‘Nobody Kills a Priest’: Irish Noir and Pathogenic Vulnerability in Benjamin Black’s Holy Orders (original) (raw)
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The Noir Landscape of Dublin in Benjamin Black's Quirke Series
Estudios Irlandeses, 2020
This article offers an examination of Benjamin Black's Quirke series through an ecocritical lens. Set against the backdrop of 1950s Dublin, the texts feature a pathologist who investigates the murder of the victims that end at the morgue of the Holy Family Hospital. I contend that by exhaustively mapping the city through its crimes, the author hints at the far-reaching web of criminal actions executed and sanctioned by different agents of authority and violence. Similarly, I also claim that the author consistently draws on the notions of coexistence and interdependence to construct the personality of the protagonist, as the narrator insists on this growing indignation and cynicism towards the connected artefacts of dominance that inhabit the city. Consequently, the novels suggest that relationality and interdependence should involve untangling that net of power and control so as to negotiate social responsibility and create a climate of greater justice and solidarity. Resumen. Este artículo examina la serie de novelas "Quirke", escrita por Benjamin Black, desde una perspeciva ecocrítica. Las historias, localizadas en el Dublín de los años 50 del siglo pasado, están protagonizadas por un patólogo que investiga los asesinatos de las víctimas que llegan a la morgue del Hospital de la Sagrada Familia. Este artículo pretende demostrar que al rastrear exhaustivamente la ciudad a través de los crímenes que se suceden en ella, el autor sugiere la existencia de una amplia red de acciones criminales ejecutadas y supervisadas por distintos agentes de poder y violencia de la época. También se argumenta que Black utiliza de manera consistente las nociones de coexistencia e interdependencia para construir la personalidad del protagonista, en tanto que el narrador insiste en su creciente indignación y cinismo ante los artefactos de poder que habitan su ciudad. Por todo ello, las novelas sugieren que la relacionalidad y la interdependencia implican también desenmarañar esa red de poder y control, para negociar la responsabilidad social y crear un clima de mayor justicia y solidaridad.
2017
ProQuest document link FULL TEXT In Underground Cathedrals (2010), the Glenstal monk and author Mark Patrick Hederman described artists as the "secret agents" of the Holy Spirit: "Art has the imagination to sketch out the possible. When this happens something entirely new comes into the world. Often it is not recognised for what it is and is rejected or vilified by those who are comfortable with what is already there and afraid of whatever might unsettle the status quo." Reflecting on this position, one wonders to what extent Irish novelists have fulfilled the important role outlined by Hederman. In the past, they definitely did offer an alternative view of existence by challenging aspects of church and State dominance, and suffering severe consequences as a result. In 1965, for example, John McGahern's second novel The Dark unveiled a hidden Ireland where guilt, domestic violence, hypocrisy and sexual abuse seemed to thrive in a supposedly "Catholic" country. The novel attracted the attention of the Censorship Board, was banned and its writer lost his job as a teacher in Clontarf. McGahern displayed no real bitterness as a result of this unfortunate interlude, realising that he lived in a "theocracy in all but name" and describing the Ireland of his youth and early adulthood in the following terms: "Hell and heaven and purgatory were places real and certain we would go to after death, dependent on the Judgement. Churches in my part of Ireland were so crowded that children and old people who were fasting to receive Communion would regularly pass out in the bad air and have to be carried outside. Not to attend Sunday Mass was to court social ostracism, to be seen as mad or consorting with the devil, or, at best, to be seriously eccentric." In more recent times, it is far more commonplace to criticise the actions of the Catholic Church than it is to defer to the institution. This results in many novelists taking a (possibly well-earned) swipe at what they consider the inadequacies of the system. Hence John Boyne, in A History of Loneliness (2014), follows the career of a Dublin priest, Fr Odran Yates, who fails to see, or chooses not to see, the paedophile tendencies of his contemporary in the seminary, Fr Tom Cardle, with calamitous consequences for his young nephew Aidan, who ends up being abused by Cardle. Negative impact While this novel deals mainly with the negative impact Catholicism can have on clerical attitudes to sexuality in particular, it occasionally gives free rein to some of its author's personal opinions. Take for example Cardle's comments to Yates on his release from prison after serving a sentence for child abuse: "You knew it, you kept it secret and this whole conspiracy that everyone talks about, the one that goes to the top of the Church, well it goes to the bottom of it too, to the nobodies like you, to the fella that never even had a parish of his own and hides away from the world, afraid to be spotted. You can blame me all you like, Odran, and you'd be right to, because I've done some terrible things in my life, but do you ever think of taking a look at yourself? At your own actions? At the Grand Silence that you've maintained from the very first day?" Yates, being part of the institution, maintains a cowardly silence when it comes to the criminal acts he suspects Cardle may well have perpetrated. Writing in The Irish Times shortly after the publication of A History of Loneliness , Boyne made the following observation: "A novelist looks for the stories that haven't been told. It would be very easy to write a novel with a monster at the centre of it, an unremitting paedophile who preys on the vulnerable without remorse. The challenge PDF GENERATED BY SEARCH.PROQUEST.COM
Violent realities: Stories from an Irish Minority
2016
The small Irish Protestant minority has had complex, blurred and dramatically changing relationships with roles of both victimizer and victim. It has moved from an alignment with forces of British colonial power to extreme marginality, persecution and the threat of extinction following Irish political Independence. In the last decade it is coping with sudden acceptability and growth. It has moved from being mildly aligned to Britain to being quite fiercly Irish and has been variously (and often simultaneously) execrated, marginalized, silenced, silent, depressed, superior, patronized and patronising.Utilising Foucault’s notions of discourse, power and resistance, this paper explores a small number of vignettes emerging from a recent narrative research inquiry into Irish Protestant identity. The paper draws also on Bronwyn Davies’ concept of positioning through language and social interaction to increase, challenge and complicate our understanding of the layered, nuanced and ofte...
Fear, Silence, and Telling: Catholic Identity in Northern Ireland
SUMMARY The concept of " silence " is used to examine the everyday experience of lived violence in the prolonged ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland. I analyze silence as coercion, cultural censorship, embodied, and an integral component of identity and consciousness affected by a diaspora. Silence is intrinsic to the symbolic violence that is enacted in commemorations. This is a silencing of alternative histories and memories, and the ethnic identities in which these are rooted. It is also a silencing of place and an attempt to create new kinds of territorial belongings. I explore the multiple ways through which violence is manifested both symbolically and physically, penetrates the ordinary, as well as the pivotal role of borders in the creation and maintenance of boundaries. I examine how border crossing opens up a liminal space of possibilities. I argue that border regimes are not restricted to the periphery. Rather, they penetrate deep into the center into the informal spaces of the everyday. I argue that silence is a culturally learned strategy through which fear, experienced socially, can be normalized, routinized, and negotiated. I question the efficacy of truth and reconciliation commissions, as well as the drive to " speak " violence. Although the bulk of this essay relates to the production of silence during the Troubles, I extend this analysis to the present era. [ethnicity, Northern Ireland, silence, violence]
After the 1801 Act of Union uniting Ireland and Great Britain, and the broken promises made to Catholics, Daniel O'Connell founded the Catholic Association which combined religious and political demands. Despite the pacifying dimension of the movement, the decades preceding the Great Hunger (1845-1851) saw several episodes of violence, before reaching a climax during the revolutionary movement of 1848. Relying on Philippe Braud's definition of political violence and the study of British and Catholic authorities' correspondence among other sources, this article intends to shed light on the different dynamics at work in the rise in violence. It also examines the various attempts to readjust to and withdraw from acts of violence, to move beyond ambiguities and better assess the role played by religious agents.
Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Irish Fiction
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Financial speculation and capitalist accumulation leave spatial and temporal traces. When the waves of the global financial collapse reached Ireland and culminated in the extreme measure of the comprehensive state guarantee, the receding excesses of the Celtic Tiger revealed a landscape that was gentrified and alienating. The spectrality of the ghost estates of Ireland became a synecdochal signifier of Ireland's ignominious fall from the podium of neoliberal grace and the focus of both popular lament and critical intervention. This essay provides a deferred assessment of the uncanniness of dwelling in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland by concentrating on the socioecological fallout of ruins and the longterm casualties of land speculation: that is, transformations of landscape into real estate, and of place into property. Reading Ireland's ghost estates as ‘imperial formations’ that ‘register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation’ – to use Ann ...
Gothic and Noir: the Genres of the Irish Contemporary Fiction of “Containment”
Études irlandaises
This article argues that the trauma of sexual abuse, particularly child abuse, was represented as early as 1965 in John McGahern's The Dark, but was only recognized as a major theme in Irish fiction with the publication of Anne Enright's The Gathering in 2007. Both works, together with Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, display the kind of avant-garde aesthetics that critics generally associate with the representation of trauma. However, other recent Irish novels have represented the trauma of sexual abuse and of institutional containment through tropes and themes proper to two traditional genres, gothic and crime fiction. Such is the case for Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, and John Banville's Benjamin Black novels.