Whereas both church and state have been tardy in acknowledging the existence and scale of child abuse in institutional care in Ireland, there is ample evidence in much of the poetry and literature of the last fifty years that this hidden Ireland was known to many. In 1955 Austin Clarke wrote a poem entitled Corporal Punishment, a social commentary which explicitly describes the pain inflicted by Christian Brothers on small children, and the lack of effective intervention by the Department of Education:
Earning their living with much pain,
Determined nun, priest, Christian Brother,
Bring down the stick or leather strap.
Let Queen Victoria still reign here.
Bad ones, who do not give a rap
For law, home-working father, mother,
In a state no piety can smother,
Thoughts pounding like a fireman's bell
To save the souls in them from hell,
Raise up a burning hand as ruler
For no retreat can make them cooler.
Old methods are impenitent.
The new complain. But all enquiry
Is boxed in office, filed with quires
Of notes on Corporal Punishment:
'The Minister for Education:
Cane-bottom chairs for deputation'.
Fidgety boy, struck on the head
In class at Glenageary, fell dead,
A smaller, kept behind locked door
In the new school at Inchicore,
Screamed, jumped from the first floor,
Breaking his thigh. No prosecution
Dare wall our young from persecution.(Clarke 1974:271)
Indeed, much of contemporary Irish literature suggests that Irish culture is still obsessed with coming to terms with its rural past, and has not yet found a way of accommodating this into its more affluent, urban present. The recurring motif of child abuse and the dysfunctional, poverty-stricken family suggests this theme is in some way a metaphor for a deep sub-conscious national trauma. Patrick McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy, published in 1992, is a complex working through of the effects of modernisation in Ireland, an ambiguous, disturbing and challenging exploration of the clash between tradition and modernity and the impact of a largely American popular culture. The intertextual composition this novel is less dependent on borrowings from a classical tradition, and more indebted to comics, cinema and pop-culture. It is a vast network of irony, paradox and pastiche which invites the reader to participate but which denies any absolute interpretation. Meaning is not so much prescribed by the author but inscribed by the intertextual reader. (Hopper 1998:6.3) This is not to say that the novel is devoid of meaning. On the contrary, although it is set in Ireland of the early sixties, it has resonant relevance to contemporary Ireland because it deals with the issue of child mistreatment and abuse, an issue that is currently the focus of much public debate.
Set in a small town in rural Ireland, McCabe uses the apocalyptic background of the Cuban Missile crisis, and the beginnings of a television culture, to illustrate a country coming to terms with modernity. It is indeed a crucial time in the history of the Irish state, when the socio-economic conservatism of de Valera was finally supplanted by the modernising vision of Sean Lemass. This period, which is a pivotal moment for revisionist critiques of the development of the bourgeois nationalist state, is imagined by McCabe as a time of liberalising potential in many ways, although the novel's descent into individual and communal madness suggests a somewhat troubled celebration of the march of modernisation. (Herron 2000:173)
Through the eyes of Francie Brady, its self-conscious solipsist narrator, we are given a view of the realities of his past life in small-town Ireland in the early sixties. Implicit in the novel is a litany of questions on societal responsibility; dysfunctional family, parental responsibility, lack of guidance, child neglect, child abuse, lack of family support structures and the role of the clergy and leaders in society. The Butcher Boy depicts Ireland at the beginning of a decade yet to emerge from the complacency of post-independence, and clearly illustrates the extraordinary mixture of paranoia and paralysis, madness and mysticism that was Ireland in the '1950s and '60s. The threat of nuclear disaster runs continuously throughout the book, and serves as a metaphor for Francie's descent into madness.
The Butcher Boy is concerned with the relations between the individual and the widening network of social and cultural institutions which the individual must negotiate; family, friendship, community, church and authority. Patrick McCabe's protagonist Francie wickedly challenges the repressed and hypocritical norms of rural Irish society in the early 1960s, and his dysfunctional home life is a symptom of an increasingly disjointed society. The origin of the Brady family's destruction lies in the fact that Francie's father had been a victim of sexual abuse by a priest in an institution in Belfast, and Francie unconsciously re-enacts this experience. Never able to deal with his own childhood, Benny makes a misery of his own family relationships, culminating in the alienation of his brother Alo, his wife's suicide, and his own alcohol-induced death. Early on in the text there are intimations of the abuse that shaped Francie's father, and which continue to affect Francie's life; "he was off into the speech about his father leaving him when he was seven and how nobody understood him...." (McCabe 1993: 6). Describing Benny's self-pity as a "speech" suggests that to Francie it is a common refrain. Francie also uses his hyperreal imagination to mask their dysfunctional home life: during a fight between his parents he describes how "something else broke crockery or something" (McCabe 1993:6) Francie's emotional growth is stunted, he does not wish to face stark reality; he is stranded at a particularly susceptible stage between childhood and adolescence. Because of his mother's suicide, he has not been able to experience the gradual separation from her that would allow him to mature emotionally and psychologically. Francie searches to find objects and relationships capable of replacing the replete identity he experienced with his mother, but because this was only an imaginary relationship, all such attempts are doomed. (Smyth 1997:82) His childhood adventures with Joe, his parents' sojourn in the Bundoran guesthouse "Over The Waves" are all slipping further and further away from an increasingly unsatisfactory present. Early in the novel, Benny looks in vain for a pattern in the whiskey he has spilt on the floor after his denouncement of Alo and the cursing of his wife (McCabe1993:36), and Francie engages in a similar practice when he tries to make all the disparate voices battling in his head conform to some kind of cohesive narrative that will explain how things got so bad, how the past slipped away, and most significantly, how the past is a sentimental invention by those marooned in the present. (Smyth 1997:83)
Francie's fantasies are redolent of a world in which he is a onlooker; he never succeeds in making the move from being the object of others' narrative to being the subject of his own. Unlike Paddy Doyle in The God Squad he never finds his own voice and his world degenerates into ceaseless role-playing, for example Algernon Carruthers gleaned from his comic-reading, various Hollywood heroes and local roles such as Francie Brady Not a Bad Bastard Any More, the Bogman and the Pig. The ringing in his head which overtakes him towards the end of the story is the increasingly unmanageable clash of all these voices. Francie cannot breach the gap that always exists between representation and reality, and his identity begins to crumple under the strain.
Beneath the exotic fantasies of McCabe's novel lies a contemporary Irish parable about the cyclical repercussions of child abuse. Set in the rural slums of small-town Ireland with the Brady family as white trash, it is a world beset on every side by institutions of one kind or another; those "houses of a hundred windows" which crop up throughout the story to curtail the freedom which Francie believes he once possessed, and which in his arrested mental state he desperately wants to recapture: the orphanage to which Benny and Uncle Alo were sent as children, the "garage" or mental hospital to which his mother goes for her depression, the borstal where Francie is sent after his first attack on the Nugents, the boarding school which consolidates the betrayal of Joe and from which Francie is excluded, and of course the institution for the criminally insane from which he tells his story. (Smyth 1997:82)
Francie's skewed perception casts a new light on the ideological conventions which bind our society. (Hopper 1998:6.7 ) For example, his description of his mother's breakdown "it wasn't too long after that that Ma was took off to the garage", (McCabe1993:8) initially puzzles the reader until we realise that Francie is punning on the word "breakdown". The decoding is deliberately delayed until the following page, when this play on words is eventually explained: "What's a breakdown Joe......O that's when you're took off to the garage Joe told me". (McCabe 1993:9) Of course, Francie does know what is going on, he just prefers to take refuge in the linguistic fantasy. (Hopper 1998 6:7) The defence mechanisms that he learned early in life allow him to escape from the real world when he can no longer cope. Another example of this is when his mother, having been upset by Mrs. Nugent, starts crying: "dabbing at her eyes with a tiny bit of tissue out of her apron pocket. But it was no use it just frittered away into little pieces" (McCabe 1993:5). Francie's focussing on the tissue allows him not to see the reality of his mother's distress.
Although it is entirely possible that McCabe tried to indicate, through his description of Annie's breakdown, that there is, to some extent, an hereditary factor involved in the deterioration of Francie's mental state, it is evident that his psychosis has its origins also in his forced estrangement from the sacred narratives of Irish culture; family, nationality and religion. (Hopper 1998:6.8 ) His Catholicism, in particular is replaced by a personal cosmology derived from the simulacra of popular culture, mainly comics and television. As Francie himself commented, "it was all going well until the telly went. Phut" (McCabe 1993:9) Francie confuses cause with effect, and he traces the origins of his misfortunes back to this event. Afterwards, the television itself is worshipped as a holy relic or idol; long after it is broken Francie takes it out of the shed and puts it back where it used to be, in front of Benny's corpse in the armchair. The religious significance of the TV is reinforced constantly, as in Francie's description of "Mickey Traynor the holy tellyman" (McCabe 1993:100) Of course Traynor is literally a holy telly man, because he repairs TV's and sells kitschy Catholic icons. (Hopper 1998:6.8)
It is evident, however, that Francie's world has always been on the verge of collapse, since his parents' personal and marital problems could not but contribute to his fragile mental state. In the absence of guidance and direction, Francie bases his understanding of the world on the perspectives of "foreign"' cultures. These in finds in television, cinema and the comics of England and America, and he selects characters and characteristics which he transfers to himself and the people with whom he comes in contact. Francie becomes Algernon Carruthers, an English public schoolboy, his mother becomes Ma Whizz, the sergeant becomes Sausage, and the abusive priest becomes Tiddly. The early signs of disturbance displayed by Francie fail to be detected or dealt with in a serious way but are treated as the butt of humour. Shunned and scorned by the townspeople, Francie struggles with his sense of loss and pain as his fantasies become more grotesque and his behaviour more threatening. Goaded by the callousness of his neighbours and ignited by his hatred of Mrs.Nugent, Francie explodes into murderous violence. There is a relentless inevitability in Francie's targeting of Mrs. Nugent as the cause of his family's woes: "Nugent it was you caused all the trouble if you hadn't poked your nose in everything would have been alright" (McCabe 1993:2) The Nugents possess everything he does not and embody everything he is not. As representatives of a new class formation within the town they live out the de Valerian fantasy of cosy homesteads, albeit in a thoroughly renovated manner. (Herron 2000:175) It is important to appreciate that the principles expressed by de Valera underpinned the socio-economic and constitutional ethos of the newly elected state. It is precisely this utopian vision, this imagined Ireland, complemented by the power of the Catholic Church, that The Butcher Boy exposes and ridicules. The "athletic youth" have become "boney-arsed bogmen" and the romping of sturdy children have been eclipsed by the crazed wanderings of a demented boy. The Bradys, in fact, represent the underside of this idealised Ireland; they are the rural or semi-urban trash, the dysfunctional, the poor, the drunken, the emotionally scarred. (Herron 2000:176) However, Francie holds on to a mythical notion of Ireland, even as that adherence destroys him. Interviewed in the Sunday Times in 1998, Patrick McCabe described the novel as some kind of moral fable. "Francie's journey is the search for unblemished purity, for a moment when everything seemed okay, when there were no lies. That's why he ends up in Bundoran, searching for the moment of his conception. He doesn't find any moment of purity and that's when he starts to destroy the world". (Sunday Times 1998:9)
If both The Butcher Boy and The God Squad ridicule and undermine the utopian vision of de Valera, it should be emphasised that this vision bore little reality to the actual social formation which ruthlessly concealed problems such as mental illness, child abuse, alcoholism, and domestic violence, as well as social stagnation and economic underdevelopment, all of which are important factors in the production of Francie as the eponymous Butcher Boy, and Paddy Doyle, who still carries the scars inflicted while he was entrusted into the care of the state. It is evident from the many reports of childhood abuse that are now being made public that de Valera's imagined Ireland is not, in any meaningful or material way, the Ireland that Francie's family inhabit or in which Paddy Doyle spent his childhood. Instead, the vision of the cosy homesteads is a mythical supplement, an imagined possibility, a memory of something irretrievably lost. McCabe, in The Butcher Boy, uses the symbol of the puddle in the lane to represent freedom, a lost world, and Paddy Doyle's anguish when he was separated from the nuns who ill-treated him illustrate the innocence and vulnerability of a child for whom "bad care" is better than no care.
An invidious and compelling feature of The Butcher Boy is the idiom of its narrator-protagonist, Francie Brady. The first and final paragraphs are set in an asylum - in the present moment - from where Francie tells us the chilling tale of his murderous past. He begins his confession with his earliest memories, and he addresses the reader directly in the playful, solipsist manner of a child. The power of the narrative voice lies in the fact that the story is told in the first person by a highly unreliable and obviously unstable protagonist. From the opening line we know he has committed some atrocity, and this knowledge gives his ironic and sometimes hilarious commentary an horrific, gothic gloss. Initially, his childish solipsism is charming, but as the tale progresses, and Francie grows older and more alienated, the ordered, commonsense "real" world gives way completely to his hallucinogenic imagination, and what was once charming in a young child gradually becomes disturbing and unsettling in a young adult. (Hopper 1998:6.6)
In Francie's
interior monologue McCabe captures perfectly the Clones dialect which incorporates
words and slang not frequently heard in other parts of Ireland. As Neil Jordan,
who directed the film version of The Butcher Boy points out, the language spoken
in the area is almost Elizabethan in its archaisms. (Warner Bros. 1997) The
dialect and the contrast between it and the argot of American TV and B movies
are central to the book. McCabe tampers with the readers allegiance by presenting
Francie's point of view only, a perspective which although candid and sincerely
held, is clearly out of kilter with what is generally accepted to be the "norm".
(Smyth 1994:137) The reader is denied an anchoring or validating "other voice",
a reality against which to compare Francie's narrative.
The references to atomic destruction in The Butcher Boy are significant in that
another important, if somewhat less momentous development took place in Ireland
in 1962. At the inauguration of the country's national television service in
December of that year, President Eamon de Valera intoned rather ominously, "Like
atomic energy, it can be used for incalculable good but it can also do irreparable
harm". (McLoone 2000:217) McCabe has situated The Butcher Boy on the cusp of
change in Ireland, and Francie's personal disaster can be read as the narrative
of the excluded, and its implications can be limited to those who did not share
the ideological and material ambitions for a renovated Ireland. (Herron 2000:188)
Francie's inability to negotiate successfully the transition from childhood
to adulthood is symptomatic of his positioning both within and without the powerful
ideological construction of de Valera's Ireland as a frugal, spiritual republic.
Francie is at all times conscious of his family's status as the lowest of the low "pigs, sure the whole town knows that" (McCabe 1993:4) Like Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, Francie's thought process is direct and unforgettable, and he has a most peculiar and impressive sort of intelligence. Clearly he needs psychiatric help, although when he is hospitalised it is evident that the treatment available to him in the mental insitution is hopelessly inadequate to deal with the complex needs of a deeply disturbed child on the brink of madness.
Although his animosity towards Mrs. Nugent appear to be based upon a particular set of circumstances, the text seems to suggest that there are deeper and darker reasons behind his targeting of her as the source of all his family's woes. McCabe seems to take delight in presenting all the constituents of a classic Oedipal breakdown - a brutal father, mother fixation, repression, and displacement; indeed the whole gamut of psychological discourse as it has filtered down into the popular imagination. However, the text operates first and foremost as a compelling narrative of the disintegration of a mind, and it does not detract from the enjoyment of the book if the reader does not follow the subliminal narrative. (Smyth 1997:84) Francie's mind is continually open to influence, he is an amorphous creature, his identity shifts constantly as he assumes the characteristics of American and British comic characters. However, by the close of the novel his identity has become fixed, defined by a subject position identified as the Butcher Boy. Francie exposes the violence of this position by extracting his own appalling vengeance; when he kills Mrs. Nugent he enters fully, expertly, into his role of Butcher Boy. As the Butcher Boy, Francie is rejected and expelled from the community; he is that in which the community would see themselves if they dared to look. But his repudiation is total; he becomes neutralised and marginalised, as the sins of the fathers continue unabated. (Herron: 2000 178)
The power of the narrative voice in The Butcher Boy lies in the fact that the story is told in the first person by a highly unreliable protagonist. Initially it was written in the third person, but this static mode lacked vitality and failed to impress any publisher. Patrick McCabe recalled the process in an interview with Hotpress in 1993: "The first draft was written in a straight, third person narration style. It was okay, a workmanlike effort but it wasn't enough. I was afraid of it because it was such a dangerous story but you could tell it in a way that was almost twee......So I started writing it in Francie's own words. I didn't think anybody would understand it for a start because it was written in this daft, skat style. But I wouldn't have changed a word of it no matter who liked or disliked it, 'cause at this stage I'd given up hope of having it published at all. An then, the complete opposite of what I expected happened. It got published and people not only understood it, they liked it." (Hotpress Magazine 1993:7)
Irish society and organised religion is relentlessly critiqued in The Butcher Boy, both in the nuclei of the text - primarily the issues of institutional care and clerical child abuse - and in its margins. Nonetheless, Francie understands the socialising function of religion, in particular the power of ritual. When serving mass he deconstructs the Latin ceremony: "I was supposed to say Et Clamor meus ad te veniat. Et fucky wucky ticky tocky that was what I said instead. But it didn't matter as long as you muttered something." (McCabe 1993:75) Despite his cynicism Francie does admire the beauty of religion, and the comfort it ideally brings. (Hopper 1998:6.8) As an altar boy in the industrial school Francie says: "It was hard to beat that old sacristy.......the twirl of candle smoke and the secret echo of the pews, all the sounds of the morning not born right yet". (McCabe 1993 :78). It is interesting to note that Paddy Doyle, the author of The God Squad, who also served as an altar boy during his time in institutional care, and felt this duty gave him a sense of importance. He describes how he loved the early morning stillness of the town, where the streets were silent except for the click-clacking of his hob-nailed boots on the pavement. (Doyle 1989:37) It is evident that the familiar ritual of the mass, and the prestige attached to being an altar boy, brought considerable comfort into the lives of boys who were otherwise neglected and brutalised.