Thinking in Archipelagic Terms: An Interview with John Brannigan

John Brannigan is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of working-class authors Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and the first book to investigate twentieth-century Irish literature and culture using critical race theories, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing. He was editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Irish University Review, from 2010 to 2016.

Wilde, Classicism, and Homosexuality in Modern Ireland

This chapter explores how Irish writers since Oscar Wilde have invoked Hellenism when faced with public exposure of their homosexuality. Wilde is seen both as a dissident against England and, for gay writers, a champion and liberator. For James Joyce, Wilde was a figure of defiance and a fellow exile. Patrick Pearse never mentions Wilde, but seems to have been drawn to his sensibility in the parallels he suggests between ancient Greek and Irish masculinity. The writings of Brendan Behan are no less permeated by Wilde’s Hellenism. Following the decriminalization of homosexuality in Ireland, affiliation with Wilde could be openly acknowledged, as in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001), where Wilde is an iconic symbol of both homosexuality and patriotic rebellion. Controversy has been reframed, however, through media associations of Hellenism with paedophilia, and has embroiled politician David Norris and Irish-language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh.

Poeta in Vinculis II

Continuing the contrast between personal accounts of imprisonment and fictional elaborations of carceralities, Chapter 3 concentrates on the twentieth century and on (post)colonial contexts. The three authors discussed at length are Brendan Behan, the Irish dramatist; Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and ecological activist; and Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet. Whereas Behan’s and Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical texts, at least on the surface, appear to be quite reliable, i.e. factual, accounts of their imprisonment, their literary work, just like Breytenbach’s, is highly allusive, ironic, and allegorical; they model the carceral experience through distortive lenses of comedy, farce, satire, or parable. The chapter also emphasizes the use of the prison and legal criminalization as major political strategies of discrimination against (ethnic and other) minorities as well as political dissidents.

Depression, Drink, and Dissipation

This chapter examines the prevalence of alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, and general mental health symptoms among journalist–literary figures, along with the connections that can be made between addiction and compulsive behaviors and the experiences in journalism that may have helped to foster them. The stereotype of the hard-drinking journalist pervades the work of journalists that both celebrate and condemn the lifestyle of the journalistic personality. Ernest Hemingway's romanticizing of drinking in the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises provides a tragic counterpoint to the story of his last years—that of a depressed and despairing writer suffering from alcoholic psychosis, trying in vain to rediscover his lost talent, and ultimately committing suicide. This chapter first considers the depression, anxiety, and aberrant behavior found among journalist–literary figures before discussing their excessive drinking, drug abuse, and dysfunctional lives. It also looks at twentieth-century journalists and writers with addictive and psychologically compulsive behaviors, such as Charles Bukowski, Brendan Behan, and Thomas Paine.

Brendan Behan, Borscht Belt Comedian

‘New York humour is largely an Irish-Jewish creation’ (Ulick O'Connor, Brendan Behan, 1970). Brendan Behan, of course, was not a professional ‘stand-up comedian’ in the strictest sense of the term, although he possessed the wit and performative skills to succeed as one, as he proved countless times in Dublin pubs and onstage at the Blue Angel in New York to an audience that included Shelley Berman, who in fact was a Borscht Belt comedian. And, unlike Milton Berle, Alan King, Jackie Mason, Henny Youngman, and scores of comedians, he did not appear at venues in the Catskill Mountains some 100 miles north-northwest of New York City known as the ‘Borscht Belt’ because of its predominant clientele of Jews, although he and his wife Beatrice enjoyed a long weekend in Margaretville, New York, in August, 1961. When Behan came to America in 1960, however, he quickly became a star and joined a circle of celebrities that prominently included Jewish intellectuals and comedians responsible for what Ulick O'Connor regards as the Irish-Jewish core of New York humour. Indeed, Behan's affection for New York originates not only in his frequent visits to Irish bars on Third Avenue, as Michael O'Sullivan observes, but also in his interactions with Jewish-American friends and his uncanny familiarity with Jewish culture. The rowdy, even notorious, celebrity Behan shared with such figures as Norman Mailer informs the New York humour to which Behan contributed, making him more than an avatar of the Stage Irishman that some Irish-Americans despised. Rather, he often performed an eccentric Irish Jewishness central to American comedy of the 1960s.