A Postmodern Crisis of Irish Masculinity — Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood (2006)

Abstract

A sense of liminality, strangeness and dread permeates Patrick McCabe’s 2006 novel Winterwood, a dark tale of nightmarish beasts, fantastical doubles and disjointed scraps of memory. In Winterwood, Freud’s concept of the return of the repressed and the indestructible nature of the unconscious² is reflected through a fractured, hallucinogenic narrative of uncanny despair, where McCabe lays bare the impact that institutional sexual abuse, in tandem with rapid social change, can have on individual subjectivity. In this chapter, I wish to argue that this novel can be framed within the gendered reading of the cultural condition of postmodernism articulated by several contemporary feminist theorists who argue that the overwhelming masculinity of Enlightenment reason, which identified femininity and homosexuality as ‘other’, previously precluded the evolving, variable identity scripts common to postmodern texts.³ Luce Irigaray, for instance, compares the masculinity of Enlightenment discourse with the ‘temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed and capricious’⁴ nature of femininity; characteristics that in postmodernism are frequently bestowed on the masculine subject. Stripped of his clearly defined place in a rapidly changing, post-feminist society, the masculine subject lacks agency and drive and reflects Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘schizo-subject’ — multiple, decentred and often ‘refusing to speak the word “I”’.⁵

The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar … The strangeness is not without, but within, there is no home per se that is a safe place from strangers, since home is the site of the uncanny, the double … sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex.¹