ is another reminder that we are
190 M. MCATEER

in the Chapelizod area in which Dublin’s foremost gothic writer of the

nineteenth century, Sheridan Le Fanu, set The House by the Church-Yard.
The phrase ‘phaked of philim pholk’ associates the ghostly nature of Le
Fanu’s gothic style with the ‘fake’ images of film. Joyce, however, injects
a weighty connotation of Irish colonial history and violence into this
‘phaked’ image of ‘philim pholk’. They are folk that have been ‘bowed
and sould’. Through that word ‘sould’, the speaker connotes ‘bought and
sold’ in a rural west-of-Ireland accent. It also, however, recalls Dedalus’s
famous denunciation of Ireland in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man: ‘the old sow that eats her farrow’.62 Combining ‘soul’ and ‘sold’,
‘sould’ further brings to mind Yeats’s play, The Countess Cathleen, with
its demons who offer gold to the starving Irish poor in exchange for
their souls. Joyce attended the 1899 performance of the play that inau-
gurated the Irish Literary Theatre. In the second chapter of Part III of
Finnegans Wake, Shaun (by that point Juan) asks the following question:
‘Where’s Cowtends Kateclean, the woman with the muckrake?63 Kate is
the cleaning-woman in the household and public house run by Earwicker
in Chapelizod. William York Tindall identifies her as the representation of
the old Anna Livia Plurabella, just as Isabel is her younger version in the
work.64 ‘Cowtends Kateclean’ is also, however, a stingingly ironic render-
ing of the Countess Kathleen, the protagonist of Yeats’s 1890s play.
An odd combination of numbers is cited in relation to Ireland’s sub-
jugation and poverty that is implied by the phrase ‘bowed and sould’:
‘for a four of hundreds of manhood in their three and threescore fylk-
ers for a price partitional of twenty six by six’. Louis O. Mink derives
from this the figure given for Chapelizod’s population in Thom’s Dublin
Directories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: 1280.65
However, fylkers is the plural term for administrative regions in Norway,
another instance of Joyce signalling the Viking invasion as a formative
part of Dublin’s history. The price for which the folk have been bought
and sold is the critical piece of information here: ‘a price partitional of
twenty six by six’. There is no escaping the insinuation of the partition of
Ireland in 1921 into the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State and
the six counties of Northern Ireland. This is weighted even further by the
numbers four and three in the phrase, pointing as they do to the four
provinces of Ireland. Partition reduced these—Ulster, Leinster, Connacht
and Munster—to three: Leinster, Munster and Connacht. Not entirely,
however; the number three is also relevant to the fact that part of Ulster
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 191

went into the Irish Free State in 1921: the three counties of Donegal,
Cavan and Monaghan.
These numerical sub-divisions mark the violence of the political divi-
sions that became manifest during the Irish War of Independence from
1919 and the Irish Civil War that followed. As the surplus that could
not be incorporated into the new independent Irish Free State in 1921,
Northern Ireland became both a numerical and a political form of excess,
one of ‘the four green fields’ that was not counted into the new inde-
pendent Ireland precisely because it was largely orange. Likewise, the
new province of Ulster assured the British Unionist nature of its polit-
ical identity by abandoning three of its counties as a surplus that could
not be afforded. It is not surprising, then, that the mathematical equa-
tion that Shem and Shaun address here proves as insoluble as the political
conflict that partition entrenched. The ‘price partitional’ of twenty-six of
Ireland’s thirty-two counties achieves its political independence by aban-
doning the remaining six. This brings to mind the old Northern Irish
Unionist witticism on the mathematical impossibility of a United Ireland:
six into twenty-six won’t go. Denouncing the Anglo-Irish Agreement that
was signed between the British and Irish Governments on November 15,
1985, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party Rev. Ian Paisley drew
precisely on this adage: ‘This sum you will have to learn the hard way—six
into 26 will never go’.66
Thus Shaun and Shem’s night-lessons, studied in a room above the
public house that their father runs in Chapelizod, address Ireland’s vio-
lent political history in terms of a mathematical equation. The equation
can no more be solved than the political conflict, producing as it does
a surplus (the infinitely repeating decimal) that enumerates the politi-
cal surplus of a new Northern Ireland that cannot be incorporated into
the newly independent Ireland. The infinitely repeating decimal (26/6 =
4.3n ) counts the endless repetition of Irish historical conflict. The Irish
case is a striking instance of Badiou’s theorem of the point of excess:
‘there are always sub-multiples which, despite being included in a situa-
tion as compositions of multiplicities, cannot be counted in that situation
as terms, and which therefore do not exist’.67 Founded upon the ancient
province of Ulster, the new Northern Ireland of 1921 could not count
in three of its counties—Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan—without ceas-
ing to be a Unionist state. Drawing its inspiration from traditional Irish
culture (including the heroic mythology of the Ulster legends), the inde-
pendent Irish Free State could not count in its Northern province without
192 M. MCATEER

ceasing to be a nationalist state. Just as the three counties of Ulster that

remained outside Northern Ireland became a kind of void for the new
Ulster parliament at Stormont, so the six counties of Ulster became a
void of sorts for the new Irish Free State Government in Dublin. This
was demonstrated in the respective Prime Ministers of both jurisdictions
literally a-voiding one another. When Northern Ireland Prime Minister
Captain Terence O’Neill finally did meet with his Southern counterpart,
Republic of Ireland Taoiseach Sean Lemass, in January 1965, widespread
violence would break out in Ulster within a few years.
Badiou is keen to assert that the political state of a historico-social
situation is subject to his theorem of the point of excess.68 The important
point, in part, developed from Engels but advancing his proposition, is
that the State itself is ‘an excresence’. It is not the expression of a social
bond but a prohibition upon the unbinding of a society: a prohibition
against internal civil war.69 In this sense, the new Northern Ireland state
was itself an excess to the Irish Free State: an excess that mirrored the
excess of the three Ulster counties excluded from Northern Ireland as
surplus to its own British Unionist requirements. The violence of writing
in Finnegans Wake, manifested most acutely through the mathematical
point of excess, is marked throughout by this abnormality of statehood in
Ireland after 1921.70

Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans.
Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (London: Penguin, 1993), 19.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977), 56.
4. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme (Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 27.
5. Ibid., 171.
6. For a detailed account of the varieties of social, cultural and political forces
at play in Ireland from 1912, see, Diarmuid Ferriter, The Transformation
of Ireland (London: Profile, 2004), 110–85. For discussion of some of the
leading figures involved, see R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary
Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 (London: Norton, 2014), 1–25.
7. Gabriel Markus and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Sub-
jectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum, 2009), 8.
8. Margot Norris, ‘Finnegans Wake’, The Cambridge Companion to James
Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
149–71 (152).
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 193

9. Renée Fox discusses the sources for the volumes of O’Grady’s History
of Ireland. See, ‘Fleshing Dry Bones: O’Grady’s Sensory Revivalism,’ in
Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby, eds., Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain: A
Critical Edition (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 191–
209.
10. Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland (1878), vol. 1 (New York: Lemma,
1970), 13.
11. Ibid., 20.
12. T. W. Rolleston, Celtic Myths and Legends (1917), 2nd ed. (New York:
Dover, 1990), 69–78.
13. John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison, WI: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 87–125. Drawing upon E. A. Wal-
lis Budge’s 1913 translation of The Book of the Dead, Bishop also notes
that ‘Tuat’ was one of the names for the Egyptian other world. Joyce’s
Book of the Dark, 97. This adds to the origin-myth of an ancient Irish-
Egyptian association through the old Irish word for tribe, ‘Tuatha’. This
word appears in the name given to one of the earliest mythical tribes
with origins in the Middle East who were recorded in the medieval Irish
monastic manuscript, Lebor Gabála na h-Éireann, as having invaded Ire-
land from the Middle East: the Tuatha De Danaan.
14. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1939) (London: Penguin, 2000), 144.
15. Joyce’s use of this phrase indicates some acquaintance with Charles Vallen-
cy’s 1797 work Ancient History of Ireland Proved from the Sanskrit Books
of the Brahmins of India. Claiming that the first inhabitants of Ireland
came directly from Persia, Vallency’s work was dismissed as fanciful by Sir
William Jones, a translator of Persian and Sanskrit literature, a judge at the
Bengal Supreme Court in Calcutta, and a noted scholar for his work on
the relations between languages that were later coined ‘Indo-European’.
In a letter to the Third Earl of Spencer, dated September 10, 1787, Jones
wrote the following of Vallency’s work, one that he thought ‘stupid’: [H]e
insists with great warmth, that […] the ancient Irish were Persians, who
having emigrated from the Caspian settled in Ierne or Iran, and brought
with them the old Persian history, which he finds in the Irish manuscripts’.
Quoted in Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual
History (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 97.
16. Although he makes no allusion to the phrase from Finnegans Wake,
Todd Lawson’s fascinating account of the affinities between the Qayyūm
al-asmā’ and Joyce’s Ulysses provides a specific comparative context for
understanding the occurrence of the phrase in Joyce’s final work. The
Qayyūm al-asmā’ was a commentary on the twelfth chapter of the Qur’an
that was written by the nineteenth-century Iranian mystic known as the
Bab (meaning ‘door’ or ‘gate’ in Arabic). ‘Joycean Modernism in a
Nineteenth-Century Qur’an Commentary?: A Comparison of the Bab’s
194 M. MCATEER

Qayyūm al-asmā’ with Joyce’s Ulysses ’, in H. E. Chehabi and Grace

Nevilled, eds., Erin and Iran: Cultural Encounters between the Irish and
the Iranians (Boston, MA: Ilex Foundation, 2015), 79–118.
17. Joyce, James, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, in Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann, eds., The Critical Writings of James Joyce (New York:
Viking Press, 1964), 154–74 (155).
18. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘Phoenician Genealogies and Oriental
Geographies: Joyce, Language and Race’, in Derek Attridge and Mar-
jorie Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 219–39 (225); James Joyce, Ulysses (1960), Bodley Head
ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 35–45. For a close consideration of the
political tensions lurking within the exchange between Stephen Dedalus
and Mr. Deasy in the ‘Nestor’ episode, see, Mark McGahon, ‘Silence,
Justice, and the Différend in Joyce’s Ulysses ’, in Michael McAteer, ed.,
Silence in Modern Irish Literature (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017), 98–109
(101–02).
19. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920
(Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 100–101.
20. However, Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen rejected the association of Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake with the automatic writing experiments of the French
surrealists. See, Michael Begnal, Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in
Finnegans Wake (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 1–2.
21. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 13. The structure of Finnegans Wake makes it
impossible to attribute the utterance conclusively. There is a high level of
probability that it is uttered by one or other of the brothers Olaf, Ivor and
Sitric, who are named in the passage immediately preceding it. Finnegans
Wake, 12. These were believed to be members of the Norse dynasty who
conquered parts of Ireland and Northern England from the mid-ninth
century. John Gordon attributes the utterance ambivalently to a ‘return-
ing exile’ and a ‘rearriving invader’. Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 115.
22. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, 4th ed. (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 13; Patrick O’Neill, Impos-
sible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013),
264–65; Margot Norris, ‘Finnegans Wake’, 149.
23. Peter Mahon, Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and
Glas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 28.
24. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 84.
25. Ibid., 84.
26. O’Grady, History of Ireland, 48.
27. John P. Harrington, ed., Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, 2nd ed.
(London: Norton, 2009), 11.
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 195

28. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 13.

29. Adam Barrows adapts the term ‘panarchy’ from Holling, Gunderson and
Peterson to an eco-critical reading of temporality in Finnegans Wake. See,
C. S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson and Garry Peterson, ‘Sustainability
and Panarchies’, in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human
and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 63–102 (74).
Barrows describes an anarchical concept of infinity that is encapsulated in
the organic nature of lichen as punned in this line from Joyce’s work.
‘Joyce’s Panarchy: Time, Ecological Resilience, and Finnegans Wake’,
James Joyce Quarterly, 51/2–3 (2014), 333–52.
30. Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Blooms-
bury, 2013), 19.
31. Ibid., 16–20.
32. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 266–68; Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 10.
33. Henry Wansbrough, gen. ed., The New Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton,
Longman & Todd, 1985).
34. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 37.
35. James Joyce, Ulysses (1960), Bodley Head ed. (London: Penguin, 1992),
430.
36. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 535.
37. John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison, WI: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) 5.
38. Badiou, Being and Event, 294, 327.
39. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 211, 323, 467.
40. Ibid., 54.
41. Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158.
42. John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920
(Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 86.
43. Ibid., 95.
44. Joyce, Ulysses , 438.
45. Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, vol. 2 (London:
Duckworth, 1898), 507; McCourt, The Years of Bloom, 92–94.
46. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 604.
47. Ibid., 215.
48. Dion Boucicault, Selected Plays (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987),
316.
49. Seán Ó Tuama, ed., and Thomas Kinsella, trans., An Duanaire, 1600–
1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981) (Dublin: Foras na Gaeilge, 2002),
260.
50. Lady Augusta Gregory, , Selected Plays, chosen by Mary Fitzgerald (Ger-
rards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), 326.
196 M. MCATEER

51. For discussion of the debate and the satires that Atkinson’s comments
provoked, see Philip O’Leary, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival,
1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park, PA: The Pennsylva-
nia University Press, 1994), 223–26.
52. Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 346.
53. Rolleston, Celtic Myths and Legends, 58.
54. Ibid., 203.
55. Mark O’Brien, De Valera, Fianna Fáil and the Irish Press: The Truth in
the News? (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2001), 35–36. Citing the work
of historian Margaret Daly, John Brannigan asserts that despite the small
numbers of people deemed ‘aliens’ who came to Ireland in the 1930s, ‘the
issue of alien “invasion”, domination or penetration of the state was raised
with surprising regularity throughout the 1930s’. Race in Modern Irish
Literature and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009),
151.
56. Peter Mahon, Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and
Glas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 31.
57. Georges Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’ (1951), repr. in Jennifer Birkett and
Kate Ince, eds. Samuel Beckett (London: Longman, 2000; New York:
Routledge, 2013), 85–92 (87). Citations refer to the Routledge edition.
58. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(1976) (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 106.
59. John Nash, James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Mod-
ernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140–44.
60. Roy Benjamin regards Finnegans Wake as an attempt to represent Joseph
Schumpeter’s notion of ‘creative destruction’: a term describing the vio-
lent transformation of social landscapes in processes of urbanization and
modernization. Roy Benjamin, ‘Creative Destruction in Finnegans Wake:
The Rise and Fall of the Modern City’, Journal of Modern Literature
30/2 (2007), 139–50; Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy (New York: Harper, 1950), 83. Referring also to the violence
that Marshall Berman describes in the re-structuring of Paris during the
nineteenth century, Benjamin addresses its presence in Finnegans Wake
through the various textual references to the chief architect behind the
Paris project: Baron Hausmann. Benjamin, ‘Creative Destruction’, 141–
44; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience
of Modernity (London: Penguin, 1988), 150–51. Related to this are the
varieties of violence that are associated with Dublin’s Phoenix Park as it
appears in Finnegans Wake, a topic that Alison Lacivita examines in detail
and one that bears an obvious relation—Phoenix as Phoenician—to the
Gaelic-orientalist aspect of Joyce’s work (‘Trouble’, pp. 317–31). Alison
Lacivita, ‘Trouble in Paradise: Violence and the Phoenix Park in Finnegans
Wake’, James Joyce Quarterly, 51/2–3 (2014), 317–31.
 8 MYTHIC EXCESS: FINNEGANS WAKE 197

61. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 264.

62. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) (London:
Penguin, 1992), 220.
63. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 448.
64. William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1969), 4–5.
65. Louis O. Mink, A Finnegans Wake Gazetter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1978), xvi.
66. Rev. Ian Paisley, ‘The Three Hebrew Children’, repr. in Seamus Deane,
gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol. III (Derry: Field
Day Publications, 1991), 371.
67. Badiou, Being and Event, 97.
68. Ibid., 107.
69. Ibid., 108–9.
70. Antoinette Quinn captures this sense of abnormality quite strongly in her
account of the circumstances of Patrick Kavanagh in his native County
Monaghan during the time of the Irish Civil War and the creation of the
border in the 1920s. She notes that some republican families in County
Monaghan disregarded the legitimacy of the border separating them from
the neighbouring counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh. Others
‘refused to accept that roads along with they had been used to travelling
all their lives now belonged to a different State’. Patrick Kavanagh: A
Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2001), 40.
 CHAPTER 9

Voiding the Subject: Bowen and Beckett

No Lack of Void
When considering the relationship between myth, language and excess in
the post-war fiction of Joyce’s most significant literary successor, Samuel
Beckett, it is instructive to return to one of the earliest commentaries on
Beckett’s writing in the 1950s. Reviewing the first publication of Molloy
in a May 1951 issue of the journal, Critique, Georges Bataille regards the
unremittingly abject circumstances and outlook narrated by the protag-
onist as completely excessive in nature: ‘nothing in it but an exorbitant
imagination; the whole thing is fantastic, extravagant, sordid to be sure,
but of a wonderful sordidness; to be more precise, “Molloy” is a sor-
did wonder’.1 Considering Molloy’s absolute wretchedness to illuminate
‘the essence of being’, Bataille asserts that this essence cannot be named:
‘quite simply, it is silence’.2 This reading produces an interesting para-
dox: driven as it is to rid itself of all the superfluities and embellishments
in voicing the issue of existence itself in its most basic form, the narra-
tive of Molloy yet creates the most outlandish extravagance; so outlandish
in fact, it cannot even be named. Decades later, Badiou argues that when
Beckett returns from writing in French to writing in English, it is an exer-
cise in getting rid of the over-literary style of writing in a language that
Beckett has learnt in the classical manner. The return to English, in other
words, is Beckett’s attempt to rid himself of ‘the excess’ of his French
writing, reaching instead ‘a kind of subtracted English’.3 However valid
Badiou’s assertion may be at the level of style, it is subject to this problem
© The Author(s) 2020 199
M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_9
200 M. MCATEER

that Bataille’s reading of Molloy in 1951 still poses: Molloy as a novel so

excessive in its topic that it cannot even be named.
While Beckett scholars today might be inclined to downplay Bataille’s
reading as burdened with the preoccupations of mid-twentieth-century
French existentialism, the cogency of the 1951 review is testified in the
fact that Bataille anticipates by two years the title of Beckett’s third novel
in his trilogy—L’Innomable, published in 1953: ‘This thing we name
through sheer impotence vagabond or wretch, which is actually unname-
able (but then we find ourselves entangled in another word, unnameable),
is no less mute than death’.4 Indeed, Bataille’s reading of Molloy identi-
fies a significant relation back to Finnegans Wake as a work of mythical
excess. He regards the excess of Molloy as mythic in nature, asserting as
he does that death and the absence of humanity (what he calls ‘death’s
living semblance’) can only be given expression through the form of a
myth.5 The influence of the mythical aspect of Finnegans Wake is dis-
cernible early in Molloy when the narrator conveys how little it matters
what word he uses to address his mother, she being deaf for ages: ‘for me
the question did not arise, at the period I’m worming into now, I mean
the question of whether to call her Ma, Mag or the Countess Caca, she
having for countless years been as deaf as a post. I think she was quite
incontinent, both of faeces and water, but a kind of prudishness made us
avoid the subject when we met, and I could be never certain of it’.6 The
‘Countess Caca’ recalls the Countess Cathleen—the old noblewoman of
Yeats’s 1890s play. That joke on excrement (‘Caca’ as baby-speak for fae-
ces) owes itself partly to Finnegans Wake: Joyce converts the name of
Yeats idealistic heroine into that of a woman who cleans out cow-dung,
‘Cowtends Kateclean, the woman with the muckrake’.7
The affinities between Beckett’s prose works of the early 1950s and
that of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) disclose this
mythic feature of excess that Bataille observes in Molloy and its linguistic
forms. Bowen’s novel presents nothingness itself as excessive, a feature
that concords with Bataille’s view of Beckett’s Molloy as a character of
such exorbitant wretchedness that he discloses the essence of being as
unnameable silence. Set in war-time London during the period of the
Blitz, The Heat of the Day includes a character, Louie Lewis, who feels
overburdened by the sheer weight of nothingness as she lies in bed at
night. Louie ‘clasped her hands under her head and stared up at nothing
– it was oppressive, though, how much of nothing there was’.8 Like-
wise in Beckett’s The Unnamable, the narrator writes of Worm that ‘his
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 201

senses tell him nothing, nothing about himself, nothing about the rest,
and this distinction is beyond him. Feeling nothing, knowing nothing, he
exists nevertheless’.9 As Sinéad Mooney puts it, Bowen is, like Beckett, ‘a
sculptor of the void, a word that figures largely in both their writing’.10
The Heat of the Day centres on the intimacy that develops between Stella
Rodney and Robert Kelway, one shadowed by the figure of Harrison, an
agent who develops an attraction to Stella as he monitors Kelway during
war-time on the pretext that Kelway is working as a spy for the Germans.
During Robert’s disclosure of the truth of his activities to Stella, he char-
acterizes their intimacy in terms of a relation between lack and excess,
saying to her that she has been ‘too much because you are not enough’,
and asking her whether ‘you and I [are] to be what we’ve known we are
for nothing, nothing outside this room?’11 Robert’s expresses his desire
for Stella to her in terms of a void as excess, amplified by the situation in
which they find themselves in a besieged London as one of infinite void.
This stress on nothing in the fiction of Bowen and Beckett, published
during the eight years following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945,
might well be considered merely a literary emphasis upon nothingness
as a condition for being itself. The case for this idea of nothingness had
been laid out at length in Part I of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, ‘The
Problem of Nothingness’, published by Gallimard in 1943, just five years
before Bowen’s novel: ‘The necessary condition for our saying not is that
non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothing-
ness haunt being’.12 Characters are constantly ‘saying not’ in the fiction
of Bowen and Beckett during this period: perpetually haunted as they
are by that which is not quite there. The centrality that Sartre accords
to nothingness and negation in his account of absolute human freedom
in Being and Nothingness owes much to Heidegger’s idea that the basis
of one’s state of ‘being-in-the-world’ lies in the ‘nothing’ that is appre-
hended in anxiety. This ‘nothing’ generates fundamental anxiety because
it reveals the state of Dasein—once abandoned to itself—as ‘throwness
into death’.13
Using the language of logic, Badiou returns to a proposition from
Being and Time that impacted Sartre most profoundly: the condition of
being in the world. There cannot be any ‘world’ in Badiou’s view without
the void: the void is a condition for a world, what Badiou characterizes as
a specific situation within which an operation of some sort takes place.14
Considered in these terms, the circumstances of characters in the war-time
London of The Heat of the Day appear less those of a state of emergency
202 M. MCATEER

than a heightened state of being in the world. As Neil Corcoran puts it,
the environment of the novel ‘is one in which, it sometimes seems, anyone
can be, or can become, anything’.15 Indeed, the very title of Heidegger’s
Being and Time is so audible at one point in Stella Rodney’s reflections as
to suggest a philosophical knowledge beyond coincidence. She recalls her
awareness of a ‘submerged decision’ that she made with Robert Kelway
‘to go on as they were’ after Stella’s son Roderick joins the British Army.
It was a decision to continue in their relationship ‘for that “time being”
which war had made the very being of time’.16
In Badiou’s concept of the void as the point of excess, he distinguishes
an event as a definite occurrence when terms exceed a situation in which
they appear to an immeasurable extent. In so far as this situation can be
identified as having occurred, it can be named as a singular event. In this
sense, the singularity of an event is defined in Badiou’s terms by numerical
excess. However, this same excess means that an event itself is clouded in
uncertainty and cannot really be counted: it has barely happened. Badiou
puts it as follows: ‘The excess of one is also beneath the one’.17 The event
is a situation that is closest to nothing having happened. Badiou develops
this idea through the concept of the ‘envelope’ for the appearance of a
particular world. The envelope refers to the smallest value of appearance
in a fragment of a world that is capable of dominating the beings that
make up this fragment.18 Through this smallest value, the excess—gener-
ated by the connection of a situation to a void—characterizes a particular
world as the place of an event. In effect, this smallest value of appearance
is right on the verge of non-appearance, of the void to which it is indexed.
Jessica Gildersleeve draws insightfully upon Derrida’s idea of ‘trem-
bling’ from The Gift of Death to argue that The Heat of the Day is a
novel that is more than a symptom of the trauma of the Second World
War: it is a work that both endures and represents this trauma.19 In par-
ticular, Gildersleeve notes the relevance to Bowen’s novel of Derrida’s
observation that the tremble refers to that which has already happened,
as in the tremor of an earthquake. The tremble is that which endures in
the absence of the occurrence from which it emanates. Gildersleeve iden-
tifies the writing in The Heat of the Day on this basis as that of ‘a quaking
post-traumatic event or effect’, writing that ‘trembles in reaction or in
apprehension’.20 The importance that Gildersleeve accords the tremble is
appropriate to The Heat of the Day, capturing as it does the significance
that the novel invests in the tiniest minutiae of details for the cataclysmic
circumstances that it addresses. Naming the traumatic event as that of the
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 203

war itself, however, Gildersleeve makes a claim for a discernible occur-

rence of which the tremble is a trace. This underplays a significant feature
of the tremble in The Heat of the Day. The form of trembling in the novel
is only discernible in relation to nothingness: following Badiou’s notion
of the envelope, it is itself the most minimal degree of appearance.

Faithful to Nothing
In Chapter 6, Stella Rodney travels to Robert Kelway’s family residence
of Holme Dene in the English Home Counties. She is struck by how
the Kelways maintain a distinctive façade of English middle-class propri-
ety even as the social order through which this propriety is lent value has
already disappeared or is on the verge of doing so. Acknowledging the
inadequacy of designating the Kelways as middle-class, Stella finds herself
asking, ‘middle of what?’ This provokes in her an image of the Kelways
as the barest minimum, floating in an absolute void: ‘She saw the Kel-
ways suspended in the middle of nothing. She could envisage them so
suspended when there was nothing more. Always without a quiver as to
their state’.21 Claire Seiler observes in this passage Stella expressing her
sense of the inadequacy of nationality and class as terms through which
such circumstances as those of the Kelway family could be understood.22
Bowen, however, is not quite intimating the disappearance of an entire
class in English society. Stella regards the Kelways on the verge of disap-
pearance. Precisely because they do not actually disappear, they denote
the exorbitant magnitude of the void that they inhabit. In this instance,
Stella’s image of the Kelways accords with that of Badiou’s notion of the
indiscernible within a situation: that which stands in excess of the singular-
ity of a particular situation to an immeasurable degree. At the same time,
this indiscernible barely exists. In a telling paradox, Stella’s image of the
Kelways’s stubborn faithfulness to English middle-class decorum just as
it appears to be vanishing accords strongly with the radical fidelity to the
event as Badiou describes it. Asserting that faithfulness to an event is the
source from which an event derives its disruptive power, Badiou acknowl-
edges that this faithfulness cannot be counted as an element of the event
to which it is a functional relation. At the same time, it can be perceived
as a finite element of a situation to which this event is connected: ‘A
fidelity is thus always in non-existent excess over its being. Beneath itself,
it exists; beyond itself, it inexists. It can always be said that it is an almost-
nothing of the state, or that it is a quasi-everything of the situation’.23
204 M. MCATEER

Suspended in nothing, the Kelways’s faithfulness to a particular notion

of Englishness is this ‘almost-nothing of the state’. The absolute void
that their fidelity evokes—the all-pervasive secrecy, silence and sense of
unreality throughout Holme Dene that permeates the entire universe of
The Heat of the Day through Robert Kelway—is ‘a quasi-everything of
the situation’: that of mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism.24 Their state
of suspense also anticipates a Cold War situation that Paul Saint-Amour
observes as arising first in what he describes as ‘the conditional space of
catrastrophe’ that the people of Hiroshima underwent in the period pre-
ceding the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945.25
The idea of faithful endurance beyond the annihilation of the world is
one that is commonly attributed to the voice of the narrator at the end
of The Unnamable: ‘it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll
never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on,
I’ll go on’.26 Badiou identifies the speaker of these lines as heroic in his
obstinacy, since his determination (or compulsion) to ‘go on’ amounts
to torture. He sees the lines express ‘this terroristic commandment’ to
‘sustain the unsustainable’.27 In a phrase significant to Derrida’s notion
of trembling through which Gildersleeve reads The Heat of the Day as a
novel of trauma, Badiou describes the concluding lines of The Unnamable
as expressing an ultimate ontological heroism: ‘The courage of infinite
speech makes the prose tremble’.28 Consideration of Beckett’s post-war
fiction in relation to that of Bowen, however, raises the difficult question
of whether that stubborn persistence such as we find in the Kelways in The
Heat of the Day—going on as always when there is almost nothing left—
might not equally be regarded as courageous. At one particular moment
in Beckett’s Malone Dies , the narrator pours forth a stream of negative
adverbs that might easily be taken to express the state of the Kelways that
Stella imagines in Holme Dene: suspended in nothing without the least
notion of their condition, ‘without a quiver as to their state’: ‘But what
matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely
dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it
is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am’.29 The sheer abun-
dance of negative adverbs here may weaken the notion of courage that
Badiou attributes elsewhere to the concluding part of The Unnamable,
particularly when Malone Dies is considered as an advance towards the
disintegration of the third novel in the Beckett trilogy.
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 205

Bowen’s attitude in The Heat of the Day to this resolve to ‘go on’ that
we encounter in Beckett’s narratives subsequently is by no means clear-
cut. In Chapter 9, Stella Rodney returns to Mount Morris, the estate in
Ireland that her son Roderick inherited from his father’s cousin follow-
ing his death in England; Stella had divorced some years previously from
Victor, Roderick’s father. Thinking in particular of cousin Nettie Morris,
the sister of the deceased who was confined to the psychiatric residence of
Wisteria Lodge in England, Stella reflects upon the former female inhab-
itants at Mount Morris. She senses the ghosts of Anglo-Irish ladies who
had once lived there, the unrelenting silence of the room in which she
stands having gradually drawn them unto the verge of madness, even as
they retained their decorum:

Virtue with nothing more to spend, honour saying nothing, but both
present […] So, there had been cases of the enactment of ignorance having
become too much, insupportable inside those sheltered heads. Also in this
room they had reached the climax of their elations at showing nothing.30

Her reflection casts judgement upon a persistent fidelity to values in

Anglo-Irish society that had long ceased to carry much significance.
Requiring this ‘enactment of ignorance’ at the gradual disappearance of
the world that had granted these values their meaning, that obstinate
regard of these women for the distinctions of virtue and honour would
inevitably lead to nervous breakdown. Yet Stella still concedes an admira-
tion in the stance: spending nothing and saying nothing, she still judges
virtue and honour to be ‘present’. Her judgement in this instance makes
explicit the relation of excess to the void from which Badiou develops his
theory of the event. This ‘enactment of ignorance’—itself a dutiful per-
formance of negation—inevitably becomes ‘too much’. Stella imagines
these ladies becoming ecstatic in revealing nothing, propriety thereby dis-
integrating under pressure of the void through which it attempts to sus-
tain itself. It is an instance of polite discretion being overwhelmed by the
nothingness to which it makes recourse in continual gestures of evasion,
secrecy and circumspection.
Following Badiou’s idea of fidelity as the basis upon which an event
may be said to take place, it is possible to regard these ideas of virtue
and honour as radical in nature, precisely because of the absence of any
order to which they might refer. Not until her final novel, Eva Trout,
does Bowen fully endorse the view of madness as virtue (and virtue as
206 M. MCATEER

madness) in its relation to the infinite void that perpetual avoidance may
admit.31 In The Heat of the Day her work moves in that direction, evok-
ing through its personalities and circumstances the idea of the Second
World War, not as an event in Badiou’s sense, but as the consequence of
an event that is, strictly speaking, unnameable. Excess in The Heat of the
Day and Beckett’s trilogy is thus that of the immeasurable void to which
a minimal degree of endurance—of lives, voices, habits and memories—
bears testimony. This meets the criteria for the occurrence of an event as
Badiou conceives it: a circumstance the particular aspect of which indi-
cates the immediate proximity of an unnameable void that exceeds it and
a minimal endurance (fidelity) that sustains it. In this light, we can qual-
ify Sinéad Mooney’s observation of The Heat of the Day as ‘notable for
its almost total lack of event’ by asserting that this vacuum is precisely
evidence of the event to which the novel is testament.32

Negating Negation
The question still remains as to how this unnameable event is represented
in writing. Bowen herself was very much aware of this problem when she
revealed in conversation with Jocelyn Brooke how, in writing The Heat of
the Day, she was ‘trying to put language to what for me was a totally new
use, and what, perhaps was, showed itself to be a quite impossible use’.33
This comment points to a specific feature of language in The Heat of the
Day. This is language as itself excessive, overreaching itself in attempting
to denote the ‘nothing’ of its moment, but also excessive in the sense of
literally being ‘something’ other than the nothingness of the void that it
strains to convey. Stella Rodney, for example, considers the self-regard of
Robert Kelway’s mother as ‘the mute presence of an obsession’. Acknowl-
edging that Mrs. Kelway simply had no need to speak, having ‘the self-
contained mystery of herself’ with which to remain crankily content, Stella
observes her disinterest in any form of communication show through ‘in
her contemptuous use of words’.34 This is another instance of Bowen
pre-empting Beckett. The word ‘contemptuous’ discloses more than Stel-
la’s revulsion at a middle-class debasement of language into formula. It
indicates what little use words are to Mrs. Kelway, so entrapped is she
in a silence for which no words can be adequate. Language has become
largely pointless verbiage to her, surplus to requirements. In the narrative
of detective Moran that makes up the second part of Beckett’s Molloy, this
attitude to language as excess baggage recurs when Moran reflects on how
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 207

moments of anger sometimes led him to ‘slight excesses of language’: ‘It

seemed to me that all language was an excess of language’.35 Reminis-
cent as this is of Stella’s sense of Mrs. Kelway’s contempt for speech in
The Heat of the Day, Moran’s opinion refers back more immediately to
Molloy’s thoughts on his own speech-practices in the first part of Molloy.
On this occasion, the narrator reflects that ‘before he gave up speaking for
good’, it seemed to him that he had always said too much when in fact
he had said too little, and too little when he had actually said too much:
‘I mean that on reflection, in the long run rather, my verbal profusion
turned out to be penury, and inversely’.36
This problem of language as excess is, in a certain sense, the opposite
to the question that Derrida pursues in his theory of writing. Derrida’s
insistent claims are founded upon the view that language designates an
absence that intervenes between the word and the object that is signified
through that word: the object, in consequence, cannot be made present
through language. In his early writing, Derrida locates this impossibility
in the idea of ‘the hinge’ within the structure of a linguistic sign. This is
the point at which the difference between a word and the idea to which
it is linked is itself incapable of being made visible within language. Der-
rida asserts that this hinge ‘marks the impossibility that a sign […] be
produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute presence’.37
The question of language as excess that we encounter in the writing of
Bowen and Beckett presents a problem for Derrida’s theory of writing,
however.38 In those instances where the idea that a word denotes is that
of nothing, then no absence or void can separate adequately the word
from the idea to which it refers. In such cases, there is no significant dif-
ference between the absence that, according to Derrida’s theory of writ-
ing, mediates between word and idea—the absence that he observes in
the markings of writing—and the idea to which the word refers: the idea
of nothing.
In his passing comments on the silence of madness in his early essay
‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Derrida momentarily turns his
attention to this problem. He writes that the silence that has sometimes
been regarded as a condition of madness is betrayed most thoroughly
by those who seek to convey this silence in itself. This assertion is made
on the basis of Derrida’s view that any attempt to convey silence means
entering into the order of language, ‘the side of the enemy’ as he calls
it, even if one is fighting that order from within, ‘putting its origin into
question’.39 The absence of silence in the linguistic denotation of the idea
208 M. MCATEER

of silence is, in effect, the silencing of silence, or the presence of a mark

that can be spoken. In language that is as effective in denoting silence
as it is in denoting nothing, we encounter unique instances of presence
emerging from absence (not in spite of it) or something emerging from
nothing. Badiou schematizes this in the logical operation of double nega-
tion, wherein the symbol ¬ denotes negation: ‘since ¬ 1 = 0, we have ¬
¬ 1 = ¬ 0 = 1’.40
From this perspective, we can grasp the elusive significance of what
Sinéad Mooney describes as ‘the torturous double negatives’ in Bowen’s
syntax.41 Bowen explores the form of language as excess over nothing and
deficiency in the face of nothing, precisely through the manner by which
the apparent inadequacy of words signifies the magnitude of the void at
the heart of her novel most effectively. In the process, these words acquire
an almost miraculous quality. Anna Teekell remarks that in The Heat of the
Day ‘Stella thinks in double-negatives because she has discovered, but is
not yet ready to admit, the truth’.42 Yet the double-negative is a syntactic
and semantic feature that dominates the novel as a whole and the relations
between characters that it portrays.
Late in the novel, Louie expresses frustration to her friend Connie
at being constantly misunderstood. Her complaint is not only about the
presumptions that everyone seems to make about her ‘when I have no
words’. Even when she has only to say something that is within the limits
of her command of language, her utterances still create trouble, indicat-
ing to her that she ‘“cannot ever say what it is really”’.43 Putting into
words her own inability to express herself adequately, Louie communi-
cates ‘nothing’ effectively. Lying beside Connie at night in a London
silenced by the threat of aerial bombardment, her words convey self-
consciously the success of her failures with speech in denoting the pres-
ence in these war-time circumstances of that which cannot be articulated.
Connie is already ahead of the speaker of Beckett’s The Unnamable who
considers that not only will he ‘have to speak of things of which I cannot
speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is
if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no mat-
ter’.44 Like Bowen’s Connie, this voice feels obliged to speak on sub-
jects of which he is not capable of speaking. He does so by speaking
of forgetting something, precisely a way of speaking about something of
which he cannot speak. This is another instance of words succeeding in
signifying that which cannot be articulated, through their failure to sig-
nify anything in particular: more specifically, to signify ‘nothing’. As with
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 209

Connie’s speaking of her inability to speak, the narrator in The Unnam-

able bridges the gap between word and idea in addressing the gap itself as
the void regarding which the speaking of it stands in excess—the speaking
itself being something more than nothing.
This relation between excess and void in the language of Bowen and
Beckett underlines Heidegger’s observation in ‘The Way to Language’
that one ‘can speak, speak endlessly, and it may all say nothing. As
opposed to that, one can be silent, not speak at all, and in not speak-
ing say a great deal’.45 While acknowledging that talking about language
might be even worse than writing about silence, Heidegger nonetheless
asserts that the speaking of language itself is ‘as the peal of stillness ’.46
This veers closely towards a meditative evocation of language as divina-
tion but only on the basis of negation in the speaking of language itself
in its essence. This is what Heidegger designates as ‘dif-ference’: a fun-
damental separation in language of a thing from the world in which it
appears.47 The speaking of language in its essence is thereby the speaking
of the ‘not’ of this dif-ference.
Given the despicable history of Heidegger’s support for the Nazi Party
in the 1930s, it is deeply ironic that these later observations on language
‘speak’ so immediately to Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, particularly in
that scene in Robert Kelway’s car late at night, in which Stella Rodney
confronts her lover with Harrison’s claim that Robert was passing infor-
mation to the Nazis. When Stella asks him if this claim was true, Robert
struggles to speak in response. Capturing his attempt to evade the cap-
ture that Stella’s question threatens, Stella describes him speaking ‘as a
man who, in an emergency more fantastic, more beyond the possibilities
of experience, than any man should be asked to meet, casts round him for
words at random, realizes their futility before uttering them, but does all
the same utter them, as the only means of casting them from him again,
rejected’.48 His rambling clutter of sentences appear an acute instance
of speaking endlessly and saying nothing, a speech that pre-empts that
terror-inducing futility of endless speech for which Lucky’s monologue
has become infamous from Waiting for Godot . Robert’s excess of lan-
guage in this instance amounts to an attempt to say nothing, underlining
once again the relation between the void and language as excess in The
Heat of the Day. In Stella’s alertness to Robert’s sense of the futility of his
words before uttering them, yet still speaking in order to be rid of them,
we encounter one of the sharpest apprehensions in literature of the crisis
210 M. MCATEER

of linguistic expression that follows the Nazi defeat in 1945. Here a con-
text is identified that is explored even more aggressively in the narrator’s
voice of The Unnamable, the voice that will not cease articulating its own
pointlessness poetically: ‘this little yellow flame feebly darting from side
to side’, a flame that ‘should never have been lit, or it should never have
been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let
go out’.49
Derek Hand suggests that the narrator’s voice in The Unnamable could
be that of the dead ‘condemned to speak forever without end’.50 This
opens a significant relation to the voice of the mythical Cathleen ni Houli-
han. Towards the end of the Yeats/Gregory play of 1902, Cathleen speaks
of those Irish who will die for her as they who ‘shall be speaking for
ever’.51 As I noted in the Chapter 8, ‘Mythic Excess: Finnegans Wake’,
this idea of perpetual speech in Cathleen ni Houlihan is both parodied
and sustained in Finnegans Wake. Mediated through Joyce, the voice in
Beckett’s The Unnamable may then be regarded as the eternal babbling
of the Irish dead. The ‘feeble flame’ of which it speaks thereby becomes
the last flicker of a revolutionary flame, possibly traceable back to the
flames of Dublin’s Sackville street (later O’Connell street) during Easter
week in 1916, possibly stretching right back to the flames of rebellion
and defeat in the Desmondite uprising in Munster in the 1580s. What-
ever about this possible relation back to Yeats/Gregory and an Irish tra-
dition of revolt via Joyce, one thing is certain. The narrator’s voice in The
Unnamable expresses a craving for nothing: in their adequacy to the task
of that expression, the words that he uses exceed the very desire for their
own annihilation that they convey. As Andrew Kennedy puts it, the voice
aims ‘to reach a final silence through its own excess of speaking’.52 The
specific operation that we encounter here links linguistic excess and the
void in Beckett’s trilogy more emphatically than any other: the negation
of a negation.
Bowen’s The Heat of the Day stands in advance of this in the multiple
negatives that pervade the novel, and the specific manner through which
they are put into effect. Stella Rodney first encounters Harrison at the
gathering for Cousin Francis’s funeral at Wisteria Lodge, where he had
died during a time in which he was visiting this psychiatric home where
his wife Nettie was resident. Not knowing who Harrison is, Stella asks
him if he knew Cousin Francis:
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 211

“Why not?” said he, eyeing her in a moody but somehow rallying way.
“What else would make one show up at a show like this?”
“I don’t know, really.”
“You probably can’t even place me?”
“I don’t know that I’ve tried – I had not seen Cousin Francis for such a
long time that I have no idea whom he might not know.”
“Frankly, no more had I,” said Harrison promptly.53

Harrison replies to a question with a question, turning Stella’s suspicion

of him back unto her. This enhances the narrative precision through
which Bowen conveys the veneer of uncertainty that pervades Stella’s
speech in the exchange: she admits not to knowing any reason for Har-
rison attending the funeral other than having known the deceased, not
knowing if she has even tried to ‘place’ Harrison, and not knowing whom
Cousin Francis might not have known, it being so long since she had
last seen him before his death. This multiplicity of admitted ignorance is
amplified by the multitude of negative adverbs through which it is con-
veyed, and accumulates in a series of negations within a single sentence.
Admitting not to knowing if she has tried to remember Harrison, Stella
concedes that it had been so long since she had seen Cousin Francis that
she has ‘no idea whom he might not know’.54 Stella’s response to Harri-
son, however, conveys at least the minimal knowledge of her acquaintance
with the family circle into which she had entered through her marriage to
Victor, one that included the now deceased Cousin Francis (the funeral
announcement requested close relatives only to attend). While not a dou-
ble negation in the strict sense, it conveys to Harrison her knowledge that
he did not belong to Cousin Francis’s family circle as she knew it, and it
does so through a single sentence without sub-clauses that contains no
less than four negative adverbs. Admitting not to knowing what she does
not know, Stella thereby discloses what she does.

Exceeding the Subject

This original meeting of Stella and Harrison at (quite appropriately) a
funeral in The Heat of the Day presents language in excess of the void
that it denotes through a dialogue that is distinguished by both parties
communicating something in saying nothing repeatedly. Furthermore,
this proliferation of negative articles and negative adverbs occurs in a
dialogue over identity regarding who knows who. The question of the
212 M. MCATEER

subject is thus involved in the signification of nothing through language,

from which language acquires its aspect as excess in The Heat of the Day.
When considering the question of identity through the preponderance of
negative propositions in Bowen’s novel, it is telling that we encounter the
most important formulation of the negation of the negation for modern
thought in the reflections upon identity within the philosophy of Hegel.
These reflections concern the movement of consciousness. Within this
movement, the subject becomes itself by becoming other to itself, anni-
hilating itself in so doing: Hegel describes this as ‘self-sundering’, the
difference within self-identity as identity to oneself.55 Considered purely
in itself, the moment of sundering involves a complete voiding of the sub-
ject. At the same time this void derives from the operation of difference,
by which self-identity apprehends itself in a movement beyond itself into
what it is not. Hegel presents this self-annihilation as the precondition
for the constitution of the subject as an identity.56 As Žižek observes, the
overall movement of consciousness itself in Hegel’s philosophy proceeds
in excess of the subject who is generated through it. Yet it is precisely
through the active erasure of itself that the subject intervenes upon that
general process.57 Becoming other than who s/he is, the subject emerges
in his/her disappearance through an active assertion of non-being.
Towards the end of The Heat of the Day, Stella’s son Roderick arrives
at Mount Morris in Ireland, the estate that he has inherited following the
death of Cousin Francis. The caretaker Donovan tells Roderick that he
raised a boat for him that had been lying in the bottom of the lake on
the estate. Donovan relates that the boat was probably sunk for precau-
tions earlier in the war years, disclosing that the presence of ‘Mr. Robert-
son’ at Mount Morris ‘had that effect’, suggesting that he may have been
‘keeping some sort of eye on this country’ during the years of the war,
in which the Irish Free State was officially neutral.58 Roderick wonders
who this Robertson might have been, remarking to Donovan that a man
had turned up at Cousin Francis’s funeral by the name of Harrison. He
suggests that this might be the correct name of the man that Donovan
had mentioned. Donovan’s reply is inconclusive: ‘It could be: it was some
name of that sort’.59 Inadvertent or intentional, the name that Donovan
utters combines that of ‘Robert’ in the name of Stella’s lover, Robert
Kelway, and ‘son’ in the name of the man who appears to be in love with
her, Harrison. The reader is left to wonder if Robert and Harrison might
somehow share the same identity. Neil Corcoran reads this issue in a
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 213

manner that allows the influence of Joyce’s ‘Dyoublong’ (along with

its Irish signification) to be observed in The Heat of the Day: part of
‘the novel’s elaborate system of doublings and mirrorings which may
be regarded as an intensification of the doppelgänger effect elsewhere in
Bowen’.60 The name ‘Robertson’ certainly indicates the extent to which
Harrison exists as Robert’s other in the narrative. If Harrison may be con-
sidered the negation of Robert in this sense, then ‘Robertson’ names the
negation of the negation, the point at which the voiding of Robert as
the subject returns the subject to himself, constituted in his self-identity
through his annihilation in his opposite, Harrison.
Here is the forerunner of Beckett’s Molloy mutating into the figure
of Moran, the agent who pursues Molloy in Part II of Molloy and one
who is, in turn, ‘inhabited’ by Molloy.61 Maurice Blanchot comments
that ‘the principle of disintegration’ in the novel requires that Molloy ‘be
mirrored, doubled, that he become another, the detective Moran, who
pursues Molloy without ever catching him and who in that pursuit sets
out (he too) on the path of endless error’.62 As with the possibility that
Robert Kelway has become himself by disappearing into Harrison and
emerging retrospectively as Donovan’s enigmatic ‘Robertson’ in The Heat
of the Day, Molloy’s collapse into Moran is propelled by a general move-
ment of consciousness perpetually beyond the individual subjects through
whom it advances, as Moran acknowledges: ‘For what I was doing I was
doing neither for Molloy, who mattered nothing to me, nor for myself,
of whom I despaired, but on behalf of a cause which, while having need
of us to be accomplished, was in its essence anonymous, and would sub-
sist, haunting the minds of men, when its miserable artisans should be no
more’.63
In this essential anonymity, the unnameable is intimated beyond such
names as Moran and Molloy, names through which the unnameable
moves and appears within these figures in the rupture of internal dif-
ference: the non-self of the other through which a subject is constituted.
Sheldon Brivic regards the gradual merger of Molloy and Moran as a
movement towards ‘the inconsistent multiple’ as identified by Badiou.
Doing so, Brivic identifies a process that not only repeats that of Robert
and Harrison in The Heat of the Day. Although Brivic fails to draw the
connection, his perspective on the Molloy–Moran relation also links back
to the nature of the relation between Stephen and Bloom as Brivic per-
ceives it in Joyce’s Ulysses . Drawing on Badiou’s concept of the indis-
cernible in mathematical set theory, Brivic argues that Stephen embodies
214 M. MCATEER

the ‘indiscernible’ for Bloom, ‘who devotes himself to following Stephen

without knowing why’.64 In this manner of addressing the question of
the subject, we see another strong precedent in Joyce’s writing both for
Bowen and Beckett.
The superabundance of linguistic negations in the fiction of Bowen
and Beckett that was published in the eight years after the defeat of Nazi
Germany and the surrender of Japan in 1945 draws attention to the void
as an intrinsic dimension of subjective identities: the point not only from
which these identities emerge, but also the point of their annihilation.
Following an offer that the family receive to buy Holme Dene, Robert
Kelway returns there for a meeting to discuss the matter in chapter 14 of
The Heat of the Day. Standing late at night at the foot of the bannisters
in the house and remembering how his father once stood at that same
spot, Robert reflects upon the silence into which the abode has fallen. He
does so, however, in terms that lend the emptiness of this residence the
connotation of racial annihilation. Since the war, only a few of the rooms
upstairs were used, others left locked:

swastika-arms of passage leading to nothing, stripped of carpet, bulbs gone

from the light-sockets, were flanked by doors with their keys turned.
Extinct, at this night hour stygian as an abandoned mine-working, those
reaches of passage would show in daylight ghost-pale faded patches no
shadow crossed, and, from end to end, an even conquest of dust.65

Employing the words ‘swastika’ and ‘extinct’ in a work first published

in 1948, it is impossible to overlook the general historical context that
Bowen evokes for the end that now appears imminent for the Kelways at
Holme Dene: the death-camps of the European Holocaust. Ashley Maher
regards the description as one of those ‘passages in which of esoteric and
circular writing, literalized in the passages of Holme Dene, have allowed
the passage of fascistic elements into the English domestic space’.66
Maher draws attention to the original meaning of Holme Dene as ‘home
of the Dane’, speculating on a possible allusion to Nazi-occupied Den-
mark at the time of the Blitz. Yet this also carries the undercurrents
of origin and invasion such as we encounter these in Finnegans Wake.
The Saxons, the Angles, the Jutes and Frisians from modern-day Den-
mark and neighbouring Schleswig invaded and settled in Britain in the
early medieval period as Roman rule in the land was coming to an end.
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 215

The dialogue between Mutt and Jute early in Joyce’s work is preceded by
an exchange that carries puns on the Angles, Saxons and Jutes: ‘You spig-
otty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! ’Tis a Jute’.67
As Sia“n White shows, Bowen defended Finnegans Wake as early as 1941
against the objection that it was unintelligible.68 In doing so, Bowen drew
a useful distinction between communication and information, or sensa-
tion and sense.69 Her defence is almost at one with that of Beckett, when
he writes that Finnegans Wake ‘is not a book to be read but to be looked
at and listened to’.70
Declan Kiberd draws attention to the centrality of the Anglo-Irish per-
spective in Bowen’s writing. As a writer with ancestral ties to the Anglo-
Irish estate of Bowen’s Court in Cork that was destroyed during the Irish
Civil War in 1922–1923, Bowen was sensitive to the recent history of the
decline in fortunes of the largely Protestant Anglo-Irish landlord commu-
nity in Ireland from the late nineteenth century. Kiberd quotes the fol-
lowing comments that Bowen makes in Bowen’s Court from 1942, com-
ments that he describes as ‘wonderfully multivalent’: ‘I submit that the
power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or
is forced to operate in what is materially a void. We have everything to
dread from the dispossessed’.71 Kiberd notes perceptively how this can be
read in relation to Beckett, referring to Pozzo from Waiting For Godot ,
who displays ‘the autocratic madness of certain Anglo-Irish dispossessed’
in ‘barking […] their orders into an empty, contextless space’.72
This reading of Bowen’s sentiment is certainly strengthened through
consideration of the voice that speaks out of a void in the final part of
Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, the poet envisioning a plunge
‘towards nothing’ and arms and fingers spread wide for ‘the embrace of
nothing’, with the poet’s ‘wits astray’.73 Yet it is impossible to discount
Bowen’s consciousness of dispossession as a feature of rural Irish history
that took its most traumatic form in modern times in the Irish Famine
of the 1840s, giving impetus to the militant Fenian nationalist movement
in Ireland in subsequent decades. Bowen’s ‘dread of the dispossessed’ at
the start of the Second World War is of this nationalism in combination
with elements of its former adversary, the landed aristocracy in Ireland
who exercise constitutional political authority no longer. The historical
perspective of an Anglo-Irish Protestant ancestry that both Bowen and
Beckett share, an ancestry perpetually threatened and at odds with itself,
enables both writers to identify the magnitude of the void into which
European civilization had fallen in the years of the war. Out of this emerge
216 M. MCATEER

narratives that are driven by a language that gropes towards the unspeak-
able, a language of negative multiplicity always in excess of the void that
it denotes, even as it fails to speak the unspeakable, precisely because it
cannot be uttered.

Notes
1. Georges Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’ (1951), repr. in Jennifer Birkett and
Kate Ince, eds., Samuel Beckett (London: Longman, 2000; New York:
Routledge, 2013), 85–92 (55). Citations refer to the Routledge edition.
2. Ibid., 56.
3. Alain Badiou, On Beckett, eds. Alberto Toscano and Nina Power (Manch-
ester: Clinamen Press, 2003), xxxvi.
4. Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’, 56.
5. Ibid., 62.
6. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable (London: Calder
Publications, 1959), 17–18.
7. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1939) (London: Penguin, 2000), 448.
8. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1948) (New York: Anchor Books,
2002), 277.
9. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 349.
10. Sinéad Mooney, ‘Unstable Compounds: Bowen’s Beckettian Affinities’,
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 53/2 (2007), 238–56 (240).
11. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 307.
12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes
(London: Methuen, 1958), 11.
13. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 356.
14. Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Blooms-
bury, 2013), 114. Andrew Gibson suggests that Badiou’s concept of the
‘point of excess’ is effectively his ‘principle of freedom’, being a ‘princi-
ple of fundamental ontological instability’. Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos
of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 77. Given the
centrality of nothingness to Sartre’s concept of human freedom as an onto-
logical condition, the extent of the relation between Badiou’s thought and
that of Sartre becomes apparent, despite Badiou’s adherence to mathemat-
ical set theory that is entirely foreign to Sartre’s writing.
15. Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2004), 169.
16. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 109.
17. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 206.
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 217

18. Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 129.

19. Jessica Gildersleeve, Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The
Ethics of Survival (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 111–31.
20. Ibid., 113–14.
21. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 125.
22. Claire Seiler, ‘At Midcentury: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day’,
Modernism/modernity, 21/1 (2014), 125–45 (126–27).
23. Badiou, Being and Event, 235–36.
24. Badiou takes issue with the term ‘totalitarianism’, describing it as a ‘bland’
way of bringing under a single concept the Nazi extermination of the
European Jews and the mass liquidations in Siberia during the reign of
Stalin. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London: Verso, 2001), 64. His objection is entirely valid regarding the
common use of the term, but it misses a point that his own theory of the
event generates for ‘totalitarian’ as a description for the historical moment
of Hitler’s control of Germany from 1933 and the reign of terror in Soviet
Russia through the course of the 1930s. In both the Nazi and the Stalinist
cases, ‘totalitarian’ can describe the situation of total order in the face of
an excess, an order that must concede the nihilism of the void through
mass state killing and enslavement, a void that thereby renders this total
order (Badiou’s ‘quasi-everything of the situation’) incomprehensible in
its historical moment.
25. Saint-Amour describes this state of continuing life in Hiroshima as nor-
mal, despite the looming suspicion of annihilating attack by U.S. forces.
He perceives the state as a subsequent condition of Cold War urban expe-
rience more widely: ‘But in the period of eerie suspension before the
explosion, those who registered the nuclear uncanny in Hiroshima were
also the first to experience a condition that, in more explicit form, would
become familiar to everyone living in a targeted city under the Cold War
doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction: the sense that the present secu-
rity and flourishing of the city were at once underwritten and radically
threatened by its identity as a nuclear target.’ Tense Future: Modernism,
Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
26. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 418.
27. Badiou, On Beckett, 12–13.
28. Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 89.
29. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 226.
30. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 193–94.
31. Bowen’s valorization of madness, most explicitly in her last novel, adds
to Keri Walsh’s argument for French Surrealism as a significant influ-
ence on Bowen’s writing. Keri Walsh, ‘Elizabeth Bowen, Surrealist’, Éire-
Ireland 42/3–4 (2007), 126–47. Benjamin Keatinge and Emilie Morin
draw attention to the value that the Surrealists placed on madness as
218 M. MCATEER

shown in the Surrealist special issue of the small English-language publica-

tion, This Quarter, in September 1932. The issue included Beckett trans-
lations of collaborative pieces by leading figures in the Surrealist Move-
ment, André Breton and Paul Eluard. Benjamin Keatinge, ‘Beckett and
Language Pathology’, Journal of Modern Literature, 31/4 (2008), 86–
101 (87); Emilie Morin, ‘Theatres and Pathologies of Silence: Symbolism
and Irish Drama from Maeterlinck to Beckett’, in Michael McAteer, ed.,
Silence in Modern Irish Literature (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017), 44.
32. Sinéad Mooney, ‘Unstable Compounds’, 241.
33. Quoted in Gildersleeve, Elizabeth Bowen, 113.
34. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 119–20.
35. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 116.
36. Ibid., 34.
37. Jacques Derrida, of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(1976) (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 69.
38. This may account for the oddity that Derrida largely avoids writing about
Beckett—one of the most important writers in French in the post-war
era—throughout his career. Leslie Hill considers the significance of this
apparent evasion on Derrida’s part. ‘Poststructuralist Readings of Beck-
ett’, in Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 82–83.
39. Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in Alan Bass,
trans., Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), 36.
40. Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 186.
41. Mooney, ‘Unstable Compounds’, 241.
42. Anna Teekell, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Language at War’, New Hibernia
Review, 15/3 (2011), 61–79 (62).
43. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 275.
44. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 294.
45. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language’ (1959), in David Farrell Krell,
ed., Basic Writings, new ed. (London: Routledge, 1993), 393–426, 408.
46. Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’, in Albert Hofstadter, trans., Poetry, Lan-
guage, Thought (1971) (London: Harper Perennial Modern Thought,
2013), 185–208 (88, 201).
47. Heidegger, ‘Language’, 199–200.
48. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 211–12.
49. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 374.
50. Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 207.
51. John P. Harrington, ed., Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, 2nd ed.
(London: Norton, 2009), 10.
52. Andrew Kennedy, Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 139.
 9 VOIDING THE SUBJECT: BOWEN AND BECKETT 219

53. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 82.

54. There is a case for reading this sentence as an instance described by
Wittgenstein in which a double-negative does not necessarily producing an
affirmative. Wittgenstein notes that the expression of a negative statement
(disagreement, denial, ignorance, admonition) by a person shaking their
head is not converted into an affirmative statement by the person shaking
their head a second time: on the contrary, repeating the gesture usually
emphasizes the negative nature of the initial statement that the gesture
implies. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 148–49.
55. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 100.
56. Ibid., 100.
57. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd ed. (London: Verso,
2008), xv–xvi.
58. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 354.
59. Ibid., 355.
60. Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen, 180.
61. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 115.
62. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Unnamable’ (1953), repr. in Jennifer Birkett and
Kate Ince, eds., Samuel Beckett (New York: Routledge, 2013), 116–21
(118).
63. Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies , The Unnamable, 115.
64. Sheldon Brivic, Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from
Joyce to Enright (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 79.
65. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 289.
66. Ashley Maher, ‘“Swastika arms of passage leading to nothing”: Late Mod-
ernism and the “New” Britain’, ELH, 80/1 (2013), 251–85 (274).
67. Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 16.
“n White, ‘An Aesthetics of Unintimacy: Narrative Complexity in Eliza-
68. Sia
beth Bowen’s Fictional Style’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 45/1 (2015),
79–104 (97–99).
69. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘James Joyce’ (1941), in Allan Hepburn, ed., People,
Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2008), 239–47 (244–45).
70. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983),
27.
71. Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942),
338.
72. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 366–77.
73. A. Norman Jeffares, ed. and annot., Yeats’s Poems, 2nd ed. (London:
Papermac, 1991), 313.
 CHAPTER 10

Here Beyond: Heaney, Longley, Muldoon,

McGuckian

Naming the Unspeakable

Through writing that exceeds the unspeakable simply by naming it,
Bowen and Beckett evoke a relation in language between excess and anni-
hilation that becomes pressing for literature after 1945. Particularly in the
case of Beckett’s post-war writing, this continues the linguistic violence of
Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s work connects the political violence out of which
new state-formations emerge in Ireland in the 1920s to the wider context
of violence in Europe after the First World War. The language of avoid-
ance in Bowen and Beckett discreetly alludes to the unspeakable nature
of this violence in the emergence of Nazism in Germany and Stalinism
in Russia. How might this relation between linguistic excess and violence
be observed in later Irish literature? Bataille’s identification of linguistic
violence is instructive in this regard, particularly his sense of excess as the
experience of the immediacy of being itself in its purest condition. Assert-
ing that economic, political and social development disguises life itself as
‘a luxurious squandering of energy’, Bataille contends that after a cen-
tury of relative industrial peace in Europe, the two world wars ‘organized
the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings –that history has
recorded’.1
In contrast to Bataille, Badiou argues for the ‘indiscernible’ as a ‘point
of excess’ through which a given situation takes on the character of an
event and, in so doing, acquires an infinite dimension. Finnegans Wake

© The Author(s) 2020 221

M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6_10
222 M. MCATEER

signals this ‘indiscernible’ through the point of separation between mythic

order and mythic anarchy inscribed in its violation of words: The Heat
of the Day, through persistent evasion and discretion by which a loom-
ing void is signified in the very attempts to stave it off: Molloy and The
Unnamable through the proliferation of words for uttering what cannot
be articulated. Yet this ‘indiscernible’ is equally as relevant to Bataille’s
idea of the purposeless expenditure of energy as it is to Badiou’s notion
of the point of excess in mathematical set theory. Further, both this
luxurious squandering of energy and the indiscernible as the point of
excess relate significantly to Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis [event], even
though neither Bataille nor Badiou concur with Heidegger’s ontology of
Dasein. As Richard Polt observes, Heidegger’s understanding of the event
is one in which the excess of Ereignis over the meaning through which
it is disclosed is of such a degree as to expose the limit of meaning itself:
hence the radical event comes as a shock.2

Exceeding Discretion
The acceleration of political violence in Northern Ireland at the start of
the 1970s made the issues of linguistic excess, meaning and annihilation
immediately pressing for poets who attempted to confront the circum-
stances. One of the earliest and most significant interventions was made
by Seamus Heaney in a poem included his 1975 collection, North, ‘What-
ever You Say Say Nothing’. The poem addresses the inadequacies of two
contrasting forms of discourse in the face of the outbreak of extreme
violence in the North between 1969 and 1974: the media language of
modern journalism alongside a local language of irredentist political and
religious division. ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ presents both media
rhetoric and the long-familiar ‘sanctioned’ responses to questions about
the Northern conflict as exceeded by the events and circumstances to
which they refer. Heaney’s exasperation with that ‘famous / Northern
reticence’ in a ‘land of password, handgrip, wink and nod’ recalls sharply
the determined evasion of the subject in The Heat of the Day, both
with regard to Robert Kelway’s family at Holme Dene and the secrecy
around past events at Mount Morris that are never fully brought to light
in Bowen’s war-time novel. As with Bowen, there is a subtle relation
between avoidance and the void in Heaney’s poem. Speaking in codes
and innuendo, characters in The Heat of the Day thereby allude discreetly
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 223

to the unspeakable realities of mass-killing that are happening during war-

time. Heaney’s ironic instruction to ‘say nothing’ likewise speaks to the
calamitous reality that, from 1969 to the end of 1974, 1236 people had
been killed directly in political violence in Northern Ireland, thousands
more injured and hundreds interned without trial. The ‘nothing’ that
the poem addresses signifies the void that opens up in the North dur-
ing those years of carnage, one into which the small geographical area
becomes sucked.
‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ presents the poet’s most immedi-
ate experience of locality as that which has become most alien to him.
The Ulster that has shaped him is now a place where hotels are ‘littered’
with television, radio and newspaper reporters, along with their cameras,
cassette recorders and coiled leads.3 In the final part of the poem, dur-
ing a morning drive along a motorway, he notices features that indi-
cate the ongoing political violence: a new internment camp, a crater left
from a roadside bomb, and an Army machine-gun post. These produce a
‘déjá-vu’ sensation, as if he was watching ‘some film made / Of Stalag
17’, one that Heaney imagines as a silent bad dream.4 Heaney would
have seen the movie Stalag 17 sometime in his youth after it was released
in 1953, a movie for which William Holden won the Hollywood ‘Best
Actor’ Oscar award. The film depicts a group of American soldiers in a
German prison camp in Austria in 1944. The allusion to the film sig-
nals the impact of the Second World War on Heaney’s early childhood
in Ulster, Heaney having been born in the April before the war began in
September 1939.
The strangeness of what should be familiar in Heaney’s poem opens
the possibility for considering the outbreak of political violence in Ulster
from the late 1960s as an event in the ontological sense. Heidegger
writes of the event as the disclosure of the self-concealment of ‘beyng’
such that the absolute distance of humans from ‘the god’ is the utter
remoteness of humans from what is closest to them: the very ground
of their own being as human.5 Heidegger’s notion of the event con-
veys the idea that the truth of what it is to be arises exclusively from
a decision ‘of being-there [Das-sein] and being-away [Weg-sein]’.6 Pre-
scient of Badiou’s injunction—‘Decide from the point of view of the
undecidable’—Heidegger’s notion is also founded upon a fundamental
form of decision.7 The remoteness of abandonment and the nearness of
what abandons means that the decision to allow oneself to be grasped by
one’s very being is itself undecidable.8
224 M. MCATEER

Heaney’s image of the disturbed familiarity of the Ulster landscape as

‘Stalag 17’ in ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ gives Heidegger’s idea a
concrete poetic expression. It is an image most remote from the North
in which Heaney grew up. Stalag 17 was a propaganda piece for the
American military following the failure to achieve outright victory in the
Korean War 1950–1952. Remote as this setting is from Heaney’s Ulster,
his allusion to it is still intimate. It recalls not only early childhood mem-
ories of British and American forces stationed in camps in Ulster during
the Second World War, but also nostalgic memories of movies watched in
cinemas in Derry or Belfast during his teenage years.
The cinematic form of imagery and its movement in the final part of
‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ conveys the excess of elements within
the circumstances of Ulster in the early 1970s over the situation itself.
Driving along a motorway through cold morning mist, the sights that
the poet passes—the internment camp, the bomb crater, the machine-gun
post—rise and fade like scenes from a war-movie. This cinematic form
takes the reader from the new outbreak of historical violence in Ulster
to the prison-camps of the Second World War in Central Europe, from
there to the movie entertainment industry of Hollywood, and there again
to the Korean War shadowing Stalag 17 .
If the situation described in Part IV of ‘Whatever You Say Say Noth-
ing’ counts each of these aspects as (following Badiou) individual sub-
sets within a ‘set of all the subsets’, then it is obvious how these subsets
exceed the initial set itself, the total circumstance that the poem evokes in
its final part.9 This situation of political conflict in the North as Heaney
presents it at the end of ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ includes the
Second World War that shadowed his childhood, the Cold War that shad-
owed his teenage years and the rise of media technology (cinema and
television) through which these were relayed. Thus the ‘nothing’ of a-
voidance in local conversations that Heaney laments earlier in the poem
as the ‘famous / Northern reticence’ is disturbing not only in relation to
the aching void left by lives destroyed in the local conflict. It also relates
to the excess of those international conflicts over that of the Northern
Irish Troubles, included within the political situation of the North as
presented in ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ but not belonging to it.
Badiou’s statement on the nature of the totality of a situation is relevant
to what Heaney is getting at: ‘every situation implies the nothing of its
all. But the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation’.10
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 225

Addressing excess in relation to language and void, ‘Whatever You Say

Say Nothing’ also illuminates the idea of reticence in Heidegger’s account
of the event. Heidegger states that a sudden apprehension of the utter
remoteness of being is experienced as pure excess (‘Über-maß ’).11 Com-
ing as a shock, this apprehension is yet enabled and sustained by reticence.
In a state of shock, the person does not fall into bewilderment. The shock
relates internally to the disclosure of the remoteness of being that prompts
it. Heidegger’s notion of restraint names this relation: restraint as the
centre for the shock itself.12 Heaney’s poem articulates this operation of
restraint within his shock at the evidence of the political conflict in the
North that confronts him. The landscape that should be most familiar to
him is now almost unrecognizable, just over five years into the onslaught
of the Troubles.
Rather typical of several Heaney poems, particularly at the height of
violence in the North during the 1970s, ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’
performs what it decries. It is ‘careful’ (in the sense of poetic craft, of
caution and of the ‘care’ or concern of Dasein): four parts each containing
several quatrains of even metrical feet. The restraint that this involves is an
aspect of that same ‘famous / Northern reticence’ that frustrates Heaney
in Part III of the poem. It is a characteristic that allowed one reviewer of
North, Anthony Thwaite in the Times Literary Supplement, to commend
the entire collection for its ‘pure and scrupulous tact’.13 Being tactful at
a time of intense and brutal violence in 1970s Ulster may not exactly be
received as a compliment. Instead it may be considered complicit with
the message encoded in the phrase ‘whatever you say, say nothing’: watch
your mouth. Eugene O’Brien observes that in Northern Ireland during
the Troubles ‘[s]aying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or even saying
the most banal of things in the wrong place or the wrong accent, could
lead not only to offence but to death’.14
John Hildebidle regards ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ as a protest
against ‘saying nothing’ while people are being violated in so many ways.
As Hildebidle rightly points out, saying nothing in the circumstances of
the Troubles in the 1970s/1980s is saying something: ‘in Ireland, even
to say nothing is to take a side’.15 Yet the saying of nothing in the poem
refers to something more than imposed or self-imposed censorship: it inti-
mates the disclosure of a void in traumatic circumstances that cannot be
adequately conveyed through linguistic conventions. Indeed, the poem
observes how common speech itself—whether of press reporting of the
Troubles or the old evasions of everyday dialogue in a divided North—is
226 M. MCATEER

marked by violence, as Daniel Tobin suggests.16 The ‘nothing’ of ‘What-

ever You Say Say Nothing’ is as much an ontological as a political state-
ment. This is a poem that is already addressing the question of the void,
one that emerges in explicitly ontological ways in Heaney’s later poetry,
as Irene Gilsenan Nordin shows in her reading of ‘Hailstones’ and ‘Clear-
ances’ from The Haw Lantern (1987). Gilsenan Nordin observes how
deeply the language and imagery in these poems evokes the idea of ‘the
Nothing’ upon which Heidegger reflects in his inaugural 1929 lecture
‘What is Metaphysics?’17 Rather than a departure from the political ten-
sion in ‘saying nothing’ in North, the sonnet sequence ‘Clearances’ is bet-
ter appreciated as a deeper probing of what that ‘nothing’ may actually
‘be’.
Restraint typifies much of Heaney’s poetry on the Irish Troubles, but it
is even more evident in the poetry of Michael Longley. Published sixteen
years after Heaney’s North, Longley’s Gorse Fires (1991) include some of
his most enduring meditations on the violence in Ulster and its complex
relations to larger historical catastrophes, including the First World War,
the Irish Famine and the European Holocaust. One of the best-known,
‘The Ice-Cream Man’, exemplifies strikingly the exercise of restraint as a
feature of the excess that Heidegger designates to the event, apprehended
as the shock of recognizing the most familiar circumstance as the most
remote. The poem begins by listing five flavours of ice-cream, names that
the loved one to whom the poem is addressed would ‘rhyme off’.18 The
luxuriant taste conjured by the naming of these flavours is interrupted
by the disclosure in line three that the ice-cream vendor had been mur-
dered on South Belfast’s Lisburn Road, not just halting the rhyming, but
prompting the poem’s addressee to buy carnations to lay at the shop.
It would be easy to read this beginning to ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ as the
rendering of a paramilitary shooting interrupting the civility of ordinary
life along the relatively affluent boulevard of the Lisburn Road in the late
1980s, near Belfast’s University district. This, however, is to ignore the
evidently surrealistic aspect to the situation as it is presented, similar in
effect to the conclusion of Heaney’s ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’.
The assassination of an ice-cream vendor by members of a paramilitary
organization in Belfast borders on the ludicrous—as if ice-cream could
be politically affiliated. Characteristic of the influence of Homer and the
extended lists of names that recur in The Iliad and The Odyssey, Longley’s
list of flavours at the start of ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ conveys a luxurious
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 227

excess of tastes over the dead body of the vendor who had dispensed
them.19
Longley’s poem moves from luxurious consumption to a brutal murder
in its first three lines. Relevant to this is Bataille’s observation that eating
brings about death, though unexpectedly. He regards death as a culmi-
nation of the ‘fragility and luxury’ of the animal body as it has evolved,
death being the most costly of ‘all conceivable luxuries’.20 On this basis
Bataille regards human beings as the most suited of all living organisms ‘to
consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy’ produced out of the
solar origins of the movements of life itself.21 Considered from this per-
spective, the sweet inviting tastes of the various flavours on offer in ‘The
Ice-Cream Man’ not only conjure a delicate sense of self-indulgence, they
also presage a visitation of death, so fragile are they in their luxuriousness.
Peter McDonald may be right in observing that the delicacy of Longley’s
style in ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ is at odds with formulaic explanations or
modes of consolation, yet there is more to it than this: delicacy is already
anticipating death.22
This relation between delicacy and death is expanded out in the last six
lines of this ten-line poem, when Longley recalls naming for his addressee
all the wild flowers of the Burren that he had seen in one day. As a karst
landscape of sheer limestone rock extending over a range of 250 square
kilometres, the Burren in the Galway-Clare region of Ireland’s mid-west
presents a stark contrast between barrenness and beauty. Within narrow
crevices running between great flat slabs of rock grow an abundance of
plants and flowers, many of them considered rare. The naming of these
in the poem is itself an indulgence of sorts, the luxury and delicacy of
their sound evoking the exotic beauty of the fauna. These beautiful names
of wild flowers that the speaker lists out almost overflow the lyric itself,
excessive in their variety. Particularly when set against the barrenness of
the Burren’s extended rock surface, however, they also evince a sense of
purposeless waste that the poem addresses in the pointless waste of life
that the murder of the ice-cream man involves.
In this aspect, Longley’s ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ recalls Katharine Mans-
field’s story, ‘At the Bay’ from her 1922 collection, The Garden Party.
Dreaming her morning away under a manuka tree near a bay in New
Zealand, a young woman takes in her hand one of the many flowers that
fall from it, intrigued at the exquisite delicacy of the yellow petals, yet ulti-
mately bemused at the purposeless nature of their design. Contemplating
the flowers fall from the manuka tree as soon as they blossom, she asks
228 M. MCATEER

why the trouble is taken ‘to make all these things that are wasted, wast-
ed’.23 Reflecting on Longley’s list of wild flowers from ‘The Ice-Cream
Man’ in this light, the cogency of Bataille’s insights on fragility, waste and
excess becomes apparent. Observing that neither growth nor reproduc-
tion would be possible if plants and animals did not ‘dispose of an excess’,
Bataille contends that in general there is no growth ‘but only a luxurious
squandering of energy in every form’.24 Even if the wild flowers are cited
in ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ in the manner of a litany for the soul of the mur-
dered vendor (as Heaney inclines to the floral garland of ‘rosary beads’
in ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’), the sense of a life wasted is deep-
ened rather than placated. The delicate lament for the victim in Longley’s
poem is itself haunted by the purposeless excess of luxuriant life through
which his memory is preserved in poetic images of ice-cream flavours and
varieties of flowers.

Out of Sequence
While the poetry of Paul Muldoon certainly evokes the strangeness of the
familiar in its treatment of the Northern Irish conflict, it is not distin-
guished by the formal reticence that readers encounter in the poetry of
Heaney or Longley. Excess in one of Muldoon’s most important poems
on the Northern Irish conflict, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man
Wants’, is so flagrant as to suggest that the poet throws off that restraint,
surrendering to free association. The dense web of allusions in the poem
runs from the hallucinogenic mescaline of ‘Mescalero’ to the assassina-
tion of an Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier; from a trip in the
mountains north of Boston (allusion to Robert Frost’s 1914 poetry col-
lection, North of Boston) to Dante’s Beatrice (also the name of a metham-
phetamine hallucinogenic drug).25 In the poem Muldoon quotes from
The Doors of Perception on Aldous Huxley’s use of mescaline and suggests
in an interview that the world itself is hallucinogenic.26 Writing in the late
1980s, Terence Brown considers that the range and density of the poem
conveys ‘a mode of consciousness that might be compared to computer
overload’.27
In this hallucinogenic aspect, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man
Wants’ lies open to the criticism that Badiou levels against postmod-
ernist proponents of the ethics of difference. This concerns Badiou’s
belief that the promotion of multicultural difference as a value in itself
is actually devoid of any meaning, because infinite difference is simply
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 229

what is: ‘Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite dif-
ferences’.28 Badiou develops his understanding of excess in terms of a
situation being counted as singular, not merely another moment of the
perpetual flow of differences. Yet the abundance of associations in ‘The
More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ is not tantamount to express-
ing anything whatever. The poem narrates a set of circumstances that is
marked by political violence and it negotiates these through a mythical
figure, Gallogly. Muldoon certainly has no pretensions to make its char-
acters heroic, but the poem concords with Sorel’s notion of anarchism
as myth in important respects. When Sorel writes of the general strike as
myth, he has in mind the type of myth that emerged in the first stage of
Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution and the
Italian Risorgimento.29 He attributes the terror among many people that
such revolutionary moments have inspired to the enormous amount of
the unknown that they opened. By conjuring a multitudinous range of
perspectives through Gallogly in response to the violent political circum-
stances of Ulster in the 1970s, Muldoon’s poem generates the sense of
its historical moment as, at some level, incomprehensible. Evoking incom-
prehension (within the poem and to the poem) in mythic terms, Muldoon
discloses this connection that Sorel draws between anarchy and myth.
In one sense ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ involves
the kind of engagement with myth that we encounter in Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake. Claire Wills associates this with the mythical narrative form pro-
pounded in the criticism of T. S. Eliot and adapted in his poetry. Arguing
for Muldoon’s poetry extending beyond the so-called High Modernism
of Eliot (and its legacy for Heaney), Wills emphasizes how Muldoon
demotes the originality of the mythical narrative as a framing structure
to simply one more element among others within the poem itself.30 In
‘The More a Man Has The More a Man Wants’, however, the mythi-
cal figure of Gallogly generates the excess of the poems’ representations
rather than bringing them into the order of a meta-structure.
Wills points out that the name Gallogly carries a range of associations
relating to Irish, Scottish and English history.31 This includes the Irish
word for foreigner, Gall, and, by implication, the dislike of the foreigner
in colonial Irish history: the Gall as ‘ogly’. It also includes the name for
the Norse–Scottish and Norse–Irish mercenary warriors from the four-
teenth to the sixteenth centuries, the Gallowglass. Muldoon further asso-
ciates Gallogly in the poem with England through ‘Ingoldsby’, a possible
reference to the popular legends and ghost stories of Thomas Ingoldsby
230 M. MCATEER

(pen-name of Richard Harris Barham), that were published in the 1830s

and 1840s. As Peter Berresford Ellis points out, the oldest meaning of
‘Gall’ was someone who came from Gaul, the ancient Roman name for
the territory of France.32 This may account for the reference to the Seine
at the start of ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, as well as
to the presence of Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas later in
the poem, American artists living in Paris in the early twentieth century.
Of greater significance, Gallogly is associated with the Oglala Sioux
Native American tribe of the Lakota region.33 Introducing this particu-
lar allusion, Muldoon performs a remarkable trick of reversing the native
Irish etymology of the word Gallogly. Through Oglala, he picks up the
echo of ‘ugly Sioux’ in pejorative bar-room phrase ‘ugly Sue’. So doing,
he signals the lingering trace of a people left scattered and defeated by
the advance of western Europeans across North American territories. The
silent letters in the word Sioux also draw attention to excess in the form of
linguistic leftovers that are signs of colonial history. The ethnocidal aspect
that Muldoon brings up in this poem doesn’t seem to interest Robert
Faggen, who regards the association drawn between the Sioux braves of
the Oglala and the Ulster-Scots mercenary Gallowglass merely as part of
‘a litany of romantic fantasies of origin that upbraid the claims of identity
politics’.34
David Wheatley notes how the difficulty that Gallogly has with the
unpronounced ‘sh’ in the word ‘sheugh’ ironically echoes Heaney’s obser-
vation of the difficulty that strangers had with the last ‘gh’ of ‘Broagh’ in
the poem of that title.35 In Muldoon’s case, however, the historical colo-
nial meaning of the linguistic leftover is more unstable. ‘Sheugh’ is an
Ulster-Scots word for a ditch, the Irish equivalent of which is ‘sceach’.
The difficulty for Gallogly is not so much with the historical leftover
of ‘sheugh’ as it is with the ‘sh’ sound in the ditch where he hides at
one point, having been ditched himself by history.36 William Wilson sug-
gests that the ‘Huh’ with which the poem concludes is an act of disen-
gagement and poetic preservation in the face of ‘a culture that moves
randomly between apocalyptic and entropic extremes’.37 As a slang-
version of ‘what’, ‘huh’ implies incomprehension or indifference, senti-
ments which may be directed as much at the poem itself as at the North-
ern Irish situation to which it responds. Incomprehension and indiffer-
ence can well be identified as the dominant attitudes among people in
England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland to the Troubles in
the North of Ireland as the conflict continued into the 1980s. Yet like
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 231

the silent letters of Heaney’s ‘Broagh’ or Muldoon’s ‘Sheugh’, ‘huh’ also

reads as another linguistic leftover, more excess baggage from the night-
mare of history.
Excess in ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ derives fore-
most from the fact that its central figure does not quite belong to the
sequence that he generates. Gallogly inaugurates an extended string of
associations yet he is forever out of place within the wide range of circum-
stances through which the poem moves. The arrival of ‘Mangas Jones’ as
‘excess baggage’ at Belfast’s Aldergrove Airport from Florida early into
the poem gains its significance from the fact that he is an Apache Indian
who belongs to a tribe (‘Mescalero’), the name of which insinuates the
hallucinogenic mescaline.38 These Native American and drug allusions
frame the passage that follows immediately upon the arrival of Mangas
Jones. In this, Gallogly traces smoke signals to Strandmillis Embankment
along the Lagan riverbank near South Belfast’s lower Ormeau Road where
a group of loyalist youths are gathered near an 11th night bonfire (preced-
ing the traditional Orange Order marches on July 12th commemorating
the Battle of the Boyne in 1690), high from sniffing glue and not notic-
ing Gallogly’s presence in consequence. At the same time a youth plays
a video game in a Vietnamese take-away in west Belfast. Knowing that
this take-away is ‘Viet-ma-friggin’-knees, this young man ‘drops his pay-
load of napalm’. The reader is directed back to America via the Vietnam
War in these references. They also link this war to the political conflict
in Northern Ireland through the play on ‘knees’, a thinly disguised allu-
sion to kneecappings that were carried out by paramilitaries in the North.
The ‘payload’ of napalm identifies a further connection between paramili-
tary drug-dealing and the bomb attacks that these loyalist and republican
groups carried out during the Troubles against the backdrop of the mass-
bombings of Vietnam and Cambodia by the U.S. Airforce in the 1970s.
Gallogly’s movement in the poem, particularly through his relation
with the figure of Beatrice, continues the sequence of these associations
to include an American dimension within representations of violence in
Northern Ireland in terms of psychedelic drugs and international con-
flicts. In doing so, Muldoon’s poem moves beyond the Troubles in the
process of responding to it. Verse eight of the poem provides a compelling
example. Muldoon presents the reader with the image of a woman tied to
Church railings, her head shaved, tarred and feathered, wearing a bomber
jacket with a sign that seems to read ‘Keep off the grass’.39 Particularly
when referring to her as a ‘Child of Prague / — big-eyed, anorexic’, the
232 M. MCATEER

passage responds to the image of the young woman tarred and feathered
in Heaney’s poem ‘Punishment’ from North. Heaney’s poem addresses
the female body of a sacrificial victim of a fertility rite found preserved
in a Danish bog, drawing on her in response to a newspaper photograph
of a young woman tarred and feathered by the IRA for dating a British
soldier in Belfast during the early seventies.40 Whereas the line of associ-
ation is predominantly vertical in Heaney’s poem from past to present, in
Muldoon’s it is largely horizontal, moving from one place of conflict to
another. The woman’s bomber jacket associates 1970s youth fashion with
American bomber pilots of the Second World War and also with the per-
petrators of fatal bomb attacks in Ireland and Britain during the 1970s.
‘Keep off the grass’ aligns respect for Church grounds with the violent
policing of marijuana-use by the IRA during the seventies and beyond.
Sustaining these disparate associations through the course of ‘The
More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, Gallogly is always somewhere
other than the place of their occurrence. In a numerical sense of excess, he
corresponds to Badiou’s description of the limit ordinal number. This is
the number that guarantees succession within a numerical sequence, but a
number that remains the place of the Other to the entire sequence itself.
Being ‘the very place of succession’ of any sequence, the limit ordinal
number can, in principle, only be located beyond any such sequence.41
Because of this, no numerical sequence is, in practice, a finished sequence.
In Muldoon’s poem, the sequence of disparate associations is inaugurated
by Gallogly waking up to discover that his lover has already left. He squats
in his own fur, an image that immediately directs the reader away from
the Belfast of black taxis to the figure of the Native American clothed in
animal hide.
By the time the police arrive at the house in which Gallogly has slept
with Beatrice, he is already on the run. Discovering cannabis there, a
policeman takes it ‘back for analysis’, or smoking it, as suggested in the
sequence that follows.42 In this circumstance, Gallogly appears as the
policeman’s double, who has ‘double-parked’ in front of the police-
man’s house a milk-van in which he made his getaway. The policeman
encounters Gallogly leaving the front door of his house, wearing his
‘Donegal-tweed’ suit, his Sunday shoes, and raising the policeman’s hat
as he walks past, sitting into the policeman’s Ford Cortina car before
driving off.43 Gallogly’s numerical value in ‘The More a Man Has the
More a Man Wants’ as its limit ordinal number is disclosed through
the double as the figure of two. As Badiou observes, it is the doubling
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 233

of the initial ‘count-as-one’ that secures the original one in relation to

the void, thereby granting primacy to the number two. In the aspect of
the policeman’s double, we find just one of several encounters in which
Gallogly appears either in a pair or in two places at the one time.
Throughout ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’, Gallogly
appears on the periphery of widely diverse places and circumstances to
which he does not quite belong. In this way, he epitomizes the subject as
one who is, in Badiou’s words, ‘faithful to the trace, and thus to event’.44
At a farmyard in County Armagh, the Orchard County that motivates
apple symbolism in the poem, the wife of an UDR soldier catches his
image momentarily when looking at her own face reflected in a window
before which she stands as she takes a Valium tablet.45 The double-barrels
of the shotgun that she takes to ‘clear the air’ with Gallogly themselves
double the image of the milk-van that Gallogly had left double-parked in
Belfast earlier in the poem, even as he doubled-up as one of the policemen
who was searching for him.
Taking the gun to Gallogly under the symbolic operation of the dou-
ble, the UDR soldier’s wife—soon to be widowed—thereby reiterates the
Joycean question of Finnegans Wake: ‘Dyoublong?’ Likewise the image of
an IRA bomb as a ‘command-wire / petering out behind a milk churn’
repeats the image of milk that lay spilt across the street from the van
abandoned by Gallogly. It also looks forward to the milkmaid who sinks
her foot into a dunghill, pouring beastlings into the hole for Gallogly to
drink, as he repeats the name of an apple (Beauty of Bath) to himself
under his ‘garlic’ (or Gaulic) breath.46 This same hole itself repeats the
image of the hole left in the chest of the UDR soldier, assassinated by an
IRA sniper as he exercised his greyhound. Muldoon measures the hole in
the heart as the size of ‘an ovarian cyst’—a reference back to the muted
anxiety of the soldier’s wife, placated by the anti-depressant drug—and
the exit wound about the size of a fist.47 In this way, ‘fist’ reads as a
loaded (if long-delayed) rhyme with ‘cyst’ in the poem. This doubling of
death by a bullet wound with death by a cancerous tumour also connects
to the theme of belonging in ‘The More a Man Has The More a Man
Wants’. The political conflict in which the soldier is killed is rooted in con-
tested claims to territorial belonging. The rhyme of ‘fist’ and ‘cyst’ recalls
the conjunction of doubling and belonging in ‘Dyoublong’ of Finnegans
Wake.
Of the limit ordinal number, Badiou observes that it does not belong
to the sequence of ordinal numbers that it orders: ‘not belonging to itself,
234 M. MCATEER

it ex-sists from the sequence whose limit it is’.48 Counting the figure of
Gallogly in ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ as a limit ordi-
nal, it becomes apparent that excess in the poem derives from Gallogly
not belonging to himself. The numerical procedure of doubling through
the course of the poem arises from a desire to locate Gallogly by count-
ing him, precisely because he is always ‘on the run’, never present in the
first instance. As Badiou’s mathematical account of ontology observes,
the void that inhabits the origin of one as the single number is already
disclosed in the act of counting it, because the counting itself is a dou-
bling. The operation of the limit ordinal number as the point from which
excess in the poem flows is evident in the fact that, like the limit ordi-
nal itself, nothing is actually there in ‘The More a Man Has the More a
Man Wants’. Gallogly is present in the landscape of Ulster only in so far
as that landscape is removed from its immediate geographical location.
This occurs through the references in the poem to a vast array of places
and peoples as remnants and traces: the Oglala tribe of the Lakota Sioux,
the Warwickshire men who planted hedges following their plantation in
Ulster; the Astroturf football pitch in South Belfast that has replaced the
turf of Heaney’s boglands; the Las Vegas bar as a Belfast imitation of the
American city of imitations; the moment of High Modernism in New
York and Paris of the 1920s.

Out of Place
This type of displacement is also striking in many poems of Mul-
doon’s contemporary, Medbh McGuckian. McGuckian’s imagery recalls
the reworking of myth through displacement in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,
although her language pursues a different trajectory. ‘Gráinne’s Sleep
Song’ from her 1995 collection, On Ballycastle Beach, takes its title from
an episode recorded in the legend of Diarmuid and Gráinne, the most
widely known modern English-language version of which is that of Lady
Gregory. The couple are the lovers who wander across Ireland on the
run from Finn MacCumhaill, leader of the Fianna warriors. Finn had
intended to marry Gráinne, but after falling in love with Diarmuid upon
first seeing him, Gráinne absconds with Diarmuid on the night before the
marriage-day. Watching over Diarmuid as he sleeps, Gráinne sings to him
‘to whom I have given my love’.49 McGuckian’s poem extends this motif
of wandering far beyond the time and circumstances of the original leg-
end by adapting it to the love story of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. She
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 235

also incorporates the personal history of Pasternak’s love affair with Olga
Ivinskaya, the woman upon whom the character of Lara in Pasternak’s
novel is believed to have been modelled. ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’ exem-
plifies Badiou’s observation on the motif of wandering in the poetry of
Hölderin, ‘that the very being of the homeland is that of escaping’.50
Stephanie Schwerter traces the influence of Ivinskaya’s biography, A
Captive of My Time, in ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’, specifically with reference
to the love affair with Pasternak that lasted from 1946 until Pasternak’s
death in 1960. She relates the themes of sleep and insomnia in McGuck-
ian’s poem to Pasternak’s early-morning visits to Ivinskaya’s room in
Moscow. Schwerter observes how line five of ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’—
‘The house / Hadn’t enough sleep either’—echoes a line from A Captive
of My Time, in which Ivinskaya writes of the houses and streets in her
district not having had ‘enough sleep either’ at the six-in-the-morning
visits by Pasternak. Schwerter also relates this restlessness in McGuckian’s
poem to the conflict of emotions, ‘elation and despair’, awakened in Ivin-
skaya after a visit in 1947, in which Pasternak said that he would look
after her always, though he could not leave his wife. Ivinskaya recalls how
this conversation left her unable to sleep.51 Schwerter also traces the ‘pre-
war squirrel / Jacket’ in lines seven and eight of the poem to a ‘pre-war
squirrel coat’ that Olga wore at the start of her affair with Pasternak, as
recalled in her autobiography.52
Recognizing these important connections to Olga Ivinskaya and her
relationship with Pasternak helps to make sense of imagery in the poem
that otherwise may seem impressionistic. Ivinskaya’s story takes the reader
beyond the beach of Ballycastle into a world far removed from the Ireland
out of which the legendary figure of Gráinne emerges, and with her the
sleep song that she sung to her lover Diarmuid. In so doing, however,
‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’ recovers rather than abandons the Irish legend
through its allusions to a twentieth-century love story from Stalinist-era
Russia. The image of a house in the poem as one that has ‘not had enough
sleep’ not only refers to the place of meeting between Pasternak and Ivin-
skaya in Moscow. It also draws on the original Irish legend, and the druid
bond that Gráinne lays upon Diarmuid ‘to bring me out of this house
tonight before the awaking of Finn and of the King of Ireland’.53
The ‘porch in winter’ to which the speaker compares herself in ‘Gráin-
ne’s Sleep Song’ may indeed be a direct reference to the house that Olga
Ivinskaya rented from Sergei Kuzmich in Moscow, as Schwerter asserts.
The description of this porch as ‘Blue, cold and affectionate’ may also be
236 M. MCATEER

taken from a description that Ivinskaya gave for one of her cats in her
autobiography.54 ‘Blue, cold and affectionate’ is also an apt description
of Diarmuid in the original legend, however, when he stands alone ‘like
a pillar’ (or a porch) before one of the seven doors that he had made
in Doire-da-Bhoth, Deirdre having left, in the protection of Angus, Finn
and his comrades who were then in the pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne.
Though greeted by his former comrades from the Fianna, Diarmuid will
not come out until he is called out by Finn himself.55 It is clear that Diar-
muid’s mood is blue for abandoning his old life and friendships in the
Fianna because of his elopement with Gráinne, later telling her that ‘it is
hunger that you gave me through your love’, having lost his people, his
king, his ships and his treasure because of her.56 Thus, refusing the call of
Oisín and Osgar to come out from one of the doors in Doire-da-Bhoth,
Diarmuid is at once ‘cold and affectionate’.
The story of Olga Ivinskaya’s love affair with Boris Pasternak accen-
tuates rather than supplants the emotional appeal of the original Irish
legend in McGuckian’s ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’. It thereby brings to light
the nature of excess in the poem as identified by Badiou: the excess of the
state of a situation over the situation itself. Asserting that ‘all situations
are structured twice’, Badiou observes that by counting all the subsets of
the multiple that makes up a situation in order to verify that situation, a
new set is generated, that of the count itself: a set that does not belong to
the situation that it counts. This is what he means by the so-called state
of the situation in the first instance.57
Considered in these terms, we see not only how the allusions in
McGuckian’s poem to Ivinskaya’s A Captive of My Time illuminate the
passion of the original Irish legend that might otherwise remain clouded
in antiquity. We also see how these same allusions exceed the tale of Gráin-
ne’s love affair with Diarmuid in the process, an excess that accounts for
the obscurity of the imagery in ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’ even as it evokes
the intimacies of human desire so effectively.58 Badiou asserts not only
that the state is separated from the situation—the state of which it is—
but also that the extent of its excess over that situation is of such a mag-
nitude that the state dominates it.59 From this perspective, the power of
the Ivinskaya–Pasternak affair in ‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’ becomes appar-
ent. McGuckian draws on it to express the excess of feeling and imagery
in the original tale. This excess can be found in Diarmuid’s irresistible
love-spot hidden beneath his cap; the enchanted wine that Gráinne gives
to him to make him fall in love with her; Diarmuid standing on his sword
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 237

and his single-handed massacre of the soldiers of the Green Champions;

the berries of the quicken-tree in Dubhros wood guarded by the Surly
One that Finn and Gráinne desire.60
Claire Wills illustrates how another poem in On Ballycastle Beach, ‘The
Dream Language of Fergus’, draws extensively on several essays by the
poet of Osip Mandelstam.61 McGuckian’s engagement with the Russian
poet in this instance serves as a way of expressing her reflections on lan-
guage and imagination in the aftermath of the birth of her third child,
Fergus. As with the relation of the legend of Diarmuid and Gráinne in
‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’ to the story of Ivinskaya and Pasternak, Man-
delstam’s ideas and images enable the original motif of ‘The Dream-
Language of Fergus’ to come forth: the wonder of a child’s dream-world
and the wonder of bringing that world into existence. In Badiou’s terms,
the Russian is a structuring presence in circumstances to which he does
not belong. Those ideas and images of his upon which McGuckian draws
represent state of the situation that the poem enunciates, but they remain
separate and in excess of that situation, even as they help to bring it into
view.
The opening verse addresses a figure whose tongue has spent the night
in ‘its dim sack’, the shape of his own foot in ‘its cave’.62 At first fetal,
McGuckian’s imagery suggests the figure of a child curled up in his cot
or even curled up in the womb. Nothing having ‘rumpled the sheets’
of his mouth, it intimates a state of being prior to the development of
language. Even as this opening verse thereby reaches into the silent origin
of a human life, it reminds the reader of Peter Sloterdijk’s observation
that an ‘origin would not be itself if what emerged from it did not free
itself from it’.63 The silence of origin that is suggested by the image of
a baby curled up in his own preverbal world of sleep is disturbed by the
intimation of another silence; the silence of loss: ‘The excommunicated
shadow of a name’.64
Sloterdijk’s observations on the cult of the magic vulva within dis-
courses of origin from the Neolithic era intimate how these images of
loss first refer to the space of the mother’s womb that the figure has left,
and second to loss as something that is to be discovered within language,
even as it might finally be absorbed through language. Drawing upon the
ancient image of the womb as a cave, Sloterdijk considers the impossi-
ble quest of returning to the womb as the final goal of ‘truth-seekers’ in
past times, intimating how the spherical form of the womb shapes the
238 M. MCATEER

world outside it: ‘Wisdom is the realization that even the open world is
encompassed by the cave of all caves’.65
In this also there is the reminder of the metaphor of the cave in Pla-
to’s The Republic. Borbála Faragó judiciously observes Plato’s metaphor
in ‘The Dream-Language of Fergus’, proposing that McGuckian’s poem
reverses the relation between idea and image that Plato describes.66 Yet
Plato’s metaphor is already situated within a broad history of the magic
vulva in the ancient world, significant as a point of origin for philosophy as
it develops in Western civilization.67 Derived from Mandelstam’s writings,
McGuckian’s line ‘the apartness of torches’ in the final verse indicates how
critical a point of reference The Republic is to ‘The Dream Language of
Fergus’, linking back to the mouth as a cave and to the ‘shadow’ of a
name in the first verse of the poem. Resting on an image of fire throwing
shadows on the inner wall of a cave, Plato’s metaphor derives its point
of origin in large measure from earlier discourses of the womb-as-origin
with which his images of cave, fire and shadow are associated. In partic-
ular, Plato’s description of a long entrance to the underground cave with
its opening to the daylight intimates the vagina leading into the uterus.
Plato’s insistence to Glaucon that the liberated prisoner must return from
the daylight to those still imprisoned in the darkness of the cave carries the
history of the ‘returnees to the womb’ upon which Sloterdijk reflects.68
Inevitably, these considerations bring history, mythology and politics
into play in evaluating ‘The Dream-Language of Fergus’. McGuckian hav-
ing grown up in close proximity to Cave Hill overlooking North Belfast,
the historical and political significance of the cave metaphor that Plato
employs in The Republic is immediately felt. Theobald Wolfe Tone and
Henry Joy McCracken, the founders of Ireland’s first Republican organi-
zation, The United Irishmen, took an oath in one of the caves on Cave
Hill in 1795 to launch a rebellion for an independent Irish Republic, what
transpired as the defeated uprising of 1798. Employing the images of ‘half
a vanquished sound’ and the ‘excommunicated shadow of a name’ in rela-
tion to that of the mouth as a cave in the first verse of the poem, McGuck-
ian alludes to the utterance of the original oath of allegiance that gave
birth to the idea of a Republic in Ireland. The word ‘excommunicated’
suggests both the Presbyterian faith tradition of Tone and McCracken
that, by definition, excommunicated them from the Church of Rome.
More than this, it sustains a suppressed memory of Catholic adherents to
revolutionary Republicanism in Ireland, some of whom were excommuni-
cated by the Church authorities for their membership of organizations like
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 239

the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In March 1867 one Catholic Bishop,

Dr. David Moriarty, made a particularly ferocious attack on Fenian rebels
that was recorded in the press and in 1870 the Papacy issued an official
condemnation of Fenianism.69
Claire Wills traces McGuckian’s use of the word excommunication in
‘The Dream-Language of Fergus’ to a source beyond these denomina-
tional and political allegiances shaping Irish history from the end of the
eighteenth century. This is Mandelstam’s idea of words in the Russian
language as things in themselves that he outlines in ‘About the Nature
of the Word’. As a consequence, he argues that ‘excommunication’ from
the Russian language would be tantamount to ‘excommunication from
history’.70 Mandelstam’s idea of the word as verbal object seems partic-
ularly significant to the imagery of the second verse, in which language
is doing things in a literal way. Latin ‘sleeps’ in Russian; an alphabet is
‘jutting out’ from the voice.71
Ultimately, the relationship in McGuckian’s poem between the child
Fergus and that ‘shadow of a name’, the Fergus of Irish mythology, directs
the reader to the primacy of doubling in the creation of a moment of
birth. In developing his contention that all births are, in reality, twin
births, Sloterdijk draws attention to an ancient history in which placenta
was considered the anonymous twin, noting the ritual eating of placenta
by indigenous tribes in Brazil that sixteenth-century European travellers
observed, or the mummification of the Pharaoh’s placenta after birth in
the belief that the placenta was ‘the incarnation of his outer soul’.72 These
reflections on the placenta as the original partner of the baby in the womb
accord a primordial significance to McGuckian’s use of the word excom-
munication in ‘The Dream-Language of Fergus’ when Sloterdijk writes
of a ‘general clinical and cultural excommunication of the placenta’ acting
as a necessary condition for the intensification of modern individualism in
Europe from the second half of the eighteenth century.73 McGuckian’s
statement in an interview from the early 1990s acquires added significance
in this light, the poet stating that her ‘her womb was almost her brain’.74
Sloterdijk’s observation provides a physical and environmental pretext
for Badiou’s mathematical-ontological claim that the number two holds
primacy over the number one in that it retrospectively enables the latter to
be counted as one. In both instances, there is the recognition of a primary
excess, a recognition deriving in significant measure from the thought of
Heidegger. Badiou reformulates Heidegger’s idea of the care of being
as ‘the anxiety of the void’ when he observes that the verification of an
240 M. MCATEER

original one through a second counting of it brings that one into being
‘within the un-encounterable danger of the void’.75 Two not only brings
an original one into existence; it does so in relation to a point of excess
that, in mathematical set theory, is that of a void. Sloterdijk develops his
thoughts on the twin form of the fetal condition from a reorientation
of Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-towards’ to ‘being-with’.76 The unique
child who comes into being at birth is already in a primary relationship,
not with the mother ‘outside’, but with the immediate wall of the inner
womb. The one who emerges from the womb is already exceeded by the
figure of the interior that s/he leaves behind. The priority that Badiou
accords to the double over the single in his set theory account of being
and excess is also evident in Sloterdijk’s physical-environmental account
of the twin as the precondition for the emergence of individual child into
the world.
McGuckian addresses this paradox of the double as the condition for
that which is unique and singular in ‘The Dream-language of Fergus’.
She does so through her image of poetic dream-language as an aeroplane
in mid-air launching a second aeroplane, revealing her as ‘a threader / of
double-stranded words’.77 Drawing upon the television images of NASA
space missions during the 1990s in which space-shuttles were launched
from aeroplanes already in flight, this reiterates the question of the rela-
tion of the poet’s new child to the figure from Irish antiquity from whom
his name is taken. In this light the ‘double-stranded’ nature of the poet’s
words refers not just to the poetic craft of weaving rhymes, but also to
the naming of the child Fergus.
Shane Alcobia-Murphy has insightfully described her technique as
‘palimpsestic double-writing’ but this does not entirely account for the
singularity that arises from doubleness in McGuckian’s poems.78 Nam-
ing her son not only releases Fergus unto a journey of self-discovery by
inaugurating his separate identity, just as one aeroplane flight launches
that of another. It also acknowledges the excess baggage of an Irish past,
ancient and recent, almost discarded through the demise of Gaelic civi-
lization over the centuries even as it endures in the ‘shadow of a name’,
that thread running through those ‘double-stranded words’. The nature
of excess in this sense relates to the double as the poem’s structuring
principle but it also acknowledges excess in another form. This is the
waste disposal of history in the modern world of the ‘now’ in the poem,
particularly the ‘now’ of Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s, seeking
rid of its violent past through a political peace process. Sloterdijk notes
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 241

how the discourse of civility in the polite society of later eighteenth-

century Europe inaugurated ‘disgust training’ whereby placenta came to
be regarded as a ‘waste product’ that was ‘“disposed of” as garbage’.79
Exploring the exit-wounds that ‘stab’ the sky with their ‘mistaken mean-
ings’, ‘The Dream-language of Fergus’ returns the reader not only to the
discarded past of earliest childhood. By employing the writings of Man-
delstam as way of navigating the inner recesses of the mythical cave from
which Fergus has emerged, McGuckian touches the precious yet bloody
placenta of Irish antiquity. Never quite disposed of, this remains excess
material.

Notes
1. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1 (1967), trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), 33, 37.
2. Richard Polt, ‘Meaning, Excess, and Event’, Gatherings: The Heidegger
Circle Annual, 1 (2011), 26–53 (43).
3. Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber, 1975), 52.
4. Ibid., 55.
5. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), trans.
Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, IA: Indiana
University Press, 2012), 21.
6. Ibid., 21.
7. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (1988), trans. Oliver Feltham (London:
Continuum, 2005), 197.
8. Heidegger, Contributions, 23.
9. Badiou, Being and Event, 83.
10. Ibid., 54.
11. Heidegger, Contributions, 196.
12. Ibid., 14.
13. Quoted in, Henry Hart, ‘History, Myth, and Apocalypse in Seamus
Heaney’s “North”’, Contemporary Literature, 30/3 (1989), 387–411
(391).
14. Eugene O’Brien, ‘The Government of the Tongue’, Law and Literature,
14/3 (2002), 427–61 (432).
15. John Hildebidle, ‘A Decade of Seamus Heaney’s Poetry’, The Mas-
sachusetts Review, 28/3 (1987), 393–409 (393–94).
16. Daniel Tobin, ‘Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the
Poetry of Seamus Heaney’, in Michelle Lee, ed., Poetry Criticism (Detroit:
Gale, 2006), 103–41 (133).
17. Irene Gilsenan Nordin, ‘Nihilism in Seamus Heaney’, Philosophy and Lit-
erature, 26/2 (2002), 405–14 (408–11); Martin Heidegger, ‘What Is
242 M. MCATEER

Metaphysics?’ (1929), in David Farrell Krell, ed., Basic Writings, new ed.
(London: Routledge, 1993), 89–110 (98–101).
18. Michael Longley, Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 192.
John Lyon identifies this figure as Longley’s daughter, asserting that the
poem is written for her rather than for the man who has been killed.
‘Michael Longley’s Lists’, English, 45/183 (1996), 228–46 (241). In a
reading that opens ‘The Ice Cream Man’ to comparison with Yeats’s ‘A
Prayer for My Daughter’, Sarah Broom goes even further, stating that the
poem is as much about the relationship between a father and daughter as
it is about a murdered ice-cream man. ‘Learning About Dying: Mutability
and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley’, New Hibernia Review,
6/1 (2002), 94–112 (99). In fact, the man who was murdered was John
Larmour, an RUC officer who was off-duty, working in a family-owned
ice-cream shop on the Lisburn Road, Barnam’s World of Ice-cream. The
assassination was carried out by the Provisional IRA on October 11, 1988.
John Larmour’s brother, George, has published a book asserting that a
secret agent inside the IRA was connected to the murder, prompting the
British Security Service MI5 to compromise the police-investigation into
the killing in the interests of protecting this agent. See, George Larmour,
They Killed the Ice Cream Man: My Search for the Truth Behind My Brother
John’s Murder (Newtownards: Colourpoint Books, 2016).
19. John Lyon sees this Homeric influence as a two-way affair, Homer drawn
upon ‘to illuminate Northern Irish events’ while Northern Irish circum-
stances allow for a poetic recovery and a renewal of Homer’s work in
contemporary times. ‘Michael Longley’s Lists’, 231.
20. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 34.
21. Ibid., 37.
22. Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 136.
23. Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories (London: Penguin Classics,
2007), 221.
24. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 7, 33.
25. Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber, 2001), 127–47.
26. Lynn Keller and Paul Muldoon, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, Con-
temporary Literature, 35/1 (1994), 1–29 (21).
27. Terence Brown, ‘Telling Tales: Kennelly’s “Cromwell”, Muldoon’s “The
More a Man Has The More a Man Wants”,’ in Michael Kenneally, ed.,
Poetry in Contemporary Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe,
1995), 144–57 (152).
28. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter
Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 25.
29. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme (Lon-
don: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 22.
 10 HERE BEYOND: HEANEY, LONGLEY, MULDOON, MCGUCKIAN 243

30. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39.
31. Ibid., 99–100.
32. Peter Berresford Ellis, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 104.
33. Muldoon, Poems, 134.
34. Robert Faggen, ‘Irish Poets and the World’, in Matthew Campbell, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 229–50 (246).
35. David Wheatley, ‘The Aistriuchan Cloak: Paul Muldoon and the Irish
Language’, New Hibernia Review, 5/4 (2001), 123–34 (132); Seamus
Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber, 1998), 54.
36. Muldoon, Poems, 135.
37. William A. Wilson, ‘Paul Muldoon and the Poetics of Sexual Difference’,
Contemporary Literature, 28/3 (1987), 317–31 (330).
38. Muldoon, Poems, 128.
39. Ibid., 130.
40. Heaney, North, 30.
41. Badiou, Being and Event, 155.
42. Muldoon, Poems, 129.
43. Ibid., 130.
44. Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Blooms-
bury, 2013), 54.
45. Muldoon, Poems, 132.
46. Ibid., 135.
47. Ibid., 133, 135.
48. Badiou, Being and Event, 155.
49. Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (1904), in Lady Gregory’s Complete
Irish Mythology (London: Bounty Books, 2004), 256.
50. Badiou, Being and Event, 256.
51. Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of My Time: My Years with Pasternak, trans.
Max Hayward (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 18.
52. Stephanie Schwerter, Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn: Inter-
textuality in the Work of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuck-
ian (Houndsmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 171–78.
53. Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men, 234.
54. Schwerter, Northern Irish Poetry, 174.
55. Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men, 238–39.
56. Ibid., 255.
57. Badiou, Being and Event, 94.
58. In this way McGuckian’s poetry reminds us of the case that
Bowen and Beckett make for Finnegans Wake that I cite in Chapter 9,
244 M. MCATEER

‘Voiding the Subject: Bowen and Beckett’. Peggy O’Brien makes a simi-
lar case for McGuckian, asserting that the central emotional state of her
poems must be ‘intuitively diagnosed’ for the images to make any sense.
Peggy O’Brien, ‘Reading Medbh McGuckian: Admiring What We Cannot
Understand’, Colby Quarterly, 28/4 (1992), 227–38 (228).
59. Badiou, Being and Event, 275.
60. Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men, 232–60.
61. Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 173.
62. Medbh McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press,
1995), 57.
63. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 1: Bubbles Microspherology, trans. Wieland
Hoban (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 324.
64. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, 57.
65. Sloterdijk, Spheres, 275.
66. Borbála Faragó, Medbh McGuckian (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2014), 43.
67. Plato, The Republic, 2nd ed., trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Clas-
sics, 2003), 240–48.
68. Plato, The Republic, 241, 246–47; Sloterdijk, Spheres, 275.
69. Moriarty’s denunciation was reported in The Freeman’s Journal (March
10) 1867. For further discussion of the attitude of Catholic Church
authorities to Fenian rebellion in Ireland during the 1860s see, F. S. L.
Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 2nd ed. (London: Fontana, 1973), 129–
31. The matter is examined in a book-length study by Oliver P. Rafferty.
The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 1861–1875 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
70. Quoted in, Wills, Improprieties, 177.
71. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, 57.
72. Sloterdijk, Spheres, 379–80.
73. Ibid., 384.
74. Susan Shaw Sailer, ‘Interview with Medbh McGuckian’, Michigan Quar-
terly Review, 32 (1993), 111–27 (121).
75. Badiou, Being and Event, 94.
76. Sloterdijk, Spheres, 356.
77. McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach, 57–58.
78. Shane Murphy, ‘Obliquity in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon and Medbh
McGuckian’, Éire-Ireland, (1996), 76–101 (76). Alcobia-Murphy pushes
this further through the notion of ‘appropriative writing’ that he attributes
to McGuckian’s verse, a form of poetry that he also associates with
works by John Ashbery of the so-called New York School from the
1950s/1960s. Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘“My Cleverly Dead and Verti-
cal Audience”: Medbh McGuckian’s “Difficult” Poetry’, New Hibernia
Review, 16/3 (2012), 67–82 (71).
79. Sloterdijk, Spheres, 382–83.
 Conclusion

The foregoing discussion of works by Irish authors mainly through the

course of the twentieth century has endeavoured to bring to light a recur-
rent propensity to excess in Irish writing, one that appears in mystical,
material, mythical and linguistic aspects. Starting with a consideration
of Matthew Arnold’s idea of the Celtic temperament as predisposed to
excess rather than measure and Oscar Wilde’s revision of this as a com-
mendable trait rather than a shortcoming, I have considered the ways
in which excess in modern Irish writing connects to excess as it appears
in modern thought. This runs from the work of Kierkegaard, Marx and
Nietzsche in the nineteenth century to that of Bataille and Heidegger
in the mid-twentieth century and on to Derrida, Badiou and Sloterdijk
in the late-twentieth/early twenty-first century. My objective has been to
demonstrate how the excess of feeling and imagination that Arnold asso-
ciates with the Celtic spirit appears in modern Irish writing in relation
to general concepts of human experience articulated over the past two
centuries, within which the idea of excess features.
While it would be a gross overstatement to claim that modern Irish
writing presents a unique example of excess in its diverse aspects, it can
be said with some justification that its significance has been far-reaching.
This is due to the impact of Ireland on economic and political devel-
opments internationally, particularly in relation to Britain’s power dur-
ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The claim that Engels

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 245
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6
246 CONCLUSION

makes, referred to in Chapter 7, for the decisive role of an Irish supply

of cheap labour to the phenomenal industrial development of England
during the 1830s has far-reaching implications. As excess in the form of
a surplus labour-force, it could well be claimed that the Irish population
surge of the 1820s and 1830s—eventually culminating in the catastrophe
of the Famine in the 1840s—was a precondition not just for the status
that Britain had acquired as the most advanced market-capitalist econ-
omy by the 1850s in Europe, but also for the globalization of its power
in the form of empire through the course of the century. Irish excess in
this material-economic sense is reflected politically and culturally by the
early twentieth century, when rebellion and subsequent guerrilla warfare
in Ireland carry reverberations throughout the world.
This situation is apparent in the address of King George V to both
Houses of the new Stormont Parliament in Belfast on June 22, 1921:
‘This is a great and critical occasion in the history of the Six Counties,
but not for the Six Counties alone, for everything which interests them
touches Ireland, and everything which touches Ireland finds an echo in
the remotest parts of the Empire’.1 Adding that ‘the eyes of the whole
Empire’ were looking on Ireland that day, the King might have been
accused of a level of hyperbole not out of place in the drama of Bouci-
cault. Yet if we take him at his word, it presents an extraordinary instance
of Ireland exceeding itself. An independence rebellion and subsequent
guerrilla war in Ireland, a country of less than 4.5 million people in 1921,
was reverberating through two-thirds of the planet.
In the present time there seems to be little distinctively Irish any-
more about excess as it appears in Irish writing. In the sequence ‘Bar-
baric Additions’ from her 2017 work Barbaric Tales, for example, Cather-
ine Walsh employs phrases that bring into consideration the relation of
finitude and infinity in mathematical set theory, one that pivots on the
axis of excess and the void in Badiou’s thought, as discussed at various
points through the course of this book: ‘domain chutes infinities/as easily
concepts of/mathematical finitude/pervade former sets’.2 Excess in this
instance is entirely delocalized, conjuring a sense of Irish society as com-
pletely saturated by a global computer-generated hyper-reality for which
no distinctive geographical location or historical lineage carries anything
other than the most transitory of meanings.
At a stretch, this might be apprehended as an instance of Irish simul-
taneous self-evacuation and self-absorption in the manner of Cuchulain’s
 CONCLUSION 247

ríastrad as referred to in the Introduction. As the historical trajectories

and geographical identifiers of Ireland disintegrate under the pressure of
transnational finance capitalism (Cuchulain imploding), so Irishness is dis-
seminated globally through information technology (Cuchulain expand-
ing). The global greening of famous locations across the world for the St.
Patrick’s festival in recent years is an obvious example, but one can also
consider such phenomena as Cuchulain in the SMITE 2014 Gameplay
video-game, the movie-stardom of Saoirse Ronan, the role of trash talk
in the mixed martial arts career of Conor McGregor or U2’s Bono as a
redundant feedback loop. One could also point to such random micro-
cultural trash phenomena as the 2000 comic horror Leprechaun in the
Hood; American Battle Game series, Deadliest Warrior, featuring the IRA
versus the Taliban in episode 9; the official video for the version of the
Irish ballad ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ by American heavy-metal band, Metallica.
There is also any number of Irish-related YouTube videos, from accent
impersonations and street-brawls to post-ironic clips of banal Irish tele-
vision advertisements from the 1980s and 1990s or uploads of old news
reports on the Troubles.
Ultimately, however, the state of excess in contemporary Ireland is still
encapsulated by O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, written and produced
at the most intense period of the country’s formation into a modern
nation-state on a politically partitioned island. The first Act anticipates
pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland as a place of humour, misery and survival. The
second Act anticipates the Celtic Tiger period itself, the Boyle’s suddenly
turning to conspicuous consumption by rapidly borrowing on the basis of
a fortuitous acquisition of finance capital investment in the form of a will.
The final Act anticipates the post-Celtic Tiger Ireland when this will is
exposed as faulty in the way that the financial records of Anglo-Irish Bank
were exposed as unsound in 2008. This Act anticipates the collapse of the
Celtic Tiger economy in the final break-up of Boyle household. Even the
opening up of Irish society to same-sex relations is foreseen when Juno
tells her daughter Mary that her child will have two mothers rather than a
father and a mother, a much better thing in her view.3 Same-sex relations
are likewise anticipated in Boyle losing his wife by the end of the play,
but now having Joxer Daly for permanent company. Sitting drunk on the
floor of the tenement room left empty by debt collectors, Boyle embod-
ies the large numbers of Irish people left impoverished or homeless by
the global economic crash of 2008. His final intoxicated words name the
intersection of Irish excess and excess as it appears in modern theoretical
248 CONCLUSION

reflections of the human condition. The global situation as it now appears

in his abandoned Dublin tenement room combines change and chaos in
a single word. For Boyle, it is ‘a state of chassis’.4

Notes
1. ‘The King’s Speech to the Northern Ireland Parliament’, June
22, 1921, http://www.generalmichaelcollins.com/life-times/treaty/kings-
speech-june-22nd-1921/.
2. Catherine Walsh, ‘Barbaric Additions’, Irish University Review, 46/1
(2016), 213–17 (214).
3. Sean O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays, new ed. (London: Faber, 1998), 146.
4. Ibid., 148.
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 Index

A Augusteijn, Joost, 69
Adorno, Theodor, 67, 77, 96, 121,
122, 127, 135, 136, 161
B
Agrippa, Cornelius, 33
Badiou, Alain, 9, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22,
Airth, Catherine, 130
27–29, 35–37, 39, 41, 51, 52,
Alcobia-Murphy, Shane, 240, 244
60, 61, 64, 65, 73, 74, 78, 86,
Alexander, Neil, 166 89, 92, 114, 118, 137, 138, 142,
Allen, Grant, 45 143, 147, 157, 163, 176, 177,
Amhrain na bhFiann (Irish National 179–182, 184, 188, 191, 192,
Anthem), 183 194, 195, 197, 199, 201–206,
Anand, Mulk Raj, 64 208, 213, 216–218, 221–224,
Anderson, Hedli, 53, 54 228, 229, 232–237, 239–246
Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), 191 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 79
Arnold, Matthew, 5–9, 11, 16, 17, Baldick, Chris, 17
36, 45, 245 Balfour, Arthur J., 153, 165
On the Study of Celtic Literature, Balinsteanu, Tudor, 157
5–8, 16, 17, 45 Barrows, Adam, 195
‘The Function of Criticism at the Bataille, Georges, 3, 4, 10, 11, 14,
Present Time’, 6 57, 58, 65, 67, 68, 78, 79, 87,
Aryan, 187–189 89, 92, 141, 152–154, 165, 189,
Atkinson, Robert, 185, 186, 196 196, 199, 200, 216, 221, 222,
Attridge, Derek, 182, 192, 194, 195 227, 228, 241, 242, 245
Auden, W.H., 53, 54, 64 Bazargan, Susan, 47, 63

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 271
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
M. McAteer, Excess in Modern Irish Writing,
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37413-6
272 INDEX

Beardsley, Aubrey, 58, 65 The Heat of the Day, 13, 17, 200,
Beckett, Samuel 202, 204–206, 209, 210, 212,
Endgame, 123, 126, 135, 143 213, 216–219, 222
L’Innomable, 200 Brannigan, John, 196
Malone Dies , 17, 140, 141, 163, Brecht, Bertolt, 131, 158
164, 166, 204, 216–219 Breman, Jan, 134, 141
Molloy, 17, 139–142, 146, 149, Brett, C.E.B., 163
150, 163, 164, 166, 181, 199, Brexit, 12
200, 206, 213, 216–219, 222 Brivic, Sheldon, 21, 36, 41, 213, 219
Broom, Sarah, 242
Quad, 137
Brown, Terence, 228, 242
The Unnamable, 13, 17, 140,
Bryden, Mary, 142, 162, 166
162–164, 166, 200, 204, 208,
Budgen, Frank, 194
210, 216–219
Bukharin, Nikolai, 105, 107, 116, 117
Waiting for Godot , 122, 123, 209,
Bulfin, William, 27, 38
215
Burke, Mary, 27, 38, 44, 62, 84, 91,
What Where, 137 92
Benjamin, Roy, 196 Burt Foster, John, 37
Benjamin, Walter, 154, 165 Burton, Isabel, 183, 195
Berman, Marshall, 196 Burton, Sir Richard, 183
Berresford Ellis, Peter, 230 Butler Cullingford, Elizabeth, 49, 63,
Berst, Charles A., 116 175, 194
Bery, Ashok, 54, 56, 64, 65 Byron, Mark, 129, 140
Bishop, John, 174, 181, 187, 193,
195
Bixby, Patrick, 164, 193 C
Blake, William, 9, 24, 28, 40 Cairns, David, 16
Bloom, Harold, 28, 32, 39 Cannon Harris, Susan, 69, 72, 87, 88
Blueshirts, 188, 189 Carr, Marina, 3, 10, 15, 79–85, 90–92
By the Bog of Cats…, 10, 15, 79–86,
Blunt, W.S., 48
90–92
Bohlmann, Otto, 37
Castle, Gregory, 40, 193
Book of Leinster, 4 Cave, Richard, 25, 38
Borody, Wayne, 17 Celtic, 5, 7–10, 16, 17, 35, 36,
Boucicault, Dion, 12, 16, 97–101, 43, 45, 46, 50, 62, 70, 149,
106, 113–116, 118, 132, 185, 172–175, 179, 186, 188, 245,
195, 246 247
The Colleen Bawn, 97–101, 116, Celtic Tiger, 4, 108, 117, 247
132 Cerquoni, Enrica, 92
Bourke, Bernadette, 3, 15, 79, 80, 90 Chatterjee, Mohini, 57
Bowen, Elizabeth, 9, 13, 17, Cheng, Vincent, 180, 195
200–219, 221, 222 Clare, David, 117
 INDEX 273

Claribel (Charlotte Alington Barnard), Doyle, Roddy, 9, 12, 120–122, 124,

174 125, 127, 133, 138, 145, 148,
Clark, David, 79, 89 163
Clark, Rosalind, 79, 89 A Star Called Henry, 120–122,
Cold War, 204, 217, 224 124, 125, 138, 145, 148, 163
Colman Smith, Pamela, 25 Dudley Edwards, Ruth, 87
Colmcille, St., 4 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 2, 3
Commission to Enquire into Child Dwan, David, 37
Abuse, 80
Connolly, Claire, 110, 118
E
Conrad, Joseph, 54, 64
Eagleton, Terry, 30, 39, 140, 151,
Corcoran, Neil, 202, 212, 216
165
Coulouma, Flore, 3, 15
Easter Rising, 1916, 188
Cuchulain, 4–6, 25, 74, 83. See also Egyptian, 35, 44, 45, 47, 48, 53, 173,
Ríastrad 193
Cullen, James, 1 Éireann, 187–189. See also Erin
Eliot, T.S., 37, 65, 229
Ellmann, Maud, 30, 145, 162, 163
D Ellmann, Richard, 39, 41, 194
Das, Arvind, 134, 141 Eltis, Sos, 6, 7, 16, 99, 115
Davis, Mike, 123, 132, 139, 141 Engels, Frederick, 130, 131, 140,
Davis, Tracy C., 111, 118 192, 245
Deane, Seamus, 16, 107, 117 Erin, 194
De Baun, Vincent, 139 The Examiner, 17
Democratic Unionist Party, 191
Derrida, Jacques, 10, 12, 48, 49, 55, F
56, 59, 63–65, 145, 146, 158, Faggen, Robert, 230, 243
162, 163, 166, 189, 196, 202, Famine, 11, 96, 246
204, 207, 218, 245 Faragó, Borbála, 238, 244
De Valera, Éamon, 76, 188, 189 Farrell Moran, Seán, 69, 87
Diarmuid and Gráinne (legend), 14, Father Ted, 79
234, 236, 237 Fawkes, Richard, 116
Dionysian, 9, 10, 23, 24, 26, 27, 43, Feldman, Allen, 166
96, 174 Ferrar, Harold, 110, 118
Dobbins, Gregory, 7, 16, 135, 142 Ferriter, Diarmuid, 1, 15, 192
Donoghue, Joseph, 44, 62 Fianna, 183, 234, 236
Doody, Noreen, 46, 62 Fianna Fáil, 188, 189
Doolan, Jim, 89 Finn MacCumhaill, 35, 183, 234
Dooley, Brian, 163 First World War, 34, 105, 155, 159,
Dorn, Karen, 37 172, 221, 226
Douglas Howard, B., 10 Fitzpatrick, Lisa, 92
274 INDEX

Flaubert, Gustave, 45, 46, 62 Harrington, John P., 115, 194, 218
Foster, R.F., 31, 37, 148, 164, 192 Harris, Frank, 44
Foucault, Michel, 166 Hart, Henry, 241
Fox, Renée, 193 Heaney, Seamus, 21, 160, 224,
Francis Shaw, S.J., 89 228–232, 234, 241, 243
Frazier, Adrian, 25, 38 ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’,
Friel, Brian, 150 14, 222–226, 228
Fryatt, Kit, 55, 64 Hegel, G.W.F., 29, 31, 36, 39, 67,
72, 88, 96, 97, 115, 212, 219
Heidegger, Martin, 10–14, 17, 26,
G
31, 32, 36, 38, 40, 49–51, 63,
Gabriel, Markus, 173, 192
64, 76–78, 86, 89, 92, 129–131,
Gagnier, Regenia, 8, 17, 40, 71, 74,
136, 137, 140, 142, 201, 202,
88
209, 216, 218, 222–226, 239,
Gahan, Peter, 109, 118
241, 245
Garbage, 2, 4, 120, 135, 137, 141,
144, 152, 162 Heller, Eric, 37
Garrigan Mattar, Sinéad, 10, 17 Hildebidle, John, 225, 241
Garrigan, Siobhán, 9, 21, 36 Hill, Leslie, 218
Gay, John, 131 Hindu, 53, 55, 57–59, 109, 114, 188
George V, King, 246 Homer, 226, 242
Gildersleeve, Jessica, 202–204, 217 Horkheimer, Max, 67, 77, 87, 89
Gilsenan Nordin, Irene, 90, 226, 241 Hull, Eleanor, 172
Gladwin, Derek, 85, 91, 92 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 45
Globalization, 3, 4, 99, 134, 246 Hyde, Douglas, 25, 186, 188
Good Friday Agreement (1998), 21
Gordon, David J., 116
Gordon, John, 194
Gore-Booth, Eva, 50, 172 I
Gould, Warwick, 49, 63 Innes, Christopher, 116, 118, 139
Granville Barker, H., 25 Iran, 174, 193
Gregory, Lady Augusta, 25, 30, 34,
Irish Civil War, 189, 191, 197, 215
38–41, 195, 243
Irish Free State, 70, 75, 124, 150,
Gregory, Robert, 155
165, 183, 190–192, 212
Grene, Nicholas, 41, 97, 115, 117,
The Irish Press , 188
131
Griffith, Arthur, 25, 183, 186 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 75,
Guelke, Adrian, 166 145, 148, 154, 157, 159, 162,
166, 232, 233, 242, 247
The Irish Times , 3, 90
H Irish War of Independence, 128, 145,
Hand, Derek, 121, 138, 210, 218 191
Hanem, Kuchuk, 45 Ivinskaya, Olga, 14, 235–237, 243
 INDEX 275

J Klee, Paul, 74
Jacklein, Charlotte, 126, 139 Kurdi, Mária, 3, 15
Jarry, Alfred, 139, 144, 163
Jaurretche, Colleen, 31, 34, 40, 41
Jeffares, A. Norman, 41, 63, 65, 87, L
91, 138, 165, 219 Lacan, Jacques, 144, 163
Jesus Christ, 22, 74 Lacivita, Alison, 196
Jones, Sir William, 193 Laporte, Dominique, 164
Joyce, James Larmour, George, 242
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Larrissey, Edward, 46
Man, 10, 31, 40, 88, 178, Lawson, Todd, 193
187, 190, 197 Leabhar na Gabála, 193
Finnegans Wake, 13, 56, 173–186, Lebor na hUidre (UL), 4
188, 189, 193–195, 197, 200, Leeney, Cathy, 15, 83, 85, 89–92
210, 214, 221, 229, 233, 234 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 190
‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, Lennon, Joseph, 43, 45, 62, 174,
174, 175, 194 187, 193
Ulysses , 32, 34, 35, 40, 41, 120, Little, Philip Francis, 30
138, 180, 181, 183, 184, 189, Lloyd, David, 1, 15
193–195, 213 Longley, Edna, 54, 56, 64
Longley, Michael, 9, 21
‘The Ice-Cream Man’, 14, 226–228,
K 242
Kader, Emily L., 91 Luckhurst, Mary, 2, 15
Kagawa, Toyohiko, 61 Luft, Joanna, 155, 165
Kandinsky, Wassily, 73 Lynch, E.M., 2
Keane, Patrick J., 37 Lyon, John, 242
Keatinge, Benjamin, 217 Lyons, F.S.L., 135, 142, 244
Kelly, Aaron, 16, 160, 166
Kennedy, Andrew, 210, 218
Kent, Brad, 97, 98, 110, 115, 117, M
118 MacDonagh, Thomas, 69
Kiberd, Declan, 16, 215, 219 MacKinnon Robertson, John, 96, 115
Kierkegaard, Søren, 11, 70–73, 77, MacLiam Wilson, Robin, 141
96, 97, 101, 108, 111–113, 245 MacManus, Michael J., 176
Either/Or, 111, 118 MacNeice, Louis
Fear and Trembling , 10, 11, 67, ‘Autumn Journal’, 53, 54
68, 88 ‘Birmingham’, 53, 54
Killeen, Jarlath, 6, 16, 62 ‘Didymus’, 10, 55–59, 62, 151
King, H.F., 150, 164 ‘Letter from India’, 10, 54, 55,
Kinsella, Thomas, 16, 195 59–61
Kirk, Geoffrey, 43, 62 The Poetry of W.B. Yeats , 40, 53,
Kirkland, Richard, 160, 163, 166 64–66
276 INDEX

‘Valediction’, 56 Mills Harper, Margaret, 48, 50, 63

‘Variation on Heraclitus’, 61 Mink, Louis O., 190, 197
McCarthy, Dermot, 138 Molloy, Fr. Niall, 80
McConnell, Gail, 21, 36 Mooney, Sinéad, 201, 206, 208, 216,
McCormack, John, 126 218
McCormack, W.J., 16 Moore, George, 24, 25, 30, 38
McCourt, John, 175, 182, 183, 194, Moran, James, 69, 87
195 Morash, Chris, 91, 117
McDonagh, Martin, 2, 15, 91 Moreau, Gustave, 45
McDonald, Ronan, 124, 139, 140, Morin, Emilie, 149, 150, 164, 217,
156, 165 218
McDonald, Peter, 58, 65, 165, 227, Morris, William, 25
242 Muldoon, Paul, 9, 13–15, 228–234,
McGahon, Mark, 194 242–244
McGuckian, Medbh, 13, 14, 234, ‘The More A Man Has The More
236–240, 243, 244 A Man Wants’, 14, 228, 229,
‘Gráinne’s Sleep Song’, 14, 231–233, 242
234–237 Murphy, Paul, 131, 141
‘The Dream-language of Fergus’, Murphy, Paula, 84, 91
14, 237–241
McGuire, Matthew, 167
McHugh, Roger, 176 N
McHugh, Roland, 194 Na gCopaleen, Myles, 3
Maddox, Brenda, 47, 48, 51, 63, 64 Naous, Mazen, 47, 63
Magennis, Caroline, 142 Nash, John, 189, 196
Maher, Ashley, 214, 219 Nathan, Leonard, 38
Mahon, Derek, 21, 120, 138 Nazis, 209
Mahon, Peter, 21, 36, 176, 188, 194, New Irish Library, 2
196 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 90
Mandelstam, Osip, 237–239, 241 Nietzsche, Friedrich
Manley Hopkins, Gerard, 54 Beyond Good and Evil , 23, 87, 88
Mansfield, Katharine, 227, 242 On the Genealogy of Morals , 23, 88
Martin, Père Henri, 5 The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit
Marx, Karl, 11, 95–97, 100, 103, of Music, 10, 23, 37, 192
104, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, The Gay Science, 23, 37
130, 131, 245 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 23, 24, 26,
Mayer, Teodora, 182 37–39
Mays, Michael, 3, 4, 15 Norris, Margot, 173, 176, 192, 194
Meisel, Martin, 98, 115 Northern Ireland, 12–14, 21, 143,
Merriman, Victor, 2–4, 15, 76, 81, 89 153, 156, 159–163, 166,
Meyer, Kuno, 10 190–192, 222, 223, 225, 231.
Mills Harper, George, 38 See also Troubles and Ulster
 INDEX 277

O Pearse, Patrick, 4, 10, 68, 185, 188

O’Brien, Eugene, 225, 241 The Master, 10, 68–70, 73, 74, 77,
O’Brien, Flann, 3, 15, 126, 139. See 80–82
also Na gCopaleen, Myles ‘The Murder Machine’, 4
O’Brien, Mark, 188, 196 Pelaschiar, Laura, 160, 166
O’Brien, Peggy, 244 Persian, 43, 54, 174, 193
O’Casey, Sean Petri Sabatier, D., 39
Juno and the Paycock, 122, 124, Pierse, Michael, 141
130, 132, 139, 155, 247 Pine, Emilie, 2, 15
Red Roses for Me, 132, 133, 140, Pioneer Total Abstinence, 1
141 Plato, 29, 39, 179, 238, 244
The Plough and the Stars , 68, 133, Platt, L.H., 40
139, 140, 159 Plunkett, James, 138
The Shadow of a Gunman, 155, 156 Plunkett, Joseph, 69
Ochshorn, Kathleen, 108, 117 Polt, Richard, 222, 241
O’Connell, Helen, 2, 3 Postcolonial, 3, 4
O’Connor, Barbara, 117 Poulain, Alexandra, 21, 36, 72, 74,
Offenbach, Jacques, 108 88, 89
O’Flaherty, Roderic, 187 Pound, Ezra, 30, 34
O’Gorman, Róisin, 81, 82, 90 Powell, Kerry, 65
O’Grady, Standish, 172, 173, 177,
179, 180, 186, 193, 194
Q
Ó hÉigeartaigh, Pádraig, 185
Quinn, Antoinette, 197
O’Leary, Philip, 4, 15, 186, 196
Quinn, John, 24, 25, 38
O’Neill, Patrick, 176, 194
One Thousand and One Nights
(Arabian Nights), 47–49, 63 R
Orientalism, 10, 45, 47, 174 Rabelais, François, 3
Radford, F.L., 40
Rafferty, Oliver P., 244
P Ramert, Lynn, 110, 118
Paisley, Rev. Ian, 147, 191, 197 Reid, Christina
Palmer, Samuel, 24 Clowns , 157, 159, 161, 167
Partition, 190, 191 Joyriders , 148, 151, 155–159
Pascal, Blaise, 22, 23, 27, 37 Tea in a China Cup, 155, 165
Pasternak, Boris, 14, 234–237 Ríastrad, 5, 6, 8, 247
Patterson, Glenn, 12, 143, 145, 147, Ricardo, David, 95, 115
148 Richards, Shaun, 16, 91
Burning Your Own, 13, 143–148, Ricoeur, Paul, 2
151, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, Roche, Anthony, 40
167, 181 Rolleston, T.W., 55, 64, 173, 174,
Pearse, Margaret, 188 187, 193, 196
278 INDEX

Rushdie, Salman, 148 Stallworthy, Jon, 48, 63

Russell, George (A.E.), 25, 30, 43, Stephens, James, 43, 187
50, 172 Stewart, Bruce, 82, 90
Russell, John, 11 Stokes, Whiteley, 10
Russell, Richard, 82, 90 Sturm, F.P., 48
Ryan, Mr. Justice Seán, 80 Svevo, Italo (Ettore Schmitz), 182
Swami, Shree Purowhit, 53
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 33, 34, 41
S Symons, Arthur, 24, 30
Saddlemeyer, Ann, 48 Synge, J.M., 79, 83, 120, 138, 172
Said, Edward, 10, 43, 62, 171, 192
Saint-Amour, Paul, 204, 217
Sampson, John, 27, 44 T
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 13, 96, 115, 201, Táin Bó Cuailgne, 4, 5, 187
216 Tamaro, Attilio, 175
Schrank, Bernice, 131, 139, 140 Teekell, Anna, 208, 218
Schumpeter, Joseph, 196 Thomas, Dylan, 56, 64
Thornton, Weldon, 41
Schwerter, Stephanie, 235, 243
Tobin, Daniel, 226, 241
Second World War, 54, 65, 129, 150,
Torchiana, Donald, 39
153, 165, 175, 202, 206, 215,
Trench, Rhona, 89
223, 224, 232
Troubles, the, 14, 154, 158, 160,
Seiler, Claire, 203, 217
166, 225, 230, 231
Shakespeare, William, 132, 133
Tymoczko, Maria, 35, 41
Shannon, Catherine, 165
Sharp, William (Fiona MacLeod), 50
Shaw, George Bernard, 12, 25, 64, U
97, 116, 118 Ulster, 4, 15, 58, 83, 147, 149,
John Bull’s Other Island, 55, 64, 97, 154, 158, 167, 172, 190–192,
98, 100, 101, 105, 107–112, 223–226, 229, 234
114–118 Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR),
Sihra, Melissa, 90 228, 233
Sisson, Elaine, 69, 87
Sloterdijk, Peter, 9, 12, 14, 17, 72,
88, 127–129, 140, 237–240, V
244, 245 Valente, Joseph, 5, 16
Smith, Adam, 95 Vallency, Charles, 193
Smyth, Gerry, 107, 117 Veblen, Thornstein, 7
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 69
Sorel, Georges, 13, 156–159, 165,
166, 172, 174, 192, 229, 242 W
Spenser, Edmund, 141 Walker, Tom, 54, 64
Stalag 17 , 223, 224 Wallace, Claire, 92
 INDEX 279

Walsh, Catherine, 246, 248 And Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni

Walsh, Keri, 217 Houlihan, 83, 89, 179, 210
Wansbrough, Henry, 39, 195 At the Hawk’s Well , 34
Watson, George, 124, 139 Calvary, 78
Wheatley, David, 230, 243 Deirdre, 46
Whelan, Kevin, 121, 138 ‘Easter 1916’, 5, 68, 145, 155
“n, 215, 219
White, Sia ‘Fergus and the Druid’, 55, 57
Wilde, Lady Jane, 47 ‘Leda and the Swan’, 189
Wilde, Oscar Mosada, 46
An Ideal Husband, 7, 105 On Baile’s Strand, 25, 46
Salomé, 10, 32, 44, 46, 71, 74 Purgatory, 10, 75, 78, 82, 83
‘The Critic as Artist’, 6, 16
‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 61, 82
‘The Decay of Lying’, 45
‘Swedenborg, Mediums, Desolate
The Herne’s Egg , 58
Places’, 34
The Importance of Being Ernest , 10
The Cat and the Moon, 61
‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’,
‘The Celtic Element in Literature’,
45
3, 24
William of Orange, King, 75, 180
Williams, Bernard, 37 The Countess Cathleen, 73, 190
Wills, Claire, 165, 229, 237, 239, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, 10,
243, 244 47, 50–52, 55, 59–61
Windisch, Ernst, 10 The Shadowy Waters , 46
Winstanley, Adam, 149, 150, 164 The Unicorn From the Stars , 39, 40
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 219 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, 45, 172
Worth, Katharine, 133, 141 Where There is Nothing , 10, 25, 27,
30, 38–40, 43, 69, 84, 96, 135
Yellow Book of Lecan (YL), 4
Y York Tindall, William, 190, 197
Yeats, Georgie, 48
Yeats, Jack B., 25
Yeats, W.B.
A Full Moon in March, 82, 83 Z
A Vision, 49–51, 57, 63 Zinsser, Hans, 162
‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Žižek, Slavoj, 9, 78, 89, 154, 165,
Death’, 155 173, 192, 212, 219