Race/Sex/Shame: The Queer Nationalism of At Swim Two Boys

"Damn it all MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?"

"If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes."¹

Jamie O'Neill's recent tour de force novel, At Swim Two Boys, interweaves two coming-of-age tales, one concerning Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, its adolescent protagonists, the other concerning the Irish nation itself.² The boys' maturation entails coming to express freely their homosexual desires and, more specifically, their love for one another in conjunction with their developing commitment to the nationalist cause. The maturation of the Irish nation involves the enactment of the revolutionary energies summoned forth by an advanced nationalist agenda, culminating in the Easter Rising, in which the boys zealously participate. At Swim Two Boys thus sets forth a narrative parallelism that invites its readers to consider the historical, political, and ideological affinities between dissident sexual identity and ethno-colonial identity in an Irish context. In keeping with this organizing nexus, the predominant historical presence haunting this "Rising novel" is not a man of 1916, but rather the specter of Oscar Wilde: in his own time, a totem of both Irish eccentricity and homosexual deviancy—the prototypical ethnic-erotic queer—and in our time a patron saint of the critical activist movement Queer Nation, whose theoretical agenda accords with O'Neill's literary project.

Indeed, "queer nation" represents the underlying master trope of At Swim Two Boys, which endeavors to extend or "resignify" the idea along two interrelated tracks, the analytic and the prescriptive. In the analytic register, we have the insistent, inextricable linkage of the problematics of Irish national identity and queer sexuality. The bildungsromannarrative brings the adolescent protagonists, Jim Mack and Doyler Doyle, to a sophisticated awareness of their subject-positions as both taboo homosexual "others" within occupied Catholic Ireland and representative citizen-warriors of that emerging national formation. The collective bildungsroman of the Easter Rising sees a number of figures—historical (Roger Casement and Patrick Pearse) and fictional (Eveline and Dermot MacMurrough)—join the protagonists in bringing their renegade sexual desire and their revolutionary political demands to bear upon one another. From these overlapping personal and communal narratives emerges a complex, historically incisive ethnic-erotic analogy. In its divergence from received norms of sexual proclivity and practice, the "queer" exemplifies the inner truth of sexuality as such, that it constitutes the epicenter of subjectivity, its defining economy of desire, and the destabilizing force that prevents subjectivity from coinciding with itself, from maintaining closed and secure boundaries. In this regard, queer sexuality instances what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls "the logic of the exception."³ As colonized Europeans, metropolitan subalterns, racially denigrated "whites," participant subjects and subdominant objects of the British empire, the Irish under the Union occupied a position of historical exceptionality that likewise rendered their ethnic status the central, all-consuming element of their subject formation and its profoundly destabilizing property, that which determines their sense of identity and that which disturbs its coherence, inhibits its self-enclosure. It is this unusually schismatic Irish condition that necessitates O'Neill's corollary, prescriptive resignification of the concept "queer nation": the articulation of an Irish nationalism that, far from reifying some ethnically proper spirit, orientation, or form of life, would fulfill the queer mandate of instituting "an oppositional relation to the [social/sexual] norm" or "resistance to the very idea of the norm as such."⁴

A brief summary of the narrative and thematic outlines of the text will help to establish the "queer" analogy, whose various implications (private and public, affective and ideological) O'Neill carefully elaborates. The son of an aspiring, cringingly respectable shopkeeper, Jim Mack attends Presentation College as a "scholarship boy" and is socially marginalized on that account. A sensitive, awkward, and contemplative lad, he plays the flute in the school band and serves as the special minion or "suck" of its director, Brother Polycarp, who pressures Jim to follow in his clerical footsteps. During daily interviews dedicated to weighing Jim's vocation, Polycarp repeatedly fondles the boy and confesses his past...