PostTiger, Posthuman: Cyborg Irish Identity in the Dead Republic

"Richard Kearney argues that such fictional revisions are necessary, that 'our narrative of cultural self-identity is itself a fiction' (18) that must be renewed and challenged if it is to survive" (Lanters, 248). In her 2005 introduction to a Comparative Literatu re Studies special issue on posthumanism, N. Katherine Hayles asks "I low can bodies be deterritorialized and still used as sites for representation?' ("Refiguring," 311). Roddy Doyle's novel The Dead Republic with the protagonist Henry Smart whose reconstituted, nomadic, cyborgian body foregrounds shifts in his subjectivity becomes one answer to Hayles' question. In a text addressing the origins and development of global film networks and Ireland's place in those networks and economies, a text foregrounding a character with a prosthetic leg, which replaces his original flesh leg lost in a train accident, the intersections of global and posthuman become hard to ignore. As Hayles explains in How We Became Posthuman, "the defining characteristics [of the posthuman] involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components" (4). Henry Smart's deterritorialized movement from Ireland to the United States and back to Ireland re-enact some of the challenges of representing contemporary global Irish identity. Relying on Chris Barker's work where identity develops out of subjectivity, but identity pushes the subject from interiority and constitution as subject into relational and social contexts. While the text displays those challenges, it also provides posthuman responses to them, by representing subjectivities altered by networks and splicings in Henry Smart and Miss O'Shea, whose subjectivity sometimes depends upon technological connections. The text represents such movement, together with technological / biological connectedness and networked logics as some contemporary answers for building and identifying living subjectivity, even in a dead republic. Roddy Doyle's latest novel, The Dead Republic, published in 2010, finishes the story of Henry Smart, which began in A Star Called Henry and continued in Oh, Play that Thing. In this last installment of The Last Roundup trilogy, Henry Smart, whose shaky memory creates ongoing problems in the first half of the novel, works with John Ford to write his life for the script of the film that becomes The Quiet Man. When the produced film does not represent the collaborative writing Smart and Ford do together, but instead tells another man's story and presents a sanitized version of Ireland, Henry leaves Ford's company and film-making to build a new life in Ireland in the 1960s. He first gardens, then works as caretaker at a boy's school; reunites with his lost wife; and becomes re-involved with the Republican movement, now centered in the North. His work for the northern republicans brings attention from security forces in the Republic, who coerce Henry into informing by threatening his daughter, Saoirse, whom he has just relocated. While Hayles reminds us "it is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg" (How, 4), this character, Henry Smart, represents posthuman splicing. As a cyborg combination of man / machine, he also splices American and Irish, past and present, bio-violence and attempts at peace and perhaps Northern Ireland and the Republic. Indeed the text suggests that North and South work together as a system rather than as merely separate entities or a unified political entity / space for identity. Smart's multiple splicings connect to historical versions of the twentieth and twenty-first century in Ireland. In Sinead Moynihan's article "The Ghost of the Real Leg" she investigates the ways that Doyle's novel constructs history by both performing and responding to adaptation. Moynihan suggests that this adaptation via novel "is also an indictment of the failed promises of post-independence Ireland, and of the tenacity of a particular narrative: the nationalist version of twentieth-century Irish history" (49). …