The Rhythm of the Humdrum and the Clamour of the Lambeg: narratives, styles and Irish identities

This chapter explores novels by Patrick McCabe and Robert McLiam Wilson (‘The Butcher Boy’ and ‘Eureka Street’) whose narrative discourses are firmly rooted in the demotic cadences of Irish voices and investigate questions of identity; through a pitiless anatomisation of post-war rural Ireland and through painting an authentic picture of the Belfast which lies beneath the self-replicating media representations of The Troubles.

The Butcher Boy is narrated by Francie Brady in a rhythmical skaz which draws from the well of Irish vernacular, alongside postmodern discourses such as the comic book and advertising, and in the mimicking and parroting of his fellow characters. Francie’s demotic discourse appears to flow from almost anywhere but his own mouth. It is not the author who imposes on the character, but rather the culture at large which ‘speaks’ him. Francie is imprisoned in the discourse of others and descends into madness. The failure of this struggle for personal identity from the denial of an‘authentic’ voice; thus, a discoursal/linguistic situation mediates an ontological one.

McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street also gains expressive capital from the demotic voice, ths time from the North. Jake Jackson narrates sections of the novel in a first-person skaz, whilst those sections dealing with the other main character, Chuckie Lurgan, use a third-person narrator. Accordingly, the text provides its own useful point of comparison – between the discourses of a heterodiegetic narrator and a homodiegetic one. Later in the novel, the heterodiegetic narrator describes the aftermath of an explosion in the centre of Belfast in a grimly matter-of-fact tone; there is a tension between the linguistic register and the horror of the situation it describes – language retreats into a terse standard when confronted with the very limits of experience. The demotic of Jake Jackson, the poetry of the street names, the competing discourses of the various characters – all function as a cacophonous antidote to the linguistic emasculation and censorship enacted by the bombers, so that the narrative voice becomes in itself a paean to life.

These two writers, then, invoke the valedictory power of the orally-inclined narrative idiolect. In the first, a character fails fully to acquire and comprehend it, and his life takes a catastrophic turn. In the second, the message is more celebratory: it is through the celebration of heteroglossia (many voices) that we find the antidote to authoritarian discourses.