Lacanian 'Pussy': Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of Patrick Mccabe's Breakfast on Pluto‪.‬

I. The Rhetoric of Sameness Almost since the beginning of the Northern Irish Troubles nearly forty years ago, commentators and observers have often noted that there is a great deal of similarity between the two conflicting communities. Indeed, one need not dig too deeply to see that the Nationalist and Unionist communities are Northern European, predominantly white, English-speaking, and Christian. The belief in a universal Christian humanity inspires those involved in the growing integrationist movement in Northern Irish schools. (1) From a socio-economic perspective, it is often noted that both communities are largely working class and have suffered high rates of poverty and unemployment. (2) Since the early 1980s, commentators have noted that Protestant 'supremacy' has been in decline, which has lead to both Nationalist and Unionist communities now sharing a sense of alienation from the centres of power and influence. (3) The same sense of shared humanity also informs the critical and conceptual frameworks of recent studies of the lives lost during the Troubles. (4) The notion that both sides of the political divide in Northern Ireland are essentially the 'same" is often found in Northern Irish literary and cinematic texts that deal with the Troubles. Notable in this vein are Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983) and Grace Notes (1997), Colin Bateman's Divorcing Jack (1995) and Cycle of Violence (1995), and Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street (1996), which all view the political violence in Northern Ireland as something that is visited upon 'ordinary people' who, regardless of their background, spend most of their time trying not to get caught up in it. (5) The notion of sameness is also routinely extended by Troubles texts to the relations between characters that code as Irish and those that code as British. For example, Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992) presents a black British squaddie and a white IRA volunteer who refer to each other as 'soldier'. (6) As the film progresses, both characters are revealed to share a desire for a West-Indian transvestite hairdresser called Dil. This motif of sameness is also reflected in Terry George's Some Mother's Son (1996), in which the protagonist, Kathleen Quigley, underlines the shared humanity of both the British soldier and IRA volunteer in maternal terms, insisting that are both 'some mother's son'. (7) This motif is echoed at a formal level in Louise Dean's This Human Season (2005) which presents the run-up to the 1980 hunger strikes in chapters that show alternating Republican and British perspectives. (8) There thus exists what might be called a 'rhetoric of sameness' which threads it way through over thirty years of texts and commentary on the Troubles.