The Sons of Cuchulainn: Violence, the Family, and the Irish Canon

In a 1957 essay questioning the idea of a "national" literature, Janet MacNeill recounted the following anecdote:

I once sat in the Abbey Theatre at a performance of "The Playboy," and beside me was a German Jew who lived in New York. His English was not sufficiently competent to allow him to follow the action of the play, and he asked me to instruct him. This I did, to the understandable annoyance of people in the adjacent seats. I took advantage of excitement on the stage and laughter in the audience to whisper, "He is telling them that he has killed his father." My neighbor's spectacles lit up. "Ah," he exclaimed, "in Ireland it is a joke when you kill your father, it is funny, hein?" I did my best afterwards to correct this impression, but I am afraid that this was, for him, the significant message of the play.¹

MacNeill deduces from this that comedy does not have the universalist potential of tragedy. The image of the middle-class Northern Protestant novelist and her German, Jewish, American companion irritating and disturbing the Irish National Theater's most celebrated play at Oedipus is irresistible for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these is the way MacNeill calls attention to the importance of the theme of parricide in defining a specifically Irish literature and the strangeness of the theme if dislocated from its central cultural position. Martin McLoone, Elizabeth Cullingford, and Cheryl Herr have all commented on the remarkable persistence of this theme in contemporary Irish culture.² This essay explores the nature of that persistence and the construction of Irish cultural canons, specifically the canons of modernist Irish drama and contemporary Irish film, in ways that mirror and refract this central theme.

Commenting on Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, Cullingford notes Jordan's production diary entry that de Valera was "a father who will betray" Collins: "If de Valera was the symbolic father and Collins the son, their encounter replicates a theme that has considerable resonance in Irish culture: Cuchulainn's killing of his only son, Connla, and his subsequent battle with the waves."³ The most influential twentieth-century version of the story of Cuchulainn's battle with his son is Yeats's On Baile's Strand, but the source from which Yeats, Synge, and others gleaned the story was Augusta Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne.⁴ Declan Kiberd includes an extensive discussion of Gregory's text in his Irish Classics,⁵ proposing it as a major influence on key texts of the revival. The text not only had a direct influence on W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Mary Colum, and others, it contains within it a central trope for the emerging Irish canon. Cuchulainn's misguided battle with his son becomes a recurrent paradigm of the impossibility of a national, civil society—that is, one which can bequeath posterity to a new generation. This is of course entirely appropriate for a society defined by mass emigration throughout most of the twentieth century. "That is no country for old men," Yeats complained, but it wasn't one the young could stay in either. The widespread tendency to construct the nation in terms of discontinuity and crisis in some ways parallels this social discontinuity, but the relationship is not straightforward. Marjorie Howes argues, for example, that in Yeats's poems about the Anglo-Irish tradition,

[T]he continuity of the nation depends, not on sustaining or passing on some founding essence or energy, but on a repeated crisis of foundations that demands each generation begin anew amid isolation and adversity. In this alternate model, kindred is crisis.⁶

At least some of the bitterness Cullingford traces in the debunking of de Valera in contemporary Irish culture lies in his identification with Ireland as failed parent, specifically failed father. In her study of Jim Sheridan's The Field, Cheryl...