The Crying Game: Postcolonial or postmodern?

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Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 154-173

  Smyth, Gerry ^a  

^a LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84947321786     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: 17500176     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/para.1997.20.2.154     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Richard David Story, 'The Cult of The Crying Game', NewYork (25 January 1993), 26:4, 36. See Rebecca Bell-Metereau, HollywoodAndrogyny(NewYork, Columbia University Press, 1993) for an analysis of the impact of The Crying Game in North America.
2. On the history ofthe representation of Ireland in cinema see Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons andJohn Hill, Cinema and Ireland [1987] (London, Routledge, 1988).
3. See Patrick O'Sullivan, ' "Tell Me a Story": Ireland and the Movie Moguls', Irish Studies Review 1 (Spring 1992), 2-4.
4. This term is borrowed fromJulia Kristeva's essay 'A New Type ofIntellectual: The Dissident' (in The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 292-300) in which she cites Joyce as the exemplary modern intellectual. Joyce resists authority by undermining the law of symbolic language, and resists reincorporation into that language by undergoing physical and spiritual exile.
5. On the relationship between decolonization and realism see Homi Bhabha, 'Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms ofMimeticism', in The Theory ojReading, edited by Frank Gloversmith (Hemel Hempstead, The Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 93-122.
6. The first quote is from Simon During, 'Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today', in Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 449; the second from Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 81.
7. On this latter point see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989), especially the passages on what he terms 'flexible capitalist accumulation'.
8. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery ofSelf Under Colonialism (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 99.
9. Much modern third-world film practice is caught in this impasse, unable to imagine a way out of the oppositional logic of self and other enforced upon the postcolonial state by its history. The film is not understood as intervening in reality to produce contingent images of the nation, but reflecting with greater or lesser accuracy a pre-existing, self-sustaining artefact. For an example of decolonizing discourse cast in terms of adequacy and essence see Teshome H. Gabriel, 'Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films', in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 340-58. On the theoretical implications see Arif Dirlik, 'The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism', Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994), 328-56, and Anne McClintock, 'The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term "postcolonialism" 'in Colonial Discourse/postcolonial theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 253-66. For the Irish context see David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987).
10. Bhabha, 'Representation and the Colonial Text', pp. 119-20.
11. In 'The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse' (in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 312-31), Bhabha, quoting Michel Foucault, writes: 'Within the apparatus of colonial power, the discourses of sexuality and race relate in a process of functional overdetermination, "because each effect (. . .) enters into resonance or contradiction with the others and thereby calls for a readjustment or a reworking of the heterogeneous elements that surface at various points" ' (p. 320).
12. On the representation and adoption of the Irish as 'an essentially feminine race' during the nineteenth century see David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988) pp. 42-57.
13. Declan Kiberd, 'Sexual Polities', in Inventing Ireland (Londonjonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 359-410.
14. On the critical struggles over the status of Ulysses see Suman Gupta, '"What colour's Jew Joyce. . .'. Race in the context ofJoyce's Irishness and Bloom's Jewishness', Bulldn: An Irish Studiesfournal 1:2 (Autumn 1994), 59-72.
15. The philosopher Richard Kearney is the most active proponent of this line. See The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions (Dublin, Wolfhound, 1985), and 'Postmodernity and Nationalism: A European Perspective', Modern Fiction Studies 38:3 (Autumn 1992), 581-93.
16. The critical comparison of The Crying Game with Ulysses obviously ignores the text which at least the beginning of Jordan's film recalls - Frank O'Connor's short story 'Guests of the Nation', which O'Connor himself turned into a short silent film in the 1930s. I would not want to deny the relevance of Jordan's reworking of the hostage scenario and the crucial questions it raises for modern Irish identity; but O'Connor's text in itself, I would contend, constitutes a formal and conceptual response to the issues of identity raised in Ulysses, and it is with theJordan's revisitation ofthe gender/nation nexus -given seminal form inJoyce's novel - that I am more concerned here.
17. James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Declan Kiberd (London, Penguin, 1990), pp. lxvii and lxxviii.
18. See Colin MacCabe, JamesJoyce and The Revolution ofthe Word (London, The Macmillan Press, 1979) for an analysis of Joyce's assault upon traditional novelistic discourse.
19. James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Jeri Johnson (Oxford, Oxford World Classics 1993), p. 319.
20. Joyce, Ulysses p. 465.
21. In his essay '"Fork-Tongued on the Border Bit": Partition and the Politics ofForm in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict', South Atlantic Quarterly 95:1 (Winter 1996), 227-76, Joe Cleary argues to the contrary that far from being a radical political text, The Crying Game partakes of a 'rather obvious and empty schematism' (259) in which a debased 'masculine' politics succumbs to a healing (though in this case tragic) 'feminine' realm of domesticity and sexuality. The formal resolutions of this and the majority of narratives about modern Northern Ireland are predicated, as Cleary sees it, on a profound anti-nationalism and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict. He concludes that 'The film must be considered superficial, if not reactionary, by any standards of the political that is still measured in terms ofcommitment to social change.' (263) In arguing for the radical national potential of The Crying Game I would contest that Cleary both underestimates the impact of formal signals such as the revelation of Dil s masculinity and the ambiguity of his/her relationship with Fergus at the end of the film, as well as investing too much in questions of form at the expense of the wide range of possible positions from which the text is (and is intended to be) consumed.
22. For a wide-ranging discussion on the politics of resistance see the essay 'Can the subaltern speak' by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, pp. 66-111, a question to which she appears to reply in the negative.
23. See the chapter 'Time and space in the postmodern cinema' in Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity, pp. 308-23.
24. Herculine Barbin: being the recently discovered memoirs of a nineteenth-century French hermaphrodite (1978), edited by Michel Foucault, translated by Richard McDougall (NewYork, Random House, Inc., 1980), p. vii.
25. Foucault, Herculine Barbin, p. x.
26. Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 22-34.
27. This effect is characteristic of many titles from the Film On Four stable, including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), both directed by Stephen Frears.
28. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, Routledge, 1990). Given Jordan's liaison with Angela Carter in the film production of her story 'The Company of Wolves'it is possible that the character of Dil and the manner in which the trope of the 'womanly man' is deployed to interrogate the nature of sexuality owes something to Carter's novel The Passion of New Eve (London, Victor Gollancz, 1982), one of the seminal texts in the emergence of'queer'postmodernism.
29. On the general elision of history in the IRA-man film, see John Hill, 'Images of Violence' in Rockett, Gibbons and Hill, Cinema and Ireland, pp. 147-93. On the issue of The Crying Game's exploitation of certain stereotypical notions ofblack sexuality, and its underlying identification with white liberal attitudes see Darrell Moore, 'Now You Can See It: The Liberal Aesthetic and Racial Representation in The Crying Game', Cineaction 32 (Fall 1993), 63-7.
30. For Joyce's influence on the development of post-structuralism and postmodernism see for example J.E Lyotard, 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?' in The Postmodern Condition, pp. 71-82; Julia Kristeva, 'A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident', pp. 292-300; Jacques Derrida, 'Ulysses Gramaphone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce' in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature, edited by D. Attridge (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 253-309.
31. During, 'Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today', p. 449.
32. Dirlik, 'The Postcolonial Aura', pp. 330-1.