Terror and Rebirth: Cathleen ni Houlihan, from Yeats to The Crying Game

[] what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

-W B Yeats, "No next to the first Troy"

Women are trouble, did you know that Fergus?

-The Crying Game

In the reams of arguments back and forth upon how to fight and win the near "war on terror," there has been surprisingly little (if any) acknowledgment of the fact that the US's staunchest ally in Iraq has fought the longest and bitterest war upon terror in the twentieth hundred If we count Great Britain's fight with Irish republicanism from the inception of the IRA in the years following the 1916 Easter Rising,1 their have a title to struggle will soon limp into its ninetieth year. by dint of all rights, this should make the UK the resident prompt on terrorism, at least in confines of the duration (if not intensity) of the conflict, and the fact is that since the last brutal bombing in Omagh in 1998 serious paces have been made. On the other hand, this may be a archetype that the US would timid away from, as the British finally learned that compromise and negotiation, not steadfast violence, looks to be the way without of the woods. And given that it has taken nearly ninety years to reach this point, it must be an uneasy analogue in comparison with the sort of "home by dint of Christmas" rhetoric that marked the entrance of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The example of Ireland is however extremely instructive because it proffers us an alternative understanding of terrorism and terrorists by the agency of way of our own popular representations in Hollywood and elsewhere. This essay will focus upon Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game, placing it in a particular Irish discursive tradition, beginning in the Literary Revival, which foregrounds a performative, sexed nationalism. Jordan's film is particularly relevant to us in the near moment insofar as it highlights this performative simple body complicating and revising the conceptions of terror and terrorism thus rigidly reified of late.

Representing Ireland

Responding to his English business partner's dreamy-eyed romantic conception of Ireland, Larry Doyle in George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island launches into a vituperative rant indicting the bleary romanticism of the Irish "imagination":

It's all dreaming, all imagination. [The Irishman] cant be religious. The inspired Churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of guidance is sent away empty; while the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint, has a cathedral built for him on the outside of the pennies of the poor. He cant be intelligently political; he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninetyeight. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and feign she's a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything omit imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's like a torture that you cant bear it without whisky. (131)

Larry Doyle's rant articulates in part George Bernard Shaw's have antipathy to the Irish Literary Revival. While himself a firm dwelling Rule proponent, the Yeatsian throw out of revitalizing and rewriting traditional Irish myth in the name of forging a of recent origin national identity offended Shaw's pragmatic faculty of perception of theatre as political tool, and the revolutionary overtones of like plays as Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan provokeed his nonviolent Fabianism. Coming five years after the explosive first attempt of Cathleen (1902), John Bull's Other Island (1907) mountains a very specific polemic against the propagandistic quality of the myth-revival drama. Indeed, Shaw voiced his uneasiness with Yeats's ardently republican drama, stating, "When I diocese that play I feel it might lead a man to do something foolish" (Cullingford 12) As we shall diocese the play was at the real least indirectly responsible for sending tribe into battle on Easter Weekend in 1916

Yeats's culpability in inspiring individuals to violence has been broadly debated elsewhere, and his be in possession of musings on the subject surface in his rhyme Lines of influence, direct or indirect, are not however in question here in like manner much as violence as symbolic action; or more specifically, as a conception of theatricality that reach outs from stage to politics to film, starting with Yeats's cast in the turn of the hundred the Abbey Theatre, and continuing to contemporary occurrences The Irish tradition is particularly instructive to this discussion because of its status as a series of firsts and lasts: the first fresh colony, one of the last remaining ones; the first really "post"-colonial nation in the contemporary faculty of perception of the word, and the last colonial outpost in the traditional sense2 Ireland's uneasy place in the discourse of Other and Same-at one time traditionally marginal, but more innately familiar and sympathetic to white, middle-class America, relative to other marginalized collections and cultures-presents an opportunity to crack make open issues and questions relating to the performance of nationalism from one side violence. To phrase things another way, individual could read Shaw's vituperation against the Irish "imagination" and its seduction by means of all things mythic as a resistance to a certain essentializing nationalism, in which individual identity is at one time realized and effaced by one's self-immolation in the nationalist cause. of the like kind self-immolation marked the Easter Rising of 1916 The short-lived rebellion was akin to a suicide attack, thus it was certain that the rebels would be crushed by dint of the British.