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lond wey’ instead, the son and his wife arrive safely, as prophesied (p. 390). The story operates as a structural means of affirming Kempe's holy privilege, trusted in her older years as an earthly conduit to the Holy Ghost, as the son attests, and also as a narrative foreshadowing of the growing importance that the power of the elements will hold for her subsequent experience. That the son is noted straight after to have shortly died is also appropriated as a sign of verification, bearing witness to his safely ‘coming home’ into heavenly life: ‘So gostly and bodily
stand on the stool. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. I’m hungry. I eat the cheese. There is cheese in the fridge. Cheese with blue fur. When is Mommy coming home? Sometimes she comes home with him. I hate him. I hide when he comes. My favorite place is in my mommy’s closet. It smells of Mommy. It smells of Mommy when she’s happy. When is Mommy coming home? My bed is cold. And I am hungry. I have my blankie and my cars but not my mommy. When is Mommy coming home? (James, 2015: 216) Unlike the sad blue-collar men of contemporary American film
fire, anxiety about castration, or the fetishising of weapons may also be illuminated by psychoanalytic interpretation. Michael Selig’s essay ‘Boys Will be Men: Oedipal Drama in Coming Home’ (1978) and Antony Easthope’s critique of The Deer Hunter are examples of psychoanalytic commentary on war films. 14 Gender analysis of American war films has been largely written by
living being and then revert to its previous condition as an abstraction. ‘Night Walks’, one of the essays collected as The Uncommercial Traveller in 1861, describes Dickens’s attempt to deal with insomnia ‘by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise’. 2 In the course of these night walks he encounters the ‘houseless’ and temporarily shares the condition of ‘houselessness’. The words ‘houseless’ and ‘houselessness’ are no longer current (we would now say ‘homeless’ and ‘homelessness’), 3 a fact
from Corsica was very near at hand. My portmanteaux and bags lay strewn all over my rooms, and Johnson, up to his eyes in packing, was inclined to be irritable. “I can’t think what’s come to that dog, Sir,” he remarked one morning, “a-whining and a-whimpering he is – fit to drive mad.” I also had noticed that Bonaparte seemed restless, and had surprised him more than once staring miserably at the luggage. “Come here, Bonaparte,” I said, “what’s the matter with you today? You surely can’t imagine that I’m going to leave you behind? Don’t you know that you’re coming
with astonishment: It’s a startling new Ireland, but why shouldn’t it be? I myself left the best part of twenty years ago and the finest thing about coming home is the rawness and the newness. I dislike what has been lost, but why whine about it? Why hold tight to the past when we have this sort of future? (McCann, 2007: viii) Commenting upon the recent wave of immigration to Ireland, John Brannigan (2009: 3) outlines its distinctive features. Among these, he enumerates its extensive scope (‘the scale of contemporary migratory movement’), the creation of diverse
ease in their adopted country. Eileen describes the emigrants who returned to Ireland on the ‘builder’s holiday’, the first two weeks in August, as follows: ‘Every year, you sensed that this place felt a little less like home for them. People looked forward to them coming home but felt an unspoken relief when they left again’ (Bolger, 2010: 124). Oscar in Act Two is also caught between two countries, at home in neither. He has left behind two 155 Paula Murphy wives in Turkey, ‘[t]he one I left behind the first time I went away and the one I married when I tried to
Irish emigrants forced to leave their homes in past times. As Coyne ponders, the new immigrants were ‘the Blasket Islanders coming home’ (59). Hamilton thus employs two motifs which will be used with some consistency in subsequent novels, with the immigrants as victims and the heirs to the Irish of past periods. Another recurring motif is that of the ‘unsympathetic Garda’. This model takes the figure of the police officer who is openly hostile to the presence of immigrants in the country and who is generally challenged by another officer or person of authority whose
winning a game of darts, he goes home, watches Mickey Mouse on the television, and dies. It is Mary who observes, a few days after the funeral, ‘Poor Johnny’s gone. It’s almost as if he never was’ (305). Johnny has become a gust of air, unnoticeably moved into the permanence of Mary’s memory together with all the others, whether they are ‘here or in England or alive or dead’. Even though Johnny is not a foreign character, McGahern’s depiction of the Irish migrant coming home resonates and speaks to our understanding of the other-nation migrants in Ireland at this time
learn about the central character is that ‘[you’d] never see Jimmy coming home from town Norquay_10_Ch9 159 22/3/02, 10:06 am 160 Cultural negotiations without a new album or a 12-inch or at least a 7-inch single’ (Doyle 1992b [1987]: 7). The most frequently remarked characteristic of Barrytown’s youth is their familiarity with and desire for non-Irish, late twentiethcentury popular culture, represented throughout the text (and in the above sentence) in the form of English and American music. Also noteworthy, however, are both the movement and the function