The Heritage of Elegy in The Crying Game (1993)

Irish literature has a long, elegiac history. In the past hundred years, political conflict, nationalism, and behaviors of mourning have became infused in Irish artistic representation, most notably through the cultural phenomenon now known as the Irish Literary Revival. Participants in the revival mixed poetry, politics, and social movements into their art. Specifically, the Irish sensibility produced a new sort of irony and ambivalence in artistic representation. Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game (1993)is indebted to this literary heritage. His film not only portrays the complicated nature of the politics, violence, and tragedy that surrounds the "Troubles" and Anglo-Irish relations, it also shows us that romanticizing violence, or using nostalgia to glorify the past, no longer communicates suffering sufficiently or accurately, and does not necessarily provide consolation. The Crying Game constitutes a modern elegy that transforms some of the traditional conventions of elegy to represent the complexity of nationalist issues.

Elegies have their roots in Greek vegetation myths, and have been rendered in poetic form since the sixteenth century. The word "elegy" itself derives from the Greek word for song, and song plays an important part in the film. Elegies recount and perform the experience of loss and the search for consolation. As works of art, elegies demonstrate that poetry and music converge on the experience of human loss, and that literary representation contains elegiac mechanisms that function to help people perform their work of mourning and, eventually, achieve consolation. Elegy also functions as an art form that fills gaps by consoling individuals, and the public, in the event of loss. In his seminal study on The English Elegy (1985), Peter Sacks asserts that art is a way to make the absent present. ¹ As such, the artistic move to represent death and grieving in elegy refashions loss and helps mourners work toward consolation. Thus, Jordan's The Crying Game is just as its title suggests a "crying game"—a way for mourners to console themselves through artistic representation for the peace and resolution absent in Anglo-Irish relations, and for the violent consequences individuals suffer.

In order to understand the film as elegy, it helps to trace the film's literary heritage. W. B. Yeats, for example, reveals how elegy refashions loss. For example, elegy is frequently a blame game, and Yeats blames the Irish middle class in "September 1913." The satiric blaming here complicates the nature of individual and public mourning over the death of Romantic Ireland:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave. ²

Here Yeats shows that the mourner blames others for loss. That is, the mourner wants someone to be responsible for the death of loved ones, the grief associated with those deaths, as well as to believe that they died for good reason. This poetic persona blames the Irish middle class for its complacency and greed, yet recovers the nobility of such heroes as O'Leary who fought for Ireland. Nevertheless, Yeats's persona tells us that Romantic Ireland is dead and gone with O'Leary. In doing so, Yeats's poem provides a kind of ironic and ambivalent consolation in his elegy; he blames an entire class of people for the loss of "Romantic Ireland." So, with Yeats, such modern mechanisms of mourning as irony and ambivalence begin to reshape the tradition of elegy. In the modern elegy, the elegist speaks what has been, in the past, politely left unspoken.

Like Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, as an artistic form the elegy addresses what is disturbing, but often not spoken, about war and national loss through its representation of individual suffering. The tension between individual and...