Nationalism, Abjection and the Reinvention of Ireland in Behan’s The Hostage

Abstract

In this chapter I read Behan’s The Hostage as a parodic Passion play, centring on Leslie, the English soldier and sacrificial host/age. Unlike his Irish counterpart, the “boy in Belfast jail” who has deliberately embraced martyrdom and whose drama is being played out offstage, Leslie is an accidental Christ who has no messianic message for the world, and whose Passion offers no redemption. The Passion paradigm, I argue, serves to expose the violence of Irish nationalists as the counterpart of the violence of British imperialism (such as is being directed onto the “Belfast martyr”). Though glorious memories of the Easter Rising are constantly invoked, the play suggests that Irish nationalism has failed to bring about a new era, and that revolution has merely engendered a replica of past conditions. Exposing the failure of both state nationalism and outlaw Republicanism to cater for the demands of the people, the play articulates a critique of the nationalist narrative as a homogenising, excluding fiction, and gives voice to all those it casts aside—all those “dirty thieves and whores” who populate the world of the play, resisting assimilation into the unifying construct which the self-serving bourgeoisie recognise as “the nation.” Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s critique of historicism and his investigation of alternative modes of narrating the nation, I contend that The Hostage also gestures towards such an alternative, and that the parodic Passion play, by exposing the violence of the historicist narrative of the nation, gives voice to the community of “outcasts” which this narrative leaves out and enables them to perform their radically alternative version of the Irish nation.