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Revolutionary bodies traces a style of homoerotic writing in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction. As this study demonstrates, writers in that tradition explored a broad spectrum of cultural and political concerns, while experimenting with the conventions of literary realism. We witness how, in these various works, the longing for the male body is insistently associated with utopian political desire. Developing a series of innovative readings, the argument proceeds through three author-centred chapters (Brendan Behan; John Broderick; Colm Tóibín) followed by two chapters on Irish gay fiction and ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction. The latter two chapters focus on work by Keith Ridgway, Jamie O’Neill, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea, among others. Revolutionary Bodies prompts us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics, literature and sexual liberation.
This book studies the twentieth-century Irish Catholic Bildungsroman. This comparative examination of six Irish novelists tracks the historical evolution of a literary genre and its significant role in Irish culture. With chapters on James Joyce and Kate O'Brien, along with studies of Maura Laverty, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O'Brien and John McGahern, this book offers a fresh new approach to the study of twentieth-century Irish writing and of the twentieth-century novel. Combining the study of literature and of archival material, the book also develops a new interpretive framework for studying the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Ireland. The book addresses itself to a wide set of interdisciplinary questions about Irish sexuality, modernity and post-colonial development, as well as Irish literature.
Critical reflections on Oscar Wilde’s writing frame an introduction to the animating concern of this book: the relationship between homoeroticism and revolution in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction. Considering the contradictory place of gay men in the phantasmagoria of neoliberal capitalism leads to discussion of Herbert Marcuse, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, who provide inspiration for some key concepts in this study: identity, injury, vulnerability and liberation.
Behan’s only novel, Borstal Boy (1958), unites two traditions of prison writing – Irish republican and queer male – which were already merged in Wilde’s De Profundis (1897/1905). As in Wilde and Jean Genet, in Behan’s novel the humiliation and pain of imprisonment is transformative and radicalising – a central trope of Irish republican prison writing – and this radicalisation is given narrative and imaginative form through the narrator’s erotic encounter with the male body as desirable and vulnerable. In Wilde the male body is that of Christ, in Genet and Behan it is that of youthful fellow prisoners (their youth taking on a symbolic significance as a rejection of development and ‘mature’ conformity to the performance principle). This style of writing homoerotic relations, as a bodily encounter of pleasure and solidarity rather than as an expression of identity, creates a literary space for imagining utopian possibilities. Echoing the narrative conjunction of two types of (republican and queer) prison writing, we can conceptualise those utopian possibilities as a political conjunction of Behan’s contemporaries, Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon – the transformation of sexuality into Eros as correlative of the transformative leap from decolonisation to liberation.
We might reasonably expect John Broderick’s early novels, published in the first half of the 1960s, to be aligned with the orthodoxies of a postcolonial nation affirming its commitment to technological modernisation and economic subservience to the capitalist global order. His is just the type of critical realist aesthetic – eviscerating the pious hypocrisies of Catholic Ireland – that has long found a welcome home in Irish literary criticism. But the realist aesthetic of Broderick’s fiction is ruptured by the irreconcilable presence of archaic structures of feeling. One of these archaic forms is the homosexual reconfigured as a pervert; not necessarily, or not only, the homosexual as modern sexual pervert but as perverse in older theological and political senses as well. In Broderick’s fiction, the ‘homosexual’, the ‘fallen woman’ and the republican ‘gunman’ form an unholy trinity of unruly threatening perversity. These are religious and political as well as sexual heretics animating the insurrectionary potential immanent to the bourgeois social order.
Attending closely to Colm Tóibín’s trio of gay-themed novels ¬– The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004) – we encounter a paradox: when their political imaginary is most closely aligned with a progressive sexual politics is also when these novels are most fully in conformity with the hegemonic neoliberal norms. But when the concerns and obsessions of the fiction seems furthest removed from progressive sexual politics is when its political imagination is potentially most radical. When Tóibín writes about the male body in pleasure and pain his fiction aesthetically and tonally generates affects which unsettle the hegemonic ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism – even while his characters and stories are committed to endorsing a resigned and ‘realistic’ submission to neoliberal political rationality.
Critical reflections on the evolution of LGBT politics in Ireland, before and after decriminalisation, and the emergence of Irish gay male fiction after 1993. The novels under discussion – by ‘Tom Lennon’, Jarlath Gregory, Denis Kehoe and Jamie O’Neill – belong to two genres, each structured around subjective and historical time: the coming-out romance and the historical romance. These novels give narrative shape to the forms of consciousness underpinning contemporary lesbian and gay politics and give imaginative expression to the dialectic of liberation and reformism inherent to that politics. Their manifest political perspectives are often critical and sometimes socialist in their sympathies. But, beneath these manifest commitments, the form and aesthetic texture – plot; narrative and prose style; tone – generates varied affects. The political imagination of these novels could be radical, disruptive and utopian, or it could be in comfortable alignment with the hegemonic neoliberal conception of the individual and of social relations in ‘boom-time’ Ireland.
Henri Lefebvre and Ernst Bloch provide a conceptual framework for thinking about social space and hope in novels by Keith Ridgway, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea. Their fiction moves us towards grasping the neoliberal condition sensuously and dialectically, since these are examples of chronotopic writing in which styles of writing social space generate radical modes of temporal reasoning. Two chronotopes are notably expressive in these novels: the city and the gay sauna. These novels are examples of ‘hopeful’ and ‘utopianist’ writing in which homoerotic desire is a vector of utopian longing. The most powerful symbolic location of hope in this fiction is the male body as a site of desire and need, pleasure and vulnerability.
Where now after the achievement of marriage equality? Meditating on the aesthetics of vulnerability in Joe Caslin’s murals prompts speculation on possibilities and potential for a revolutionary politics of sexual liberation.
This book examines the historical formation of ideas about sexuality in modern Irish culture. It analyses the history of sexuality in Ireland and the Catholic Church's regulation of Irish sexuality from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It focuses on the study of a literary genre, the Bildungsroman and its significance in twentieth-century Irish writing.