Homeward Bound: Trauma, Homesickness, and Rough Beasts in O'Brien's In the Forest and McCabe's Winterwood

At the conclusion of Patrick McCabe's 1992 novel The Butcher Boy, the young Francie Brady torches the debris of his family home in a pyre including clothes, books, a broken television, iconic pictures of John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, and dog feces. As he awaits his own immolation to the plaintive tune of "The Butcher Boy," he fantasizes the presence of his dead mother before collapsing into unconsciousness and nearly burning to death. Later, recuperating in the hospital, Francie relates his story with characteristic bravado and poetic license, unconsciously revealing his symbolic role in the dysfunctional family—and by extension, the national—tragedy:

I told him the whole story about the orphanage going up in the middle of the night and all the children getting out except one poor little boy. I couldn't stand the screams I said we could all see him standing at the upstairs window help me help me! . . . I told him about me and the little lad jumping from the top floor and all that.¹

Francie's narrative of personal trauma reconfigures the "home" or orphanage as an inferno with himself in the dissonant roles of both helpless bystander and abandoned orphan whose futile pleas for help give way to resignation and disaster. As the orphaned child of the all-too-familiar self-destructive Irish family, Francie suffers from a severe form of homesickness—more psychotic than nostalgic—related to the catastrophic loss of family and friends that has triggered his descent into madness.² On a figurative level, this trauma narrative of individual homesickness—featuring the iconic suffering mother, a defeated and alcoholic father, and a neglected and confused child—also signals a larger communal homesickness marking Ireland's long and troubled history of trauma, a history alluded to in Francie's offhand reference to "all that."³

The dualistic nature of this homesickness informs two more recent novels, which likewise associate the violent decline of the mythical Irish home with collective trauma. Edna O'Brien's In the Forest (2002) and McCabe's Winterwood (2006) deploy more seasoned versions of Francie Brady through equally unsettling characters. In the seventeen years since The Butcher Boy appeared, McCabe's Francie appears to have taken on an almost archetypal status as an icon of the darkest sides of the Irish psyche, a latter-day iteration of the vision of modernity that Yeats indelibly introduced into Irish writing in "The Second Coming." As these millennial "rough beasts"—Michen O'Kane in O'Brien's novel and Redmund Hatch in McCabe's—slouch into an increasingly globalized new century, they drag with them a long traumatic history. Consequently, they expose the darkly disturbing homesickness in the belly of that other famous beast, the Celtic Tiger that some have embraced as "a lucky escape 'from all that.'"⁴

Twentieth-century Irish literature has implicitly acknowledged the link between personal trauma and national, or collective, trauma.⁵ Such trauma narratives, Laurie Vickroy argues, connect "personalized responses to [the past] century's emerging awareness of the catastrophic effects of wars, poverty, colonization, and domestic abuse on the individual psyche."⁶ The individual response extends to the cultural psyche as collective trauma, defined by Kai Erikson as "a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality." Trauma, he argues, has a "social dimension: "wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a mood, an ethos—a group culture, almost—that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up."⁷ In this way, individuals become an index of the wider culture: Francie Brady signals a crisis beyond his own. He recycles his parents' trauma in his own, demonstrating Vickroy's point that "trauma reproduces itself if left unattended."⁸

Addressing trauma's victims, then, is especially important; failure to do so can devastate both individuals and communities. As Luke Gibbons argues, reclaiming

the memory of those who have been forgotten or...